Perhaps one of the most disturbing aspects of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games is the willingness of the Capitol to look past the brutal violence of the games in favor of entertainment. Completely separated from the games themselves, the citizens of the Capitol view being picked as a tribute as a great “honor” and treat the games as an occasion to place bets, gossip, and pick favorites before watching the bloodbath begin (18). Collins portrays this deep social corruption through the dissonance of Katniss’ situation compared to the reality of the Capitol citizens.
The Capitol citizens have the luxury of never being reaped, never needing to risk their lives by taking out tesserae, and never seeing people they personally know die in the games. They view the games as a light-hearted affair because they are isolated from it, and they ignore the humanity of the tributes they idolize by treating their lives as only worthy for entertainment. Katniss on the other hand, has always lived in fear of the reaping, was forced to take out tesserae to save her family from starvation, and has seen peers die in the games before. Not only this, but because the games are put on for the Capitol’s enjoyment, she is forced to play into their desires in order to increase her chances of survival. Beyond the audience pandering chariot-introductions and flashy interviews, in the death arena itself Katniss is forced to act out a frivolous romance to please the sponsors. To keep herself and Peeta alive, Katniss knows that she has to “give the audience something … to care about”, implying that her life alone is not enough to care about, only her romance (248).
Collins provides two simultaneous levels of social commentary with her dystopian premise. The attitude of the Capitol reveals how the prevalence of violence in media desensitizes us to human suffering and teaches us to turn a blind eye. Framing pain as entertainment seems to justify why the pain is happening, not unlike certain entertainment in our own world from violent sports to dangerous reality tv. The second layer is that the wealthy will be the ones who get to sit back and watch. Suffering for the entertainment of others will always be a job that falls to the poor, the other-ed, and the underprivileged.
The real paradox of the social commentary comes from a meta-analysis of the Hunger Games brand itself. It is an unignorable fact that the commentary on the harm of excessive violence in media comes in the form of a highly acclaimed YA book trilogy with a movie franchise to boost, all about a competition of teenagers killing each other. It is difficult to say whether this makes Collins hypocritical, by capitalizing off of the sensationalized premise of a murder area, or whether that irony was purposefully considered and included during the writing of her novel. But regardless, one fact remains: the meteoric success of The Hunger Games only further proves that violence does not turn us away from entertainment, it draws us in. And even more disturbingly, the public already turns a blind eye far too easily to the violence in media in favor of romance plots and love triangles… not unlike the Capitol.
I think that your analysis of the social commentary of the Hunger Games is spot on. Collins wished to display not only our society's propensity to accept and be entertained by violence, but how that violence is justified by inequality and class structures. Panem is not so different from the modern United States: both countries share a similar capitalistic structure where the haves exploit and oppress the have-nots.
ReplyDeleteI also thought that your critique of Collins' hypocrisy is accurate and cutting. Collins is trying to expose the inhumanity of sensationalized violence and exploitation with The Hunger Games, but at the same time is entertaining her audience with a story that revolves around that same violence that she is criticizing. Whether the hypocrisy was her intention or not, in any case she is still profiting off of fictional violence as entertainment. So is her audience really changing anything about themselves, or will they be more inclined to pick out violent books in the future, thereby perpetuating the convention she is trying to destroy?