La Fille Sauvage

What is most immediately striking about "The Savage Girl" is how it reads like anime. Perhaps it's because of Chas' warped perfection, the goofy good-guy humour of Javier, or the outsider perspective of Ursula, or the near-Apocalyptic vision of the near future. These are recurring sorts of characters and themes in anime (of certain types anyway), culminating with Chas' bastard vision of the Lite Age. It makes a more interesting and moving story when the conflicts, personal and universal, are placed against the backdrop of the real life scheme of mass consumer culture.

Shakar extends the notions Hebdige formulated about style: individual expression (even in subcultures where there is an oppositionist ideology) is, in practice, a pattern of consumption of goods. These patterns were first explored in Bordieu's piece, but take on new meanings when applied to the choice of consumption beyond food and into nearly every facet of everyday life. In Chas' presentation of the Lite Age, he claims that only by acts of consumption do we remain free. If our only free choices are seen as what we buy, then those who are truly in control of our identities are those that sell us these objects. The revelation that Shakar brings us to, and Hebdige describes, is that we no longer need convincing that we need the objects. The question barely arises in our minds - it is simply that part of who we are is exemplified in what we buy, and the absence of that is the absence of self.

In this system, art aside, where is authenticity? It seems clear that, because of the appropriation of the Savage Girl's image, authenticity lies outside of the system of consumption, and it is the job of the industry to sell off that authenticity via decontexturalization of that authentic image, then mass reproduction. This model leads us to believe that the aura of the Savage Girl is what lures consumers to purchase the goods associated with the reproduction of her image, despite that the original is unknown to them. It's implicit that somehow consumers sense aura in reproduced items deriving from authenticity.

I can name one well-known example of this phenomenon, although the 'original' was well known - the grunge fashion in the early 90s. Had high fashion appropriated that image before Nirvana started selling platinum, would it have still been accepted for the bit of aura still left through the processes of decontexturalization and reproduction? Perhaps not in those days. What I propose, and I think Shakar may be implying, is that now we're trained to decode and adopt a processed form of authenticity to an unprecedented depth.