Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Guess What, "Hunger Games" Fans, You Actually Live In "The Capitol"


In a rare example of keeping up to the minute with our mindless pop culture, I actually spent this past Saturday night at a screening of The Hunger Games. Normally, I steer well clear of such mass produced tripe, and am actually proud to say I've never laid eyes upon Avatar, Titanic, the second Star Wars trilogy or any of the Harry Potter or Twilight flicks. But the wife has read the entire set of Hunger Games novels, and sometimes you do what you have to do to maintain domestic tranquility.

That said, I didn't hate the movie as much as I thought I might. It was actually better made than most of the garbage that comes out of Hollywood these days. My two biggest quibbles with it were that the supposedly hungry denizens of District 12 actually looked pretty well fed, and the violence was far too tamed down for such a horrific premise. Yeah, I know they needed to ensure they didn't get an R rating so that the teenyboppers could flock to see it. Mission accomplished in that regard, I guess. At least I saw it at my local art house theater, which meant that the audience was not all teenagers and that there were no blaring advertisements on the screen for the 25 minutes we sat waiting for the previews to start. At this point, I'll take any small favors I can get.

The plot of the film has become culturally omnipotent, so I won't rehash it in great detail here. It involves a future dystopia in which The Capitol long ago won a war and now subjects the 12 outlying districts to its will through brute force. The outlying districts are forced to provide the resources which allow the denizens of the The Capitol to live in decadent luxury. Every year in order to reassert The Capitol's authority, The Hunger Games pit 24 teenagers (12 boys and 12 girls) chosen by lottery against each other in a brutal fight to the death as part of a Survivor-on-steroids type reality show.

It's not surprising that this theme would have great appeal to American moviegoers, since the plot is not substantially different from that of the original Star Wars. The Capitol is the Evil Empire, and even though there is not yet a rebel alliance (to be formed in the inevitable sequels, I gather) the main character, Katniss, is a scrappy, tough and resourceful rube from the provinces just like Luke Skywalker.

The theater itself was sold out for my show, and the audience not surprisingly seemed to eat up what was on the screen. As a culture, we just never seem to tire of watching the underdog overcome long odds in a battle against the forces of evil. Yet the thing I couldn't help but wonder as I observed my fellow patrons, especially as we were filing out after the film was over and half of them already had their eyes glued to their cell phone displays, is that none of these people seem to realize that in the real world it is THEY who are the spoiled, easy living citizens of The Capitol, reveling in a seeming cornucopia of luxury in a world plagued by mass deprivation, and ironically distracted from reality by so called reality television shows.

In a Friday Rant I posted last June 17th entitled, "Unlike in the Movies, in Real Life Americans HATE the Underdog," I wrote:
...it’s in the international arena where America most behaves like the Evil Empire, to the cheers of domestic Star Wars fans everywhere. The empire’s legions roam the globe, dropping drone missiles on top of any goat herder’s wedding party in countries where the locals are unfortunate enough to be living on top of vital energy resources and actually have the audacity to insist that they should be allowed to live their lives free of American meddling. You’d think, given our alleged love for the small fry, Americans would be outraged at this injustice and demand that our military stop butchering civilians in our name, but you would of course be wrong. Instead we plaster yellow ribbons on the back of our cars, drape an American flag on anything that doesn’t move quickly enough and warble “Proud to Be an American” at top volume during every ball game.
I was at the time, of course, thinking about the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. And now, here comes The Hunger Games, which could very easily be taken as a sharp commentary of how globalization and neoliberal economics, enforced at the point of a drone missile if need be, are designed to ensure that much of the the many Districts' (read: world's) resources continue to flow to the decadent Capitol (read: America). The Hungry are actually those billions of the world's poor living a subsistance-level existence in countries where the economy largely functions either to extract the raw materials or build the cheap consumer products so loved by those queued up in line to watch The Hunger Games.

Granted, the movie has been given such a slick Hollywood sheen that it is really difficult to take seriously as anything other than mere popcorn entertainment. Nevertheless, it just continues to amaze me how the American populace is collectively so lacking in self awareness that it cannot apparently even sense the inherent contradiction of always rooting for the cinematic equivalent of "terrorist insurgents" to overthrow the Evil Empire.


Bonus: "Lay down your money and you play your part...everybody's got a hungry heart"

18 comments:

  1. But I thought exceptional light-on-a-hill America was akin to Skywalker fighting the evil death star villains like the heathen Red savages, tyrannical Red coats, Reds, and Satanic Islam.

    Jesus loves you enough to send you to hell for thought crimes against God's Chosen People, Mr. Hicks.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. But hey, to paraphrase something the real Bill Hicks once said, since rock'n'roll is the "devil's music," hell is where all of the great concerts are going to be. :)

      Delete
    2. Different Anonymous, Well Bill, I think it was Mark Twain who said "Go to heaven for the climate, hell for the company."

      Delete
  2. James Cameron pulled his punches, Hollywood-style, it's true. People were able to walk out of the theater afterwards, just like you describe, without making the explicit connection between the destruction created by OUR industrialized society and the fiction on the screen. But I think you really missed something great there, anyway. It's worth watching ESPECIALLY if you understand it.

    As far as clueless empires, Glenn Greenwald nailed it http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/03/19-1 (quoting):

    Here’s a summary of the Western media discussion of what motivated U.S. Staff Sgt. Robert Bales to allegedly kill 16 Afghans, including 9 children: he was drunk, he was experiencing financial stress, he was passed over for a promotion, he had a traumatic brain injury, he had marital problems, he suffered from the stresses of four tours of duty, he “saw his buddy’s leg blown off the day before the massacre,” etc.

    Here’s a summary of the Western media discussion of what motivates Muslims to kill Americans: they are primitive, fanatically religious, hateful Terrorists.

    Even when Muslims who engage in such acts toward Americans clearly and repeatedly explain that they did it in response to American acts of domination, aggression, violence and civilian-killing in their countries, and even when the violence is confined to soldiers who are part of a foreign army that has invaded and occupied their country, the only cognizable motive is one of primitive, hateful evil. It is an act of Evil Terrorism, and that is all there is to say about it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I've heard it said before that "Avatar" does actually have some of the same merits of intention as "The Hunger Games," but despite being a huge fan of the original "Terminator" and "Aliens," I totally lost faith in Cameron after the execrable "True Lies." :)

      Delete
    2. You should at least give Avatar a shot Bill. But you should definitely be proud that you didn't see the second Star Wars trilogy. They are just a travesty.

      Delete
    3. @Anon - I'm actually still waiting for Scorsese to make a worthy follow up to "Goodfellas" before De Niro gets to old to credibly play a mafia boss. :)

      Delete
  3. "It involves a future dystopia in which The Capitol long ago won a war and now subjects the 12 outlying districts to its will through brute force. The outlying districts are forced to provide the resources which allow the denizens of the The Capitol to live in decadent luxury."

    Coming in with zero familiarity with the books or the movie, this to my ear sounds like a Glenn Beck/Tea Party fantasy about big government and decadent "elites." Does that have anything to do with its popularity?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It probably doesn't hurt its popularity that it COULD be interpreted in different ways, especially if a person is clueless about the way the world really works.

      Delete
  4. Bill, too bad "True Lies" (which I fortunately have not seen and, given your comments, I'll keep avoiding) ruined Cameron's films for you -- "Avatar" would be a good one, otherwise.

    Great insight, though. You're right: Americans think they love the underdog, but only when they're the ones portrayed as such. It all gets back to the weird victimhood thing here, where people like Tea Partiers and rabidly religious right-wingers claim to be victimized by horrible liberals, gays, people of color, etc., when they're usually the ones doing the bullying.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yep--the right wing has elevated "professional victimhood" to a science.

      Delete
  5. From what my daughter and her friends tell me (13 year olds): it's more a tale about a future that encompasses Roman Empire decadence complete with gladiator games, but massive technology is in place to reflect the reality tv thing. Not really a new type of tale, except the protagonist is female.

    That's how they are perceiving it, anyway-- and they also said they liked it because "it's no stupid princess movie".

    They do love it, that's for certain.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Bill, I disagree with the suggestion to see Avatar. If you've seen 'Dances With Wolves', you've seen Avatar. If you swap out the Native Americans with really tall Smurfs and Earth with a forest planet of glowing plants it's the same thing.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for that. Anyone who has been reading the blog for awhile knows I'm a zombie movie fanboy, anyway. :)

      Delete
  7. They stole the idea of children fighting each other to the death on a remote island from a Japanese film called Battle Royale. Very hard to find in the US, but it has all of the gore and grotesqueness that I'm sure Hunger Games lacks - it's been compared to Clockwork Orange. Highly recommended if this is your thing.

    ReplyDelete
  8. You nailed it with the phrase "tripe". Thats all this worhtless film is to me and my brother. Me and him were discussing this trash and he swore to me it was a direct ripoff of an earlier Japanese animation film about 24 young people,( 12 male 12 female), dropped off on a remote island to fight to the death for the televised amusement of a worldwide audience. It was way more violent and gory according to him, but the same story neverless. Just with a female heroine, that is no princess, but more like the greek goddess/ huntress with a bow. I forgot her name. We both have no stomach for watching children killing children. We both see enough of that in both Chicago and Detroit. Thanks but no thanks. Let the young girls see this total nonsense and fantasize.

    ReplyDelete
  9. You should have watched this review, domestic tranquility be damned...

    http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/escape-to-the-movies/5516-The-Hunger-Games

    ReplyDelete