What does Red Mean?

In reading Rushdie's different take on The Wizard of Oz, I began to think about my own experiences watching the movie. Looking thorough my notes to see a pattern of what I had written down, pondering if there was a key element of the film I was missing. As I kept going through my notes, I realized that the color red or different shades of this color kept appearing. Whether it was the dark color of red, almost mahogany, that made up the sky as the tornado hit Dorothy's town, the color pink that represented the bubble that the nice witch entered from, red apples, the red ruby slippers, red smoke that the wicked witch how the horse turns red in the emerald city, all of these instances of red note something that at first glance I missed. Red is the color that as a child we all fear. It is the color of blood, the color of a stop sign, the color of hell. But as we get older, we get to see that the bad in life, such as blood, stopping and hell may not be what we originally depicted them as in our brains. Likewise in Oz, Dorothy has a poor preconceived notion of her life, but once the experience of Oz has completed, her preconceived notions are null and void, based on the maturation Oz gave her. The color red and Dorothy's experience, I think, run parallel; furthermore, Rushdie's unique take on the movie enabled me to see the Wizard of Oz in a new way and come up with a reason for this mise-en-scene element that shouts important.