Il colore del sangue

Il sangue nell'immaginario collettivo influenzato da cinema e tv.
Un breve essay di Topic sulla rappresentazione non necessariamente accurata del sangue sul grande e sul piccolo schermo.

What color is blood?

This is a deceptively complicated question. On one hand, we've all bled, and seen what came out of our bodies. On the other, many of us have heard the explanation for why our veins appear blue: that it's because blood is actually blue when inside the body, and that it doesn't turn red until it is exposed to oxygen. The fact that this isn't actually true is less important than what it says about us, namely that we aren't really sure what color our blood is, even if we know what color blood is. And that might be because most of the blood we see in our lives isn't really even blood—it's fake blood created for film and television.

The fake blood we see in films is usually red, but the color of that red varies, from the bright syrup of Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 nouvelle vague masterpiece Pierrot le fou—"not blood, red," Godard called it—to the almost brown whale-gore of John Huston's 1956 epic Moby Dick to the diverse spectrum of Dario Argento, one of the most plasma-heavy filmmakers we've ever had. ("The blood has changed a bit over the years, from the bright comic-book red of his early thrillers like The Bird With the Crystal Plumage and Deep Red, in which the vital substance is roughly the color of maraschino cherries, to the dark, almost black stuff that gushes so freely in his latest film, Mother of Tears," wrote Terrence Rafferty in 2008. "It's never quite the color of real blood, though.") According to Peter Biskind’s 1999 book, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Martin Scorsese was forced to desaturate the color of the blood in Taxi Driver's climactic shootout to appease the MPAA, even though Scorsese thought it made the scene, in which Travis Bickle shoots his way through a brothel, "even more shocking."