The Hunger Games
By Suzanne Collins
Movie Directed by
Gary Ross
(Also discussed in
this review: What It Is Like to Go to War by Karl Marlantes)
“I am by nature
warlike. To attack is among my
instincts.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
Unless you have been
living under a rock for the past few months, you probably know the basic story
line of The Hunger Games. The book is the first of a young adult
trilogy written by Suzanne Collins and set in a futuristic North America. The country of Panem has a capital city in
the Rockies. The extravagant and
self-indulgent citizens of The Capital City are supported by twelve districts
which are held in captivity and forced to send the majority of their resources
to The Capital. The citizens of the
districts live in abject poverty and the elderly often starve to death while
younger adults and children do their best to survive. This is the perfect recipe for revolution,
which indeed occurred 75 years prior the time of this story. The Capitol City prevailed, and as punishment
and as a reminder to the Districts as to who is in charge, the tradition of the
Hunger Games was proclaimed. A male and
female child (called “Tributes”) is chosen annually from each district to fight
to the death in a contrived battle zone concocted and manipulated by the Game
Masters in The Capital. The one
surviving Tribute brings great glory to his or her district as well as
increased rations for the following twelve months.
The main character
is Katniss Everdeen, an older teen who is fiercely independent and protective
of her younger sister Prim. Katniss has
held her family together, hunting for food in the forbidden zones using her
advanced archery skills and psychologically supporting her despondent
mother. Katniss lives in District 12
which was formerly Appalachia. District
12 supplies coal and minerals to The Capital but still is one of the poorer
Districts. Katniss’ father was a coal
miner and died in a mine accident. When
the time comes for the annual “Reaping” (selection of Tributes) Prim’s name is
drawn but Katniss volunteers to take her place.
The male selected from District 12 is the son of the local baker and has
a romantic interest in Katniss.
The remainder of
the story, told by Katniss, carries the reader through the preparation for and,
finally, the Hunger Games themselves.
Katniss and the other Tributes are fed like royalty and put through
vigorous training. Katniss and Peeta
Mellark (the male Tribute from District 12) are coached by the only previous
District 12 Hunger Games winner, Haymitch Abernathy. Haymitch is a bumbling alcoholic and is very
pessimistic about the survival chances of the current two District 12
tributes. He does convince Katniss and
Peeta of the importance of providing good entertainment value for all of the
citizenry who will be watching the games live.
They play up the romance angle and Peeta and Katniss become known as
“The Star-crossed Lovers.”
The Games are
dominated by Tributes from the richer Districts, many of whom have been trained
since birth to fight. Katniss uses her
unique cunning and archery skills to remain in competition. Each time a Tribute dies a cannon sounds and
at the end of the day pictures of the Tributes who perished that day are
projected on a giant screen which takes the place of the sky. The obstacles to Katniss’ survival go beyond
the other Tributes and include forest fires orchestrated by the Game Masters,
unpredictable weather, genetically altered killer bees called Tracer-Jackers
and, finally, the dead Tributes themselves who are reincarnated as huge
dog-like carnivorous beasts.
The movie is
extremely well done and follows the book fairly closely. Several minor characters and plot lines were
not included, but they added a television commentator who narrates the events
of the day to TV audience watching in The Capital City and in the
Districts. This character allows a lot
of detail to be revealed at a fast pace, keeping the story in motion. The characters of Katniss and Peeta are
played very convincingly by Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson, and Woody
Harrleson (yes, the same guy from “Cheers”) does a marvelous job as
Haymitch. The cinematography is
wonderful and most of the outdoor scenes were shot around Asheville, North
Carolina. Charlotte was used for The
Capital City, but I didn’t see a lot of resemblance.
For a 200+ page
Young Adult book, this story packs a huge punch and the areas for discussion
here are almost limitless. Much has
already been written about the political and social issues brought forward by The Hunger Games. What can be said for a society which lives of
the back of its poorer citizens, each year increasing the gap between the
wealthy and the less fortunate? What can
be said about a society which receives thrills from watching the “agony of
defeat” on live television reality shows?
This story speaks volumes about the ability of a few to control the many
by abusing their position of power by economic means. Panem is an extreme, but is it really that
different from our current culture of greed?
There are also a
plethora of religious symbols in The
Hunger Games. There are churches
that have started Bible study groups based on a discussion of this story. There is the self-sacrifice which Katniss
exhibits early on, volunteering as Tribute to spare her younger more fragile
sister Prim. There is also the theme of
placing the good of a group over individual goals. The survivor endures a terrible ordeal, but
at least for twelve months, the lives of citizens in his or her home district
are much improved. Katniss also makes
many decisions based solely on what she thinks is the morally right thing to do
rather than what she feels society or others expect of her. As Krishna states in the Mahabharata, “It is not right to stand by and watch an injustice
being done. There are times when active
interference is necessary.”
It is purely by
coincidence that I was reading Karl Marlantes’ new book What It is Like to Go to War at the same time as I was reading The Hunger Games. Marlantes, you may recall,
is the author of Matterhorn, the monumental novel of the Viet Nam War
reviewed in these pages a few years ago.
This author is an Ivy League graduate, served as a Marine Lieutenant in
the Viet Nam war and has struggled to understand his war experiences ever
since. He notes how societies send their
young men (and now women) into combat very poorly prepared psychologically and
spiritually for this experience.
Soldiers are trained in the efficient use of more and more lethal
weapons, but are never counseled in how to deal with the anguish of violence
and killing. In this new non-fiction
work Marlantes calls on Jungian psychology to state that we all have an evil
inside of us (a “shadow” person) which under normal circumstances we are able
to suppress. In the extremes of stress,
such as in combat, the evil side can surface and enable a human to kill
another. This “shadow” can also explain
atrocities such as My Lai during Viet Nam or, more recently, the torture of
Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib . No
soldier really “gets over” the experience of combat and killing and Marlantes
feels this is the main cause of the high rates of suicide and incidence of
alcoholism and drug abuse among veterans.
As Marlantes says: “Warriors will
always have to deal with guilt and mourning.
If we perform with a noble heart and dedicate our efforts to some higher
good we minimize the suffering of guilt afterward. This unfortunately will not eliminate the
suffering of mourning. Guilt is
different from mourning.” Even more
telling, Marlantes says further: “To
survive psychically in the proximity of Mars, one has to come to terms with
stepping outside conventional moral conduct.”
It is enlightening
to read The Hunger Games book and
even more startling to watch the movie through the prism of Karl Marlantes’
important work. I think that what
Suzanne Collins has forged is an incredible anti-war statement. Katniss Everdeen certainly is forced to step
outside conventional moral conduct to survive.
The character of Haymitch (again so ably performed by Woody Harrelson)
is really the symbol of the prototypical veteran consumed by survivor’s guilt
and regret and drowning his later adult life with alcohol. The evil side of human nature is Exhibit A in
The Hunger Games. There is even one time
in the movie where Woody Harrelson’s Haymitch, referring to Rue, a younger
Tribute who is following Katniss around The Capital City during training
exercises, stares into Katniss’ eyes and says “You have a shadow!” There is a long pause which seems to me to be
a reference to the “self-preservation at all cost” nature hidden inside the
outwardly humble and backward Katniss.
Marlantes describes night terrors where he sees North Vietnamese
soldiers he killed years earlier. The
demons at the end of the story, the snarling, mad, flesh eating monsters
created by The Game Masters from the killed Tributes have to represent the
combat survivors’ nightmares.
Young Adult
literature? The Hunger Games has been
pegged as such. I think that this story
deserves a much larger audience and greater discussion. It succeeds on so many levels. I recommend the book and the movie
interpretation highly.
“Unfortunately
there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines
himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied
in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an
inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore,
it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually
subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from
consciousness, it never gets corrected.” – Carl Jung, from Psychology and Religion
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