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Trish Summerville's "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" collection for H&M - Remember this?

Holy cow! This movie tie-in thing is really starting to get out of control. A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that H&M was launching a collection based on the Lisbeth Salander character from The Girl With The Dragon Tattoofilm which will open on Tuesday. The collection hit stores today. I suggested in my post that the collection left me a little confused about H&M’s understanding of its target audience. But really, it is a bizarre concept all together. H&M has received criticism for the collection arguing that it glamorizes rape survivors. Natalie Karneef writes that “[Lisbeth Salander]’s a hero in some ways, but in other ways she’s somebody that I don’t think we should glorify from a fashion point of view”. H&M has responded saying that the collection was less about the specific character, than it was “about encapsulating an urban street fashion and how Trish Summerville was inspired in creating the costumes for the film”, about a general revival grunge aesthetic. H&M’s response kind of misses the point. Karneef has said, “I want them to think about why she’s wearing the clothing and how that’s not a good thing.” Lisbeth Salander is an incredible character, but much of her strength and character come out of a childhood of horrible adversity and abuse. Her style is 100% informed by those experiences. Clothing plays an important part in self-definition, so it is naïve to offer up to the public an identity of anger, walling oneself off, rejecting engagement with society as a result of intense trauma and suffering, and to suggest that the public put on that wardrobe without realizing that you are offering them that identity, and idealizing it, along with the clothes. One can admire Lisbeth Salander for how she has responded to those circumstances, and who she has become as a result, but I don’t think any of us really wants to walk in her shoes, literally or figuratively.

This image shows the original names for the China Glaze Hunger Games nail polish collection. After the company found itself facing a lawsuit with the movie studio, the nail polish is now being released as the "Colours from the Capitol" collection and the color names have been changed to Dress Me Up, Foie Gras, Fast Track, Hook and Line, Stone Cold, Smoke and Ashes, Agro, Mahogany Magic, Harvest Moon, Riveting, Electrify and Luxe and Lush.

And now beauty manufacturer China Glaze has come out with a Hunger Games inspired nail polish collection (above)! Seriously, WTF? For anyone who doesn’t know, the Hunger Games is a wildly popular young adult science fiction trilogy. The first book originally came out in 2008 and the movie version will release this spring. The story takes place in a post-apocalyptic world in a nation called Panem (located where North America once was). The capital city is surrounded by 13 (and then ultimately 12) impoverished districts. Every year each district must select one girl and one boy by lottery to participate in the “Hunger Games”. The whole nation then watches on television as the 24 “tributes” are locked in an outdoor arena where they must fight for survival, killing each other until only one tribute survives. Most of the plot of the book follows the children as they hunt each other down. In other words, it’s extremely disturbing. The Hunger Games books are well written and engaging. I read them and was engrossed from beginning to end. But they are also twisted and upsetting. Again, we are presented with a female lead character, Katniss, whom we grow to love and respect. And again, none of us would ever want to be her or to find ourselves in her world. Not for a second.

Obviously capitalizing on movies is nothing new. The idea of merchandising our whole worlds and identities around a movie character went crazy with Harry Potter. Kids were not only dressing like Harry, had wands, but even eating the same candy that Harry eats in his wizardly world. But the idea of kids escaping into the fantasy of being wizards and attending Hogwarts made sense. Of course kids would want to immerse themselves in that world. It’s a fabulous world, and that’s what kids do. Somehow I feel like something else is going on with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and Hunger Games, and they’ve gotten the whole concept of how we relate to movies, or at least how we should relate to movies, very wrong.

Art Into Life. Art, movies included, are not created in a vacuum. They tell us something about the society from which they emerge. And in turn, art can be used to instruct, teach, shape the world around it. Do H&M or China Glaze think what we’re supposed to come away from these films with is so concrete that if we loved the books and flock to the movies, we should want to become the lead characters and inhabit their worlds and literally their skin, to fashion ourselves after them? Even if there were something about Lisbeth Salander’s or Katniss’ world that was a little more enviable, merchandising these products not as novelty or costume items but as fashion is taking the whole “art into life” thing a little too literally.  In the inimitable words of Jean Baudrillard (since what this situation clearly demands is some snooty intellectual response),  ”The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth–it is the truth which conceals that there is none.  The simulacrum is true.”   Do you think even he could have envisioned his pronouncement played out so literally, and with such little imagination?  ���

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