The Hunger Games films draw on many genres, but not always in the same way. Although we argue that all their generic engagements converge on the importance of youth, the genre with which we need to begin is speculative fiction, an umbrella term used to unite stories that imagine another world across many media. In advertisements and in their opening sequences, the most immediately apparent feature of these films, before any action takes place, before any question of character is raised, is that they are set in a world that is not ours. This chapter takes up three approaches to the importance of fantasy in the Hunger Games. Our first section establishes a critical history for talking about fantastic fiction, and its relevance to the Hunger Games, while the second begins with the role youth plays in speculative genres before turning to how this appears in the Hunger Games. These are necessary critical foundations for all the following analysis, including in the last section of this chapter, which acknowledges that the Hunger Games franchise also draws on very different popular fantasy genres by turning to its commentary on and use of reality television.
Between the two dominant forms of speculative genre the Hunger Games is clearly more science fiction than ‘high fantasy’, because it invents a future for the world its audience is presumed to share, and because it diverges from that world by technological rather than magical means. The key difference between technology and magic in this sense is that the former is concretely imaginable. Thus, in a world that has rockets and planes, interstellar travel is more readily conceivable and the possibility of alien civilisations is raised. In a world that routinely uses microchips and all scales of camera for surveillance, virtual reality and digital connectivity for gaming, and digital special effects for film, television, and video, the technologies represented in the Hunger Games can be imagined, even if we cannot currently create all the traps featured in The Games or used for defence of the Capitol. Every strange element of Panem – full body skin tints, rosters of daily tasks encoded on forearms, or controlled herds of hybrid killer monkeys – are extensions of technologies that already exist. This is key to the story the Hunger Games tells about youth, and the fact that science fiction is a form of fantasy is crucial in this respect.
We thus want to take a step back to some canonical theories of fantastic genre. In Tzvetan Todorov’s famous 2000 definition, the phrase ‘I nearly reached the point of believing’ is ‘the formula which sums up the spirit of the fantastic’ (2000: 18). Fantasy represents what might be felt as believable, although it is not true. The much-discussed changes to Disney princesses over time exemplifies what this means in the field of girl culture (Hains 2014; Heatwole 2016). Disney’s 2015 version of Cinderella is no less fantastic than its 1950 iteration, but the earlier story would now fail the test of a girl audience’s expected pleasures and desires, and could never be almost believable. One thing that has changed for that audience is an expectation of girl heroism that even the corporate imprimatur of Disney cannot over-ride. Highly successful films like Brave (Andrews and Chapman 2012), Frozen (Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee 2013), and Maleficent (Robert Stromberg 2014), featuring multiple examples of female heroism, sketch this broad expectation (Heatwole 2016: 6–7). Today, even Sleeping Beauty (in the case of Maleficent) must actively choose her path and interrogate the workings of her world.
Todorov offers us a usefully subtle framework for this, noticing that ‘Either total faith or total incredulity would lead us beyond the fantastic: it is hesitation which sustains its life’ (1970: 18). This hesitation can be between real and unreal, between ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ (19), or between known and unknown technologies. Speculative genres seek to imagine new parameters for social experience that feel as yet undefined, and what Todorov calls the ‘reader’s hesitation’ (18–19) expresses the necessarily dialogic relation between an imagined world and the world from which it is read. Speculative genre requires the audience enter a world organised by a visibly different set of rules, but also never leave behind awareness of that difference.
The Hunger Games is also, however, heroic fantasy, and characterising Katniss’s individual bravery and resilience and the justice of her cause is aided by aligning her with a very familiar structure for such stories. In narrative theory focused on the ‘heroic quest’, we can see how an intertextual field of inference adds significance to Katniss’s every move, adding to her decisions the weight of redefining the world. From the most famous theories of how myths, legends, folktales, and popular speculative genre work, we will mainly reference Joseph Campbell (1949) and Northrop Frye (2004), who both also discuss the quest hero as paradigmatically adolescent.
In The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Campbell argues that ‘The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation – initiation – return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth’ (1949: 30). The youthfulness of a hero on this journey emphasises a passage to being someone special – even unique. They often begin the story suffering from clear disadvantage or need, emphasising the problems in the world at hand. Even more often, however, they come from unknown or concealed origins, emphasising the scarcity of skills needed for the task at hand, which often includes youthful energy and passion. As Frye explains, ‘The enemy is associated with winter, darkness, confusion, sterility, moribund life, and old age, and the hero with spring, dawn, order, fertility, vigour, and youth’ (2004: 110). All these points are true of the Hunger Games, and the story quickly establishes, by such generic cues, that Katniss will be the hero Panem needs, although exactly how this will be manifested is never certain until the end.
Frye refers to heroic quest narrative as the ‘romantic cycle’, and the foundational such cycle as the sun-god’s renewal (110), which is why heroes travel ‘perilously through a dark labyrinthine underworld full of monsters between sunset and sunrise’ (112). While the end of this cycle is always a return (in the classical sense of ‘a romance’), bringing the hero back to an ordinary world, now free to live in it, this comes about through a transformative crisis. Campbell calls it ‘a supreme ordeal’ and ‘expansion of consciousness and therewith of being’ (1949: 246), while Frye refers to it as sparagmos, ‘or tearing to pieces’, which precedes ‘the reappearance and recognition of the hero’ (2004: 113–114). Each book/film in the Hunger Games franchise, and the story overall, fulfils this pattern, with the crucial exception of Katniss being a girl. Frye draws on comparative mythology to represent this cycle as structurally requiring a male actor, who leads change while the female is aligned with reproduction and continuity. This hero is distinguished from women, as Campbell says more specifically, because ‘woman is life; the hero its knower and master’ (1949: 101).
That this overlaps with Laura Mulvey’s account of the ‘male gaze’ as the locus of seeing and knowing in narrative cinema (1975: 12–13) points to a dominant popular cultural theme, and raises again the question of change. Many scholars have questioned the relevance of Mulvey’s model beyond a particular moment in the history of distinguishing mainstream Hollywood and art cinema, and arguments about the cinematic working of a ‘female gaze’ have also been proposed, although these generally agree there is a stark on-screen opposition between gendered bodies and looks (e.g. Taylor 2014). The problem with formalist theories, whether Frye’s or Mulvey’s, is not that they are old-fashioned, or too formulaic, as evidenced by the ease with which the Hunger Games fits the heroic formula. It is that they are necessarily insensitive to history. Contemporary speculative girl heroes offer something more than a girl in a boy’s role, as we will consider again in the next chapter with closer reference to action film. While girl heroes are now common, they typically use the familiar boy-hero formula to articulate a difference which does not erase the pressures of that expectation.
A range of feminist critics have intervened in the heroic ‘monomyth’ to emphasise the consistency of its relegation of girls and women to the role of prize/victim. Teresa de Lauretis’ essay ‘Desire in Narrative’, which first appeared in 1984, emphasises that both Frye and Campbell were indebted to Sigmund Freud, and defines ‘narrative form’, after Jurij Lotman, as ‘a passage, a transformation predicated on the figure of a hero, a mythical subject’ (1984: 113). De Lauretis also, however, connects this to the patterns, tropes, and topoi of 1980s cinema, where ‘narrative itself takes over’ from this ‘function of the mythical subject’ (121). In all, she notices the importance of an opposition between ‘mobile’ characters – agents ‘who can change their place’ in the imagined world – and ‘immobile characters or personified obstacles … standing for (on) a boundary which the hero alone can cross’ (118). In the popular cyclical structure of heroic narrative, she argues, an ‘endlessly repeatable’ story appears – one of ‘entry’ and ‘emergence’ relative to a feminised ‘plot-space’ (ibid.). This hero must be male because this plot-space is ‘not susceptible to transformation’ (119) – to life, death, history, and narrative.
The value of de Lauretis for us is her focus on questions of change, asking how these earlier formalist approaches are continued rather than presuming the model is eternal. Speculative genres change continually. Brian Attebery, in 2004, distinguishes contemporary fantasy from ‘traditional myth’ by its ‘dependence’ on pre-existing stories – its drive to ‘be understood’ by ‘channeling the fantastic imagination through … psychological and social codes’ (301). Insofar as fantasy perversely depends on mimesis (296) – on being recognisable as well as being inventive – it often works with ‘iconic’ imagery. As Attebery suggests, these images are ‘concrete emblems of problematic or valuable psychological and social phenomena’ (299) through which audiences are invited to recognise a familiar lexicon, heightening the sense that these genres afford special ‘insight’ into their social world (ibid.).
As a tool for prising meaning out of Katniss’s story, the heroic romance formula is best understood as generating iconic meaning. A passing allusion can activate this whole set of expectations, and continue to do so even if contradicted by other story elements – and Katniss’s story does much more than allude. For example, entering The Games arena involves walking onto a spectacularly visible stage rather than entering an underworld, but it still functions as a heroic trial in Books/Films 1–2, no less than the literal undergrounds of Book 3/Films 3–4. Similarly, although Katniss is not destroyed as she becomes the Mockingjay, a symbolic association between the Mockingjay and the phoenix remains apparent in the novels, the films, and the iconography circulating in the broader franchise. At the same time, however, Katniss’s version of the phoenix is tinged with Cinderella images of a makeover transformation, and this indicates a rather different aspect of the story.
Novelist Ursula K. Le Guin also argues that the fantasy genre, while a game ‘played for the game’s sake’ at one level, is also ‘a game played for very high stakes’ (1979: 145). It works, she thinks, much like a dream (in what she understands to be Freud’s sense), and demands ‘a different approach to reality, an alternative technique for apprehending and coping with existence’ (ibid.). In her essay ‘From Elfland to Poughkeepsie’, Le Guin discusses the kind of representation that makes fantasy work, focusing on internal consistency – anything is possible in speculative fiction as long as it rings true for the imagined world. Extolling this inventiveness, Le Guin defines fantasy by ‘the creator’s voice’ and against the ‘comfortable matrix of the commonplace’ (154), which is a ‘substitute for the imagination’ allowing only ‘ready-made emotional response’ (155). We suggest, however, that the familiar is also important in fantasy; offering what makes it almost believable. A panorama of expected responses and presumed desires are involved in anyone understanding a ‘creator’s voice’. In the Hunger Games this includes, for example, expectations that girls are self-conscious about their appearance, allowing only a slight reference to any girl’s reflection on how she looks to work as characterisation. Allusions to both generic and real-world expectations tie the Hunger Games’ Mockingjay-phoenix to makeover narratives in a contradictory girl-image which is both commonplace and iconic.
It remains worth asking why the heroes of speculative fiction are so often young. Why are girls and boys, or young men and women, so often at the forefront of defence against imagined evil forces? One possible answer would cite the presumed audience for these stories, but if Hunger Games novels seem to clearly be marketed using the YA category the same audience association does not carry directly into films. There, YA stories might be converted into ‘family’ films (as in the Harry Potter franchise), remain predominantly oriented towards a youth audience (as in the Twilight franchise), or like the Hunger Games films be adapted to action spectacle or some other generic mix with a crossover audience. Moreover, while the YA category aptly describes a mode of marketing that places books relative to others; it does not predict an audience in the same way as do preschool books. A family audience of parents who read to or with children was crucial to Harry Potter book sales, for example, and an older adult female audience (sometimes labelled ‘Twilight Moms’) was just as important to the success of the Twilight novels.
The assumption that fantasy literature appeals primarily to adolescents is nevertheless historically entrenched, in the same way it is assumed that video games are played primarily by adolescent boys despite industry reports demonstrating most players are adults and around half are female since at least 2001 (see, for example, Entertainment Software Association 2017). The fans of literary fantasy have always been multi-generational, but at least since the new wave of fantasy literature that appeared following the ground-breaking success of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), it has been associated with young audiences.1 This is partly because this new fandom, like video games, was associated with changing times (although with ‘new age’ sympathies rather than new technologies), but also because a taste for fantasy is associated with escapist incapacity to face reality and thus with immaturity (see Walters 2011). While the youth of the heroes of The Lord of the Rings is highly debatable, despite Frodo’s impulsiveness being linked to his only just ‘coming of age’ (or turning 33) at the beginning of the first book (Tolkien 1954: 8), the youthful associations of being a fantasy fan are not. By the early 1950s, popular science fiction too was widely considered to have a dubious influence on young minds, and to have juvenile characteristics (Johnston 2011: 9), especially in the superhero and monster subgenres that are now once again among its most popular forms.
Social anxiety about these forms of entertainment for the young was furthered by ‘rite of passage’ theories of adolescent social development that also became increasingly popular across the twentieth century. Anthropologists like Arnold van Gennep (1909), Margaret Mead (1928), and Victor Turner (1969), were engaged with the work of psychologists like Freud but also those more concerned with youth culture per se, like Erik Erikson (1968), and they were succeeded by cultural studies and youth studies scholars focused on how youth identities differed from other perspectives on the world. Modern speculative genres have continually been engaged with changing ideas about the importance of youth, and this recognition demands that we think carefully about the role played by youthfulness in the Hunger Games.
At the beginning of Book/Film 1, the youth of Panem’s districts are all potential tributes for The Games, which memorialise a past war as an ongoing ritual suppression of rebellion. At the government’s annual ‘Reaping’, one boy and one girl (12–18 years) from each district are chosen to fight to the death on television. As this gladiatorial spectacle is compulsory viewing for all citizens, including the families and peers of the tribute children, The Games generalise and individualise the threat extended by the Capitol. Other more banal forms of oppression characterise life in the districts of Panem, including managed scarcity of basic resources to the point where starvation and exposure are common. But The Games as ritual punishment target adolescents to underline the Capitol’s power over life and death, leveraging the idea of youth that symbolises the continuation of any family or community. From the moment Katniss is ‘harvested’ for The Games, what we might call the state-media complex suspends Katniss’s life between the impoverished mining district where she grew up and a luxurious life in the Capitol. In this state and period of what writers on rites of passage call ‘liminality’ (e.g. Turner 1969), Katniss might die, might win a victory that saves herself and her family from poverty for life, or might – because from the moment she volunteers for The Games to save her sister Prim she is obviously the hero – change everything. She cannot emerge from this liminal moment the same as she entered.
This is one place to remember Collins’s overt references to classical Rome, taken up in various film-script elements, like the staging of gladiatorial training and reference to both ‘the arena’ and its ‘tributes’, and reinforced by design elements, including allusions to togas and wreaths in costumes and the use of chariots and amphitheatre seating for parades. While a contemporary audience easily associates an arena with entertainment spectacles, tribute is a far less common term. The figure of tribute children is also a far less comfortable classical allusion than gladiators, despite its broad resonance through well-known mythologies and folktales in which children are given to appease gods or other powers, or to restore an idea of balance. Collins specifies a reference to the legendary Greek hero Theseus, who defeats the Minotaur to end the ritual tribute of fourteen Athenian children (in Margolis 2008), but tribute sacrifices of children are also the stuff of religious scripture and recorded history. In all cases, it is the most extreme of demands.
Modernity extended and specialised longstanding ideas about the special value of children; constituting childhood, as Phillipe Ariès famously argues, as both the pivotal foundation of the self and an icon of innocence (1962: 32 and 100–127). As Joanne Faulkner has detailed (2011), harm to children looms large among contemporary taboos and protecting children has come to commonsensically measure the justice of a society (Grealy 2018). This symbolic significance has been frequently exploited by cinema, and there is a well-established cinematic language for representing the vulnerability of children. The early dramatic sequences of Film 1 are dominated by building tension through the fearful and anxious faces of increasing numbers of District 12 children as they appear, brushed and washed and neatly dressed in blues and greys and whites, to be subject to the Reaping (Figure 0.2). From the preceding scenes with the Everdeens, we know that every one of those children is accompanied by fearful families who have prepared them for this event, and a focus on Prim builds through cuts to other perspectives as she anxiously takes her place for the first time and is finally chosen for almost certain death.
Prim is presented as a ‘little girl’, and Katniss’s palpable anxiety over her physical and emotional vulnerability is what drives her to volunteer for The Games in Prim’s place. It is Katniss’s role as Prim’s protector, far more than her angry discussion of the injustice of the Reaping with Gale, that positions her as the protector of District 12, and thus Panem. Additional symbolic power is attributed to the girl victim, traditionally presumed to be even weaker than children in general – physically if not also emotionally and intellectually. This is reinforced by the fact that we see more children in District 12 than elsewhere; that in Film 1 at least we see more children than adults there; and that we also see no other Reaping, except in clips of the moment of announcement. The detailed depiction of Prim’s Reaping reinforces the premise that youth cannot be held responsible for the faults of a present society and that sacrificing them at all, and most of all for the sins of the past, is unconscionable.
All the youth of Panem’s districts are potential tributes, but not those of the Capitol. This inequity, exacerbated by poorer families having likely taken the tesserae which increases their chances of selection in exchange for extra food, links the Hunger Games to the many stories about adolescent alienation and rebellion that are also stories about social injustice. Youth has many kinds of significance for The Games. The youth of the tributes in Film 1, established as a world default, links images of alluring youthful glamour, images of youthful rebellion and violence, and images of unconscionable victimisation.2 Youth is figured as a fantastic space of trial and revelation and an object of fantastic value, made more complex by the fact that the young must kill as well as be killed and that even the most vicious of those selected remain tributes to the state. The developmental range encompassed by 12–18 plays a role here too, setting trained young fighters against those who still appear to be children.
The emphasis placed on the first Reaping in Film 1, and on Prim’s age, smallness, and apparently fragility, is also significant. On screens across Panem, the fragility of the youthful body blends with the perceived innocence of young minds to create a spectacle of tragic disruption. Whenever a selected tribute is emphasised as a specially cruel choice, they come from the girl side of the Reaping – beginning with Prim, whose fear acclimatises us to The Games, then equally young Rue, the girl tribute from District 11, whom the books describe as similar to Prim in stature and manner. While in the 75th Games age and infirmity characterise several tributes, the only death we are asked to identify with is the elderly Mags, who volunteered in place of the equally vulnerable Annie (Stef Dawson). No male deaths across The Games call for such focused sympathy. Both an unnamed small boy and Thresh (Dayo Okeniyi) are positioned as tragic deaths in Film 1, but the first is a minor character and the second happens off screen.
Rue’s elusive smallness is also always emphasised in framing: she appears peering between or from behind things, hiding in small places, or dwarfed by the size of the interviewee’s chair. This is punctuated by the grave of songs and small flowers that Katniss makes for her, in a scene of unprecedented tenderness which, anchored by its link to Prim, feels genuine despite being televised, and inspires gifts from Rue’s district and mercy from Thresh, its remaining tribute. It also appears to set off the first flickers of public rebellion that grow into a revolution across the story, and is visually and verbally recalled a number of times across the following films: in the shots of Rue’s siblings, in Peeta’s painting of Rue’s grave, and in the shared memory of the scene among rebel commanders in District 13. Prim also reappears as the little girl, although unlike Rue she gets to grow up another year or so. She even shakes off her ‘little duck’ image to become a battlefront healer, but this only makes her a more moving final innocent victim. Ostensibly killed by Snow’s last defence of the Capitol, Katniss and the audience know that Coin (and, in part, Gale) are responsible for the bomb that kills Prim, right in front of Katniss and as the final break with the young Katniss whom we met before The Games.
The girl’s greater symbolic weight as a victim is why Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari use ‘the little girl’ to explain the ‘haecceity’ that marks becoming as a mode of subjectivity (1987: 287). Becoming describes the singularity of a subject manifest as a conjunction of forces and actions, rather than being as form. The little girl represents being subject to a multitude of outside influences and investments; becoming herself in passing through them. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the ‘body is stolen first from the girl … the girl’s body is stolen first, in order to impose a history, a pre-history on her’ (305). This pre-history is, at least in part, gender, invoking the ways in which regulations and anxieties speak for the girl, objectified by her ‘stolen’ body. This suggests some useful questions about how the deaths of Prim and Rue are used by various political factions and media producers in the story to propel the narrative of revolution and used by Collins and the films to incite identification. The deliberateness of their spectacular deaths clearly condemns those in power, and yet their use as plot device confirms their effectiveness.
Kerry Mallan and Sharyn Pearce (2003) suggest that young people are particularly saleable images of rebellion in popular media but also the most obviously manipulated by media industries. Mallan and Pearce argue that:
When removed from any temporal or spatial verities, the commercial representations of youth acknowledge the contradictions in and ambivalence of this stage of maturation and turn angst, rebellion, and even nihilism into desirable commodities. By mapping these psychological conditions specifically onto a young body, the market forces create … a site from which ideological or political struggle is elided, reducing the body to a purely superficial or external referent.
(4)
According to this argument, ‘youth’ itself is commercialised, while the agency of the people ‘youth’ seems to name is excluded from the image presented. By this argument, young people are interpolated into media texts as voiceless subjects while remaining the media subject of choice. It is thus particularly relevant that the Hunger Games story is directly concerned with whether the individuality of these tribute children, including Katniss, is lost amongst the symbols that represent them. For Anita Harris, it is ironic that young people are meant to express this unrepresented individuality by responding to mass media – by choosing from just such images presented for their consumption. Harris argues that ‘Consumption has come to stand in as a sign both of successfully secured social rights and of civic power. It is primarily as consumer citizens that youth are offered a place in contemporary social life’ (2004b: 163).
Story formulas in which an adolescent hero is sent to another world often emphasise their fantastic singularity. The hero’s specialness can be identified by self-recognition or public acknowledgement, by being ‘sorted’ (Basu 2013) or chosen. Harry Potter is marked as special when sorted into Gryffindor (but almost Slytherin); Tris is identified as ‘Divergent’ from all the available factions; and Bella in Twilight is intrinsically desirable to every vampire, although no one initially knows why. Katniss is singled out by her exceptional skill at archery, but ‘specialness’ in this sense is never just a learned skill but always more innate, and in Katniss’s case her survivor attitude is an intrinsic personal quality that encompasses her resistance to the oppressive social order in Panem. Often, these processes of sorting or choosing begin a gradual recognition of the self. For Katniss, however, survival initially depends on building a fiction that hides rather than reveals her own specialness. This fiction presents her as vulnerable rather than heroic, and as reliant on the protective support of her public love interest, Peeta. Paradoxically, however, Katniss’s world-changing potential relies on people being able to see her specialness through this fiction – not only Peeta, but all of Panem, who can thus be inspired by her.
Like most young speculative heroes, to reach the point where she will become her future self – the cathartic, world-changing Mockingjay – Katniss must cross the border between a home world and another world where all the meanings and certainties she is accustomed to are transformed. Such transformation can happen through otherworldly avatars, as in Michael Ende’s The Never Ending Story (1979); by stepping across a literal threshold into another world, as with the Pevensie children in C.S. Lewis’s Narnia novels (1950–1956); by discovering a shadow universe co-existing with their own reality, as for Quentin Coldwater in Lev Grossman’s Magicians novels (2009–2014); or, perhaps most often, by a journey that takes the hero from an ordinary life in which they were relatively unremarkable to one in which they take on greater meaning. These devices can overlap, but it nevertheless is notable that Katniss’s journey to the image-world(s) of the Capitol and The Games brings her closer to the commonsense world of the Hunger Games audience rather than further away, as in all the examples we listed above.
The novels make it clear that Panem is built on the post-apocalyptic ruins of the US. District 12 is in the Appalachians (Book 1: 41), refracting its history of coal-mining, poverty, and relative cultural marginalisation into the story of Katniss’s origins. The Capitol, on the other hand, is in the Rocky Mountains (ibid.) with the other districts located on a partly drowned map of North America that never becomes explicit until the second film (Figure 1.1). But for tethering fantasy to reality, such literal references are not as important as the continuities of media culture, including close reference to the conventions of reality television.
The expanding success of reality television since the late 1990s has diversified the genre’s original focus on documenting ordinary lives into a plethora of subgenres in which the central characters may or may not be ordinary, and the lives on screen may be relatively banal or spectacularly manufactured. Indeed, most types of reality television move their on-screen characters along scales from banal to spectacular and from ordinary to special. Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette identify the following key subgenres: the ‘gamedoc’, dating, makeover, docusoap, talent contests, court programmes, reality sitcoms, and celebrity and charity variations on most of these (2004: 5). Apart from the court programme, and a case might be made even for that, the framed reality programme within the Hunger Games draws on all these subgenres. While it centrally documents a ‘game’, that game is about relationships as well as skill, and the central text is framed by accessory programming that makes over the tributes into stars and juxtaposes them with celebrity hosts and commentators who preview each season’s contestants and solicit audience identification with their profile.
The Games thus draw on the conventions of ‘reality television’ in a range of ways that are crucial to the story overall. These include emphasis on a preview of character types from which a live audience helps select the winners of a real-time screened competition; a network of representational skills and their public assessment through a hierarchy of generic cues; and the imposition and editorial framing of risky experiences. Katniss clearly brings special skills to The Games, but there are also aspects of her character that do not work to her advantage in the reality genre, including her reticent blunt persona and her disinterest in gender performance. However, as Haymitch later explains, Katniss’s spontaneous courage and sense of justice interrupt the tight generic expectations of The Games as a media package and make her seem spectacularly real. In fact, as much as Katniss is aligned with the generic expectations of specialness that mark a hero, she is aligned with the real-world presumption that conformity to the successful character types of reality television is a moral failure. We should not miss the fact that Katniss’s authenticity, which seems so clearly opposed to the conventional types the production emphasises, is clearly visible to the national audience that propels her to stardom. The glimpses of unscripted sincerity that Haymitch lists in Film 3 make Katniss both a TV star and a political figurehead, and are entirely consistent with the appeal of reality television.
As Murray and Ouellette put it, ‘What ties together all the formats of the reality TV genre is their professed abilities to more fully provide viewers an unmediated, voyeuristic, and yet often playful look into what might be called the “entertaining real”’ (6). This appeal persists despite the awareness, repeatedly acknowledged by the diegetic audience and producers of The Games, that reality television is tightly managed by casting, scripted frames, and narrative editing (5–8). That the audience of The Games loves Katniss, and that the narrative as a whole makes it clear they are right to single her out as worth saving, is thus a clever continuity with the literary device of the unreliable narrator. Although ‘much of our engagement with’ reality television ‘paradoxically hinges on our awareness that what we are watching is constructed and contains “fictional” elements’ (7), the viewing pleasure lies in teasing out authentic moments. Like a characterised narrator who is frequently wrong and often confused about what is real, even in her own responses, ‘Reality TV promises its audience revelatory insight into the lives of others as it withholds and subverts full access to it’ (8).
Book/Film 1 establish that Katniss’s greatest weakness is her unwillingness to play games of appearances and that one of her core skills is the exposure of lies and false images. But given the paradoxical pleasure of detecting authenticity in the reality genre, her weakness becomes an advantage. The books clearly critique many of the workings of reality television, including the conventionality of the stars into which competitors are made over. While the films necessarily mimic the reality genre when they represent it, compromising any clear distinction between commonplace forms of subordinating reality to image, like Katniss’s pretty dresses, and the forms that literally manifest state brutality, like the deaths of adolescents transformed into memorial images in an artificial sky.
Depersonalising media effects are pivotal to the cruel world order that must be defeated in the Hunger Games. This is what both Katniss and Peeta contest in their attempts to be something other than a screen ‘object’ and a pawn in the Capitol’s games. Always more adept at managing images than Katniss, before the first arena. Peeta says, ‘I keep wishing I could think of a way to … to show the Capitol they don’t own me. That I’m more than just a piece in their Games’ (Book 1: 71). Katniss gradually comes to understand what he means. As critique of the reduction of people to images is more difficult in film texts that necessarily invites absorption in the screen image, it seems inevitable that the audience is caught up in the pleasures of Katniss’s transformation from backwoods hunter to television star. Certainly, we walk on stage with Katniss, sutured to her by the camera’s look, but this is an ambivalent moment (see Figure 1.2). While, with her, we are met by rapturous applause and embraced and elevated by a circling camera, the scene is self-consciously overwhelming: the noise of the crowd sonically overwhelms both her and us even as the lights on the stage blind us both. In that moment, neither Katniss nor the audience knows exactly what is happening and must be dragged back to the action by the host/narrator.
The Hunger Games certainly flirts with the pleasures of commodified girl culture, but how exactly it does this is crucial, as we will consider from several perspectives across the following chapters. Katniss’s media success story does mirror reality television in the world of its audience, including through unrealistic representations of body image and a strict adherence to traditional gender codes. From a Cinna design that makes her feel like ‘a silly girl spinning in a sparkling dress’ (Book 1: 136) to the ‘Remake Room’ in District 13 where her team assembles to take her body back to ‘Beauty Base Zero’ (Book 3: 71), Katniss’s success is a self-consciously embodied spectacle. But it remains worth considering the films’ makeover scenes closely. The first, and far longest, sets an uncomfortable and even unpleasant tone in a coldly blue-lit room like an operating theatre, or a morgue, in which Katniss, dressed in a hospital robe, is whispered over and worked on. Prone on a metal table, framing stresses the limits on what Katniss can see, and dialogue and action indicate that she does not know what they are doing. Later scenes are too brief to maintain these clinical associations, but the simultaneous labour of artifice and erasure of personality successful appearance involves is always stressed. Katniss’s celebrity is something done to her, without her willing consent or active contribution.
The use of reality television in the Hunger Games is not confined to such experiences of commodification. However, we never actually look at Katniss in the arena through the lens of a reality television programme. The scenes are not looked at in the way television is filmed. Instead, we are firmly aligned with Katniss’s experience rather than a televisual one, so that action is exclusively centred on Katniss rather than edited with cuts away to other contestants. In cinematic terms, Katniss walks on to a reality television set and walks into a film, where she is not just the most popular character but the star. Although differently to the books, then, the films manage to surprise their audience with reminders that a diegetic television audience saw everything they did, without being able to reveal exactly how it was seen. Similarly, while in the books Katniss explicitly worries about whether her actions were always shaped by awareness of the television audience, the films raise this question by jarring juxtaposition of filmic action and its dislocating framing by television hosts, wildly cheering audiences, and other reminders of reception.
Katniss’s success in this media environment is enabled by the team around her. Foremost among these is Peeta, who, through a combination of empathetic personality and a less disadvantaged life, better comprehends the media game of winning favour with the audience by manipulations of character and plot. It is Peeta who plays up Katniss’s beauty, charisma, and bravery, and who centrally nurtures a love story that will help attract fans and sponsors. However, Katniss’s lack of sophistication remains key to the success of this story, from her naïve reactions to Peeta’s declarations to her sincere awkwardness in finding herself on stage. Overall, the Hunger Games suggests a confluence of forces is needed to get Katniss through The Games, including the (both real and not real) screen image of the ‘The Girl on Fire’. This image is aided by Peeta, Haymitch, and Effie as Katniss’s collective public relations team, but most importantly given a name and a look by the stylist/designer Cinna and his assistants. For her interview appearances, Cinna dresses Katniss in uncharacteristically feminine clothing to enhance her on-screen gender identity: sometimes in ‘little girl dresses’ (Book 2: 218) to stress her innocence, and sometimes in smouldering fitted costumes to emphasise her dangerousness. The self-conscious mix of politics and artistry that Cinna represents (even posthumously, in designs he leaves Katniss after his murder in Book/Film 2) is most explicit when he is instructed, before the 75th Games, to dress her in a wedding dress the diegetic audience believes she would have worn to marry Peeta. In the films, this dress is more like a Disney princess costume than is the dress of ‘heavy white silk’ that the books have the audience select in a televised reality competition (Book 2: 298). But for both Cinna crafts this white wedding dress to transform into one resembling the black mockingjay birds which have been taken up as a revolutionary symbol after Katniss’s first win. In this transformation, which summarises the plot of Book/Film 2 overall, Cinna’s design simultaneously draws on the audience’s desire for romantic fulfilment and also names a political struggle which the state-media complex is trying to hide.
Katniss’s special abilities are not such skills in representation but rather a combination of physical dexterity, a certain measure of tactical skill (although she often acts instinctively or emotionally), and a refusal to compromise herself. But image politics makes the difference between life and death in The Games. The charisma of Katniss’s authenticity is not enough for this, and she needs a support team that expands as her significance does. The later films largely replace the makeover team with Katniss’s own film production team (she has both in the books), and the political advisory role is expanded from Haymitch to a team of rebel leaders. With Katniss separated from Peeta in Film 3 and alienated from him in much of Film 4, more personal advice she can trust comes from Prim, or from Finnick. Finnick especially understands the importance of constructing oneself as object (and in a girl-centred text, this un-gendering of sexual objectification is significant).
However, if Katniss’s authenticity is not enough to save her life it is still this, more than her courage, determination, or skills as a hunter, that uniquely equips her for heroism in a world of carefully constructed appearances. As Haymitch insists, she is a better political-media-military figurehead when ‘unscripted’ or left ‘alone’ ‘in the field’ (Book 3: 89). As the televised action is both real and unreal, Katniss’s role as this figurehead is both real and unreal. When Book 3/Film 4 finally focuses on trying to specify what is true or false about Katniss, through the device of helping Peeta pin down reality after psychological torture, the answers that are ‘true’ do not exclude the fictions and fantasies that have pervaded her story. The careful construction (and deconstruction) of the unreal, as well as the ways that reality and unreality are blurred, are also important to the ways Katniss is (mis)aligned with the expected narrative of the spectacular girl hero.
