...which still manages to
include what are technically PLOT SPOILERS
The Hunger Games film series have been
much spilt over by ink, with
comparisons to the Occupy movement, references to the arrests of Thais who took up the three-fingered rebel salute and so on. Which suggests they weren't just successful but struck a
chord. Much like the Lord of the Rings series, showings of the
sequels would repeatedly be preceded by ever-multiplying trailers for
copycat films, with titles like 'Skipped Lunch Furore'
On another front others have complained
they lacked originality. In particular, it's been claimed they're a
knock off of 'Battle Royale' (2000). But this
overlooks that zeitgeisty dramas are likely to overlap, if they're
sourcing from the same real-world events. It also overlooks the similarly themed films from that great era for SF
dystopias, the early Seventies. And in fact the distinction between
the two films occurred then. 'Battle Royale' is
the inheritor of 'Punishment Park' (1971), merely
swapping young delinquents for political rebels. While the Hunger
Games films take up from 'Rollerball' (1975). In
both a gladiatorial snuff sport takes place inside a
techno-Colosseum, all designed to keep the masses quiet. In both the
wrong winner just keeps winning, until the games become less a safety
value for a passive public and more a lightning rod for dissent.
But the real current the films plug
into is much more recent. Of course, its reality TV. We've reached the
point where touchy-feely TV interviews co-existing with slaughter
doesn't feel satirical, it feels incisive. The success of the films
lies in their exposing something innate to reality TV, even if they
do it by exaggeration. Its function is to appear a bubble
environment, distinct from our workaday world. After all, by its
nature its unscripted. No-one knows how it will work out. How can it
possibly have an agenda? And this is precisely the root of its
effectiveness. What's presented as something separate from is in
actuality a microcosm of our society. As Haymitch says to Katniss
“your job is to be a distraction so people forget what the real
problems are”.
And what reality TV really stands for
is the market. Like the market all appears natural. The combating
'tributes' battle one another in a forest, seemingly following the
law of the jungle. Yet the environment is not only artificial,
preserved under a dome, it's manipulated throughout by unseen hands.
When Katniss tries to wait the contest out, a forest fire is conjured
up to push her back in the fray. (To complete the circle, a South Korean reality TV show was even called ‘Law of the Jungle’.) Like the market, the tributes have no real
choice about participating – someone will be made to go. Yet like
the market everyone joins in the pretence that they're taking part
voluntarily, and are even looking forward to the whole
kill-or-be-killed business. Because they need to, to stand any chance
of winning.
Which leads us to the most important
point of all. In an advance on 'Rollerball' its
not all about being skilled, having a particular knack for staying
alive yourself while doing the opposite to other people. At Katniss
is told, your main survival skill is getting the audience to like
you. Because shows such as 'Big Brother' presumes
the prime commodity you trade in is no longer your labour power but
you - you present that personality in competition
with your peer group. Take for example this article by Tom Peters: “Starting today you are a brand.
You're every bit as much of a brand as Nike, Coke, Pepsi or the Body
Shop... [your] most important job is to be head marketer for the
brand called You.”
In short, it's a war of each against
all, where the winners are already predetermined because they've made
themselves the judges. This is why the bravura scene is so effective
when Katniss' arrow brings down the dome that houses the Games,
revealing the mechanism beneath. (Visually compared to firing
straight at Snow himself.)
(Which leads to the irony that at the
same time she's forced to play-act for the audience the Games do
genuinely socialise Katniss. She starts the film as almost a feral
creature, with no father and a remote mother - pretty much a stranger
in her home territory. Almost her first line is the threat to cook a
cat, while she seriously considers sneaking off to live in the woods.
We'd probably look at that more if this was a proper review.)
Based on teen lit books, there's also a
focus on the sacrificial nature of youth. While everyone has focused
on the similarities to 'Battle Royale', they have
much in common with 'Cabin In the Woods' (2012).
In both, teens are put into a situation of combined voyeurism and
life-threatening danger, in an apparent natural environment which is
ceaselessly manipulated to pull their strings. In both this is a
longstanding ritual, used to keep the unspoken at bay. The panopticon
is all-seeing but iconoclastic, it has no space for anything but
young faces. Its a world based around the cult of youth. But its that
same cult of youth which eats youth up.
But most significantly, particularly
for a modern American film, is the evocation of class. Without this,
there'd be less comparisons made to Occupy and it's 99% vs. 1%
narrative. Its not only a world where people sell their labour power,
its a world where the many labour to keep the few in comfort. As
Peeta says “our lives were never ours”. Anyone who objects will
come face-to-face with a ruthless police force. Author of the source
novels, Suzanne Collins has said she came up with the concept by putting together reality TV with the Iraq war. Which in many ways was America sending its young and
its poor off into a TV spectacle. (This reaches its literalisation in
the scene in the final film, where the IED unleashes a deluge of oil
which nearly drowns Katniss and her team.)
Perhaps what's most significant is how
anything like this is generally so absent from mainstream culture –
not that it is here but that it isn't
almost anywhere else. At the same time as class differences have
exacerbated, the subject has disappeared from stage and screen.
Dramas can evoke a form of anti-capitalism, but this is normally
posed as a kind of individualised, subjective rejection of
capitalism. Which of course is absurd and self-contradictory. It
reduces anti-capitalism to anti-consumerism then makes
anti-consumerism into a consumer choice. It presumes we're “free
agents”, abstracted individuals at liberty to create our own
association with the world, which is a fundamental supposition of
capitalist mythology in the first place.
Whereas Katiss' situation stems largely
from her social position. She resists not to express herself but for
her and her sister's survival, no separation between want and need.
She at first resists individually, but largely through force of
circumstance starts to work collectively. (“Katniss, remember who
the real enemy is” - that's actually pretty good advice.) Because
you can't choose your way out of the Games. The dome needs to be
smashed. That probably shouldn't seem unusual, but it does. (I
haven't bothered watching any of the afore-mentioned copycat films.
But their trailers give the impression they keep the youth aspect
with none of the class.)
This clash of values is well presented
in the film by a clash of styles. Katniss' home, District 12, is
filmed in quite a social realist fashion. Then, just when we have
become used to this, a mighty ship from the Capitol rumbles over the
woods - like a Star Destroyer showing up in 'Kes'.
The preening dandies of the Capital are grotesque and cartoony, yet
we see these figures of satire rub shoulders with 'real people'.
In short its the scenario of the films,
telegraphed in the title, which is the crux of the thing. 'The
Hunger Games' is about the Hunger Games. And when the third
film, 'Mockingjay' (split into two parts like they
always are) transitions from the games to the revolution, it tends to
lose it way. As it turns out a revolution is just a war with the odd
ethical debate tossed in, in fact the sort of ethical debate which
often finds their way into war films anyway. 'Land and
Freedom', Ken Loach's acclaimed 1995 film of the Spanish
Revolution features long debates over subject such as land
collectivisation, but as they're pressing to the characters' lives
and not abstract theorising they become compelling. It might be an
ask to see something quite like that in a mainstream mulitplex film.
But there's nothing even similar.
The second and third films makes little
secret of the fact that rebel leader Alma Coin sees the revolt as her
fast-track to Presidency, that Katniss is being played by her almost
as much as she was in the Games. The Capital-like blonde streaks in
her hair become a signifier of where she wants to be living. (Just as
President Snow is less dandified than any other Capitol dweller.) At
the time, this seems an advantage. We'd probably guess at what was
coming anyway, so why try to hide it? We just wait for Katniss to
catch up with it all.
But the problem is that when she
eventually does, in the final instalment, there's not much else left
to happen. The scene where Coin announces she's made herself “interim
President” until things quieten down is nicely underplayed. (No-one
has ever boldly announced a coup.) But the subsequent assassination
scene tries to stir up tension where none remains. We never doubted
Katniss would catch up, we just wondered when and how. So we know
what will happen - and then it does.
The film holds Coin at arm's length, in
order to make her more puppeteer than combatant. But this does two
things at once. It means Coin's desire to seize power is merely a
streak of her nature like the streaks in her hair – she was just
like that. Consequently the implication becomes
that by shooting her Katniss safeguards everything. She moves from
seeing offing President Snow as the big fix to assuming arrowing Coin
does the same thing. But when Coin argues, for example, that with
Panem ravaged by war, they need a period of stability and
consolidation - is it not in fact ravaged by war? Given that her
death won't solve any of that, should that argument at not be given
some credence? Just dramatically alone, wouldn't that be more
effective?
In short Coin doesn't represent the
wrong politics, at one and the same time she has no real politics at
all and she represents politics – in and of itself. (Ironically the
nearest character the film has to 'good politics', Heavensbee, is
sidelined by accident, actor Phili Seymour Hoffman's unfortunate
death.) Leaving Katniss as her opposite. As the Mockingjay is the Marianne of
Panem's revolution, (see her next to Eugene Delacroix's famous
painting below) she's the heart to others' brains. Coin says to her
“may your aim be as true as your heart is pure” shortly before
the inevitable. The right politics is always held to be innately and
self-evidently correct, in short to not be politics at all. Listen to
your heart, Katniss. Listen to the Force, Luke. Being pure of heart
is perilously close to being pure heart, which is itself close to
being pure symbol.
So while in many ways she is the
positive role model for girls everyone talks about, while she might
have the much-desired agency, Patrick Hayes is right to say in 'Salon' that she ultimately lacks
in subjectivity. (Overall his reading of the film is skewed and a
little too sweeping. Yet he's right on this point.) Even when she
isn't acting like a poster girl for revolution within the film, she's
still acting pretty much like a poster girl for revolution in
the film. Watch a random scene and try picturing a thought balloon
above Katniss's head, then populating it. Largely, you can't. She's
driven by instinct and intuition. She often doesn't know herself what
she'll do until she does it.
Yet should she gain any subjectivity,
if for one minute she acts from reason rather than out of instinct,
the film's schema is such that she'd need to start dying blonde
highlights into her hair. In this way the film can feign at
radicalism, appear to suggest that revolutions don't have to be
betrayed, they're not fated to that outcome. Yet its suggestion is
functionally useless. It leads nowhere.
The default example of a revolution
people have today, even so long after the Cold War, remains Russia.
And I'd be the first to agree that it did succumb to the “meet the
new boss” syndrome, that its original egalitarian aims were
ruthlessly betrayed by the Bolsheviks. But that historical example is
dehistoricised and made a universal law. If revolutions don't always
work that way in history, it was decided long ago that they do in
mainstream media.
Notably, we see exactly the same
doublethink as these films do over Coin. Its all to do with the
personality of Lenin. He was duplicitous and treacherous and
successfully played everybody. He even had a Ming the Merciless
beard, what more proof could you need? Yet at the very same time
we're asked to suppose that was all inevitable. Workers getting
together to decide what gets done with the stuff they produce,
clearly such a notion was doomed to failure. It was all Lenin's
fault. But if there hadn't have been Lenin, there'd still have been a
Lenin.
And this double act is achieved
precisely by not considering Lenin's political
motivations, looking at the context he was operating within or asking
why others were willing to listen to him, but by depicting him as
some Victorian melodrama villain. None of this is to defend Leninism
or claim his draconian rule was justifiable. Its to say that before
you can engage with Leninism, however critically, you have to concede
such a thing exists. Arguing his politics were wrong involves
acknowledging he had some. (You can of course find political writings
which don't do any of this, which just damn the man and ignore not
only the ball but the whole pitch. But they're political writings
played at the level of Hollywood scripts, not the other way round.)
Or if Russia's not to your tastes you
could consider the French, Chinese or Cuban revolution. It doesn't
matter much because you'd only have to substitute the names. But this
ceaseless repeat doesn't make the thing seem less likely – instead
its held as proof of just how true it is.
And, to come back to the films, this is
clearest in the response of the crowd. Not expecting Katniss' public
assassination, even if we were, they react by rushing forward. To...
well, actually they just rush forward. There's the
suggestion they kill Snow. But Katniss, who has either traitorously
shot their leader or rid them of a new dictator, they just push past
her like they don't have an opinion... like it hasn't occurred to
them to have an opinion. They're as devoid of subjectivity as the crowd in 'Dark Knight Rises'. Even the armed guards, previously
presented as firmly loyal to Coin, do nothing. They're all there to
confuse the picture, to provide a cover for Katniss to escape. (Or
more accurately “be escaped”.) At that point, a cloud might as
well have passed over the sun, obscuring everyone's view. Katniss's
Mockingjay role is to stand for them. So its presumed they cannot act
on their own accord.
(Reader, please note that in this
context 'pro-revolutionary' does not mean the films stand or fall on
their ability to incite popular revolt, that if the audience don't
collectivise the multiplex's sweet counter on their way out then the
whole thing was in vain. The suggestion that people could get
together and agitate for political change, and that if it did so it
would be a force to be reckoned with, that would be enough. This
being the internet, you need to spell out that sort of thing.)
A summary, then of the Hunger Games
films would be “half full, then half empty”. Of course, none of
this is altogether surprising. Perhaps it was always going to be
easier for a contemporary film to capture contemporary capitalism
than to portray revolution, a situation we encounter daily versus one
which almost none of us have any experience whatsoever. Perhaps in
trying it busts the banks of what can be done in an adventure film.
Perhaps things should have freeze-framed near the end of the second
film, when Katniss shatters the dome and left us to figure out what
might have happened next. Throwing the impetus back on the audience,
not offering a neat and tidy resolution, that might have been a
greater spanner in the works of mainstream movie-making than the two
hundred and sixty minutes which follow.
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