JA from MNPP here. Have you guys seen the bizarre (and wonderful, genius even, if you ask me) merchandizing choices that the team behind The Hunger Games movies have been making? First I assume we all know the basic story, but if not here's the quick take - in a future dystopia, The Hunger Games are a televised battle fought every year by the children of this society's twelve districts. Fought to the death, that is. The survivor of the battle wins food (yes, food) for the starving people of their district. Such a light and airy premise! Happy, happy stuff..
Anyway this is a big Hollywood movie they're making so they have to make money somehow, and so naturally they have decided that the best way to sell this movie's premise is with nail polish.
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Naturally! Okay a little more context is needed. The first district is The Capitol, and it's a city and it's filled with rich vain types. There are good people and there are bad people there, it's not cut and dry, but there's a definite focus on the ways in which we distract ourselves with frivolity in the face of the world's horrors. If you've seen the trailer then you've most definitely seen Elizabeth Banks as Effie Trinket, who typifies the people therein. That's her in the ad above, and now there's an entire website devoted to "Capitol Couture" and it looks like any old fashion website. Except, you know, with an undercurrent of violent, horrible death.
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Since the books are very critical of this thoughtless extravagance by the super-rich and the literally life-or-death inequalities deeply embedded within these societies, I've seen a lot of people online who have gotten upset that the movie is using these same kinds of frivolous extravagances as its marketing tools. But I dunno... it seems kind of brilliantly ballsy to me. I haven't seen the nail polish in person but if I'd been the one designing it I'd have really wanted it to say somewhere on the label that this bottle was bottled by only the most downtrodden of serfs, working the most horrible hours you can imagine. And when you're done getting dolled up, you're going to look like a crazy purple clown lady, won't that be just terrific?.
Can you imagine? But even without getting that explicit, I really do feel as if the nudge is there. Come for the pretty fingernails, and stay for the state-sanctioned murder of innocents! Or am I projecting? What's y'all's take on this?