The Hunger Games is almost an anti-violence novel

I read Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy a year ago — the novels are set in a futuristic America that has been at once neatly simplified and reordered beyond recognition. Collins does this in order to discuss politics without hurting anyone’s feelings. Something on the level of “in this world, there are HUGE disparities between the rich and the poor! this world glorifies violence! what a scary future,” etc.

In the end, it touts itself as a trilogy exploring the horrors of war, the callousness of totalitarian governments, and—yes! COOL BATTLE SCENES! A SLOW ELIMINATION OF OPPONENTS THROUGH KARMIC DEATH AND OCCASIONAL PLOT TWIST! In a nutshell, the energy behind the message of The Hunger Games runs counter to the energy of its plot.

Anatomy of The Hunger Games

Susan Collins’ The Hunger Games is a popular trilogy, soon to be a popular movie series. Like most great books, it’s nothing new. In fact, The Hunger Games can be broken down into exactly five threads.

1) Reality TV

notable predecessors: The Running Man, Death Race 2000

A book or a movie based on reality TV is basically a book or a movie based on all the contrived things that TV shows like to do to us in order to make us watch. We read cliffhangers in books, sure—but a reality TV show builds their entire show layout on them. When Katniss sits in her tree, thinking that it’s getting too quiet and the games designers are going to get antsy—well, it justifies almost any plot twist in the book.

2) Deadly Sport

notable predecessors: The Most Dangerous Game, Gladiator

I don’t know why we humans like this trope. Most of us would lose these kind of games—and real quick, too. I think it’s the karmic victory—the reluctant soldier who turns on the eager killers and gives them a run for their money. Yeah. I think it’s that.

Book Reviews: Two Kinds

A scholar named Gordon Hutner gave a talk at my university a few months ago. During the talk, he lamented that literature professors rarely talk about popular contemporary books—we’ve phased ourselves out of the conversation, leaving it mostly to journalists and novelists. There are plenty of reasons this might have happened (including but not limited to professorial snobbery), but more important is how this affects the general tone of book reviews today.

Journalists tend towards writing like this: “Book X is a tale of betrayal and deception. It begins with a car chase through downtown New York, and it ends with a fistfight atop the Pyramids of Giza. It’s a great read! Read it read it” i.e. book reviews are market tools! and the only important thing about a book is how preeminently saleable it is. Which leads to thumbs up/thumbs down appraisals as if the book is a glitzy gladiator.

Lad Theory

Last Saturday, I was drawn into a random conversation with strangers at a friend's birthday party. I listened to a guy, mid-thirties, make generalizations about sex and love and make indirect asides about his ex-fiancee and his friends -- and then I piped up, "Oh, isn't this just ladder theory or Harry Met Sally stuff?" It didn't phase him -- he just said no, it was his own theory, and a good one, about how men can't be friends with women whom they're attracted to.



Like your eighteen-year-old cousin who makes up "quotes" that are actually misremembered lines from old Modest Mouse tunes, I find a certain type of guy tends to regurgitate the Ladder Theory, whether they've read it or heard it recycled in fraternity discussions or actually tapped into that original vein of nice-guy-resentment from which the theory springs. Guys are simple! they'll have sex with anyone. Girls are impossible! they have two ladders: guys they'll sleep with and guys they won't. The theory recycles familiar tropes like the "friend zone" and the "nice guy" -- though here they're given ever-affectionate terms like "abyss" and "intellectual whore."

The Uninvited Other Identity We Sensed at the Fight Club

Sara and I went to see Shutter Island last Friday -- mostly because it was the film showing at the St. Louis Moolah Theatre (and who can pass up an opportunity to sit in leather couches in an old Masonic lodge, watching movies on a giant screen?), but partly because it was a thriller and partly because it's a Scorsese film and partly because of Leonardo DiCaprio. It's about two US federal marshals who come to investigate the disappearance of an escaped woman from a island-locked mental institution for the criminally insane.

And so the film begins rather provocatively: two men who barely know each other, visiting a very scary place on a very solitary island in what appears to be a thickening storm, trying to get information from increasingly recalcitrant and resistant hospital leaders and guards, mixed with unnecessary flashbacks to WW2 and their death camps which are meant to resonate with the possibly evil machinations of a hospital for the insane in the 1950s. So far so good, yes?


So does the film move in the direction of a horror film, where the lights go out, the storm sets in, and all the evil criminals run loose, doing unforeseen violence? or does the film move in the direction of a political thriller -- i.e. the push for further information slowly reveals deeper and darker levels of conspiracy and manipulation? or does the film become a psychological thriller, where the hero's psychological pressures begin to bleed into the dilemmas of the villains, unsettling reality as we know it?