Disclaimer: This essay contains spoilers and will almost certainly seem a bit convoluted at first. Hopefully I can convince you otherwise by the end!
Baby Driver is in many ways a morality play. The titular Baby spends most of the film navigating moral dilemmas, sometimes by playing the hero or devolving to his worst self, but most often by simply by looking the other way. I believe that Baby’s interior conflict, the crux of the film, is spelt out to us symbolically through the use of colour. It’s a brilliant use of metaphor, the most striking I’ve experienced in a film in quite a few years, so I thought I’d outline my thoughts on this ambitious and possibly over-elaborate theory here on Reddit, where everyone is one hundred percent supportive one hundred percent of the time.
The premise behind Baby’s character is that he was indoctrinated into the deadly world of crooks and crime at an early age after a traumatic experience, and to cope with all the bloodshed around him, Baby goes to great pains to ignore it, to literally dull it all out. As Griff points out early in the film: “The driver is meant to be the eyes and the ears,” yet Baby insists on wearing shades to shield his eyes and constantly listening to music to distract his ears. When Griff takes his shades from him, Baby immediately replaces them with another pair, these being red instead of his usual black. In the first act of the film especially, Baby insists on keeping himself distanced from the horrors around him, but the writing is on the wall even in these early moments, and I’m not referring to song lyrics. When Baby waltzes back into Doc’s building with a foursome of coffees in hand, “1 More Time” is scrawled in red across the window, almost mockingly.
The colour red is easily the most obvious of the film’s colour metaphors, standing in as a symbol for violence, and there are countless examples to prove it. When Baby learns of JD’s death, we get a shot of the Asian in Home Invasion’s coffee cup made to look like a button, only for the film to cut to, believe it or not, a big red elevator button. In the blink of an eye a man and his coffee are vanquished in a blast of red. Another example can be found in the gas station scene, where the neon red of the sign shines on Buddy’s face as he plots to kill Bats, and then on Baby’s ear as the conspiring thieves ask if he heard what they were saying. If you need any more proof of the significance of red as the harbinger of danger and destructiveness in the film, just reflect on this little snippet between Darling and Buddy:
“What are we gonna do with all that money,” asks Darling during the same gas station scene. “We’re gonna go to Vegas and put it all on red,” Buddy replies with a reckless smile.
Of course the predominant use of red is in defining the criminals in Baby’s life. Bats dresses in all red to appear dangerous, while Buddy merely gets it “in his eyes” whenever something pisses him off. Buddy is the real psychopath of the pair, because the violence is a part of him, not a costume he insists upon wearing. In light of that, Baby’s costume during his jobs is a combination of blacks and whites. Baby literally wears his worldview on his sleeve, for he is of the mind that the world is made up of good and bad people. He can smile and dance as he fetches coffee for killers because he has deluded himself into believing he is the white among black. And to be fair, seeing as how Doc has ensured that Baby live his whole life in the red, he couldn’t possibly know any better.
Despite this Baby does try to escape his life of crime early in the film by becoming a pizza delivery guy, dressing in red to deliver red pizza boxes to strangers. At this point Baby has only just met Debora, and thus has yet to realise that there are more ways to make a living than through dangerous activities, and so he is reeled back into Doc’s world, having never really escaped in the first place (“I said that we were square, not that we were done,” Doc reasons).
That’s where Debora becomes crucial to my theory. Debora’s most prominent outfit is a blue denim jacket over a yellow dress, and almost all of her outfits are combinations of these two colours, the other primary colours along with red. In other words, Debora represents everything else life has to offer besides violence and crime, and it is through spending time with her that Baby learns of these other ways of life, and thus becomes increasingly uncomfortable with his criminal lifestyle. During his parkour escape late in the film, Baby dons a blue denim jacket and yellow shades to blend in among the civilians. Gone are his days of naively believing in a world of black and white. Now Baby is aware of his own free will, and in the aftermath of his gruesome murder of Bats (which was no doubt justified by Baby as a necessity) he chooses to don a costume, and thus a life, similar to that of the best person he knows.
Unfortunately Baby does relapse soon after this. Even though his new jacket (now green - a blend of blue and yellow) has not a blotch of red, Baby does steal a red sports car from two gangbangers. By this point in the film, Baby has taken a life and is thus no longer able to deny his role in the violence unfolding around him, yet he chooses to add to it again, one last time, for a truly selfish, if noble, reason. Consequentially, Doc has to die as penance for Baby’s stubborn reluctance to surrender.
Eventually Baby does surrender to the police, on an open road as the red of the sun sets behind him. Baby, or Miles as his name is now revealed to be, finally manages to leave the world that sun represents in his rearview mirror. When he is released from prison (which is notably depicted as a sea of white, for Baby’s experience here can only be described as an unconditionally pure, healthy one) after five years, Debora is waiting for him, posing on the bonnet of a car, just how she did in his dream long ago, the difference being that Baby’s fantasy was in black and white, while his reality here in the film’s closing moments boasts a wide variety of colours. Baby’s mind, as twisted and confused as it had become, is finally unravelled as he manages to see, and hear, a balance in the world and its colours like never before.
So yeah, that’s how I believe Baby Driver tells its story through colour. The pull of the red, of violence, is strong and is in many ways the ‘easy option’ (looking again at Buddy’s casino plans), and the point of Baby Driver is to show how one can break away from this pull, and how important it is to surround yourself with a more balanced palette of colourful characters, rather than the likes of Buddy and Bats.
I really hope this wasn’t too convoluted a read (though I suspect it was) and I’d love to hear just how wrong I am if you’d care to share a comment!
Submitted September 17, 2017 at 06:35AM by TheCrimsonCritic http://ift.tt/2h7OWTS
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