Hunger Games are a metaphor for any
tool of social control that leaves young people worse off.
While the Hunger Games are the central
concept of the book and trilogy (Hunger Games, Catching Fire,
Mockingjay) by Suzanne Collins, one concept does not a (good) book
make.
Background
For those of you that have avoided the
book and movie, Hunger Games is set in a future version of North
America where the current governing structures have been replaced.
The whole is called Panem (which is linked to the Latin for “bread
and circuses” in the book, but sounds like “Pan America”
contracted to me). The Capitol in the Rockies rules over twelve
districts using a colonial system. Each district is required to
specialize in a sector of the economy, but everything is distributed
by the Capitol. Even people in the agriculture sector live hungry.
The people in the district live in grinding poverty while the people
in the Capitol live opulent lives focused on fashion and gluttony
(minus the twenty years many of them have to serve as “Peacekeepers”
who are the occupying military/police forces).
At some point about 75 years in the
past the districts rebelled and were crushed by the Capitol. To atone
for this rebellion, the Capitol created the Hunger Games. Each year
one boy and one girl (both 12-18 years old) are selected to
participate in a ritual that works like the TV show Survivor. Only
the contestants are killed by the dangers in the game or more often
by other “tributes”.
The protagonist
Katniss Everdean is 16 years old and
the head of her family after her father was killed in a mining
accident. She's from District 12, producer of coal and the poorest
district (Appalachia), but also one laxly regulated. Katniss supports
her mother and sister, Prim, by hunting with a bow while her hunting
partner, Gale, specializes in setting snares.
Being a professional hunter turns out
to be useful in a game where moving and hiding in the woods is a big
part of the game and killing people is how one eliminates opponents.
A Modern Robin Hood
But there's a bit more to Katniss'
skill with a bow, if you're part of Anglo-American culture. Every
child knows the legend of Robin Hood, a hero and protector of the
people who stood against an unjust king. And whether it was true or
not, the story Americans tell about the Revolutionary War Minutemen
was that their prowess with aiming weapons far exceeded the British
occupiers. This iconography carried over to TV Westerns where good
guys were able to shoot the gun out of the hand of bad guys while
inflicting minimal physical damage.
Right/Left Appeal of Katniss
Collins is able to make Katniss
appealing to adherents of both Right Wing and Left Wing fears about
society.
Ethnicity. The people of District 12
live in Appalachia, but Collins (through Katniss) describes Gale
thus: “Straight black hair, olive skin, we even have the same gray
eyes.... Most families who work the mines resemble one another this
way.” The shopkeepers, who are only marginally better off, tend to
have “light hair” and “blue eyes”.
I suspect that people who ascribed to
Right Wing politics see the people of District 12 as oppressed
“White” folk. (They were portrayed this way in the movie where
the decadent citizens of the Capitol included a large number of
Blacks.) People of the Left probably see District 12 as pan-ethnic
and economically oppressed.
The pro-gun crowd probably see Panem's
bans on citizens having weapons as validation that government not
only wants a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, but on the
weapons too.
The anti-United Nations crowd probably
like that Collins named the police force “Peacekeepers”.
And the anti-government people
(libertarians) probably feel validated that government is doing the
oppressing.
The Left probably sees the books as
being anti-war, anti-fascism and a critique of corporate culture
marketed through television. Also, religion does not seem to exist in
the world of Hunger Games. It is not a moral force; it is not a tool
of social control; it does not exist, not even derelict churches.
Moral Question Posed By Hunger Games
At what point does society become so
predatory it no longer deserves our support?
The system of social control is so
offensive that no one from the outside could support it.
But television legitimizes the Hunger
Games. The audience gets to participate by pooling money and
“sponsoring” tributes with gifts that help them survive. For some
reason these felt like campaign contributions in politics to me.
The winners of the Hunger Games then go
on tour, like finalists from American Idol.
There's a multi-layered system for
making the Hunger Games seem normal. It seems likely the Collins is
posing the question to readers, “What in your society is
fundamentally immoral but propped-up by television and other forms of
propaganda and social control?”
Empathy
One of the things that I caught is that
Katniss understands loyalty and indebtedness, but that she struggles
with empathy. “Empathy” doesn't exist as a word or even an idea.
When Katniss and her family were starving, Peeta Mellark, the baker's
son, burned two loaves of bread so that they would need to be
discarded. Peeta got the burned bread to Katniss.
Katniss says of Peeta, “I couldn't
explain his actions.”
In a world where the people in power
are ruling unjustly, it would be useful to reduce the feelings of
connectedness and empathy between the citizens being ruled.
I suspect that this is part of Collins
message. We have to break the psychological traps created by people
in power to create the solidarity among regular people to address
injustice.
Technology & Steam Punk
I suspect that Collins' handling of
technology is a key reason Hunger Games resonates.
She's tapped into the appeal of SteamPunk, a category of science fiction and fantasy that operates without
most of the technology of the Twentieth Century. There are no
airplanes or automobiles in the trilogy, although the Capitol has a
limited number of hovercraft.
But Collins has done something more
clever than tapping into Steam Punk. She's created a world where the
differential in access to technology is exaggerated. The people of
District 12, and most of the other districts, live lives with little
access to technology and medical science. The people of the Capitol,
and especially the people running the Hunger Games, have advanced
technology and medical science.
The Capitol's technology advancements
are mostly biotech and medical. And they are mostly either to create
weapons, creatures for the Hunger Games and cosmetic surgery.
I suspect there are huge anxieties
about technology in the modern world. People have a hard time with
technology they don't understand. And technological advancements have
largely served to consolidate wealth and power in fewer hands.
Because of the anxieties people already
feel about technology, Hunger Games feels like it understands our
current problems.
I'll stop writing about Hunger Games
now. Consider the this blog entry opening the door to a conversation
about the book, the movie and the trilogy.
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