Presssy ！Σ（￣□￣;）

RED IS NOT ALEX FORBES COLOR.

Now, before someone comes to murder me in my sleep, I would like to make y’all pause for a moment and just— just walk with me.

Firstly, why is it that our first instinct is to associate Alex with red?

A lot of reasons actually. His obvious lack of control when it comes to his emotions, making his anger issues pop out. His anger and violence is red. Danger is red.

(And if I really wanna be controversial and piss someone off, I would say that red should be Nigel’s color. He’s the one dissecting, getting broken (& bloody) noses, killing innocent girls and pushing his own parents to their deaths to fulfil a religious myth, and later killing himself without a second thought.

Lots of blood, lot’s of calm brutality, after all, MURDER is RED.

Well, at least those things scream “pretty red” to me…)

Okay now back to the point I was trying to make; then what is Alex Forbes’ color?

I will need y’all to brace yourselves for this one;

Alex Forbes’ color is GREEN.

HEAR ME OUT, HEAR ME OUT.

Alex’s eyes are a deep rich green that make his natural beauty and innocent appearance pop. And that specific feature that Eddie Redmayne has is just so— perfect.

Because those eyes, that get teary and show so much emotions that Alex does not dare to speak are actually what disguises his game.

Alex and the color green go hand in hand, because green is normalcy, green is naivety.

Green is what Alex is surrounded by.

If we just look at the scenes, if we pay A LITTLE ATTENTION, we can see that there’s green literally EVERYWHERE.

And why that’s brilliant, you ask?

Because his prominent green actually HIDES the red inside.

The green is the innocence that he displays when he is being questioned in the police station, is the wild spirit Alex doesn’t hesitate to let out in the middle of the night, is the deep connection he has to his instincts.

The green is what Alex uses (very intelligently) to hide the red he knows is buried under his skin.

More specifically, JACK.

Jack is red. Not Alex.

AND the moment those colors (red and green) start to mix with one another, is the moment when Nigel comes and takes over Alex’s thoughts.

Nigel wants to make the red in Alex’s soul prominent, because if he let’s it out, if he makes Alex replace the green for the red (if he becomes his Jack over Alex) they will match, not only in colors but in ideas.

"damn it, nigel,"

this was caused because I went on a bit of a rampage because of @mistedandfogged's post here and thought it best for me to move it to my own analysis post. I don't exactly know how I drew this conclusion, but it happened, and it ended up with me researching a new psychology theory. So I'm going to bore you all to death about that today!

Sources I used: Emotional salience Reconsolidation (they are really quite interesting!)

The main point I'm making is Alex's description of Nigel's "terror in his eyes," and how he doesn't appear to be that terrified. Now, the use of this wording strikes us all as odd, and it can be attributed to Alex's unreliable narration as a form of foreshadowing, but I have a few rather unconventional ideas about how recounting this moment might be because of how much he is falsifying and feeding us lies about what actually happened and how some elements of truth are picked up during it. My theory (which led me to research the theory of reconsolidation and emotional salience) is that he subconsciously incorporates true visual and auditory cues into his false retelling, which confuses Sally and the audience, as they don't seem to match up. But it works in Alex's favour because he was painting Nigel in a negative and delusional light anyway. If Alex was lying through his teeth about the events on that train, playing it off as a freak accident while still keeping Nigel as a suspect (when he could have been the one to kill Josh), a lot of this dialogue and his retelling of the scene would make a lot more sense.

First, let's explain the theory: Emotional salience/reconsolidation refers to how much an event or detail stimulates your brain's threat/reward system. The more emotionally charged something is (fear, disgust, terror), the more "important" your brain considers it. and the greater the likelihood that detail will be preferentially stored and later retrieved. In practice, this means that screams, a terrified face, and a rotten odour are more likely to return when you remember than mundane background information.

There are two major players: the amygdala (which flags emotional significance) and the hippocampus (which binds contextual details into episodic memories). When something emotional occurs, the amygdala sends signals to the hippocampus and cortex, and stress hormones (adrenaline/noradrenaline, glucocorticoids) modulate synaptic plasticity, causing the event to be consolidated more strongly. That is why emotionally charged bits are "boosted" during encoding and can withstand rehearsal or fabrication better than neutral details.

Emotions have a tendency to narrow attention. Central, threat-relevant features (the face, the weapon, the angry line of dialogue) become more prominent, while peripheral details (what the lamp looked like, exact turns of conversation) frequently fade. This is called the weapon-focus/attention-narrowing effect. So, when Alex falsifies a scene in his retelling, he is likely to keep these details while inventing or misplacing the others.

Alex is a highly intelligent sociopath who can manipulate his environment and others to his advantage. While being interrogated, he convinces the audience and a forensic psychologist that, despite having the means and motive, being in the right place and time, and being the only survivor of that event, he was completely innocent of all charges. This is seen when he was supposed to meet Susan for that movie, and despite being there at the right time, he still passes the blame to Nigel. This is also seen during Josh's murder aboard the train. If he had been partially to blame for Josh's death rather than the entire weight of the murder falling on Nigel's shoulders, he could have easily explained the events and cleared his name of all suspicion. However, his description of Nigel throws him under the bridge. Sally, unlike us, does not see the events unfold visually, so she must rely on Alex's word to determine whether or not he is telling the truth. We on the other hand, see Nigel, completely cold and unconcerned about what had happened before him, which led us to confusion about what Alex's choice of description really meant.

I have two ideas based on Alex's description of the events and the accompanying visuals.

1) Nigel had fully chosen not to reach out his hand to Josh, and his sociopathic nature shows no remorse for it. Alex's description of the "terror" he sees is simply to paint Nigel as the villain to Sally, adding depth to his story. What we see as visual events is the truth, and it foreshadows his unreliable narration.

Or 2) it's a case of reconsolidation and emotional salience. His description of the events is accurate because he saw Nigel with terror in his eyes, which could only have occurred if Alex had been a contributing factor to Josh's murder. The visual events we see are the lie he told Sally about what happened on the train, but his subconscious couldn't help but include some true details in his story. He is reactivating a memory that can be altered simply by telling it. If he retells the train scene to Sally (or to himself), he creates a reconsolidation window in which whatever sensory cues exist in that moment are re-encoded as part of the memory.

So, when Alex paints Nigel with the phrase "terror in his eyes," it could be a theatrical phrasing or the imprint of a sensory fragment that stubbornly survived Alex's lie and reattached to the memory during retrieval. Reconsolidation frames this as memories cycling from inactive to active and back, which is precisely the process that allows truthy fragments to survive attempts at total falsification.

Because he is essentially narrating the events from memory, and because he is falsifying the vast majority of it, he adds some details simply because Nigel did something visual or auditory. It would be extremely difficult to come up with new dialogue on the fly to fit your story while being interrogated, so the theory of reconsolidation supports my claim that you would tend to turn those into lies. He didn't have enough time to corroborate his story, so those are truths that he unintentionally incorporated into the story...

For example. Alex claims that Nigel said he "could smell you on her," but does not provide any contextual evidence from that day. He plays it off as if Nigel was just a fucked up weirdo who was deluded, but given that he never went into detail about what happened after Nigel showed him the body or what any of that actually meant, there appears to be a LOT he never told us, raising the question of whether any of what he said about Nigel was true in any way.

All in all, It would be interesting to see if Alex caused Josh to slip up and Nigel had that 'terror' in his eyes as a result, rather than the other way around. Now, I don't necessarily believe it to be true, but it's an idea that has been brewing for a while.