10 ways The Hunger Games is our present – and our future. #1: “Real or not real?”
It’s not a high school drama, it’s a political coming-of-age story, for its characters and its audience
This is a series of blog posts based on my new book, Stay Alive: Surviving Capitalism’s Coming Hunger Games, published in April/May 2021 by Zero Books.
An uber-rich ruling class gorge themselves in a futuristic playground, while working people struggle to survive in exploited rural areas. The possibility of revolution is only a distant memory, a forgotten hope kept at bay by brutal policing, aching poverty and a rigidly segregated class system…
The Hunger Games could be seen as a critique of explicitly authoritarian states, and/or just an imagined future dystopia. But that wasn’t the series’ aim. Its setting is a post-collapse North America. It’s more both a warning about the near future and a cutting critique of the present-day United States – of reality TV politics, the demonization of the poor, state violence and oligarchy, and many more issues that we’ll discuss in this series of blog posts.
When The Hunger Games began in 2008 – it’s since become a defining story for a generation that’s grown up with economic crisis and never ending war – many commentators lumped it in with other young adult genre fiction such as Twilight and Divergent. But The Hunger Games is political. It’s about an elder elite that uses state power, a compliant media and violent spectacle to pacify its population. It’s about how a rebellion is sparked by defiance and spreads through subversive symbols, while the regime responds in the only way it knows.
It’s also about collapse, war, rebellion, trauma and recovery. It’s dark, emotionally and politically truthful, and while it doesn’t flinch from the horrors of its setting, it’s also ultimately, eventually, realistically hopeful. It’s a story about how regimes fall, but how the revolution against power and exploitation can never end.
And with the climate crisis and environmental disaster, it’s about a coming future of enforced scarcity and segregation, and an emerging form of authoritarian statism we’ll call ‘capitolism’. It’s the story of our times, and most likely of our near future as well.
Despite, or because of, these themes, The Hunger Games struck a chord from the start. Suzanne Collins established her name in children’s literature with the Underland Chronicles fantasy series for middle-grade readers. She continued to explore themes of war and violence for a young adult audience with The Hunger Games. The first book in the series, published in 2008, was an instant bestseller, appealing both to teenage readers and adults. The book appeared on the New York Times bestseller list for over 260 consecutive weeks (more than 5 years), selling more than 100 million copies in 54 languages in 52 countries.
The New York Times Book Review thought that, “At its best the trilogy channels the political passion of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the memorable violence of A Clockwork Orange, the imaginative ambience of The Chronicles of Narnia and the detailed inventiveness of Harry Potter.” In 2012, the first of four films based on the novels was released (the final book was split into two films), starring Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss. The series has earned $3 billion at the worldwide box office. Clearly, the story has resonated with audiences, particularly young people. The question is why, and whether it means anything politically.
Some commentators assumed its appeal centered on the love triangle between Katniss, Gale and fellow District 12 tribute Peeta. But this isn’t the focus of the story, it’s a subplot to bigger political questions, notably how to survive under an authoritarian regime, the price people are prepared to pay to bring it down and whether this corrupts the post-regime society they long for.
We might be suspicious of Hollywood selling us ‘rebeltainment’, even clever meta-stories that critique how rebels use storytelling to sell their revolution. There must be a catch. But even if this were true, if Hollywood is the creative Capitol (the ruling elite city in the story), we can claim and subvert its stories. As we’ll see in these blog posts, Katniss (our main protagonist) introduces a new story to the Games, of defiance in place of deference, cooperation instead of competitive individualism, self-sacrifice rather than subservience. Once these seeds have been sown, it’s the Capitol that becomes terrified of their reaping. It scrambles to regain the initiative by attempting to assimilate Katniss and Peeta’s alliance (with, yes, some reality TV game playing on their part as well) into a sentimental story of “star-crossed lovers.” Neatly anticipating some of the misguided commentary on The Hunger Games as just a teen love triangle, the Capitol desperately tries to depoliticize them.
But as the late commentator Mark Fisher noted:
“The Hunger Games is irreducibly political in a way that the Potter and the Twilight films could never be. The film’s political charge depends upon the surprising intensity of its brutality. This brutality is affective rather than explicit; the amount of gore is actually quite low, and it is the prospect of pubescents murdering each other, not the sight of their doing it, which shocks. What makes The Hunger Games more than a workaday thriller is its disclosing of a world – a world that, as with all dystopias that connect, is a distorting mirror of our own.”
Hence the reason why The Hunger Games has been used in youth-led protests to this day. It reflects the unavoidability of the oligarchic, near-dystopian future that’s already here. 2019, when I started writing my new book, saw youth-led revolts in numerous regions and countries, from Hong Kong to Chile, Thailand to Columbia. Despite different local flashpoints, underlying all of them were extreme inequalities which especially disadvantage young people, and the willingness of elites to crush any challenges to their power. The world hadn’t seen a wave of street protests like this since the late 1980s, surpassing the scale of the Arab Spring protests of the early 2010s.
In an important sense, The Hunger Games predicts how regimes around the world are likely to respond to increasing youth-led protests against their power – mainly with repression of course. The real hunger games are just beginning. That’s why we need to return to Panem.
Stay Alive: Surviving Capitalism’s Coming Hunger Games is published in April/May 2021 by Zero Books and can be pre-ordered from the following places now: