FROM HUNGER by Harvey Roy Greenberg
An earlier version of Dr. Greenberg’s review appeared in his column, THE MEDIA ON MY MIND: ADVENTURES IN POP CULTURE, published by Clinical Psychiatry News.”
The Hunger Games, the film, directed by Gary Ross
Philosophers since Plato have portrayed Utopias – earlthy paradises crafted and lead by the best of the best. Science fiction mainly favors dystopian hells over utopian heavens. In story or film, dystopian futures may be precipitated by natural disaster or alien attack. In recent years, they’ve been emerging from our assaults upon the planet or each other.
Sci-fi dystopias classically fall into two categories. Society runs super-smoothly in the squeaky-clean dystopia. Crime, disease, poverty have been eliminated, but free will is crushed (e.g.. The Matrix series). In the trashed-out dystopia, the world has been rendered into a vast garbage heap, a dominion of detritus. A degraded semblance of society survives. At day’s end, one is lucky to find a handful of rice and a rag over one’s head for shelter (e.g. the Road Warrior and Terminator franchises). Holywood continues grinding out such post-apocalyptic fare: it’s a profitable man-cave favorite.
Rulers of trashed out dystopias are typically wily, psychopathic warriors or crimelords, by the barren standards of their milieu better off than their constituency, but not by much. They certainly possess more food, fire, furs. But they lack the signets of culture, because education, the arts and sciences are gone, or nearly so – and good riddance from their perspective.
In a smaller group of elitist trashed -out dystopias, the rulers are not brawny thugs in bearskins, but rich, cultured. Occasionally status is inherited. In movies from the last few decades, their wealth and power is likelier to derive from business empires, built on exploiting current or future precious commodties – oil, food, water, air, so forth. Whatever the leadership’s origin, it is overwhelmingly male, patriarchal, and despotic.
The silent prototype for elitist dystopias is Metropolis. In Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece, the affluent live in fabulous skyscrapers, while the lower orders toil in misery, underground. Blade Runner and Soylent Green are two of the finest, and most influential inheritors of Metropolis’ totalitarian mercantile dystopia. In both films, corporative executives rule from sumptuous high-rise fortresses, while a destitute rabble scrabbles for survival in the mean streets. Blade Runner implies hunger may be a problem in its polluted, overpopulated milieu. Soylent Green starkly foregrounds famine as its’ world’s most pressing concern. In design and intention, both movies are worthy predecessors of Stephanie Collins’ hit novel, The Hunger Games. Unfortunately, Gary Ross’ film version, is an unworthy, deeply flawed successor. Of which, more presently.
Collins’ forbidding vision is set in an indeterminate future. After obscure natural upheavals ravaged the earth, a single nation, Panem, rose out of North America’s ashes. Panem’s seat of government was the Capitol, a thriving metropolis which originally presided over thirteen ‘districts’ (clearly invoking America’s colonial past).
At some point, commerce between the dictatorial Capitol and the districts became so burdensome due to taxation and other corporte depredations that they revolted. Their war of independence failed; the thirteenth colony was razed. The Capitol became Panem’s replicant of Rome: a merciless fascist presence, bleeding its colonies to support a lavish lifestyle. Its’ rulers exact a terrible penance for the failed rebellion. Each year the twelve remaining districts must select a teen-age boy and girl by lot, as “Tributes” to compete in a savage rite called – the Hunger Games.
Panem references the Latin tag: panem et circenses – bread and circuses. Rome’s Caesars sweetened their oligarchic oppression by tossing destitute plebians a few dusty loaves in the midst of ferocious gladitorial games. The Capitol’s recreation of the Roman circus unfolds over several weeks. The Games are televised down to the minutest detail,; universally broadcast; and heavily wagered upon.
By now, the Gamemakers have raised the Hunger Games into an obscene art form. In fabricated or natural ‘arenas’, weapons are served out to the Tributes; the environment is then harshly manipulated as occasion demends to present ever more riveting mayhem. Eventually, every Tribute dies by slaughter, hunger, or disease save one. The survivor returns home, wealthy for life, his or her district receiving extra rations for a year to supplement the Capitol’s marginal sustenance.
Collins’ story begins in the twelfth and poorest colony, a dismal Appalachia, whose coal supplies the Capitol’s major source of energy. Life there is Hobbesian: nasty, brutish, short. If permitted to work, men dig for slave wagers under perilous conditions in the mines. Starving is a daily fact of life; strarving to death in the streets a commonplace.
Collins’ sixteen year old heroine, Katniss Everdeen, lost her father in a mine explosion. To support her mother and twelve year old sister, Prim, Katniss has become an illegal hunter, a crime punishable by death. She’s a bluntspoken, plainlooking, unsentimental pragmatist, in permanent resilience mode. She scorns romance; wants neither marriage or children. Her best friend is Gale, another poacher, whose hatred for Panem is dangerously open. Their relationship has been platonic.
When Prim’s lot is unexpectedly drawn for the seventy-fourth Game, Katniss takes her place. Her co-Tribute is Peeta Mellard, the baker’s son. Their chances of quick execution are rated high. Only two District Twelve contestants have ever won. “Career” Tributes from three wealthier regions, who eagerly spend their short lives in Spartan training, are the usual victors. Peeta has no combat skills. Katniss has carefully concealed her own archery and tracking prowess.
At the Capitol, Katniss and Peeta join the other Tributes in an elaborate introductory ceremony. Their handlers, rather than dressing them as in dusty mining-based garb, use fiery costume special effects. Katniss is instantly acclaimed as “the girl in flames”. She impresses the Gamemakers during rigorous training; wins the TV audience with disarming modesty in the stock pre-game interview with a preening talkmeister. During Peeta’s interview, he suddenly blurts out that he’s secretly been in love with Katniss since childhood, arousing the TV audience’s astonishment and pity. For now she might have to be his killer, or his victim. He explains to her later that this was really a ploy pitched at getting wealthy sponsors to help them during the Games.
Katniss and Peeta are the sole survivors of the ensuing carnage; indeed must turn on each other. But when they show the world they would rather die in each other’s arms by eating poisoned fruit, they are proclaimed winners, the only time two Tributes have ever prevailed
The tale ends on seveal disquieting notes. It’s suspected the ‘star crossed’ lovers staged their romance. Rules have been defied, the potential for district uprisings stirred. The pair will assuredly be surveilled by Panem’s leaders, with dire reprisals against them and their families if the truth is ever revealed. The show of romance must continue. But Katniss is genuinely attracted to Peeta by now; and, her heart awakened, is drawn back to Gale as well. Clearly the stuff of sequels (two books followed).
I read the novel after taking in the film. One quickly realizes why the book escaped the narrow confines of the young adult market aimed at adolescent girls, to command an impressive readership of both sexes. Comparisons are inevitable with Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight vampire series, which also achieved breakout success. Meyer merely advances a fashionable pseudo-feminist agenda, awash in sexy supernatural gore. Her feckless heroine becomes empowered only through being turned into a vampire. Katniss brings her empowerment to the table, fully flowered.
It’s been said that science fiction’s future is our present. Collins uses genre conventions to touch unpolemicaly upon profound current issues, such as the alarming deterioration of America’s social contract, as business and government oligarchs flourish; the dashing of young hopes in a virtually non-existant job market; the ascendance of the warfare state; above all, the largely ignored issue of pervasive American as well as world-wide hunger.
Collins is also a far better writer than Meyers. Her first person prose is impeccably spare, vivid. Katniss is a laconic observer of District Twelve’s dispiriting Ozark milieu; of the Capitol’s dazzling wonders, inflected by repugnant narcissistic excess; finally, of the Games’ bizarre cruelties. (I rate an attack by genetically warped “muttations” one of the most frightening scenes in contemporary horror writing, as unsettling as anything by Stephen King) The author skilfully compels us to read between her lines. In the tradition of the best sci-fi, she never spells out ‘how we got here’. The allusions Katniss drops – of which she’s totally unaware – make us eager to work out her world as we go along.
A leftist wag wrote that Karl Marx’s account of the worker’s crass exploitation by the bosses was pretty much on target; except Marx never imagined the workers could let themselves be entertained out of their revolution. In Katniss’ dry descriptions of the media frenzy surrounding, and impelenting the games, Collins satirically references the talk show’s anesthetic blather; the empty glitter and cut-throat ambience of American Idol programming. (For all the contestants’ fulsome praise of their fellows’ mediocre talents, one wonders if they would gladly commit murder for the laurels.)
In the cinematic Hunger Games, one gets absolutely no sense of authentic hunger. No one looks really famished – just fashionably dirty. The problem isn’t deficient make-up. With today’s CGI, Jabba the Hut can easily be transformed into a terminal anorectic. On conditions of anonymity, a Hollywood correspondent told me that ‘real hunger just isn’t sexy at the box office.”
The film’s depiction of Districct Twelve is a respectable spin on a dreary Dickens era coal town (How Grey Is My Valley). But there’s nothing here which hasn’t been done as well, or better in post-apocalpytic movies like The Matrix or The Road Warrior. Opening ceremonies and training sequences at the capital are the film’s strong points, nicely fleshing out Katniss/Collins’ spare narrative.
But the Capitol’s overindulged citizens, dressed and coiffed in eye-splitting color, look Beetlejuiced in from a Tim Burton film; smack more of silliness than satire. Nor does the film make one cringe at the malevolent manipulations of Panem’s rulers in rigging the games to subject its colonies. Donald Sutherland plays Panem’s venomous President Snow as a twinkly-eyed, mean old coot, one eye squarely fixed on his bank balance. (The other principals do yeoman’s service, but are hardly memorable).
The commencement of the Games themselves is credibly suspenseful, and quite faithful to the novel. The high-tech manipulations of the pitiless Gamemakers are engrossing throughout. But the action peters out and ones’ attention flags, as director Ross becomes increasingly involved with showing Katniss and Peeta’s dull quasi-courtship.
The picture’s sheer length, at nearly two and a half hours, undermines the film’s potential frissons as sheer entertainment – and I greatly relish decerebrate action movies. But I am chiefly troubled that Ross deliberately chose to distance the film from the crucial social issues which Collins so cleverly raised in the book ,without ever flogging her readers with them. I doubt if many viewers leaving the theater will be any more concerned with world hunger, or our childrens’ crippled futures, then they were going in. In effect, the movie has lulled us into becoing a supplementary audience to the Hunger Games, with no more awareness of, nor interest in, the greedy evil underpinning
the Games than the Capitol’s dwellers themselves!
Addendum: The employment of lethal games by a dystopian fascist state has been addressed by fine mainstream science fiction films like The Tenth Victim, The Running Man, and Rollerball. I treasure these movies, especially Rollerball depiction of the ultimate corporate squeaky-clean dystopia. However, my favorite in this small sub-genre is a virtually unknown indie production, Series 7:
Seven citizens of a small American city, adolescent to senior, hung each other down in what may be a contemporary or future TV reality show. Contestants are chosen by lot, cannot refuse to play. The last one standing goes to the next town and round, until the season is completed.
The action unfolds during one episode near the end of the current season, using the standard tropes of reality shows like THE REAL HOUSEWIVES. The monstrous dystopia which sanctions the show is never spelled out; we can only guess about its nature from the show itself. Slaughter in everyday locales is punctuated by saccharine backstory interviews. I deem Series 7 the most scathing inditement of a society amusing itself to death ever lensed. If it isn’t being streamed, buy it cheap on half.com.