The Hunger Games

[Ed]

I can’t ever remember being excited about any film yet to be released which is why I’m slightly supervised by how much I’m looking forward to seeing the sequel to the Hunger games, Catching on Fire. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kDj6zTiwvs

The first film does not have a particularly original theme following the well trodden path of films like Death Race 2000 and more recently Battle Royale. In these elimination films the contestants are usually people who an authoritarian government deems as undesirable. In battle Royale it’s delinquent youths, in the re-made death race it’s prisoners. In the hunger games it is the working class. In all the elimination films the goal of the contest is to distract the majority of the population from the poverty and oppression they face in their daily lives or to make scapegoats of a certain group. A reasonable comparison could be made with real life X-factor style elimination contests, except for the brutal murders. In the world of the Hunger games the contest is created as a direct result of a failed revolution by the starving working class. Contestants are randomly selected from those who choose to accept the governments offer of food, giving the choice of either competing for their lives or the threat of starvation. Not so unlike the department of work and pensions.

Katniss Everdeen is the heroine of the story, the character follows the usual mold of other elimination films. Due to growing up in abject poverty and surviving famines she is the archetypal individualist who doesn’t need others and provides for her mother and sister who are dependent on her. Early in the film we see signs of her resentment for her mother because of this. She survives through her exceptional hunting skills poaching in restricted areas. Her partner Peeta Mellark is the opposite, he’s from a slightly wealthier background being the son of a small shop keeper, while being completely unremarkable, in that he does not possess extraordinary survival skills. Peeta does possess skills which Katniss finds she cannot do without. That is, Peeta is a social being, who is able to relate to others and work with them to achieve his needs. One of the main themes of the first film is Peeta helping Katniss on her journey to overcome her self reliance and to begin to trust and work with others. By doing this they end up winning the Hunger games contest. In the trailer for the sequel we see that Katniss has become an unwitting symbol for hope among the working class. Due to the manner in which she and Peeta beat not only their rivals but also the oppressive government who tries to stop them. The government on the other hand also wants her to be a symbol for hope, not for liberation but in the same way that the myth of social mobility being achievable by everyone is used in our own society. An example of this in the first film is the use of the phrase “may the odds be forever in your favour”. In the trailer we see some graffiti on a wall which reads “the odds are NEVER in our favor”. I’ll be really interested to see how the themes of individualism vs the need for social co-operation play out in this next film.

I see these elimination films as a metaphor for capitalism, the unnecessary forced competition which is an amplified version of the competition that we as workers face on a daily basis. Hunger games makes this metaphor much more obvious by centering the story around the working classes struggle against the ruling class and the state apparatus the backdrop for it’s dystopian future society and by clearly showing that even a pseudo super hero like Katniss Everdeen can’t do it alone. It may be a heartening fact that the Hunger games trilogy’s target audience, teenagers, have related to it’s message so greatly. Making the series of books rival the Harry Potter and Twilight series in popularity. Not having read the books, however, I remain skeptical that the story will offer any alternative to capitalism and rather end up just being a tale of liberation from tyranny.

[steve colborn]

Ed, do you think these films are a modern day interpretation of Nobel prize winning author, William Golding's Lord of the Flies and a caricature of the way humankind is percieved by Social Darwinists?Steve.

[Ozymandias]

I enjoyed the first movie but I haven't seen the trailer for the sequel. Here is an article from conspiracy theory website "The Vigilant Citizen"  http://vigilantcitizen.com/moviesandtv/the-hunger-games-a-glimpse-at-the-new-world-order/  The idea here is that many mainstream Hollywood movies are produced with a view to de-sensitize, pre-programme and inure workers into subliminally accepting totalitarian fascism (or NWO as they call it) as an inevitability.               I confess that I sometimes visit David Icke's website as well as Vigilant Citizen. One half of me thinks this shit is preposterous…but when I start looking into drone warfare, high ranking paedophilia, false flag events, vatican cover-ups, subliminal messages in music video's, movies and fashion magazines, royal largesse, heraldic symbolism and rumours of elite satanism as well as watching the utter lies in our TV schedules (not just in the news but in almost every programme) I begin to think some of this shit is fuckin real. Horribly real.               

[Mike Foster]

I haven't seen or read any of the Hunger Games films or books, but they certainly look interesting based on what Ed says. It would be interesting to know what the author of the books' political views are, and if any of them have been toned down for the film adaptations, in the same way that the film of V For Vendetta has a different political message to that of the original graphic novel.The premise of the Hunger Games reminds me a bit of Logan's Run, which describes a future society where anyone over 21 (in the book) or 30 (in the film) is 'eliminated'. Here, it's a metaphor for fears of overpopulation (which were more prevalent in the 60s and 70s when this came out than they are now) and fears of aging (which are probably more prevalent now).As for comparisons with Lord of the Flies, I'm not sure if there's much of a link. Lord of the Flies gives the view that people can't co-operate without the framework for society being imposed by an elite. This would probably be the view of the fictional elite in The Hunger Games, but based on what Ed says, this wouldn't be the message of the film/book itself, which sounds more optimistic about co-operation. 

[Author]

Posts