Rare News Desk
For all of its teen appeal, Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Game series has always been more than just another Twilight. And the filmmakers have treated the source material with great seriousness — not least by casting the brilliant Jennifer Lawrence as our heroine Katniss Everdeen. Underneath the teen trimmings of this series beats a subversive, individualist, anti war heart.
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The world of Hunger Games is a world in which the USA has turned into a dystopia known as Panem. Panem is divided into 13 isolated District. Some 74 years before the first book began, a failed rebellion against the oppressive Capitol lead to the institution of the annual Hunger Games, which pit 24 12- to 18-year-olds against other in a battle to the death. This far-fetched premise is a condemnation both of of war and of reality TV.
In the first two books and movies, Katniss had to survive the Games by cunning and bow skills. Now, in Mockingjay — Part 1, the first half of the final book of the trilogy, our heroine, riddled with PTSD, has to become the propaganda puppet. She is the symbol of the new rebellion against the Capitol.
The Hunger Games series is shot through with libertarian themes. The Capitol squashes hunting, trading, and free movement like any oversized government. Brutal Peacekeepers, an uncomfortably familiar hybrid of cops and soldiers, patrol the streets. Propaganda keeps everyone in line. Watching the games is mandatory, as is the draft that brings new players into the arena.
With all of these restrictions, it’s no wonder the people began to rebel. And they are right to do so — perfectly justified. Only, the series manages to recognize that the rightness of a war on paper does not end all questions about its manner of engagement.
In the sappy teen sensation Twilight, heroine Bella Swan had to choose between a dreamy vampire and a hot-headed werewolf. And that was about it.
Echoing that now-mandatory YA Fiction standby, Collins put a love triangle in her series. Katniss continues to waver between two men in Mockingjay — Part 1. But Katniss’s choice — and this is more clearly defined in the books, even if they aren’t as good in a lot of ways — is bigger than deciding which dreamboat to spend her days with. She has a choice in tactics, too.
Peeta, the shorter, sensitive baker’s son almost plays the damsel in distress at times through the series. Meanwhile, Gale, her hunting partner, is tougher. The two boys continue to follow this path until Gales becomes a rather brutal partisan willing to use any method to bring down the Capitol which has caused him so much misery, and has firebombed his home into rubble.
On the other hand, Peeta continually voices his fears over the rebellion becoming as bad as the vicious Capitol. And — spoiler alert– he turns out to have been right. There are hints in Mockingjay — Part 1 that the life of the rebels is rigid and controlled. Assuming that the book will be followed, part two will show all too clearly that a new government can — no, will — turn into the old tyrannical one in a split second.
In short, the point is not that some rulers are monsters and some angels. The point is that the rulers have no moral right to control other people’s lives. The power was the problem all the time.
As a heroine, Katniss is commendably individualistic. Not in the Salon.com parody way, but in a brave, selfless way. Her first big act in the series is to take her sister’s place in the Games. Everything else she does is just part of her will to survive, and to someday get back to her family. And yet, in the Games, which are meant to induce maximum sadism in the contestants, she goes as long as possible without hurting anyone else.
Katniss has no grand ideology. She simply knows something is wrong with her lack of choice. As she tells her sister in second movie, after Gale has been brutally whipped by a Peacekeeper, “How can we live like this — how can anyone live like this?”
There are some serious, weighty, grisly themes in Mockingjay — Part 1, and in the rest of the series. Never mind teenagers, adults could learn from these films as well. This isn’t unrealistic YA fluff. Katniss suffers terribly, as a real person would in the same circumstances.
For all of her qualms, Katniss does end up fighting in a real war. She is certainly not a pacifist. At the same time, Mockingjay the novel does not end with the war’s closure under a Mission Accomplished Banner.
The drama strains credibility at times, but it says something true about war. Good cause or not, your loved ones will die. The lines between bad guys and good guys will blur. At the end of it all, you may just have another tyrant on your hands.
