10 ways The Hunger Games is our present – and our future. #2: “They messed us up pretty good, didn’t they?”
How The Hunger Games resonates with alienated and anxious young people today
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.
The first post can be found here.
One of the major themes of The Hunger Games is trauma and coping, especially as experienced by young people. As well as enforced poverty (discussed in the next post), we’re presented with the corrosive effects of cruelty, terror and fear, powerlessness and passivity under a despotic regime.
Most obviously, we see how children from poor communities are forced to fight to the death in a gruesome reality TV show for the entertainment of the rich. On top of systemic poverty and inequality, this is intended to numb a pauperized populace. It seems to work – for a time.
The generation coming into adulthood now are often referred to as Gen Z (Generation Z). They’re typically understood to have been born between 1997 and 2012. The oldest of them might vaguely remember the end of the twentieth century. Some of them will live to see the twenty-second century. The Hunger Games is their story; they’re the tributes (the competitors in the cruel Hunger Games ‘competition’) of our world.
The oldest of them, perhaps their older sisters and brothers first, will have read Suzanne Collins’ series and then watched the films at the same time they were coming to their own comprehension of the state of the world. A society controlled by a corrupt elder elite, albeit heightened and dramatized. The story felt, and still feels, like it captures an essential truth.
In creating her fictional world, Collins reflects many of the prevailing anxieties of young people today. No wonder The Hunger Games speaks so strongly to them. It suggests, much more than most generational commentary and analysis, what’s really traumatizing the kids.
Katniss, the main protagonist in the story, epitomizes this trauma. Even before the Games, she’s desensitized. She describes the suffering of the districts, but there are no feelings attached. She’s continually repressing her emotions, shielding her vulnerability, wary of connections and anything that isn’t self-sufficiency. Katniss is always ready to help others, but doesn’t want to rely on anyone else. How could she, in her world?
Katniss is also surrounded by expectations about what she should be and how she should act. As we’ll explore, the reality TV show of the Hunger Games and state spying means that Katniss and her peers are often acting for the audience, a pressure felt by young people in our own age of social media surveillance. But this means that Katniss continually distrusts the motives of others. She even often doubts her own motivations.
There might then be something to the idea that The Hunger Games appeals because it embeds familiar teenage challenges in its dystopia: disappointment with adults; the pressure to be likable and attractive; a lack of privacy; the need to make alliances, and the difficulties in deciding who can be trusted.
But to stop here would be to ignore the more explicitly political themes of the story. In how young people are contained and punished, The Hunger Games also reflects adult fears of adolescence as a powerful destabilizing force. It isn’t a high school drama, not really, it’s a political coming-of-age story about class and conflict, for its characters, and for its audience.
And talk about great timing. The first book was published in the midst of a global financial crisis and an adult world run irresponsibly amok, from which the resulting austerity was inflicted mainly on the young, poor and minorities. Much of The Hunger Games’ generation has lived with a lack of opportunity and growing inequalities in generational wealth and power, alongside war and terror and reality-twisting politicians. For example, the actors and director of the films were aware of the clear connections between the story and the Occupy movement, among other protests, that were taking place while they were filming the first movie.
In the story, this plays out psychologically as well as politically. Katniss is alienated from herself, to the extent she’s internalized the Capitol’s hateful propaganda. She thinks she’s a fundamentally horrible person, unworthy of love. She doesn’t believe anyone else could love her either.
What lies underneath this is deep grief. The cruelest crime committed by the Capitol, the ruling city that is the heart of the regime, is not the way it kidnaps children to participate in the Games, terrible as that is. It’s the way the entire system steals from children any sense of psychological safety.
Economist Noreena Hertz has called those born between 1995-2002 “Generation K,” after Katniss. This is a generation riddled with anxiety and distrustful of traditional institutions, but like their heroine also imbued with a strong sense of social justice. They look out on a world of terror and insecurity. Of course they’ve been shaped by technology and recession, but also by existential threat.
As Hertz says: “[U]nlike those currently aged between 20 and 30, the ‘Yes we can’ generation, who grew up believing the world was their oyster, for Generation K the world is less oyster, more Hobbesian nightmare.” (We’ll discuss this latter philosophy in a later post.) Hertz’s research with American and British teenagers suggests they’re defined by anxiety, loneliness and fear about their own futures as well as the world – but also by a distrust of corporations, a desire for connection and co-creation, and a commitment to equality and the environment.
Of course, The Hunger Games is a deliberately extreme story. But in these respects it reflects the feelings of young people today, one of the reasons for its resonance with them. While young people of every generation face challenges, today’s have been taught that resources, whether economic, educational or environmental, are limited and that they’ll have to fight for them, a mental hunger games they have internalized to the point of sickness.
Characterizations of young people as ‘overly sensitive snowflakes’ don’t then stem (just) from commentators being cranky olds. They serve as a distraction from an exploitative economic system, from austerity and insecurity, and ever-increasing psychological pressure for personal productivity and perfectionism generated by contemporary capitalism. And as we’ll see, from coming collapse.
So of course young people identify with Katniss, whose only markers of adulthood are accepting responsibility for her family’s survival and being thrown into a brutally competitive arena in which she’ll struggle to survive. But she will – just about, but not without suffering terrible damage first.
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: