Many of us know since we were children that in the Star Wars movies the lightsabers of the Jedi (the good guys) are blue and those of the Sith (the bad guys) are red. The chromatic universe of one of the sagas most anchored in popular cinematographic culture is much richer and represents the basis that Jaime Repollés, a professor at U-tad University, uses to explain the theory of color to his students in a Digital Design degree. color in a much more enjoyable way than from a strictly technical point of view.
How do you arrive at this relationship between color and Star Wars? “When I explained an electromagnetic field in class,” says Repollés, “I said ‘this is a force,’ and somehow I saw myself speaking like Yoda or I used metaphors about what I thought is what happens between colors, which are complementary.” when they are on the opposite side of the color wheel and there is enormous attraction between them.” The teacher highlights this love of color “for its shadow, for its dark side.” “Then,” he says, “I began to realize that, without meaning to, I was repeating the commonplaces and clichés that we all know from the saga.”
Star Wars – today, May 4, is the day of the saga because in English “may the force be with you” sounds similar to the pronunciation of this date – is seen by Repollés as “very useful to introduce us to the antagonisms typical of the theory of color and light, because this saga introduces us to a fascinating world where a subtle and omnipresent force governs, the electromagnetic field, which polarizes the vision of color in an eternal conflict between its dark side and its light side.
There are things that fans of the saga may find fascinating. In addition to the blue and red sabers, there are others. Yoda’s is green, a color that is located on the color wheel halfway between red and blue. It represents balance. Another of them, Jedi Master Mace Windu, is a more ambiguous character, who could straddle both sides of the spectrum. His saber is violet, a mix of red and blue.
Repollés turns to Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey, which describes the stages that every epic story follows. The saga of George Lucas, according to the professor, takes its protagonist, Luke Skywalker, on “a mythical journey that has a quite interesting correspondence with the color cycle as well and with the different phases or episodes that it goes through, from the beginning in the Tatooine desert, which would be, for example, yellow, until the final confrontation on the dark side, let’s say in violet, with that figure of that paternal alter ego” who is the bad guy par excellence, Darth Vader, his other extreme. His father.
“When Luke goes through the different phases of his journey – observes Repollés – there are also those correspondences, which are always mediated by the tension between the light and the dark and between the cold and the warm, between the colors that represent the good and the evil. the bad guys”. One of the curiosities is in the planets, which usually have a monochrome tone.
Hoth, a snow planet, “is white or blue in color and is related to resistance to the Empire” – in English, hot is hot. Another paradox is that the red of the bad guys, which represents heat, has a cold color temperature, while the blue of the good guys, which is cold, has a warm temperature. The universe and life meet again and again in Star Wars.
