i've read the hunger games trilogy several times now. my immediate response was to be underwhelmed. as i've thought about it more, that opinion shifted. the female character is relatively inoffensive. for the most part, no one (in the book) makes a huge deal about her gender. she tries to escape from the narratives that characters like peeta and gale try to paint for her - not completely, obviously, but she tells them both on more than one occasion that she has bigger things than her love life going on. she's tough and self-sufficient, but doesn't lose her desire to nurture. i mean, yeah, she's often thrust into this care-giving role, the way women often are, but i find i like the fact that she doesn't have to surrender everything conventionally feminine about herself.
the image aspect is also interesting. it annoys me that by the third book katniss has pretty much bought into this idea that her good looks and public image matter perhaps more than her actual ability to be a hero or leader. but she also seems like an interesting mirror of the scrutiny that all women live with. we're all always aware of the gaze of others, the "cameras" in a way that men aren't. this isn't to say that the pressure on them hasn't ramped up, but the intensity is still less. and it becomes an interesting way to talk to students about the public-privateness of things like facebook and youtube, our new celebration of the mundane.
but something about the books continued to bother me. it isn't that the "bread and circuses" thing doesn't work, but the threats were always too on-the-surface for me. the whole thing about bread and circuses is that you don't tell the people what you're doing. you justify it with patriotism and love of the people, you don't say "these games are cause we can always kill your kids." ideology never needs to be that blunt. i'm thinking of zizek, saying that we use ironic distance from ideology to put ourselves more under its spell than any trickery would. the illusion of our escape is the best cage. and i don't see this in the hunger games books. i'll buy that katniss and gale have accomplished a sort of awakening, but it seems like everyone around them ought to be more integrated into this society. president snow says things are fragile - no shit. this society would never have gotten this far. people are too angry, too aware.
and maybe i'm being unrealistic. i think about egypt, and about wael ghonim saying that people had been miserable for years, maybe decades, but fear kept them silent. so it isn't that the lower classes of panem haven't known until now that the odds are never in their favor, but they never felt they could speak up before. but then, there have been other rebellions - haymitch included. but i don't know. fear does things.
but even if i set that concern aside - the idea that it's the government bothers me. when my students write rhetorical analyses of this book, they talk about how it's kind of just like today. but it doesn't feel that way to me. do we have an all-powerful, frighteningly efficient government that spends what must be tens of billions every year on entertainment? no. on the military, maybe. but never this distraction.
but more interestingly, for me, no one BLAMES the government for this. for killing? sure. but for all that money, all the resources that could, i don't know, feed everyone, no. who do they blame? the residents of the capitol. katniss thinks about how much food they have, and how everyone back home would want it. the capitol residents are the true contemptible in the novel, because they do nothing to earn their lives. in the third book we see a few of them working, owning shops, but they sell stupid things, so we can safely dismiss them. most of them seem to do nothing to earn their living. and this they share with characters like katniss's mother, who is also an object of contempt, for her helplessness, and for her willingness to accept what katniss provides. more so even than snow, who is hated, but also respected as a terrifying enemy.
so that's the message i find troubling. the despised in these books are those on welfare. katniss, the hero that she is, *tries* to stop hating her mother, but only respects her once she starts standing on her own two feet and working again. the heroes are gale and katniss, who work. even peeta works - and the first book makes it clear that gale and katniss both struggle with resentment toward the blinded merchant class, who they see as their natural allies. those people are complacent (maybe the only complacent people in the books, aside from districts 1 and 2, which are basically all merchant class) but they are the people katniss and gale identify with. because they are themselves merchants. they have made a business out of themselves, and this is what the book respects.
these books are about the hungry, the disenfranchised, the poor, but no one ever talks about income distribution. no one ever talks about using the money of the capitol to feed them. the thing they want is for the government, the all-powerful, evil government, to step aside and let them make something of themselves. the government both murders and stifles them, and this, more than the hungry seems to be the message of the book. and probably why i find it hard to believe or identify with. i don't live in that world. were the games run by a media corporation that held snow under its thumb, i think i could get behind it. it would make it a mirror of the society i seem to be living in, and not some sort of muddled libertarian metaphor, some message of fear about a government that, at least out of the books, at least *sometimes* makes an effort to HELP the hungry, disenfranchised, and poor.
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