Why do everyone look like out of the hunger games? -

[stares at error messages]

With all the men in dresses with their hair did, there are all these street walkers with wacky hair that looks like out a movie. There was this movie The Hunger Games, I remember some saying about it that all the costumes the actors ware are all like extra exotic and meant to look serial and uncanny valley. Really it look like clone makeup, the government and professional people in the films.

<https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/02/03/article-2095792-1191ADA9000005DC-701_634x482.jpg>

<https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-36StTBqR...the-hunger-games-movie-28006508-1200-1637.jpg>

<https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6HbXmO_k...bISc/s1600/tumblr_m15kbpNeSb1qjopp9o1_250.jpg>

<https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lw1IlkvQ...CIdwg/s400/tumblr_m15kbpNeSb1qjopp9o4_250.jpg>

Even men are getting in on it.
<https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-AssnB7f4...ockingjay-stanley-tucci-caesar-flickerman.jpg>

<https://static.boredpanda.com/blog/...-colorful-beard-hair-dye-men-trend-4__605.jpg>
These two look like bingo trolls.

<http://static.boredpanda.com/blog/w...colorful-beard-hair-dye-men-trend-33__605.jpg>

<https://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/DSF3093__605.jpg>

How did the costume designers from the movie predict that this is what the future would look like? I see this stuff and think, " these women look as ugly as trinnies". Why are women going out of their way to look perversely unattractive?

 

[Blamo]

Media sets the tone that society will adapt. It shapes the box people are thinking in, basically.

 

[Madre Muerte]

They know holy shit stock up on food. Move to America to avoid global flooding (preferably the capital) and watch the games.

 

[shoplifter7]

literally because of lady gaga

 

[kiwi-identified cow]

I was assigned this series in a class a few years before the first movie came out. Our general consensus on the Capitol's culture surrounding personal expression was that while the people are fully free to change their appearance, they are never 'free' in the political sense, yet try to convince themselves they are since they're free to change their bodies however they want and free to waste resources in a lavish way.

Spoiler: more sperging

The people of the Capitol are actually just as repressed as those in the Districts, but have been brainwashed into thinking their lifestyle is the best because it's comparatively better than life in the Districts and because they can buy/waste/do whatever they want (that their government allows -- and if they don't allow something, well there's just a good reason, of course!). They tell themselves they're happy because they have everything material they could want and because they can turn their physical body into whatever they dream of seeing in the mirror, but they're blind to the stunted nature of their society and incapable of recognizing it; they slather on more and more makeup and gaudier and gaudier clothing in increasingly futile attempts to exercise control over their lives while glossing over all the clear signs of oppression. The end result -- immaculate city streets populated by people who look like dolls -- is then presented back to them and to the Districts as evidence that their society is successful, and the cycle is reinforced.

It's been several years since I read it, but I seem to recall at least one part in the book(s) where Katniss makes some of these observations herself. I definitely see some parallels with the real world, though I don't think the trendiness of dyed hair and the like is the core of the issue; I think it's more about the push for personal -- and almost entirely visual -- self-expression with no conceptual anchor to personal responsibility or self-worth. (For that reason, stuff like the two old guys with dyed beards doesn't give me the same bad vibe.) These days, we've got a lot of people who have a carefully crafted outward appearance and set of identity labels to match it, but are beneath the surface ideologically homogeneous and actively repress their own thoughts/discussions (lest they have the 'wrong' ones). While these real-world people do not (yet) have a government as oppressive as Panem's, they follow their group ideology with the same submissive approach that a citizen repressed by their government has: "I don't want to do or say the wrong thing, and I want to be happy, so I'll just do what seems to be acceptable and express myself in whatever way is allowed. I must be a good person because I'm doing and saying all the things that they say good people do."

 

[Mariposa Colorado]

I noticed alot of parallels with modern day society and the Hunger Games. You can even see it in Japanse society: The nail that sticks out will be hammered back in but in Tokyo, the people express themselves to the extreme with their fashion and behavior.

 

[Solid Snek]

I was assigned this series in a class a few years before the first movie came out. Our general consensus on the Capitol's culture surrounding personal expression was that while the people are fully free to change their appearance, they are never 'free' in the political sense, yet try to convince themselves they are since they're free to change their bodies however they want and free to waste resources in a lavish way.

Spoiler: more sperging

The people of the Capitol are actually just as repressed as those in the Districts, but have been brainwashed into thinking their lifestyle is the best because it's comparatively better than life in the Districts and because they can buy/waste/do whatever they want (that their government allows -- and if they don't allow something, well there's just a good reason, of course!). They tell themselves they're happy because they have everything material they could want and because they can turn their physical body into whatever they dream of seeing in the mirror, but they're blind to the stunted nature of their society and incapable of recognizing it; they slather on more and more makeup and gaudier and gaudier clothing in increasingly futile attempts to exercise control over their lives while glossing over all the clear signs of oppression. The end result -- immaculate city streets populated by people who look like dolls -- is then presented back to them and to the Districts as evidence that their society is successful, and the cycle is reinforced.

It's been several years since I read it, but I seem to recall at least one part in the book(s) where Katniss makes some of these observations herself. I definitely see some parallels with the real world, though I don't think the trendiness of dyed hair and the like is the core of the issue; I think it's more about the push for personal -- and almost entirely visual -- self-expression with no conceptual anchor to personal responsibility or self-worth. (For that reason, stuff like the two old guys with dyed beards doesn't give me the same bad vibe.) These days, we've got a lot of people who have a carefully crafted outward appearance and set of identity labels to match it, but are beneath the surface ideologically homogeneous and actively repress their own thoughts/discussions (lest they have the 'wrong' ones). While these real-world people do not (yet) have a government as oppressive as Panem's, they follow their group ideology with the same submissive approach that a citizen repressed by their government has: "I don't want to do or say the wrong thing, and I want to be happy, so I'll just do what seems to be acceptable and express myself in whatever way is allowed. I must be a good person because I'm doing and saying all the things that they say good people do."

That's an interesting perspective, and while I'm only passingly familiar with the Hunger Games, I suspect it's a sound analysis. It strikes me as being somewhat similar to the situation presented in HG Wells' The Time Machine (or at least, an evolutionary earlier version of it): as the based, populist underclass transforms into hungry Morlock warriors who subsist in the darkness as violent hunters of men, while the liberal, bourgeois overclass transforms into the decadent, childlike Eloi; effete slaves to the system they were born in, fattened on the labour of others, living in apparent luxury but utterly unable to think for themselves.

I think you're right about the main societal problem, too - it's not the weird hair or the funky clothes that's the issue, the issue is the fact that their epistemological method has become so closed, dogmatic, and illiberal, that they are blind to the stunted nature of their society and incapable of recognizing it. I'd also venture to argue that this is the same problem today - people like to dunk on "danger hairs", but danger hair isn't the problem (it may be an outward sign of the underlying problem, but if one were an old guy with blue hair AND were capable of not only questioning his own social peer group, but also of fostering an environment in which such questions might flourish, instead of fostering an environment in which any such questions will be dismissed a priori as "trolling", "Oldthink", or "radicalization" - then I'd say there'd be absolutely no issue with his haircut!)


I hate giving Trad Marxists credit, but I really do believe that the current state of the "danger hair left" needs to be understood in relation to class conflict. The modern Western left - the post-Modern/ post-Marxist/ intersectional/ whatever you want to call it left, has created political fetishes out of all these (what are ultimately) surface differences, like the color of your skin, or the shape of the genitals that give you a boner. These differences transcend class, and allow the entrenched leftwing bourgeoise to create bizarre Marxist narratives of oppression in which they are the victims, holy and righteous, while the working class - white, poor, angry - are the true enemies. The Bolsheviks did the same thing to the working class in Russia, dividing them up into "kulaks" and "lumpenproles" depending on how badly the working class was resisting their new oppressors - only this time, instead of the oppressing class being at least nominally concerned with the plight of the poor above all else, the danger hair oppressing class has convinced itself that the poor can get fucked, since what really matters now is that Ivy League educated transwomen get easy access to state-stolen funding in order to have vanity surgery done on their penises.

And I'd even go a step in saying that we may not actually be as far off from the "government as opressive as Panem's" thing. Maybe the government isn't that bad yet (we still sort of have a Constitution, at least until the Democrats finish becoming a monoparty and gut the whole thing), but I think that many ways, society as a whole is. After all, what is the racebaiting and riotmongering that's been perpetrated by the media elites since at least 2016, but a sick method of getting poor people to fight each other? Which is the teaching of Conflict Theory politics to children, but a method of turning them against one another in a Malthusian/Lord of the Flies struggle for resources?

 

[Pruto]

Because that shitty book was a cautionary tale on liberalism, obviously.

 

[IAmNotAlpharius]

Because that shitty book was a cautionary tale on liberalism, obviously.

One can only hope that this means we’ll have a return to gladiatorial combat to appease the masses.