It’s a tradition in my family to watch old timey black and white films together. My dad gets the biggest grin on his face whenever we all agree to it because we usually reject all his movie suggestions and go with a classic “rom-com.” However, I can’t deny that I have thoroughly enjoyed every Alfred Hitchcock-esque movie he has shown us.
I was in sixth grade when I saw my first one: "Psycho." I instantly fell in love. The black and white screen made everything more mysterious and dramatic, the actors and actresses talked with elegance and the violent graphics and blood were hilariously fake, and I soaked in every minute of it. After watching this film with its odd lack of coloring, I started to develop a strange idea in my head.
Although I was a freshly graduated elementary schooler, one light bulb in my brain simply did not get its batteries in on time, as I thought the world actually used to be black and white. It seemed to be the only logical explanation for why all these old movies made in the early 20th century were filmed that way.
My old fantasy recently got me thinking, and I realized that even though the world was never technically been black and white, we humans sure do seem to see it that way. I rarely find people who see the world with its exotic and beautiful colors, and who make the most of every single shade. When most of us are presented with an issue or a situation, we immediately assume there is only one solution, that it’s all or nothing, black or white, no shades of gray. There seems to be no middle ground on which one can mesh the positives and negatives, a red and a blue, to find a balanced result that produces a radiant purple. Some people use this thinking as a defense mechanism because they don’t want to think realistically and see those exotic and beautiful colors in the world.
While I still appreciate old-timey black-and-white movies, I believe it is time for all of us to open our eyes and see that we will never live in a world where everything is either one color or the other. We live in a world with 10 million different shades of pigmentation. We have 10 million different ways to handle what is thrown at us. You may be given only brown and yellow paint, but with a little effort, you can create a fascinating artwork of solutions.
