President Coin immediately after declaring herself the unelected president and stating that the election is delayed indefinitely: “But I have called you here for a far more important vote: a symbolic vote.”
Ahahahaha oh it’s such a good depiction of a smarmy liberal democrat. Like yeah this is better than the fascists but uhhhh this is not exactly true democracy
“Oh sure we could execute all these high ranking fascist adults who are responsible for all the atrocities and running the fascist machine [but I want that machine so I can have control of it] so instead we will hold a ‘symbolic’ Hunger Games of the innocent children of random people of the privileged class to sate the thirst for blood”
Hahahahah people really hated this part when it came out but honestly now I fucking love it it just works so well. I love how the new Panem emblem looks almost identical but is blue. I love them having an implied Operation Paperclip and the way that people raised on seventy five years of hunger games just see it as a normal thing to do and are totally desensitized to it as patently ridiculous and cruel.
I love how she killed Coin to force an actual election to happen and how the mass crowds of people get to just beat the shit out of Snow instead. It’s such a good way for it to end everyone fucking hated it so much but it’s like the only good way to have properly done this particular critique of American culture. You can’t fix the system by just changing out the head between one of two options that both suck.
The last 30 seconds, that LAST scene in the book, where Katniss is dressed traditionally feminine holding a baby in a field while Peeta plays with one of their older kids, still definitely kinda sucks like it’s such weirdly fascistic cottage core volkish imagery like oh Katniss heals by becoming a mother especially with the white washing of Katniss.
But after having seen the Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes that last like she says about how when she gets nightmares she “makes a list of every good thing I’ve ever seen someone do” does hit different. It becomes about refusing the Snow-style fascist belief that people are inherently savages without a social contract forcing them to adhere to Law and Order. To believe that even as the world is terrible and there are very few humans left alive, and even as the terrible things humans do feel so loud, that even still there are so many good things people do despite that, that people do not have to be forced to be good, they want to be good if enabled by the system around them.
Still think it would’ve hit different if maybe they cut out the baby scene and maybe it’s the scene where she gets into bed with Peeta and she’s like “I had a nightmare again” and he’s like “okay, let’s play that game again. Let’s list every good thing we’ve seen someone do.” And then they could’ve ended on that.
But also when Suzanne Collin’s wrote this I really don’t think she was expecting that the same year the movie was released we’d start to see a huge resurgence in literal fucking Naziism in this country so “this looks volkish” probably wasn’t on her mind in the way it clearly was with the Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes where she makes a big effort to show Snow as a little fucking Nazi Youth at the end and draws heavily on Nazi Germany for the architecture of the Capitol.
I’m thinking about the end of the Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes when the guy who “invented” the Hunger Games tells Snow the true story of where they came from. That he was just joking around and thought up the most absurd over the top ridiculous way to punish the districts possible as basically a thought experiment in a brainstorming session that he never thought would actually happen. And then Snow’s dad the war general just went ahead and actually implemented it and made it into a thing and the guy who came up with it was so horrified for the rest of his life that this shit was actually fucking happening and he tried to sabotage it but failed because the spectacle was so outlandish and cruel that nobody could look away and people became obsessed with it.
It felt so fucking real as like, that absurdism of the cruelty of reality. So many times these past seven years I have felt that way. Ever since 2015. It’s that “posted cursed with the gift of prophecy” meme right. Like people keep imagining patently absurd and cruel things happening and think like, surely that won’t actually happen though, it’s too extreme. And then Trump did get elected and he did implement a policy of separating children from their parents at the border and locking them up in all child concentration camps purely as a method of terrorizing and punishing the parents. And the whole time it was happening it was all I could think about day in and day out for months. It was so over the top cruel. The footage of those kids crying. You’d expect that there would have been uprisings and acts of terrorism in revolt and instead people were so glued to the horror that, yes there were protests and I was one of the local leaders in organizing them in my town and I got arrested for doing them, but even what we did felt insufficient to the horror of it all. The level of violence not properly reflected. Even when I was sitting in a solitary cell without food or water I felt as though this cruelty towards me as punishment for my nonviolent insurrection was insufficiently violent when this same government treated those children so much worse than me for being foreign born.
And then there was QAnon and that felt just so absurd and yet it kept growing and then there was the storming of the Capitol building and that felt so unreal you couldn’t look away. Fascism brings with it a spectacle of violence so profound you can’t even believe it’s happening and you become paralyzed like a rat staring down a snake. How could you possibly organize against a machine so violent. Even just the idea of trying to commit arson on an unimportant government or something small like that feels insurmountably complicated if you wanted to avoid getting caught with all the mass surveillance we have. Did you know that every product you purchase from every store has a unique serial number embedded in the POS system which helps law enforcement track down which store it was purchased from and when? Not just controlled things anymore. Just any random thing you buy from Home Depot or Target. It can be tracked. Even a box of cereal, let alone a bottle of kerosene, a rag, fire retardant gloves.
Ultimately in Mockingjay what ends the civil war is also a spectacle. Snow invites all the children of the Capitol into his mansion to try and create a human shield against the rebels. The rebels instead manufacture a false flag operation, making it appear as though Snow dropped bombs on a pen of Capitol children to hold off the rebels from reaching his mansion. That act made all the cops and guards defect to the rebellion. It was a nationally broadcast live spectacle of such insane unbelievable cruelty that it won the rebellion. Of course that kind of act is the sort of fascism that Snow used to rule, so that is how Katniss sees that Coin just another fascist seeking power.
Yet somehow the unfathomable cruelty of the Trump regime never made the DHS officers defect. And under Biden the cruelty has barely lessened and in some ways has intensified. The Democrats do not revel in spectacle so much but they do not shy away from cruelty.
I think about Gaza. So much of what the IDF is doing to Gaza is a profoundly cruel spectacle. It is an unbelievably insane level of violence and inhumanity. They have done things this past month far worse than what Suzanne Collins imagined for her intentionally over the top ludicrous young adult novel about spectacle and cruelty. Telling Gazan families to evacuate directly to places targeted for bombing. Targeting journalists and hospitals. Using randomized algorithms to bomb unpredictable and meaningless places. They’ve literally done to Gazan children exactly what was supposed to be an absurd spectacle in Mockingjay. Rounding them up, telling them to flee to a location for safety, and then bombing that location. Something so absurdly inhumane that even the fictional characters in the book couldn’t believe it had been real. Something that even in the fucking Hunger Games it wasn’t actually a real plan that fake comically over the top fascists had actually come up with.
And yet in the real world the real fascists in the IDF actually did that. It’s a spectacle. They’re trying to crush the hearts of Palestinians and demonstrate overwhelming firepower. They’re trying to punish the rebels. It’s an overwhelming material genocidal infanticidal act of crimes against humanity—and that they actually did it is itself psychological warfare on anyone who survived.
People often look at the Hunger Games and say “it’s so absurd. We don’t need a cautionary tale about how it would be bad to do the Hunger Games. Nobody is actually going to do the Hunger Games.” But that’s not the point. Because the point is to look at the spectacles of violence in our own world and see that we already have a global society that does far worse things than the Hunger Games on a regular basis.
At times like this, what else is there to do but revolt? What else is to be done but to block the highways and shut down train stations and blow up dams and take hostages and try to do anything at all to make it all stop.
I think in a sense that’s the hope in writing stories about fictional fascist dystopias. That we help people see that which has been normalized as alien, and the necessary responses to the violence once thought unimaginable become imagined by the reader. Maybe you are an American and you cannot imagine the country that is normal to you as fascist and cannot imagine revolt against it that breaks the law. But imagine you weren’t American but Panerican, and imagine the eagle was a phoenix, and imagine the police were called peacekeepers. And imagine them doing exactly what they do today. But doesn’t that seem cruel now? And what do you think the people should do about it? I will tell you a story about what these people of Panerica did, and I want you to imagine that you are a girl in this country and a part of this story, and imagine the people doing the things that I tell you about in this story, imagine you were there and you took action. Now the unimaginable has been imagined.
A lot of people don’t need this to help them see the dystopia. But there are many people who do. I’m not sure how effective it is given how often people miss the message. I hope that the people of Israel can find a way somehow to see how cruel this war is. Yet somehow the mother of that hostage who was killed by the IDF sent a thank you note to his killer. Somehow Israelis hate Palestinians more than they love their own children. But I wonder if somehow there’s a way to get through to them. What level of spectacle will be too profound for them to handle. What level of cruelty will make them defect. Surely the IDF has crossed that line?
Alas, we live in the dystopia. Dystopias are not futures but mirrors of presents. I’ll have to remember the good things I’ve seen people do, for now. I need to watch after my health. Now is not a time to go to jail again when I’m recovering from multiple surgeries and major injuries in one heat. I hope somehow I can believe in the power of words. What I’ll say about jail is it is more cruel and awful and traumatizing and miserable than you can imagine, for even just a day. But it still feels like it pales in comparison to the cruelty you were protesting that landed you there.
