Children killing each other for "sport" makes "Hunger Games" a repellent (and false) vision of the future

There have been many visions of what the “next world” will be like. Some are good, some bad, others indifferent. It’s odd, but life seems to change little in its basics: Work, eat and sleep. The only things that have changed significantly is the rapidity and ease of the exchange of communication and information. During the height of the space age in the 1960s and early 70s it seemed that science fiction and reality were rapidly becoming one, but then Richard Nixon essentially turned off the spigot for funding of manned space travel (this included several more Apollo flights that were cancelled despite having already been funded, and the guts of NASA brainpower was lost forever through massive job cuts). Since then in many respects technology has let the world down; thinking “big” has been abandoned in favor of “small.”  Electronic and computerized gadgets are cute and have modest power requirements; yet even supercomputers cannot help humanity’s feeble mind escape being permanently confined to this planet, save in the world of fantasy. 

I suppose that most assume that life will trudge along as usual, with the expectation that the only significant changes will be in ease of life technologies. Few people think ahead to shortages of natural resources (like fossil fuels) or the effect of pollution on the water or the air. The Earth is big enough to absorb whatever humanity dishes out, or so it seems because it is so hard to notice until the occasional catastrophe occurs. Of course, there are those who think in apocalyptic terms, seeing dangers ahead that the populace needs to be warned of, and usually like a sledgehammer to the head. Of course, no one knows for certain how the future will look, but most visions of this eventuality—especially as envisioned by novelists and Hollywood—seem to be rather pessimistic. 

The problem with pessimistic views is that they ignore societal change and the tolerance level of people for that change. Women (or at least white women) have benefited from societal change far more than any other “oppressed” group in the past 50 years, while blacks have a much higher public (if not to say private) profile that would have been unimaginable in the not so distant past. The fact that gay and lesbian marriage is becoming more “acceptable” is also an indication that the tolerance level of most Americans has not leveled off—or it may simply be that religious-based morality has almost no influence in social policy; people just don’t want to be bothered or called bad names if they don’t agree. Going back to a societal “stone age” in this age of rapid communications where opinions and denunciations can cause revolutions or destroy reputations seems unlikely. 

That isn’t to say that if problems that exist today don’t improve, they won't have “apocalyptic” implications. One of these is the widening income gap between the rich and everyone else, or the separation of society between the elite and the masses. In Medieval times you had the nobility residing in their castles, and the peasants “slaving” in the countryside; but this did not lead to the “Apocalypse.” In fact, the Black Death in the 14^th Century was the beginning of the end of feudalism (although it would persist in Russia until the 19^th Century), as sharp depopulation changed the nature of the relationship between worker and master. Not that the essential nature of that social structure did not remain a subject of speculation; it certainly was so in the French and Russian revolutions, and Edgar Allan Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death” envisioned a society of noble elites in a castle high on a hill, protected from the ravages of the outside world, until an unwelcome visitor from that outside world intruded on their reveling. 

Novelists and Hollywood, as mentioned before, have their own “visions” of the future. Take for instance the following: There is a country with a well-off “Capitol” surrounded by 13 dirt-poor districts, one of which was recently “destroyed” as punishment for rebelling against the Capitol. As further “punishment,” each remaining district must provide one boy and one girl between the ages of 12 and 18, selected by lottery, to kill each other in a “game” until only one remains alive. The “contestants” are required to doll themselves-up like Ken and Barbie to appeal to the “audience.” They are interviewed and give cute answers to gain the sympathy of the audience in order to attract “sponsors” to pay for this stupidity (oops, I think I gave away something there).  

“Naturally,” if any of the “contestants” find favor with the bloodthirsty audience in the Capitol, they may receive “gifts” to help them survive, which is actually a kind of cheating and a bit unfair to the other contestants, I think. This must have come from watching “Dancing with the Stars,” when the audience kept keeping Sarah Palin’s daughter Bristol “alive” over much better performers. When the audience becomes enamored with a “romantic” angle between two of the contestants, the rules are conveniently changed so the lovers both survive, but then later the rules are changed back so that one has to kill the other, but instead of doing so they agree to commit a double suicide; since this would be bad for “ratings,” the idiots in charge of this decide they’ll change the rules again. So both contestants “win.”

Unfortunately, that’s not the end of it. In the second installment, the “winners” go out on a “victory tour.” So what was the point of all of this? Wasn’t this supposed to be some sort of “punishment” for acting “rebelliously”? I mean, who wants to die for the “amusement” of the rich and powerful elite? What evidence is there that the “audience” would even tolerate this? Even the average German pretended he or she had no idea of what the Nazis were doing in the next door concentration camp. Then it turns out that because the female hero supposedly embarrassed the powers that be by forcing them to change their own rules—twice—during the last “game,” they view her as a political “threat” by serving as an example for the people in the districts to revolt. How would they know? They are supposedly so poor they can’t afford to eat, but they can afford to watch television? Wouldn’t it be in the interest of the Capitol to keep people in the districts as ill-informed as possible—especially in the practice of such a barbaric “game”? 

Anyways, the two alleged lovers are required to publicly engage. Whatever. Then it is decided that all the previous winners of the “game” must fight it out again (the author must have seen this on Jeopardy). So here we go again, children and teenagers killing each other because people supposedly like watching cold-blooded murder for real and not in the movies (I told you this makes no sense). The whole point of this is just to kill the principle heroine, as if an “accident” cannot be “arranged” for this purpose. Unfortunately, the games must go on, and not everyone we want killed (like the “heroine”) to end this nonsense does so, and survives for another day, or at least the next installment.

Who comes up with bizarro (let alone sicko) scenarios like this? The author of the source novel of this mess called “The Hunger Games” is someone named Suzanne Collins. She supposedly concocted this scenario while TV channel surfing, which in keeping with the inanity of much of television product probably makes its own kind of warped "logic." When I was growing up, television actually did inject social commentary even in the silliest sitcoms, and news programing actually did discuss topics that were actually relevant. But today with hundreds of channels to fill, quality is stretched paper thin, with “reality” shows and their low budgets filling in the dead spaces, and not very well. Who really “gets off” on people who whine, complain and fight all the time? It’s not even funny. 

Supposedly the author thinks that the Roman Empire is a historical forerunner for the plot; it helps, because frankly, using the channel surfing bit (reality TV, the Iraq war) and Greek mythology makes absolutely zero logical sense. You have Rome, and supposedly all these poor provinces surrounding it; certainly there were defined “classes,” then as now, and the principally agrarian society suffered from excessive tax burdens. But this wasn’t out of some “need” to oppress the masses, but to extend the reach of a “superior” civilization, to bring potential invaders to heal under that civilization, to maintain that vast empire and its defense. There were bad rulers of course, but this was not out of “policy.” There were probably far more rulers who sought to improve conditions for the masses than actively make them worse.

But, you say, what about the gladiator “games” where people kill each other for the amusement of the masses? Just one small problem with that assumption: It’s not true. Owners of gladiators didn’t train and maintain them to die—it was too expensive to do so. Even Starz’s “Spartacus” series wasn’t dumb enough to kill-off most of its gladiator characters until the last episode.  In the vast majority of these arena battles, two gladiators fought until one was wounded or too exhausted to fight on; it was only in rare cases where a sponsor of a contest paid extra money to cover the loss of a gladiator that a “fight to the death” was expected. 

In keeping with this ideological mess, the  author also claims that she based the heroine on Theseus, a “heroic” character in Greek mythology; she probably saw an abbreviated version of the story on the History Channel. But the only possible “link” between the Theseus story and the “Hunger Games” is the part about the seven Athenian boys and seven Athenian girls who were sent to Crete to be eaten by the Minotaur. Theseus, being Athenian, just happens to be in town and takes pity on his fellow citizens, stopping the practice by killing the Minotaur. 

But this is, after all, Greek myth, and the Minotaur wasn’t really all that bad a guy; it didn’t want to be what it was. King Minos asked Poseidon to show favor to him, and Poseidon gave him a white bull that Minos was supposed to sacrifice to him. But Minos liked the bull so much that he kept it and sacrificed another bull. Poseidon became angry and cast a spell on Mino’s wife, causing her to fall in love with the bull and mate with it, and out came the half-bull/half-man offspring who nature had decreed could only be sustained by human flesh. The Minoans didn’t just randomly throw people into the Labyrinth; the Athenians had treacherously murdered Minos’ son, and so as to avoid destruction of their city as revenge they agreed to provide the Minotaur its meal. 

The thing about Greek mythology is that it has very little to do with ethics or morality as we know it.  So someone goes out on a quest not to save civilization or improve people’s lives, but to avenge a personal wrong, or to prove a point. This invariably requires the “hero” to tread on someone else’s turf who does not approve of this, and defends it—and usually winds up being killed by the “hero.” Often a “bad” character is merely someone who has run afoul of an arbitrarily-minded god, and is turned into some kind of hideous thing just for the heck of it.

But the tone of “The Hunger Games” is not “myth,” but a deadly serious vision of the future, based on the usual victimology we have grown all too accustomed to hearing about in the media. To this purpose, we are supposed to “identify” with cold-blooded killers just because they are told to be so, with “good” characters just hanging around to help the female protagonist to survive, with several seemingly sacrifice themselves to allow her to live—despite the fact that we are supposed to believe she is a “selfless” hero of the people, when in fact her principle occupation is her own skin (and maybe her boyfriend’s). This would be “reality” if we choose to see this as it is; but we are asked to view all of this in quite a different way, and thus it rings absurd and off-putting.

I was on a bus recently where I just happened to be was sitting in front of what appeared to be a 16-year-old female and her boyfriend. He was going through a list of incidents in the film adaptation of “Games” that made no logical sense to him; the female breathlessly “explained” that “everything” would make sense if he had “read the book,” because so many scenes and characters were “left out.” But that begs the question: What is the explanation for the (mostly) fanatical critical and fan reception? For this girl, gender politics no doubt was a factor. I mean, what is “cooler” than a poster of a girl pointing an arrow at someone?

But gender paranoia sometimes goes off into flights of illogic that have little correlation with the modern world, save for those constantly infused with their perceived “victim” status. If these “games” were actually “real,” it would be highly unlikely that girls (let alone boys) would be “contestants,” because society simply would not tolerate it, and never has. There is no reason to believe that people will change to “adapt” to that “vision” in the future. Even the Nazis when they were killing millions were too “squeamish” to engage in murder for public entertainment—especially that involving children. 

Because the target audience of this book and film “franchise” is the sub-adult section, this explains the free disposal of logic. Still, one suspects that this whole morally and intellectually rotten infrastructure was built just to “prove” a “point”—the physical and martial “equality” between the sexes, with just a dose of female victim mythology. Here you have a supposedly “starving” female of indeterminate “ethnicity”—at least in the book—except that the lead actress looks like a well-fed, blonde and blue-eyed white female who spent a few hours in a tanning salon and fitted with eye lenses. It’s odd, but doesn’t this describe the conceit of a certain privileged demographic in this country? No wonder Jon Stewart of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show didn’t bother to “read up” on the particulars of the plot when he had the film’s star, Jennifer Lawrence, as a guest.