10 ways The Hunger Games is our present – and our future. #8: “It’s all a big show. It’s all how you’re perceived”
How elites try to manipulate reality – and how we feel about ourselves
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.
Suzanne Collins has stated:
“Bread crops up a lot in The Hunger Games. It’s the main food source in the districts, as it was for many people historically... But there’s a dark side to bread, too. When [Head Gamemaker] Plutarch Heavensbee references it, he’s talking about Panem et Circenses, Bread and Circuses, where food and entertainment lull people into relinquishing their political power. Bread can contribute to life or death in The Hunger Games.”
‘Bread and circuses’ refers to the Roman Caesars’ strategy of quelling public discontent by providing people with food and entertainment. (Of course, the Capitol doesn’t really provide the bread; even the name of the country is a lie.) The phrase was coined by the Roman satirist Juvenal, describing how the state pacified its subjects by distracting them from political reality. The entertainment was largely provided by gladiatorial games.
In The Hunger Games novels and films, these contests are crossed with reality television techniques to create Panem’s Hunger Games. The setting draws a link between Ancient Rome and the present-day United States, with the almost limitless distractions provided by the latter’s media entertainment complex taking the role of the gladiatorial games.
We’ve already noted some of the reasons that The Hunger Games was a generational phenomenon. Another reason is this manufacture of images and storylines. Through Katniss’s experience, we see how the regime creates and manipulates these for its own ends.
By design, the Hunger Games commodify the competitors, turning them into objects, always a precondition for abuse and exploitation, so that the audience can be entertained rather than horrified by their suffering.
Leading up to the Games, the tributes are expected to act cheerfully and hide how afraid they are. Katniss and Peeta and all of the other tributes are taken to the ‘Remake Center.’ Katniss is literally scrubbed clean of the scars of her life in District 12. They’re styled for a grand parade, then have to pitch themselves on a confessional-style talk show. Each tribute is treated as a character, distinct from the human being who is about to kill or, more likely, be killed. The audience doesn’t experience them as real people, which might induce empathy with their plight.
Katniss even has to pretend she’s humbled, awed, to be in the Games, “this little girl from District Twelve.” And then in the arena, the competitors have to consider how to solicit crucial supplies from rich ‘sponsors’ in the Capitol (as her Games mentor Haymitch advises Katniss, “You really wanna know how to stay alive? You get people to like you”). Just before being thrown into the arena, the tributes are given a rating by the Gamemakers based on their chances of survival, which is important to attracting sponsors. Obviously, because no one wants to back a loser.
Suzanne Collins’ most obvious inspiration was reality TV. She’s explained that: “I was channel surfing between reality TV programing and actual war coverage when Katniss’s story came to me. One night I’m sitting there flipping around and on one channel there’s a group of young people competing for, I don’t know, money maybe? And on the next there’s a group of young people fighting an actual war. And I was tired, and the lines began to blur in this very unsettling way...”
The titles alone of well-known programs indicate the ‘values’ they promote: Big Brother, Survivor, American Gladiators, Fear Factor, Naked and Afraid... Critics have suggested how reality TV combines neoliberal ideology (competition, individualism, the offer of instant wealth, the humiliating ‘elimination’ of losers) with the normalization of a surveillance society.
In the story, the Hunger Games aren’t designed as a distraction, then. They perform a propaganda role in establishing a dominant set of social values, values that legitimize the state’s brutality and enforced inequality, and corrode the natural social solidarity that might threaten the Capitol. The Games model and promote, attempt to naturalize, the Capitol’s broader ideology: brutal competitive individualism for the masses, eternal punishment for the poor, and a hopelessness that they can ever really win.
Collins also captures how contemporary capitalism creates pressure for young people to commodify themselves, to craft a personal brand, perform, and promote their ‘best’ identity. Of course, social media provides the perfect vehicle for this. As Jia Tolento argues in Trick Mirror, these platforms are all about commodifying selfhood, but are leading us to mass alienation. Social media offers a kind of ameliorative solidarity which isn’t real; we gravitate to social media in order to feel more connected, but often feel more isolated (in a later post, we’ll consider actual solidarity). It’s just one respect in which The Hunger Games is less sci-fi dystopia than current critique.
Later, in Mockingjay, the third part of the series, Katniss is used as a symbol by the revolution, but she’s equally deeply conflicted about adopting this persona, both about her ability to play the role effectively, and the consequences of the conflict with the Capitol. It takes Katniss a long time to recognize that her power actually lies in her fragility, vulnerability and flaws – in her humanity (“The damage, the fatigue, the imperfections. That’s how they recognize me, why I belong to them”).
But perhaps the most insidious, often invisible erosion of the self derives from the daily grinding focus on survival, a kind of identity theft by a cruel, corrupt society. Katniss’ struggle will be to recognize who she really is, something that totalitarian regimes never encourage, since the beginning of the true self is often the beginning of the end of tyranny.
And indeed, Panem’s total surveillance society will come to be turned back on the Capitol. Katniss’ actions during the Games, which are not purposefully revolutionary, at least consciously, will play out in the most public way possible. The TV spectacle of the Games is a national focal point (viewing is mandatory for all of Panem’s subjects), but this is also what creates such a perfect platform for their subversion.
The Mockingjay revolution starts here.
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: