As a big fan of science fiction, particularly of the dystopian stripe, and an even bigger fan of making fun of dumb teenagers, I finally sat down to start reading The Hunger Games book the other day. I made it six pages in before tossing it aside. Here's the passage that did me in:
In the fall, a few brave souls sneak into the woods to harvest apples. But always in sight of the Meadow. Always close enough to run back to the safety of District 12 if trouble arises. "District Twelve. Where you can starve to death in safety," I mutter. Then I glance over my shoulder. Even here, even in the middle of nowhere, you worry someone might overhear you."
That "I mutter" was like an ejector button that tossed me right out of the book's cockpit. The writing doesn't get better, most of my friends who made it to the end warned me. The story, however, is compelling and you do end up caring about the characters.
Misgivings aside, I did end up going to see the movie, because I'm much more willing to swallow cheese in visual form. My friends were right. It was a tense, downright brutal story, and surprisingly so, given its youthful target audience. Granted, much of the horror needs to be smuggled in through your own imagination, but the circumstances of the narrative are such that it's not a difficult burden.
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| So that's where Avery Jessup has been this whole time |
The PG-13 rating necessitated a lot of obscuring of the actual deaths, but there's no getting around the existential horror of The Reaping scenes, in which the characters are chosen by lottery to go face certain death. Or the transformation wherein the characters who try to put on a brave face before the games abruptly come to the realization that they are in fact dead men walking. And no amount of shaky-cam misdirection can hide the fact that in the initial stages of the game you have muscular 18 year old trained killers hacking 12 year olds to death with axes. You'd be wrong to dismiss this as a kid's story. Nonetheless, the seven year old girl that sat in front of me stood up at the end of the film and said "That's the best movie I've ever seen." Her barely out of his teen's father who texted the whole time seemed less impressed.
Much has been made of the story's cribbing from the Japanese film Battle Royale, but that's merely one of the reference points. Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" being the obvious one in the state-sanctioned killings motif. The predictable notes of dystopian theme-bearing loadstones are sprinkled throughout as well, "1984" et al. "The Running Man" of course, in the televised death spectacle framework, and "Lord of the Flies" naturally. "The Hunger Games", for all its over the top campiness in the stylized Capitol of the future hues more toward the serious side of adult dystopia in its world building, even if it does pull back from the child-on-child brutality of "Flies."
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| Also ripped off Spaceballs a little too much if you ask me |
While the adults on screen are indeed horrific, and the world-bearing appropriately bleak, it's the lateral move from the theme of humanity stripped away to reveal our bestial nature of "Lord of the Flies" that I found the most problematic part. These are, for the most part, just average children forced into a life or death situation. Some of them rise to the occasion, and indeed tackle the task with relish. In some cases it's a little on the nose, as in the professional killers trained for the game -- they're too over the top in their murderous gusto to seem believable.
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| You are so dead after class. Literally. |
But Katniss is allowed to remain much too pure throughout the orgy of violence and death. While she does directly murder one tribute, and bring about the death of two or three others, they're all "justified" killings given the circumstances. There's nothing cold or calculated about her killing. It's the murderous version of the "Twilight" stories' horny virgin dilemma. It's all of the allure of sex/killing without the actual penetration, be it with a musty vampire cock or an arrow. Katniss gets to fuck everyone while keeping her maidenhead intact. Maidenhead is a pretty gross term by the way.
That's the whole point, defenders of the books will say. She's not willing to compromise who she is to play the game. It's an act of rebellion. They may be right. Without her refusal to dirty herself, she'd just be another in a long line of competitors trying to get ahead. But it seems likely to me that sort of person would die pretty quickly in a situation like this. We're deprived of any sort of real ambiguity about whether or not she would kill Rue if it came down to it, for example, or Peeta for that matter. It's all too clean.
That's par for the course for YA stories I gather. Skirting around the serious issues without forcing the characters to make the tough decisions. Plenty of time for that to come post-adolescence I suppose. Besides, there are certainly no lack of anti-heroes and morally ambiguous murderers in contemporary fiction now, but it pulled me out of the story somewhat, and I think it's one valid complaint about the difference between books like this written for children, and a series like A Song of Ice and Fire, in which no one is innocent, even the heroes, and that life is brutal, short, and miserable.
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| Weirder beards, same institutional cruelty and indifference |
Still, I've found myself thinking about the movie non-stop in the 24 hours since I watched it. Maybe it's the central metaphor I took away from it, which is suggested, but downplayed, perhaps for fear of politicizing what is meant to be a mass market entertainment (and has certainly succeeded as such). It's the idea that in this horrible future, children are plucked from their hometowns to go off to fight and die "for their country." In some areas it's taken up willingly as an act of honor, bravery, and privilege. In others its seen for what it is really is, a horrible waste where the lives of our youth are thrown into the meat-grinder, a pointless sacrifice at the alter of our collective "ideals." Patriotism in "The Hunger Games" as in the real world, is nothing but a manipulative, murderous joke. Or, to put it another way, as this commenter on i09 did, "THE HUNGER GAMES: utopian vision of a US in which the number of young people condemned to be devoured by the system has been reduced to only 24."
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5 comments:
Not quite as good as Bum Fights but easier to masturbate to. Go Team Luke!
Give your brain a rest, Pauline.
Go see The Raid.
Ohhhhh. I might see that. I don't see shit usually though. Seems like there were five movies in the previews for this one I wanted to look at though. Avengers anyway.
See The Raid. Showing at Coolidge, it's unreal.
I love this post the most. I didn't get the arrow/cock analogy really on my own, but I don't think of that in YA books that much. That's a good point. I totally agree. I thought the writing was awful but loved the story the whole time I was reading it I kept thinking, "this would make the coolest comic book", because as you said the writing is awful, it's sallow awful, like Twilight, there's no description and leaves a gaping amount of nothingness for the reader, making each read an individual experience which is why there is a such a large and motley fanbase for this shit.
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