Pink

Charlie White’s spent three years researching and producing a body of work tilted Girl Studies, all about the American teen as image and idea. The German athletic apparel company Adidas created an innovative ad campaign for the re-launch of their Adicolor shoe line, where they chose artists to make short films about their emotional and creative response to each color. Guess who was asked to make the video about Pink? Charlie White!

His film is poetic, surreal, feminine and teen. The filmshows an American teen in her bedroom talking on the phone wearing cheerleading shorts rolled up, and a tank. Her blonde wavy hair bounces as she laughs on the phone. Her carpet is pink, her phone is pink, her walls are pink, and her hairdryer is pink-lots of pink. In her row of stuffed animals along her bed, a pink teddy bear suddenly moves and looks at her. As this happens, the pink shell on her desk starts to emit a clear liquid, and her hand starts to become covers in pink liquid. A pink liquid covers her whole body. The bear walks towards her. The pink liquid dissipates, revealing her body covered in pink rhinestones. The bear crawls off the bed. She feels her face. The bear crawls on her and hugs her while she lies on the carpet in fetal pose. The clear liquid goes back inside the shell. Music is playing the whole time that repeats the phrase, “Holding on.”

The film has a melancholy feel, with the music, the slowness of motion and the way it ends in a fetal pose. The teenage girl becomes covered in the color that most represents Girl in the American culture. Not only does she become pink, but also she becomes rhinestone pink, like the coverings teen girls put on their phones. While she is covered in the feminine pink materials, she loses her gender at the same time. Her long blonde hair, her girly clothes, her makeup, is all gone. She becomes a human form covered in pink rhinestones. She is a young woman and a child all at once. She seems to feel overwhelmed with her transformation, with her feelings. The teddy bear seems to understand how she is feeling, and goes to comfort her. The bear hugs her, instead of her hugging the bear. She seems to be unable to help herself, and just has to rest and let it all the changes happen.

She is covered with a pink teen layer on the outside, but how much is happening in the inside? Her environment affects how she looks and acts so much, but how much of her environment is she in control of? This film shows a moment is a teenage girl’s emotional life that is rarely seen, and definitely open to interpretation. She is in metamorphosis and the person in controlling her changes is unclear.  Does she want to be pink, or does the culture want her to be pink?