by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I finally watched The Hunger Games, the DVD of which we’d had sitting around here for
a month or two but which we held off because Charles and I had zipped through
the books quickly through the summer and then ended up with an ambivalent
feeling about the film: would it be as good? Would we get hung up because the
characters weren’t as we imagined them from Suzanne Collins’ pages? (She’s in
second place on the screenwriting credits and all three names are separated by
the word “and” instead of an ampersand, indicating that Gary Ross, the film’s
director, wrote the first draft of the screenplay, Collins wrote the next draft
and Billy Ray was the last writer to work on it before the shoot.) In case
you’ve been living in a village in the Afghan mountains for the last three
years, The Hunger Games is the
sensationally successful first novel in a trilogy by Suzanne Collins (the
others, Catching Fire and Mockingjay, are also — inevitably — being filmed, and like
the final Harry Potter and Twilight books, Mockingjay is being milked to provide two films instead of
just one) set in a dystopian future in which civilization throughout the U.S.
has collapsed except in the Northeast, where a ruthless dictatorship of the 1
percent called “Panem” has established control over a gated capital city,
called simply “The Capital,” and 12 districts which supply all the essentials —
foodstuffs, raw materials, industrial labor — and whose people are kept in a
state of enervated penury, sort of like the way most human “civilizations” have behaved throughout
history. The name “Panem” — the Latin word for bread — comes from panem et
circenses (“Bread and Circuses”),
the formula the Roman Empire had for keeping its citizens happy, and Collins
reinforces the parallel by giving virtually all the Capital’s residents (save
for the chief of state, President Snow), names of real-life ancient Romans
(Caesar, Cinna, Seneca, Flavius, Octavia, etc.), but her ruling elite is a lot
bigger on circenses than panem and the actual lives of the people in the
Districts are closer to those of the proles in George Orwell’s 1984 (a book that has influenced virtually every
dystopia written since — the pre-Orwell dystopias, like Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, were far less big on privation than the
post-Orwell ones have been — and has been drawn on by writers with as different
ideological agendas as Ray Bradbury and Ayn Rand), carefully eking out a living
while the wealth of their resources and their labor is sucked out to feed the
bloated world of the Capital.
Seventy-four years before the events of this
first movie in the cycle, the Districts organized a rebellion; District 13,
where the regime’s nuclear weapons were manufactured, was obliterated
altogether (at least so we’re led to believe in the first part of the trilogy)
and the other 12 districts were forced to surrender one boy and one girl, 12 to
18 years old, each year for the Hunger Games. The Hunger Games are a
combination gladiatorial duel and Most Dangerous Game-style human hunt (the debt The Hunger Games owes to The Most Dangerous Game was considerably more obvious in the film than it
was in the books) in which the 24 sacrifices — “tributes,” they’re called (once
again Collins appropriated part of the imperial vocabulary of ancient Rome) —
are locked in an elaborate arena whose design, determined by a Capital staffer
called the “Gamemaker,” is changed year to year. They are subjected to various
privations from the environment as well as each other, and in the end all but
one of them die (either they kill each other or they’re taken out by natural
causes or booby traps built into the arena by the Gamemaker) while the survivor
is hailed as “Victor” and gets to live in relative comfort in a house built in
one of the Districts for that purpose. The Hunger Games are televised
throughout Panem and the people are forced to watch whether they want to or not — the people doing the forcing are
the Capital’s security police, the “Peacekeepers,” who wear white riot suits
similar to those worn by Darth Vader’s minions in Star Wars — while the people in the Capital have a gay old
time (some of them in more ways than one) watching the spectacle and betting on
who will win.
What struck me about The Hunger Games the novel when I read it is that Collins was
equally adept at writing serious fiction with a social/political message and creating gripping action scenes; she told all
three novels from the point of view of the central character, 17-year-old Katniss
Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) from District 12 (its industry is coal, and her
father died in a mining accident while her mother was an herbalist and healer —
though the film doesn’t tell you what happened to her dad except in an
ambiguous flashback while Katniss is in the arena and it doesn’t mention her
mom’s medical skills at all), who volunteers for the Hunger Games to take the
place of her 12-year-old sister Primrose (Willow Shields), whose name is drawn
at what’s called the “Reaping” — where the “tributes” are picked at random. The
film doesn’t explain why some people’s names are in the drawing more than once:
the rulers have set up a system called “Tesserae” in which families can obtain
badly needed extra food rations in exchange for allowing their kids to be
entered in the Hunger Games more than once; Katniss’s hunting partner and
sort-of boyfriend, Gale Hawthorne (Liam Hemsworth), is entered 42 times. Until
she’s picked for the Hunger Games, Katniss has survived largely through her
skills as a huntress, particularly with a bow and arrow; she and Gale sneak
into the forbidden woods just outside District 12 (the fence between the
district and the woods is supposed to be electrified, but it’s fallen into
disrepair and is not charged) and kill small animals, which they trade to local
shopkeepers for bread and other foodstuffs — which is how Katniss has met Peeta
Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), who has a crush on her (he once gave her an extra
bread roll as a token of his esteem) and ends up her co-tribute from District
12 in the Hunger Games.
The movie couldn’t help but be different from our
expectations of the book in several particulars — both Charles and I imagined
Katniss as considerably blonder and more physically formidable than Jennifer
Lawrence (ironically Lawrence is naturally blonde but had her hair dyed black
for the role, giving her a striking resemblance to the late alternative AIDS
activist Christine Maggiore in her younger days) and I imagined Haymitch
Abernathy (Woody Harrelson), the only surviving Hunger Games winner from
District 12 who’s supposed to mentor Peeta and Katniss but who’s of little help
because his post-traumatic stress disorder from the experience has led him to
alcoholism, a bloated Falstaff-type drunkard instead of the surprisingly
healthy physical specimen we see before us, with only a windburned face and
tousled hair indicating the long-term effects of his thirst. (Harrelson is a
vegetarian in real life and insisted that his servings of the sumptuous feasts
the sacrifices-to-be get in the Capital not include meat dishes.) Also I think
the movie should have had a longer prologue depicting daily life in District 12
so it could have duplicated the visceral shock Collins describes in the book
experienced by Katniss as she compares the luxury and waste of the Capital to
her own austere existence back home — but even with deletions (and a few
additions, including a riot in District 11 — a portent of a coming revolution —
which Collins didn’t describe until book two) this film came in at 142 minutes
in length and the prologue I would have wanted would have made it even longer. The
Hunger Games as it stands is a
marvelous movie, much of it shot with a deliberately jumpy camera in order to
bring us into Katniss’s world without the device of a voice-over narration
(it’s a technique actually invented by Abel Gance for the 1926 Napoleon — he wanted the sequences of the French Revolution
to look like newsreel footage of the actual event would have if movies had
existed then — and the most recent director to use it was Kathryn Bigelow in The
Hurt Locker, also to bring us into the
minds and experiences of a troop of people in combat facing life-or-death
situations almost every minute), and a quite impressive film even though,
having read the books, I’m not sure how much sense it would make to someone
coming to the story de novo without having read at least The Hunger Games itself.
I was dubious about some of the casting —
frankly I would have liked it better (and believed it more) if Liam Hemsworth and
Josh Hutcherson had switched roles — and a few of the plot twists: in the book
the “mutts,” genetically engineered feral dogs patterned after previously
killed tributes who menace the survivors in the final sequence, are a total
surprise to the tributes and the readers alike, while the film shows them being
created by the gamemaker and therefore takes the edge off their appearance in
the arena — and there are other things I could pick to pieces (like the
appearance of the Cornucopia, from which the tributes are allowed to pick up
supplies at the beginning but which invariably turns into a bloodbath because
it also gives them an opportunity to knock each other off — I had imagined it
being a giant version of a real cornucopia and instead it’s an abstract creation
the set designer deliberately modeled on Frank Gehry’s ugly “modern”
buildings), but overall the film is quite close to the book, makes most of
Collins’ points and even adds some: in the movie, much more than the book, it’s
clear that the spectacle is being deliberately manipulated by the gamemaker and
his staff to provide the jaded Capital residents with their sick idea of
“entertainment,” and on film the Hunger Games themselves look even more like
the ultimate extension of the TV “reality show” than they seemed in the book
(where the Capital’s residents were the only people in Panem who actually could watch TV regularly; the people in the Districts
were rounded up and put in front of group televisions to make them watch the
Hunger Games, much the way I saw being done in Cuba whenever Fidel Castro made
a speech: ordinary Cuban TV in 1977, when I was there, was black-and-white from
old Russian set designs, but when Castro spoke color sets were brought out and
the people were gathered around them).
The Hunger Games is one of the most important stories created by anybody in the last few years — Suzanne Collins probably
said more, said it more succinctly and reached far more people, than all the
Occupy orators and theorists talking about the 1 percent and the 99 percent —
and for the most part this film does justice to its chilling first episode. How
the moviemakers (including a different director) handle the more morally
ambiguous second and third books remains to be seen, but they’ve made a good
start; one could readily imagine a Marxist professor (assuming there are any
left!) assigning Collins’ books as an illustration of much of what Marx was
talking about in his theories of exploitation, surplus value and labor — not
capital — being the source of all wealth.
