With no guarantee whether or when (due to Charles’ work schedule) we’d be having an evening together any time soon, I ran Charles The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1, the awkwardly titled third film in the Hunger Games cycle based more or less on the first half of Suzanne Collins’ Mockingjay. This business of stretching out a cycle of films based on a cycle of popular novels by making two films instead of one out of the final book was started by the producers of the Harry Potter films and it’s become a regrettably standard practice — Lions’ Gate films, which produced the Hunger Games movies and is also making the Divergent cycle (the second film of which, Insurgent, was just released this weekend), is splitting the final book of that Hunger Games wanna-be, Allegiant, into two films. Mockingjay, Part 1 is actually a well-made movie, though if I wanted to I could probably nit-pick it to death. It’s reasonably faithful to the book (or at least the first half of it), as one would expect given that Suzanne Collins herself is credited with the adaptation — though two other scribes, Peter Craig and Danny Strong, wrote the actual script (and Francis Lawrence repeated as director from the second film in the cycle, Catching Fire, thus putting this quintessentially feminist story largely in the hands of men), though some actions performed by one character in the book are given to another in the film, largely to fatten the part of Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks), the fashionista and unlikely turncoat from the Capital who’s once again in charge of making over heroine Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence, authoritative as usual even though she seemed a bit bored by a script which gave her precious few opportunities for the kinds of action scenes she did so well in the previous films), this time into the “Mockingjay,” the symbol of the revolution the underground denizens of District 13 are leading against the Capital and the evil regime of President Snow (Donald Sutherland). The Hunger Games, the complete cycle, is a fascinating look at the modern-day Zeitgeist and its success first on paper and now on film says a lot about why there’s so much discontent and alienation among modern American young people facing a considerably less materially abundant life than their parents and having to work much harder than their forebears did to get by. As I noted in these pages when I read the first book, it was such an indictment of the government/corporate state one could readily imagine it having been written by an Occupy member — but the cycle as a whole is about not only the exploitation of the current regime but the hopelessness of any attempt to change it.
There were works
before The Hunger Games that were
aimed at young people that expressed a similar sense of hopelessness —
including Pete Townshend’s song “Won’t Get Fooled Again” (with its classic
final line, “Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss,” which I thought of quite
frequently as I read Mockingjay,
particularly the parts of it that haven’t been filmed yet) and Alexander
Payne’s 1996 film Citizen Ruth,
in which a drug-abusing woman, Ruth Stoops (Laura Dern), gets pregnant and
finds herself aggressively and unpleasantly manipulated by both pro-choice and pro-life activists who don’t give a
shit about her as a person but only seek to exploit her for the sake of their
“cause.” The moral of Citizen Ruth
is basically to stay away from “activists” of all sorts, avoid political involvements and cope with
whatever this cracked-up civilization throws you entirely as an individual,
without help from anyone except your family members and those you love. This is
very much the moral of The Hunger Games — especially Mockingjay
— as well; throughout the book the innocent young protagonists, Katniss
Everdeen and Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) are shown as victims of sinister
political and social forces seeking only to use them for their own game —
Katniss in the underground world of District 13 being forced to shoot tacky
propaganda films in support of the revolution being led by District 13’s
president, Alma Coin (Julianne Moore, who though a woman is clearly cut from
the same cloth as the Capital’s President Snow — though, oddly, the puritanical
authoritarianism and sheer deadliness of the District 13 regime doesn’t come
through quite as strongly in the film as it does in the book, where Katniss
Everdeen’s culture shock as she finds herself in the underground world of a
population she’d always believed, as the Capital had propagandized, had been
completely wiped out as the price of a previous attempt at rebellion), while
Peeta has been brainwashed and tortured by the Capital to make videos urging
the people in the Districts not
to rebel but to support the Capital in its attempts to restore order and
control over Panem, the fictitious country (located in what is now the
northeastern U.S., though the film’s location work was actually done in
Georgia) in which the Hunger Games
cycle takes place.[1] (Charles and
I were morbidly amused that most of the actors pronounced the name “Pah-NEM,”
with the accent on the second syllable, whereas we’d always assumed it should
be “PAH-nem,” like the Latin word from which it was derived — the name came
from Panem et Circenses, “bread
and circuses,” the formula by which the emperors of ancient Rome said they
would keep their power indefinitely, and Collins underscored the parallel by
giving virtually everyone in the Capital the name of an historical ancient
Roman.)
Given how abruptly the film ends — with Peeta attempting to strangle
Katniss and being put in a deprogramming room in District 13 (the last shot of
the movie is of him thrashing around in a bed, apparently responding either to
the Capital’s programming or whatever the District 13 people are trying to
deprogram him — in the latter part of the Mockingjay novel Peeta actually becomes a Gollum-like character
whose loyalties are so scrambled it’s unclear what side he thinks he’s on, or wants to be on, at any given
moment) — it’s clear that much of the anti-ideological ideology of the book is
being saved for the last film in the sequence, but a close study of The
Hunger Games and its success will offer a
lot of insights into the question often asked these days: why, in a nation
(and, for that matter, a world) in which the division of wealth and income is
getting more and more unequal every day and people are told they must assume
more and more of the risk of their lives because governments will no longer be
there to protect them with such obsolete and quaint programs as Social
Security, Medicare, unemployment compensation and food stamps — and why,
especially in the U.S., young people are being told they can’t succeed without
a college education while the cost of a college education has become so
astronomical most young people can’t get one without taking out so much in
student loans (the only form of
debt other than taxes not
dischargeable in bankruptcy, by the way) they eventually end up as indentured
servants to the corporate elite for the rest of their professional lives — is
there so little organized resistance? (And what resistance there is comes more
from the Right than the Left in
the form of the Tea Party and the Libertarian Party, both of which are growing in
influence as what’s left of the U.S. Left fades further into a kind of
quarrelsome and self-absorbed irrelevance.)
Historian Steve Fraser recently
published a book aimed at answering that exact question, The Age of
Acquiescence, in which he tries to figure
out why the original Gilded Age of the 1880’s and 1890’s (the one many
Libertarians and Republicans are quite open about wanting to see us return to)
aroused such mass protest movements — populism, socialism, anarchism, communism
— while this one seems to be meekly accepted as a force of nature and an
unchangeable fact of life. On his appearance last December on the sorely missed
PBS program Moyers and Company
(killed when veteran PBS anchor Bill Moyers could no longer get corporations
and foundations to fund it, which itself says volumes about what any attempt to
revive a Left in this country is up against), Fraser said, “We live in a kind
of windowless room of a kind of capitalist society to which there can be no
alternatives. A kind of techno-determinism which governs the way we view
things. The market is the beginning and end of life so far as we have been
instructed and the media have reiterated over and over again. I think that’s
one big reason.” I haven’t read his book yet but I’ve seen that interview with
him and read reviews of it in the Los Angeles Times and the New Yorker (the New Yorker critic paired it with two other books about inequality and essentially
ridiculed Fraser for wanting to see more social outrage against the injustice
of inequality), and what most surprises me about it is he doesn’t seem to be
mentioning the most obvious reason there hasn’t been a mass Left movement
against economic inequality: “the failure of socialism.” Whatever you may think
about the nature of the regimes in the Soviet Union, Mao’s China and the other
countries that called themselves “socialist,” the fact is that the Soviet Union
and its bloc crumbled in a way that was brilliantly used as propaganda by the
corporate Right to say that any
attempt to set up an economy and a society that are not ruled by “The Market”
will inevitably lead to tyranny and ultimately collapse under the weight of its
own inefficiency and its suppression of the individual entrepreneurial drive
that (in the corporate Right’s view — and never mind that really existing giant
corporations do more to suppress
the innovative entrepreneurial spirit than to nurture it!) is the true source
not only of all social progress but of all economic value.
The Left long ago
lost the ideological conflict in the U.S. and is losing it worldwide — the
idolatry of “The Market” and the belief that whatever human outcomes it creates
are foreordained and society and its people only get in trouble when they try
to mess with it has become hardened into an orthodoxy, held with the kind of
faith people once put in religion and the “divine right of kings” (and it’s
indicative of how totally market ideology has triumphed that old-fashioned
religion, not any secular movement, is today the biggest threat the worldwide
capitalist order faces: that’s the real lesson of the popular success of al-Qaeda and ISIS — with the secular
socialism of Nasser, Saddam Hussein and the Assads discredited, the young
rebels of the Muslim world are turning to fundamentalist Islam as the only remaining
credible alternative to the Western market system). The fable people, and
especially Americans, are being told today about the end of the Cold War is
that it marked the final triumph of capitalism over all alternatives; the Soviet Union collapsed and China
survived only by remaking itself from a Communist dictatorship into a
capitalist one, and using the repressive mechanism Mao created to enforce
socialist equality instead to enforce capitalist inequality and essentially
turn China into a giant sweatshop Western capitalist employers can exploit (at
least until the Chinese workforce starts being underbid by even sleazier
competitors like Viet Nam and Bangladesh). What all this has to do with The
Hunger Games is that The Hunger
Games — the entire cycle, not the
Left-leaning first book in it — is yet another part of the capitalist
propaganda campaign to discredit the very idea of alternatives to the market system; at the end
Katniss and Peeta turn away from the people on both sides who tried to manipulate them, withdraw
altogether from public life and end up in an oddly Voltairean ending literally cultivating their garden. That’s the message from
the books and the films: don’t bother trying to change the economic, political
and social order — the best case is you’ll fail and the worst case is you’ll
just end up creating something even worse (“Meet the new boss/Same as the old
boss”) — just accept your world the way it’s been given to you and try your
hardest to survive in it, and don’t expect any help from anyone but yourselves.
[1] — Indeed, it occurred to me, not only because District
13’s world was established underground after its above-ground civilization was
utterly destroyed in a series of genocidal nuclear attacks by the Capital, but
one of their principal advisors is man in a wheelchair — Caesar Flickerman
(Stanley Tucci) — that Mockingjay
could in a way be seen not only as a sequel to The Hunger Games and the second film in the cycle, Catching Fire, but a sequel to Dr. Strangelove as well. “We cannot allow ourselves a mineshaft gap!”
