The Hunger Games -- Movie Review
The Hunger Games
Directed by Gary Ross
I went to this movie expecting not to like it, but I liked it better than I thought I would. I went to it out of curiosity. It is not the type of film I would normally be interested in. But I wanted to try to understand why it is so popular with young people. Why are they flocking to it in such droves? What do they see in it that resonates?
The film is a powerful metaphor for the lives of young people in contemporary American society. It is in the tradition of Network, Falling Down, and Wall Street: films that draw attention to the perversity, excess, and malaise at the core of American life. It is not about the future, by the way, although the film purports to set itself in the future. This film is about the present. Now. The young people are imprisoned in a police state. They are sullen and anxious about their personal futures. The older daughter must assume the responsibility of caring for her younger sister because their mother is self-absorbed, incompetent, and incapable of adequately caring for the young girl -- right away a slam at the traditional American ideal of motherhood. The father has died a long time ago (Isn't that the truth about American life?) Instead the father figure is fragmented into three main parts: Donald Sutherland plays a character that alludes to Donald Trump, who seems to be the supreme leader and the grandmaster of this sadistic competition (akin to his TV show), his younger companion and minion who serves as the ringmaster of the Hunger Games, and the television interviewer, who caricatures television talk programs where guests are subjected to probing, intrusive, hostile questions about their personal lives for the voyeuristic glee of the audience. These ersatz father figures play similar roles as distant, sadistic manipulators -- cold, demanding authority figures who insist on subjecting the young people to sadistic trials which they cannot win, but have no choice but to play out. Woody Harrelson, playing Haymitch, serves as an ancillary support to this conception of the father, but somewhat less distant. A former winner of the Hunger Games, now an alcoholic and still sadistic, he is positioned as a mentor who purports to offer occasional helpful advice, but he very much believes in the institution of the games, and is fully committed to subjecting the young people to its regimen, which he knows will ultimately kill them.
The young people are chosen by their society (which could also be seen as their families) to sacrifice their lives for the greater good, although it is not clear why this annual ritual is necessary. Its chief value seems to be entertainment, similar to our sports culture. Think of Andre Agassi, the NFL, Len Bias, Tiger Woods, Mohammed Ali, among countless other victims at all levels of America's insatiable appetite for athletic heroes. The Hunger Games ratchets this up to the ultimate level where young people are forced to compete until all but one are dead in a murderous game of hide and seek. They come from the lower classes, but are generously rewarded for their willingness to play the game -- just as athletes are -- being permitted to enjoy a brief period of sumptuous affluence and comfort before embarking on their deadly careers as rivals. They prepare themselves by militaristic training in combat and the use of weapons, which mirrors America's obsession with guns and militarization, and our tendency to try to solve every problem with weapons and force.
The way to win in this game is to acquire sponsors: to get people to like you. This is how you get the help you need in killing your rivals. This reflects the values and attitudes of the American corporate class, where genuine friendships are discouraged and always perilous. Relationships are superficial and strictly instrumental serving to promote oneself or one's business and can quickly turn to betrayal when one's interest or fortune shifts. The film spends about a third of itself setting up this macabre circus. This is actually the best part. Once the event is launched the bulk of film is taken up with chase scenes and violent clashes as the participants slowly kill each other off. It becomes a cross between a video game and a "reality" television show with lots of savagery and gore and phony melodrama that gets rather dull. The film is way too long and probably could have been cut by one third with no great loss.
The rules of the game change in midcourse, implying that the game itself is not fair and that the manipulators are actually choosing who the winners and losers are. There is surveillance of everything the kids do in the film, just as there is in their daily lives as students in school, by their parents, and their employers, who now want their Facebook passwords before they can get a job. This prepares them for the pervasive surveillance by the government and private corporations that is steadily encroaching upon the lives of American citizens day by day. The manipulators often intervene on behalf of one participant or against another. This seems to bear out the injunction that gaining sponsors and making alliances for the combat is the key to victory.
A lame romance develops between Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) and Peeta (Josh Hutcherson). It is very slow moving, sanitized, and altogether unconvincing, but I liked the scene toward the end where the manipulators sick a small army of vicious dogs on the young lovers that pursue them in a harrowing chase through the forest. This represents the war on intimacy and young love that is being waged throughout American society by the government, the schools, religion, businesses, corporations, the media, and the medical community, as well as families against their own children. A perfect example of this is the recent case of Jordan Powers and James Hooker, the 18 year old student and her 41 year old teacher, who have been publicly torn to shreds by a pack of vicious dogs while the whole country enjoyed the spectacle. Any kind of close personal relationship between children regardless of age is also very much frowned upon and anything that might become sexual is particularly singled out for persecution and suppression. There is no place for friendship in this game. Alliances are only temporary and ad hoc, their basis being mutual protection on the one hand, and to collectively destroy rivals on the other. But they all know that ultimately they will be forced to turn on each other because only one can survive. So what appears to be friendship and mutual support is only superficial. The essential underlying dynamic is hostile and rivalrous. Katniss struggles to preserve a semblance of human friendship in this grotesque environment, but her efforts are always thwarted in one way or another. An incipient same sex relationship between Katniss and Rue, a young black girl who befriends her and helps save her life, is quickly killed off.
Rue's death, however, precipitates a rebellion in her hometown, led presumably by her enraged father against the police state responsible for her death. There are riots and mayhem in the streets that are finally brutally crushed by the police state with the community thoroughly devastated in its wake. However, this could harbinger a coming revolt of the American people against the militaristic policies of the American government that seems to be on a worldwide rampage over the last decade sending young people off to senseless, futile wars around the world, without declarations of Congress, under irresponsible political leadership that uses lies and misinformation to manufacture public support for the ventures, and then expects the soldiers to go on fighting in endless tours of duty, moving from one war to the next, until they are either killed or disabled or they snap like Robert Bales, embarrassing their slave drivers in acts of spectacular rebellion. Americans are slowly growing weary of this and there could be a collision coming over it which the film foreshadows.
The producers seem unable to settle on how they wanted to end this film. At first it was billed as a last man or woman standing with Katniss set up to be the battered survivor. But then they infused this weak romance into the mix, so what to do about that? They decided to change the rules in the late stages with the game nearing its conclusion so that the two of them could share the winning honors. But that seemed a little too merciful and humane for this film, so at the very end after the two had won together fair and square through cooperation, the joint victory is revoked and the original concept forcing them to fight one another to the death is reinstated. The two young lovers, however, reject this condemnation, and were about to opt for a Romeo and Juliet ending of mutual suicide -- which I liked and thought fitting. But then again, in another bout of confusion at the top, this was remanded and once again they were both allowed to live. The ending they settled on is kind of sappy and doesn't fit with the gruesomeness and heartlessness of the rest of the film. I think Romeo and Juliet would have been much more apt and underlined the villainy of the manipulators.
Jennifer Lawrence, playing Katniss, is a beautiful young girl who is riveting throughout the film. Her captivating beauty and physical presence really carry the film, which could have been extremely dull without her. Donald Sutherland is also very strong as the incarnation of Donald Trump, who is the supreme representation of the ruthless corporate values of success at all cost and the merciless stomping of all rivals.
Although the title of this film is The Hunger Games, hunger is not an issue in the film. No one starves to death, no one is losing weight, in fact, what imagery there is of food is pretty sumptuous. The hunger in this film is emotional and psychological. What these kids are hungry for is warmth, sympathetic understanding, a comforting, nurturing environment, relationships that are supportive and empathic and founded on genuine good will. Their efforts to create such relationships in the hostile world of the film are beleaguered and beset by intractable obstacles. The film poignantly encapsulates the predicament and the prospects middle class young people in the high stress, every-man-for-himself-and-get-out-of-my-way American society. Too numbed and overwhelmed to fight back, they grimly soldier on participating in the game they are forced to play against their will, and are unable to opt out of. They seem incapable of organizing themselves to fight the system that is forcing them to kill one another for the sadistic entertainment of the masses. They think about challenging it, but they sense their powerlessness and futility. It is a biting, caustic comment on American society and its values of competition, sadism, ruthlessness, brutality, and violence, and the crushing toll it takes on the personal lives of American youth.