Love, Lies and The Hunger Games

By Maria Padhila

To me, there’s no point in talking about what might have been… I still wouldn’t have wanted to marry anyone. I only got engaged to save people’s lives, and that completely backfired. — The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

I had to get eye surgery halfway through reading the Hunger Games trilogy, and I’m just now picking it up again — with one eye. Everything on the horizon is clear, but my close vision is kaput. Same thing will happen in two weeks to the other eye. So I suppose that means I can’t see what’s right in front of me anymore. I’ll have to discover the implications there later.

Poly Paradise at Burning Man. Photo by Eric.
Poly Paradise at Burning Man. Photo by Eric.

My daughter and I also saw the movie, with Issac. I loved Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone, and I think she did pretty well in this one, too. But like everything and everybody else associated with Hunger Games, she and her character have been analyzed from every angle. I’m going to continue this madness, from the one direction I haven’t seen too much about yet — relationships. In the plural.

I’m an old-school believer that our pop culture obsessions say interesting things about us, whether or not we’re immediately engaged with them. So even if the last thing you’d do is care what Mockingjay means, you’ll still be affected by a generation of primarily young people who are shaped by the phenomenon. Barbie dolls and YouTube shares are no lesser texts than Quality Works of High Art or the most avant-garde pieces. Seeing as how I practice the exalted art of poetry, which gets read by about five people nowadays, that’s saying something.

For those who don’t know the story, it’s not giving too much away to share the basics: In a dystopian future, in a country called Panem — North America before the waters climbed over the edges — the evil, trivial, rich and partying denizens of a Capitol district are supported in their debauchery by the dozen districts of serfs that ring the region. Some provide food, others textiles, others power.

District 12, which has an Appalachian flavor, is full of near-starving coal-mining families. It’s home to Katniss and her little sister and her mother, widowed in a mining accident. Katniss is an accomplished hunter, hiding her forbidden bow and arrows, sneaking past an electrified fence and spending every day she can in the woods, bringing in rabbits and squirrels and fowl mostly, to sell on the black market and feed her family.

As intrepid as this Diana is, she can’t escape the most cruel law imposed on the serfs: Each year, two children’s names are drawn from each district, a girl and a boy. They are then sent off to star in a combination reality show / real-life video game created by the most talented virtual artists, in which the children from each of the serf districts fight to the death. The one who survives to the end wins quantities of food each year for the whole village and his or her family. When her little sister is chosen to fight, Katniss volunteers to go in her place.

The rulers say they enact this ritual and performance to remind the districts not to rebel. The books are overtly political and are drawing many commentator comparisons to the Occupy movement and even global uprisings. I get a charge out of so many young girls, in particular, reading about this warrior-for-justice heroine. My daughter and I have had much to talk about, from drawing comparisons in history to going over hypothetical situations in which one would take a stand, and how much one would risk to rebel. It’s an extraordinarily harsh and existential story to have caught on so powerfully in the larger culture.

A few critics and commentators have pointed out that in the story, and more so in the movie, Katniss is yet another strong pop culture heroine cast into the role of She Who Must Choose Between Boys. The precedent most often referenced is the Twilight series, which I haven’t seen or read, but apparently involves a young woman choosing between a hot vampire and a sexy werewolf. I suppose there are worse situations, and I’ve been in them. The Choice is a reliable device to keep interest up in a narrative, especially one aimed at girls and women; I have no complaint with a relationship-centered story, per se. Relationships are more interesting to me than most things in life. I don’t think a heroine is a less-interesting character if she focuses on finding herself within relationships. It’s not even necessarily a bad ‘role model’.

There may be more to The Choice model than its compelling fairy-tale tug; it might be surfacing in our prominent narratives for a lot of reasons. Maybe young women don’t feel they have, or are, enough in a traditional relationship. Maybe they feel they’re living a second life, below the radar of superficial successes demanded of them. The most common interpretation is that one boy is ‘good’, and one ‘bad’ (a la Dr. Horrible’s Blog), and sometimes it’s hard for the girl to tell the difference. This reduces the male characters to functional at best. In these stories, the girls are the stars.

But in Hunger Games, it is refreshing how played-down the romantic relationships are — to the point where I was really hoping Katniss would turn out to be a lesbian. Of course I’m used to scifi, where a lot of the greatest writing is by, for, and about lesbians. Katniss is adamant that she never wants to marry, both because she doesn’t have time after caring for her family, and because she refuses to have children who will only starve or, each year, face the chance of getting called for the Games. But instead, Katniss has a situation with two boys. Her best friend, Gale, is the buddy with whom she has long hunted in the woods. He’s her counterpart, the kind of friend you can say anything to or nothing at all as you skin squirrels, side-by-side.

Her male counterpart in the Games, Peeta, upsets this relationship and sets another storyline in motion. He tells the interviewer, on the round of vicious talk show nonsense the competitors must undergo before the Games, that he has always been in love with Katniss, back at their home village, and that he doesn’t know if he can bear to kill her.

It creates a situation that can both save her and sets her teeth on edge. The avid viewers of the reality show now have someone to root for, a romance to cheer, star-crossed lovers to moon over. His feelings are real, but he’s also using them calculatedly. She has little feeling for him, but if she pretends a romance, it will benefit them both. And she does feel friendship for him.

If the competitors are well liked by the rich viewers, they can be ‘sponsored’ — meaning viewers who favor them might send food, water and weapons into the arena for them. Playing a bubble-headed bimbo in love could keep her alive.

This leaves the ordinary Who Will She Choose issue behind. The male characters get dimensions beyond Bad Boy and Socially Acceptable Boy. They’re just as much chewed up by the image machine as the girl character is. It turns into a story of someone deliberately alienated from herself by an oppressive political structure.

What’s striking to me is the importance of the concept of surveillance in the books and movie. The eyes of the world are always upon her, and her survival depends on her pretending to the deepest, most autonomous and individual emotion — love. Most of her interior monologues in the narrative are caught up with her trying to stay alive and keep her family safe. Fewer involve whether she will hurt the feelings of either of the boys. Fewer still are about her trying to understand and discover her own feelings. It’s a story of how trauma and constant dissembling rob us of being in touch with our own emotions and motivations, and of the breakthrough moments that can come despite this constant barrage of stress.

No, we aren’t starving and being firebombed; we aren’t even, usually, under the gaze of the reality-show cameras. But many of us — even voluntarily — live as if we have them on us. Even without cameras, we’ve internalized a set of ‘audience expectations’ we play to in our relationships. Technology just makes it more obvious.

I actually find liberation in self-creation, using whatever tools are around me to keep adding and subtracting a little here and there about my identity, and trying out several if I choose. But I know it’s not for everyone, and you can end up simply fooling yourself if you aren’t careful. I might be.

On another level, I wonder what has made it so immediately acceptable and understandable for so many young fans of the books that surveillance is a given and real love must be hidden while its camera-ready version is played out. Are they intuiting the future world of drones, sensors, GPS positions and learning how to live in it? Are they trying to keep one simple segment of their own will safe from hovering helicopter parents?

We are becoming more free to love who we want in ways we want, to be anywhere on the spectrum, and we’re being protected by new laws and understanding alike. So why are so many of them clicking in to a future scenario in which the only way to have real love is to speak in codes and move very carefully under the eyes of the censors? Why are they so attuned to the need to create a sort of Potemkin village of romance that the audience will go for if they ever hope to have a life of their own?

In some ways, the themes echo those in the wonderful film about East Germany, The Lives of Others. The more we must lie to the eyes in the sky — and those under the bed — the more the chances increase that we lie to each other. This is the process by which oppression can wipe out even that most anarchic emotion, love.

14 thoughts on “Love, Lies and The Hunger Games”

  1. “The books and movie actually have little graphic violence.”

    Based on the careful descriptions of said violent scenes, I think that is a matter of degree of desensitization to violence as a whole. To someone inured to violence the scenes may seem tame but to someone for whom any violence is not the norm (or who is not already desensitized and built up a tolerance for it) it is egregious. Parents and adults have walked out of the movie in extreme distress because of the violence depicted therein. They all describe the scenes as profoundly disturbing because the actors are supposed to be children or youth. These people do so because they have not desensitized themselves to violence. Movies such as this do just that; they desensitize people (and now the youth who so eagerly view them) to the violence depicted.

    I do not see desensitizing people to violence as the direction we need to be going in society. To do so makes us easy prey for violent acts perpetuated upon us with little or no dissent against it. Instead, as a people we ought to be smart enough to see the media machine for what it is; a capitalistic, profit-driven machine which cares nothing for the societal health of the viewers. I advocate not for censorship on the part of the media but for parental discretion; parents need to stop jumping on the “new and everyone else has seen it” bandwagon and THINK before paying the machine the money that feeds it. Unfortunately, people are too often unthinking novelty junkies to their own detriment.

  2. “In the books and movie, the Games are designed to PUNISH the adults and keep them in line, not in any way to entertain them.”

    That’s the surface picture but the underbelly is there. It is designed to punish SOME adults but it is definitely entertainment for the elite. If that underbelly message is realized, we may soon see child labor again in our society. Hence my ire about the subliminal message of “You can become rich like us someday (the message of capitalism) and get your kicks off torturing children in order to keep the poor aduts in line.” Not the message I want to see spread around, KWIM?

  3. No Mommy Wars here. I am just fed up with the way children are treated and depicted these days. I am also fed up by how people are so easily led by the next, new thing without any thought as to the social commentary of said new thing or its value (or lack thereof).

  4. Maria: “I feel for those who can’t get the space and privacy not to be subjected to violent depictions that disturb and trigger them”
    Please don’t assume that I am triggered by violence, that’s your projection. Hmmmm….seems like a Mars direct opposite Neptune, Pluto retro, Sun opposite Saturn kind of day. I wish you the best in healing your triggers.

  5. Not getting in a Mommy War, uh-uh! 😉
    But Carrie, I’m not getting your point about adults resenting children having anything at all to do with this one. In the books and movie, the Games are designed to PUNISH the adults and keep them in line, not in any way to entertain them. The 99 percent live in fear of having their children taken from them and being made to fight (or dying of starvation or in a mining or factory accident). Even many of the 1 percenters are afraid of each other (getting ratted out and turned into slaves). It’s grotesque, but it’s a most effective way the rulers have found to control the working people. It creates a great deal of fear (which prevents rebellion), and just enough hope (that one’s own children will escape). Rebellion would destroy that slim hope.
    It’s much like the situations with serfs of many other civilizations over hundreds of years, such as in Russia, where peasant towns were regularly raided and young people taken as soldiers. The books extend this metaphor–a few of the rich and powerful create wars for their own purposes, and everyone else, and their children, suffer horribly. It is a terrifying concept indeed, and that’s why it’s a fit topic for exploration in fiction. The books and movie actually have little graphic violence. Whether individuals read a book or not is an individual choice best made based on what they know about themselves and their families.
    I feel for those who can’t get the space and privacy not to be subjected to violent depictions that disturb and trigger them. Media can be/feel omnipresent, and that’s actually one of the points I tried to make in the post.
    I’m actually triggered by things like breaking glass and slamming doors–these can set off an embarrassing and debilitating hysterical reaction. It only happens with real life, though, not with movies, images, or words. There’s no practical way for me to protect myself from these things, so I try to make clear to the people around me what’s going on, and put their concerns at rest. My own embarrassment and impatience with myself is much harder to master!
    Of course people have the right to set up boundaries to shield themselves and their children from things they feel are inappropriate. I made no argument against that, and never would. I just want to make it clear that there’s a big difference between making choices and calling for censorship or speech restrictions.
    I also feel that fiction can sensitize people in a good way, perhaps to become aware of the level of violence other families face daily all over the world, and that this can lead to compassion and change. There’s a woman in Afghanistan now with dishes breaking all around her, if she’s lucky enough to have any left, and I think I’m under fire? That’s when I tell myself, “Bitch, please.” These games have got to end, for real.

  6. Maria,

    I know…it is a heroine story…it makes kids feel good…it is a Post Apocalyptic story…blah-blah-blah. My issue is; why couldn’t the author have made the post apocalyptic hero/heroine point without the savaging violence against children? There are other very well written books in the hero/heroine-post apocalyptic genre that don’t have the gladiatorial style violence involving children for adult pleasure. To me it shows that marriage between the so-called “reality” shows with the humiliation and degredation for sport and the violence against children. This mixture is disturbing and is a canary in the coal mine of our society. Neither was necessary to write a good story in the genre. It points to that adult resentment against meeting the needs of our children and a growing underbelly of anger against them that puts them at risk.

    Regarding reading: I was allowed to read whatever I wanted as I grew up. That meant I read way too many romance books which made me believe that relationships were like what I read. When they weren’t, I was angry, resentful, and disappointed. So to keep my daughters from being programmed in that way, I kept them from reading those romance books. I also knew what was developmentally appropriate (based on how children’s brains develop) and made sure they had reading that reflected that development.

    I also prevented them from reading a totally inappropriate book for their 6th grade assignment. The district thought a book that was made for high school or college age students (with a high-school age female lead, adult themes of rape, stalking, mental illness, sexual predators, and fear) was appropriate for 12 year olds. I read it first and was appalled. I made the teacher give my daughters alternative reading because I knew this book was part of the push downward of curriculum. In other words, reading material that would have been suitable for late high school or college was now being used in 6th grade just as fractions (which I was taught in 5th grade) were now being taught in 3rd grade. This push downward is not based on child development but rather on social pressure based on a hyper-comptitive society and parental pressure.

    I knew that young kids’s pre-frontal lobes of the brain (which deal with abstract reasoning, hidden motive and intent, and innuendo) don’t come awake until late puberty so until then, when they read stories they just see the stories, not the hidden agendas or social messages. It makes no sense to have them read stories with such loaded social concepts until their brains are mature enough to fully understand them. Doing so early doesn’t benefit them the way it would if they read these kinds of books when they are older.

    The emperor is naked folks. Really.

  7. Bravo Carrie, I’m in your camp with this too. My ‘kids’ are 23 & 24 and the last couple of years I have been stunned with the DRAMA that their generation is so hooked into in their lives (courtesy of reality shows). I mentioned it many times to my daughter, eventually getting to the point of interrupting her when she would start her rambling tirade telling me all about it. I didn’t want to hear it. “Get yourself out of everyone’s drama, including your own” is all I would say. I must say, I was really impressed one of the last times I saw her. One of her friends was trying to pull her into one with the rest of the group and my daughter told her “I don’t want to be involved with that drama.”
    The friend I live with loves the violent movies. I wake up at 7:30 in the morning with Spartacus on her tv, full blast volume, followed by all kinds of shows where people are sliced, diced, raped………..there must be 25 people murdered visually by the time she goes to work at 11:30 am. Many times I just have to go back to bed, shut my door and put on a nice cd – very loud. Oooooh, just as I typed this, what do I hear? The same thing I hear about 15 times a day: “Violence, viewer discretion advised.” Ugh. I spend a lot of time continuously clearing this house of that energy.

  8. Fiction, and all arts, are good vehicles to understand and gain empathy for what humanity is capable of–cruelty or heroism. The books aren’t great masterpieces, but they’re stories of a heroine fighting to save her family from starvation and death at the hands of a tyrannical, insane regime. Young people, like all of us, like to be able to imagine ourselves in the hero’s role–and that might be good for us, too.
    Not every story is right for everyone at any time. My mother was a librarian and never restricted my reading in any way. She had five children and had to work constantly, so we didn’t get much of a chance to talk about what I read, but I consider the free range of the library the greatest gift she gave me. I’m very fortunate to have time to talk to my own daughter about what she reads. And

  9. ::::rant on::::

    I can see what you are getting at. I have not seen the movie or read the books and the reason for this is that after reading the reviews and synopsis of the story (as well as the play-by-play descriptions of the mnore graphically violent scenes), I was apalled.

    In our society, since the Women’s Movement allowed women to become more like men, the position of children has fallen ever lower. Our society is very adult-centered to the point that we now think that if the adults are happy and fulfulled, the kids will be happy even if the adults divorce or work 80 hrs a week in order to feel fulfilled. More and more child psychologists are coming out and saying this is not true; children’s needs and focus are on themselves for obvious reasons (they are not as developed as adults therefore delayed gratification is less developed and they need us to survive) and as such, they are not really thinking about how happy their parents are; they are thinking of their need for love, caring, nurturing, and guidance.

    This adult-centered focus includes a trend toward glorified bullying via the media in shows (called “entertainment”) in which people compete for a prize knowing they will be humiliated, “voted off,” demoralized, and treated like crap by a set of bully judges and an audience who gets off on watching other people suffer said humiliations.

    The Hunger Games now takes the two things and puts them together: the low status of children with the bullying concept that allows adult people to feel elevated and superior off of seeing others’ humiliations and demoralizations but with an added twist; it includes graphic violence. The premise is that these kids compete to the death for the pleasure of the ruling elite (all of whom are adults).

    In that whole scenario, I see a deep-seated resentment adults have against the innocence and neediness of children. It is a sign that the adults feel like their needs have not been met and they resent having to BE the adults carrying all the responsibility. As a nation, we have NOT grown up. Are our children going to keep paying for our prolonged adolescence?

    The fact that the film is said to have a LOT of gratuitous violence sickens me. Where else BUT in today’s world would people eagerly line up and pay out scarce money to see a graphic depiction of children bloodying and mangling each other for the pleasure of adults? Is this what we have become as a society? I don’t care how lofty the author’s intent to show how societies can degenerate; that could have been made clear without the violence depicted as it is or the use of children.

    I know it is all the fad today for everyone to see this film and read these books but I cannot do either for the reasons I have stated as well as the last reason; I refuse to glorify this or encourage more of it by contributing to the money machine that created it.

    If this is soapboxing, so be it. I made a promise to myself that I would no longer remain mute in the face of things I find egregious. The trend toward using violence, and especially violence toward children, is a dangerous and unhealthy trend. Someone HAS to speak up and say ENOUGH.

    This catalyst :::pointing to self:::: is finding her voice and it is stronger than ever.

    :::rant off::::

  10. I think it’s a sign of the times where we are so connected by social media and texting with our smart phones never more than an arm length away that life feels so observed. With an audience comes acting.

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