Dear Hollywood and Covergirl: Time for an Irony Lesson

This morning I woke up to the news that Ben Stiller (who is creeping closer to fifty and apparently wigging out about it) is shopping around a Reality Bites comedy series.  It will be set in the nineties, and, one assumes, will follow Lelaina and Troy around after they finally hook up.  I suppose we'll be able to see if Vickie ever stops shacking up and if Sammy and his mom reconcile.  My point is...nobody is going to care about this.

The disaffected youth of the 90s are all grown up.  We have kids now and mortgages and real jobs and the idea of a young person doing the gas card/cash thing makes us look anxiously at our children and ponder things like savings accounts and bicycle transportation.  Samantha from Sex in the City numbed us to the whole "I sleep with everybody" thing and Doogie Howser came out of the closet in real life.  I mean, really.  Ben Stiller, embrace middle age, buddy.  EMBRACE IT.

Anyway, I was all shaking my head and going, "Gah, Hollywood, you SUCK!" when I came across the following little nugget.

This, my friends, is "The Coal Mining Look" as inspired by the movie The Hunger Games.    I'll let this sink in for a minute before I begin my tirade.

Ready?

Okay.

Obviously, the first problem in all this is that the book industry, Hollywood, and the fashion industry are now all inextricably linked in America.  What winds up happening is that any time a book is successful, Hollywood gets involved (there's a woman who wrote a novel and now it's going to be a five novel series AND a movie series and the first novel hasn't even been published.  It's a fantasy series that I can't even bear to look up right now.) Sometimes, Hollywood gets a book adaptation "right" (I'm thinking the last few Harry Potter movies and most of The Hunger Games,) but invariably there are bits left out.  Also invariably, there comes a giant marketing push.  The littles get Happy Meals and dolls and Halloween costumes.  The bigs get collectible bobble heads and makeup collections, like the one seen above.

Okay, so the gimmick here is that The Capitol has commissioned Covergirl to do a cosmetics line based on District 12 and the coal mines, in order to "honor" the contribution of the district.  Hilariously, this is EXACTLY what The Capitol would do:  capitalize on the grief of a district to make money and provide entertainment for the shallow, uninformed Capitol citizens.  For those of you who haven't read the books or seen the movie:  life in District 12 sucked.  Working in a coal mine, in real life and in Katniss' world is dangerous, frightening work.  It killed Katniss' father.  It makes people sick.  It, in short, is awful.  You should also know that the citizens of The Capitol are portrayed as idiots.  There are very few that are not portrayed as idiots, and non-idiotic ones don't wear a lot of makeup.  In fact, the tinting of skin and hair is pretty much a hallmark for "being a dumbass" in The Capitol.  Suzanne Collins goes out of her way to to point out that the one Capitol person Katniss can trust wears only a touch of gold eyeliner.  His lack of makeup is enough to catch Katniss' attention and make her relax around him.

Wake up and smell the irony, Covergirl.

But Covergirl can't and more than that, Covergirl is counting on a lot of teenage girls to be as ignorant as Capitol citizens and buy this crap.  Covergirl and whatever studio is forking it in from whatever deals it has with whatever companies are also sucking up money from Collins' cautionary cash cow actually probably DO see the irony and are doing a dance all over it.  Argh.

The creator of the line says,  "I was inspired by the interpretation of coal mining, by the colors in coal mining: the dust, the grey, the silvers and the black,” which makes my head spin.  Seriously?  The colors in coal mining?

Children, here's a little look at the colors in coal mining:

courtesy The Decatur Daily archives  http://archive.decaturdaily.com/decaturdaily/news/060129/mine.shtml

SEXAY, right?  Check out those rich mineral tones!!  Wooooohooooo...that is GLAMOUR right there, y'all.

Even more hysterically awful is when this mess of an advertisement goes on to say: "Of the bright, bold sweep of canary yellow in the inner corner of the eye, Dotti adds: 'It signifies the power in coal.'"

Ahahahaahahahahahaahaahahahahaaa!

Whew.

I'm sorry, it's just...were they TRYING to be ironic?  I mean...don't they KNOW what a canary was used for in coal mines?  The "power" in coal in relation to canaries goes a little something like this:  canaries were used by coal miners back in the day to determine if the methane and carbon dioxide inherent in underground mines was going to kill them.  If the caged bird brought in by the miners was singing, it was all good.  If the caged bird stopped singing, it was time to run out of the mine.   http://www.wisegeek.org/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-canary-in-a-coal-mine.htm

I have to think that the makeup artist hired to do this was thinking, "WTF?  You people are nutso and completely uninformed, so I'm going to put this little nugget of irony in here for the smart people to chew on."

Because if I DON'T think that, I will fall over in a brain explosion accident.

It grosses me out that The Hunger Games is being linked to makeup in such a clumsy, seemingly unfeeling way.  I'm not saying that THG is high literature, nor do I scoff at makeup in general, but, honestly, Collins wielded the metaphor of the citizens' obsession with outside appearances and their inability to grasp the reality of life like a fricking CLUB in this book.  If you wore makeup like this, --ESPECIALLY to honor District 12--in the book, Katniss would either hate you or think you were an idiot for whom she felt sorry.

The awful thing is...you know more is coming.  Will they develop a line of cosmetics for people of color to honor District 11?  Maybe with a plum lipstick to celebrate agriculture?  All white-makeup to signify the flour from District 9?  Ugh.  UUUUGGGGHHHH.

Tell you what Hollywood (and Covergirl).  Why don't you get out of my bookshelves?  I mean, honestly, if you can't come up with something original, why don't you start making movies about the Duck Dynasty people and Honeybooboo.  Or, like professional wrestling.  Or...I don't know...golf.  Because all of this dumbassedness is hurting my feelings, which are vested in the universes that my favorite authors created that you are dumbing down for a generation of young people who have no idea that they are being spoonfed idiocy.

And while you're at it, why don't you get out of my early adulthood, too?  It was pretty hazy and desperate and there are a lot better stories to tell about the reality NOW, anyway.

Although there's a lot less Evan Dando in the now reality.  Which, you know, does kind of bite.