I think anyone who thinks the Hunger Games is an unrealistic YA dystopia with nothing to say about America needs to take a good hard look at College Football
I’m rewatching the first movie now and even though I still think the book is better there’s this scene they added where Snow is literally pruning a rose and explains that the Hunger Games has a winner because it gives the districts something to hope for. “A little hope is good, a lot of hope is dangerous. A spark is good, if contained.”
And I just feel like that’s so apt for what so much of American culture and propaganda is. Redirecting hope away from hoping for revolution or deep systemic change and towards hoping for your sports team to win, hoping for your candidate to win. Small, contained, controlled hopes.
So that you imagine how wonderful it would be if your district won the hunger games this year, and not how wonderful it would be if there weren’t any hunger games at all. That would just be too outlandish. They’ve been going for 74 years after all. It’s always been like this. And you don’t even think about what it would be like if the economic system and government were different completely
I think it’s also erroneous to view all of Panem as being solely America. One of the powerful things about dystopian fiction is how it can shrink the scope and scale of our dystopia and simplify things in order to better highlight and discuss the complexities of our world.
If you try to describe the full global economy in proper nuance and detail you’ll be writing Das Kapital and you’ll die before you finish
So Suzanne Collin’s shrinks our world. Chilean miners are now Appalachian miners. Bangladeshi garment factory workers are now Midwestern garment factory workers. Carribean sugar plantations are just literal southern cotton plantations. And the imperial core that lives in lavish excess from the resources extracted from the world is now contained entirely within the Capitol city.
It is easier to illustrate this dynamic to a teenager when it is one continent with twelve numbered districts. But what you hope is that the reader will understand the transference. Americans live in great luxury and excess that is achieved by extracting wealth and labor from the world. What America exports is not really natural resources but military strength and propaganda. The Capitol is the same. The Capitol takes in all the resources from the districts, and exports the Peacekeepers and the propaganda that maintains their hegemony. The propaganda frames it all as necessary. You need the Peacekeepers to maintain order and the propaganda “heals us and brings us together.” The strongest victor brings “honor and wealth” to their district as an exceptional individual who rose from their bootstraps, showing how the system really is just and fair.
Obviously despite the massive success of the Hunger Games franchise we don’t have millions of anti-imperialist young women. In the books Katniss and Peeta fake a relationship to game the system and win. And in real life the mass media focused on this fake love triangle instead of the actual themes of the book, infamously falling directly into replicating all of the media trends criticized by the books.
But I do know that when I was 18, attending Justice for Trayvon Martin protests (it wasn’t called BLM yet), when I saw the police I thought of the Peacekeepers. When I saw the media spin on Occupy Wall Street, I thought about the Gamemakers. When I started to truly notice the extreme segregation and wealth disparities, I thought about the Capitol. Maybe it didn’t reach everyone but it was certainly a helpful bridge for my adolescent mind between American propaganda and reading actual leftist theory.
I thought about this also when I read Mark Oshiro’s Anger is a Gift which is a genius YA dystopia novel that is set in our world in our time. It’s just East Oakland in 2015. There’s nothing in it that isn’t in our world. It’s literally not sci-fi. But it’s written like the Hunger Games. Our police are written like the Peacekeepers, because they are the Peacekeepes. Modern riot control technology is described like sci-fi dystopian technology out of the Hunger Games, because modern riot control technology is something out of a sci-fi dystopia.
Yeah it’s problematic that in the movies they made Katniss white and that it took a pretty white girl to be relatable to a lot of people for whom the dark olive toned Katniss of the books would have been too foreign and unrelatable. Infamously book fans were pissed when Rue, who is canonically Black in the book, was depicted in the film exactly as described in the book.
But I still think that the Hunger Games is a good dystopia novel and that if being YA actually better serves its commentary and messaging, even though most readers seemingly missed it all
