Emotionally unsatisfied by The Hunger Games

[breakinglight11]

Finally saw The Hunger Games last night. It was all right, not badly made, but I had a lot of the same problems with it that I did with the book. I only read the first one, and I was not terribly motivated to read the next ones. The character of Katniss doesn't have much dimension to her besides her steely determination to get through whatever it is she's up against-- survive, really, I guess --and I was really disappointed by how little the story treats with the issue of how horrible it is to be forced to participate in the violence. I feel like the notion of how terrible the violent child-on-child murder for entertainment is gets lost by how both the book and the movie just... graphically provide the terrible violent child-on-child murder for our entertainment. They kind of just handwave the horribleness-- yeah, yeah, this shit's bad, we're much more concerned with finding out how Katniss gets through this struggle and making sure all the right people (ie, the people we have not been led to sympathize with) died. I found it very emotionally unsatisfying that the heroine just sort of... plays the game. Everyone just plays the game. Nobody tries to resist being forced to participate in such a disgusting ritual; they just kind of focus on getting through it alive. No analysis is made, no attempt to strive for a higher moral truth. And nobody ever attempts to deal with the emotional consequences of playing the game-- you killed other kids! For somebody's entertainment! For no reason! And you never tried to resist it, or find some other way out! You're never going to think about it, you're never going to experience the repercussions to your soul? Well, no matter, all the right people die! Except for the ones we like, which we mourn without thought for the, "Well, what did you expect? That's the game!" aspect of their deaths. It's sad because we lost them, but not at all because of the fact that, good or bad, these children are being put through something ABOMINABLE. We liked the cute, angelic little Rue girl, and that big blond boy from District 1, despite being a horribly warped child raised to be a killing machine, we're glad Katniss ices. Again, no thought for the horribleness of being in the situation-- we just kill the baddies and cry for the goodies. A very immature way to approach the situation. The one nod to it was the previous champion Haymitch is now an embittered alcoholic, ostensibly driven to it by the trauma of the experience, but it's never directly referenced.

On the plus side, when did Lenny Kravitz get so hot? Damn, sir. Must be I like him better without the afro. And the gold eyeshadow. Man, did he rock the gold eyeshadow.

Comments

[staystrong62805.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, it is mentioned and delved into in the second and third book.

One of the problems I had with Katniss was that she didn't deserve the almost Messianic qualities given to her. It was a large reason I disliked the series... Until I sat down and talked with some friends who shared this observation and realized that... That's sort of the point. Katniss doesn't deserve it. She's not good or bright or wonderful. She's, in fact, brutish and not all that smart (how very unintelligent she is is highlighted in later books).

It's not a great series. I'm not even sure it's a good series. But they do deal with the horror of the situation and the government.

[rigel.livejournal.com]

. . . the horror of the situation and the government.

This. I like the story almost exclusively because of this: the pageantry, the too-terribly-thin coat of glitz and falseness around this unfeeling machine of class oppression.

[blendedchaitea.livejournal.com]

1. I like your usericon. REPO! is one of my favorite movies. :)

2. What I thought was interesting about Katniss is I thought that her sense of "I am going to survive no matter what" making up the vast majority of her personality was a result of growing up in an environment of stark deprivation and class lines. When Cinna & co. dress her up and put sparkles on her, she /likes/ it, but she never had a chance growing up to explore any part of her personality besides that of the tough survivalist, so it never feels comfortable to her.

I'm finding that the more time I spend away from the series and talking about it, the more I find to like about it.

[sprrwhwk.livejournal.com]

I'm very reluctant to characterize Katniss as "unintelligent", though I confess that I haven't read the later books. Certainly in the first book she shows herself to be a competent tactical thinker and whatever win she pulls out of the first Games she does by some fairly abstract thinking. But her intelligence is shaped by her experience, which has mostly been narrowly constrained and focused on daily survival, so once she is out of that environment and situation she is, I would believe, very much out of her depth.

[rigel.livejournal.com]

To Lenny: Yeah, he was pretty tasty in the movie. Yow. (I liked the gold too.)

[nennivian.livejournal.com]

I would also recommend reading the second and third books, though I caution you that the beginning of the second was slow and fairly uninteresting to me. The series seriously evolves over the course of the books and each is pretty different from the others. The second two are more similar to each other than they are to the first, making the first the odd one out. Number one is meant to hook the audience and set the stage, but the real story has only barely begun. I think a lot of your disappointment came from not getting the story that they save for the other two.

(Though, I agree completely that Katniss is not supposed to be very amazing or personable. The books are through her eyes, but she is frequently oblivious to deeper meanings and wider implications, either out of ineptitude or stubbornness/survival. She's not meant to be wonderful in our eyes. The world we see is tainted by her point of view, but the further you get in the books, the more she becomes aware of how complicated the world is.)

[sprrwhwk.livejournal.com]

handwave the horribleness

I choose to believe that this is a commentary on just what terrible things people can come to accept and even revere, rather than authorial laziness.

The ending, with Katniss and Peeta and the berries, is Katniss's attempt to fight back (and it works, but it's not without cost); and consider Peeta's talk, before the Games, about wanting to die in such a way that the Capitol would know they didn't own him.

With the understanding that authorial intent is worth exactly the electrons it's encoded with, I've read that the filmmakers were concerned that the movie not "commit the sins of the Capitol" in making the child-on-child violence a spectacle. I personally felt like they did a good job of that; indeed, I sometimes wished they'd shown more, because when blood is flying it's clearer the cost in pain and fear to all involved, and I wanted to feel it more than I did, without descending into Kill Bill-levels of ridiculous gore. That would have made the horribleness a little less handwavy, for me.

We don't get much of the aftermath for Katniss in the book or the movies -- they end too soon. I wouldn't be surprised if the subsequent books treat with that, though I haven't read them.

Katniss is a survivor, indeed, and that's the only thing that makes her in any way special. I appreciated that, personally -- I'm tired of Chosen Ones in my media, specialness by accident of birth or breeding. It doesn't make for a "well-rounded" character -- a character that low on Maslow's hierarchy doesn't have time to take up the piano or find deep emotional responses to her situation, she's too busy worrying about where her next meal is coming from -- but I identified with her enough that she worked well for me as a character.

And oh man, Lenny Kravitz. :DDDDD