Tuesday October 24, 2006

Hat Spat a Marketing Ploy?

I saw Little Children this weekend, and I highly recommend it. It’s the best dark dramedy I’ve seen in years. While watching it, however, I was reminded of last spring’s infamous “hat spat” in Park Slope. As both New York magazine and Gawker detailed at the time, a PC brawl broke out on a message board for Park Slope parents when someone found a jester-style children’s hat and assumed it belonged to a boy.

As you can see from this still, a jester-style children’s hat plays a somewhat important role in Little Children. The little boy who wears it has a complicated emotional relationship with his head gear. This made me wonder if the “hat spat” wasn’t just a guerrilla marketing campaign all along, designed to lure Bobo parents into a movie that mocks their very lifestyle. Wouldn’t that be great? At the very least it would prove that it was a boy’s hat after all.

Posted by jim at 10:56 AM ||