Hobbit mdse: or, That stuff behind your eyes / It all ends up as stuff that you can buy

Is this an appropriate moment to note that “Thorin Oakenshield” has finally joined the category cloud (eight months after “The Hobbit” did)?

Welcome, Thorin.

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Title comes from the soundtrack for this post: Chumbawumba singing “On Ebay”

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I’ve been mostly amused by it, so far, but signs in the other direction are emerging. People I know in ArmitageWorld are starting to question the flood of stuff. AgzyM had come out before against clutter. Today, she writes that she had decided to stay away from it, and puts it this way: “I started feeling a bit annoyed with all the merchandise on offer and the expectation that I’d want to spend any money before I know if the movie is any good.” Jazzbaby1’s comment on failed product tie-ins for the film might have been written in a similar mood. And a post crossed my desk today from at least three different directions about Hobbit nail polish — which I think is a design project and not something to put on one’s fingernails — but the fact that I wondered for several minutes if it were potentially a real product before realizing the poster had no brand name witnesses to my own increasing disorientation in the merchandise stream. Even if Denny’s restaurant isn’t my favorite place to eat, I caught the connection between hobbits and breakfast — but red velvet pancake hushpuppies with cream cheese? I wouldn’t eat that under ordinary circumstances, no matter what label they put on it. It defies the imagination.

Readers of this blog will have noticed the trail of the flood of stuff across its posts, as I tend to post stuff I find striking (some WETA stuff), amusing (cell phone covers), or embarrassing (postage stamps and coins). I’ve also been linking to RichardArmitageNet.com amazon affiliate links where possible in order to exploit filthy lucre for the purposes of charity. I will admit that this is not the thing about The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey that is primarily irritating me at the moment — but it still bears consideration, and something someone said to me today made me think about it a little more.

I’ve been buying this stuff off and on, which is kind of a big step for me. When I was a child, my brother and I would not have been allowed to express even the wish to own stuff like this. “Nonsense” was the catch-all expression for anything that smacked of marketing or style as opposed to education or practicality. We had no shortage of toys, but with the exception of Barbie, they were typically not things that were associated with the marketing of specific characters or books or movies, not even stuff my mother was okay with, like Sesame Street. I think that was one of the many problems my mother had with the poster of Mr. Spock that I bought when I was twelve and that she made me remove from my closet door when I was fourteen. On the whole, too, I never disagreed with the ethical position and the critique of certain kinds of consumption that my parents were articulating with regard to heavily marketed toys — that there are better places for that money to go, and that by spending it in that way you’re buying junk and giving in to Hollywood in the process. I still think both of those things are true. On the other hand, my inclination to judge anyone else on this issue went out the window when I gave in and bought a Heinz Kruger / Captain America costume card, which became an energizing talisman. I concede all the possible points about religion and authenticity in the age of mass manufactured value, but my own experience with Armitage relics very much eliminated my feelings of shame about wanting stuff like this and also any inclination I might have felt to criticize others who buy it.

Presumably for each of us there’s a place we won’t go with our consumption. I’ve been a bit surprised at where that place might be for me, as I’ve pre-ordered an expensive plush toy, and I’ve started to wonder if price, rather than content, is actually my major consideration. Would I have bought a Thorin coin if that were within the realm of my budget? As I’ve stated before, my credit card has rejected some of these purchases because the bank’s computer doesn’t think I should be buying it; it’s out of my pattern of consumption. Sometimes it’s stuff that appears to be taking on a particular meaning, like the Thorin figure. Other times it’s stuff that I just think is funny — I bought some NZ postage stamps. But what weirded me out for myself this week was that the question of a smart phone has become acute in my life and I’m thinking I might actually get one. And the next thing that popped into my mind once that threshold was overcome was: I could get a Thorin Oakenshield cell phone case — and then I could go to Denny’s and see that special content available only on smart phones!

Not that that would be an incentive. Man oh man. Servetus slaps herself on the forehead.

Pursuing the remark made by AgzyM, who writes about her frustration with being asked to invest money in stuff before the film even comes out, I’m wondering if the following is the dynamic that’s governing my relationship to the stuff at the moment:

It seems to me that the people marketing this film don’t actually see the film as separate from the stuff; that is, the “event” of the film involves not only the premiere of the film in several weeks, but also its making and the gradual, staggered appearance of the stuff. They are selling us not only the artistic product but also the vicarious experience of participating in the production by vlog and a bunch of stuff that both marks and intensifies the growth of our excitement over what we would see as the actual artistic event but which they see as simply one piece of the entire process. In that sense, from the marketing standpoint, we are investing in the film already because those things are already part of the film. Presumably, too, the experience of having their childhood pleasures mediatized and marketed to them is also something that both parents and children in the U.S. are much more comfortable with, as it’s a standard practice now, and no one thinks anything of it. The question isn’t whether product tie-ins, but simply the attractiveness of the ones made available. And finally, of course, The Hobbit is not an unknown quantity — it already has millions of fans who might be ready to purchase items even in advance of this particular iteration of it simply because of their ongoing allegiance to the book and the fan community around it. So we can find plenty of reasons not to hold back the sale of the stuff that make complete sense depending on the position of the observer.

But Agzy’s remark makes me think of a colleague I had in my last job who was an avid collector of Star Wars action figures. We had a fair number of conversations about it (at that point I was a crazed collector of a few styles of porcelain), and I asked him if he was buying them to play with them (we are both of the age that we could have played with Star Wars toys when they first came out). He said, no, he looked for ones in the original packaging and kept them in the boxes and looked at them and remembered having played with some of them — but that he had many more now than he had had as a child. He thought that while the value of the figures was an excuse, it was more about the nostalgia he felt in looking at them closely, even when they were items that he did not associate with the time in question but had only been able to purchase for himself as an adult.

What I wonder is whether part of the discomfort some of us are feeling — and some of this depends on why one is buying, and what, and how one feels about it — concerns the way that we are seeing nostalgia being created for and sold to us right in front of our eyes — we’re asked to accept these merchandised constructions of nostalgia for an event, the film, that we have not yet experienced. If you’re a marketer, of course, the entire leadup is what’s being sold, and thus we’re not being cheated of any experience, since the stream of stuff is (also) the experience. And since something that’s very new and pleasant to me at the moment is the euphoria over watching the general awareness of Richard Armitage grow, and the proliferation of things witnesses to that, I am less disturbed by this than I might be — because the escalation in Armitage’s career is part of the event I am watching / buying. But even if I’ve gotten friendlier towards the stuff — if I’ve started to see consumption as an acceptable means of identity constitution under certain circumstances, I haven’t completely let go of other concerns.

And so, I ask: If you, like me, grew up in an age where memories were still mostly derived in the aftermath of an event rather than in the leadup to it, to the extent that we are bothered by this, could it be that we’re disturbed by the flood of objects because we’re being robbed of our power to construct our own nostalgia? By the apparent inversion of cause and effect, of event and memory?

Am I being sold, in the words of Chumbawumba, “the stuff behind my eyes”? To what extent am I not only comfortable having my own dreams, imaginations, wishes made concrete in the form of merchandise and offered to me by a friendly retailer, but also accepting them rewriting my history via my memories? Because that’s where this seems to be going.

I don’t know. To think about. And I’m sure we’ll have plenty more opportunities to do so.

Anyway, because I’m curious, I’ve interspersed some polls asking how you feel about the flood of stuff at this point. I put in every answer that I could think of off the top of my head, but please leave others in the comments.

~ by Servetus on November 4, 2012.