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'Mannequins Mauled in Store Wars': Best Headline Ever?
Author: Simon Sellars • Oct 9th, 2007 •Category: Ballardosphere, advertising, consumerism, fashion, urban revolt
The shop mannequin and the crash-test dummy have always held a privileged place in Ballard’s fiction. Battered, broken and discarded, they housed the streaky veins of alienation and despair that marked The Atrocity Exhibition. Rendered with Ballard’s clinical, amoral gaze, they evoked the terminal stylisation wreaked by technology in Crash. Fused by nuclear radiation into a solid, molten slag heap, they formed one of the most potent symbols of postwar anomie in ‘The Terminal Beach’. Trussed in bizarre orthopaedic harnesses, they signalled the insidious posthumanism of the early 21st century in Super-Cannes.
So it was with keen interest that I read Brendan’s email, informing me that shoppers have gone on the rampage at a store called … ahem… Clockwork Orange in Northern Ireland. ‘Feverish shoppers ripped clothes off shop mannequins during a bargain store sale which ended in trouble and police being called,’ the report intoned. According to an employee, ‘It was completely primeval – it was like hunter-gatherers. Within half an hour of the store opening the windows had been ransacked by people coming in and ripping the clothes off the mannequins and just leaving the mannequins on the ground.’
I’d fancifully like to think that these shoppers are exacting revenge for all the failings of themselves that they see reflected, Ballard style, in the eerie melancholy of the shop mannequin. But maybe, as Brendan writes, there is something more bloodless at work: ‘It seems that the store’s sale idea, that the cost is determined by the time of purchase [if you were in by 5am, everything was 5 pounds], is itself part of a willful upending of rational economics. They brought it on themselves…..this riot was part of the sales service?’
By the way, that BBC headline, ‘Mannequins mauled in store wars’ — it may well be the very best headline since ‘headless body found in topless bar’ (or, for Australian readers, ‘Man bites Jana’s bum’).
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I can’t help but think that the litigious Mr. Kubrick would have sued over the egregious use of his movie logo by that shop since it’s ripped straight from the promotional art. He had a scene with some serious mannequin mauling during the fight at the end of Killer’s Kiss. Thanks to the indefatigable YouTube, you can see that here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HYY0TaSoVY
Thanks John, I’ve seen Killer’s Kiss and I’ve always remembered that beautiful mannequin scene. Imagine Kubrick directing, oh i don’t know, High-Rise, say?