For those of you who have not read the Hunger Games trilogy, or fallen prey to the crime of the movie casting rollout, skip ahead, nothing for you here.
Cinna is the new Capitol recruit assigned to style the Tribute from the lowly District 12, the gifted artist who creates the costumes that give advantage to Katniss. Unlike the absurdly coiffed, surgically altered members of the Capitol – Tigris’s “semi-feline mask” face, the “freakish” Caesar Flickerman in his lightbulb suit, Octavia’s pea green skin and face etched in gold tattoos – Cinna is the contrary of expectations. He is surgically unaltered, dresses in black, has natural dark hair, and uses gold metallic eyeliner to accentuate the goldflecks in his glittering green eyes.
Everything about Cinna is calm and subdued except for his wildly original artistry, into which he channels all his emotions. His designs are inflammatory (literally and figuratively), creating Katniss as a revolutionary vehicle, coveting her as invaluable symbolic property for the revolution. By writing image-stories with his designs, he sends his message. Beneath his inexperienced, fragile exterior, Cinna is subversively committed to keeping Katniss alive and to defying the Capitol. He sets the stage for Katniss’ and Peeta’s sacrificial choices in the Arena by mesmerizing the audience into sympathy and support for the doomed lovers caught in a nightmare world of brutality and death.
Cinna’s designs are chimerically fantastic and insidious, from the star making “girl on fire”, to an incendiary “orange frock patterned with autumn leaves,” and headband of metallic gold, the orange red of burning coal and glowing embers, to a demure shift the color of candelight, intended to convey mercy-evoking innocence, to a wedding gown of gothic proportions, heavy with pearls, which, when Katniss spins, catches on fire, burning off the gown’s top layer to reveal The Mockingjay of black pearls and feathers (for which Cinna is beaten to a bloody pulp).
A revolutionary artist, an alchemical mercury, who better to portray the young Capitol stylist than the brilliantly theatrical, incandescent figure skater? Acutely balanced on that thin edge between artiste and athlete, the lithe, angel-faced boy is an Artist, on the ice, where he transcends all others, and on land, where he is an accomplished creator of chimeric costumes and frocks. Behind his achingly ethereal beauty – a complexion of milk, jet hair and eyes like sparkly emeralds – Johnny Weir is sweet as kittens, with a feather dusting of gravitas and a talent that crackles like burning embers.
Cinna.