This chapter offers three different approaches to the kind of girl Katniss Everdeen might be. The phrasing ‘might be’ is chosen to emphasise the importance of the idea that girls are in a state of becoming, whether this is understood in the Deleuzean sense cited in the previous chapter (of continually becoming), or more colloquially as still on a trajectory towards some mature future self. While such assumptions are applied to youth in general, they have been most important to ideas about girlhood, allowing images of girls to effectively invoke contingency and ephemerality (Driscoll 2002). These ideas pervade popular discourse on girls, the cultural forms addressed to them, and the institutions designed to support and guide them. Here we focus on some of the available girl-type stories that inform the Hunger Games films, which are not just sci-fi action films with a romantic sub-narrative that broadens the usual blockbuster audience. They are also films that insert the girl idea into every element of that generic hybridity. Here we will consider three approaches to Katniss’s girlhood that impact on the films’ narrative and visual form: the modern girl, the teenager, and the girling of the action hero.
In his influential history of the meaning of childhood, Phillipe Ariés makes the following claim: ‘it is as if, to every period of [Western] history, there corresponded a privileged age and a particular division of human life: “youth” is the privileged age of the seventeenth century, childhood of the nineteenth, adolescence of the twentieth’ (1962: 32). But to the extent that there are fresh meanings given to these ideas during these periods, in forms internationalised by colonialism and global trade and communications, for the twenty-first century it seems clear that childhood, youth, adolescence, and ‘young adulthood’ are complexly tangled together. The earlier meanings have not disappeared, but also converge in a field united by the problem of maturity. Debates around identity and development now consider (im)maturity, innocence, independence, and vulnerability together, whether focusing on the sexualisation of children, cultural differences between markers of childhood/adulthood, diverse forms of prolonged adolescent dependence, or proliferating hybrid identity labels like ‘tween’, ‘adultescence’, and ‘kidult’ (for a range of these issues see Crawford 2006; see e.g. Faulkner 2011). In this respect, The Hunger Games is a story for its time. The necessity of Katniss taking care of her family while still a young girl and of Peeta rescuing Katniss while still a young boy – but also the incapacity of Katniss’s mother, Haymitch, or the voracious self-indulgent consumer-citizens of the Capitol to take greater responsibility for the state of the world – are all elements of this. More generally, while The Games hold children responsible for social stability, these same children are still treated as minors who are not yet citizens.
Ariés’s argument about modern ideas about youth centres on seeing in youth the formation of adult character, evident in dialogues that continued through the Western seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This ‘youth’ was very specifically male, but it also produced a space for discussing girls, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s influential 1762 text on the education of the proto-citizen Emile and his help-mate Sophie exemplifies (Rousseau 1979). The tensions between a Romantic vision of youthful promise and its guidance by liberal government were widely discussed and necessarily tied to ‘the Woman question’. In her 1791 Vindication of the Rights of Woman Mary Wollstonecraft famously took Rousseau to task:
‘Educate women like men,’ says Rousseau, ‘and the more they resemble our sex the less power will they have over us’. This is the very point I aim at. I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.
(34)
Attention to the self of the girl came to dominate nineteenth-century discourse on childhood. New forms of material culture appeared representing them as girls – advertising, magazines, fashion, and fiction, interweaving with an array of implicitly and explicitly educational texts (see Dyhouse 1981; Nelson and Vallone 1994). New ideas about girls emerged, and the weakness attributed to girls rather than boys took on new dimensions, also linked to a tangle of ideas about seduction and desire which associated innocence, ignorance, and immaturity, but linked these, in modern girls, to curiosity, precocity, and spontaneity.
This emergence of modern girlhood helped fuel and was furthered by the extension of literacy to a wider range of children, available to be addressed as audiences for new communications industries. Although cinema is itself an invention of the nineteenth century, it was not yet the narrative form in which girls became important figures, but new stories and images featuring girls helped shape the movies that followed. The proliferation of popular speculative fiction is also contemporary with this expansion of literacy and of education for girls. Both reframed folktales and new fantastic stories were important among the expanding forms of publishing for children (Zipes 1997), and while girls were not central to early science fiction they were to both these types of fantasy.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (2002), the first of Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’ books, published in 1865, is often used as a starting point for accounts of children’s fiction, and much can still be learned from Alice about fantasy’s conjunction with questions about the girl-self. For discussion of girl heroes, for example, it is telling that while Alice falls down a rabbit hole to enter Wonderland, the adventures she has there are not the classical underworld romance we discussed in chapter one. Alice encounters no trial that transforms her. Instead, she encounters a series of vignettes which endlessly question who she is. Finally, she reaches a mock trial with no purpose but itself, and which she leaves in frustration rather than triumph or flight. Alice returns to the known world, then, no more or less expert, heroic, curious, or sure of herself than when she left. The drama of Alice in Wonderland is of her being in itself; or rather the unstable problem of who she is.
The opening of the second Alice story suggests why references to her continue to resonate through popular images of girlhood, even if Carroll’s original stories are now rarely read by children. In Carroll’s 1871 Through the Looking-Glass, rather than falling into an underworld, Alice climbs through a mirror into a world populated by her possibilities and impossibilities. This both speaks to the prevalence of narratives, sometimes literally mirror scenes, in which girl protagonists confront who they are and might become, and also invokes a problem. Alice is always being seen, and her being seen involves being judged according to expectations about little girls. Any of Alice’s temporary transformations pass quickly, returning her to the little girl everyone can see she is (underscored by John Tenniel’s illustrations). Speculative girl heroes are often placed in such visualised scenes of judgement, where what they know and do are subordinated to what they look like. Clearly this resonates with Katniss’s adventures in her various other- and under-worlds. But it is equally important that when girl protagonists confront such visualization, the scene often inspires scepticism about her heroism even while it dramatises the experiences of girl culture more widely: Wendy in ‘Peter Pan’ (Barrie 1911) and Mary in The Secret Garden (Burnett 1911) are also examples. Alice’s Wonderland and Looking-Glass World are, together, an ‘Underland’ in which time is frozen, forever ‘littling’ Alice and staving off the future in which she might grow up – a future mourned in Carroll’s lyrics framing these stories (Smith 1993).
The full title of the second Alice book is Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. This matters because what Alice finds on the other side of the mirror is a set of knowledge games collected into something structured more like a heroic trial than Wonderland was. Here, Alice must reach the other side (of a chess board) to become someone new, but Carroll confounds this expectation by again deflating the climax. There is no one else for Alice to become at all, and she less wins the encounters along the way than passes through them, learning only as much as negotiating that situation demands, even while she continually re-asserts her Alice-ness (Driscoll 1997). The resonance of Alice’s dramatic encounters with herself is not displaced by the way post-1990s girls took on heroic roles. Rather, this drama of self-representation, where the girl remains at the surface of a confluence of forces and significations (Deleuze 1990), is integral to the kinds of heroes and quests involved.
What is most modern about Alice is the way her insistent agency involves consciousness of the limits placed upon it by the conflicting ways she is known. She offers a model for the modern girl hero’s quest because her achievements seem so qualified, if not reduced to dramas of repetition, and yet there is no question that the story is about anyone else. There are, of course, modern girls who seem very un-Alice-like in a range of ways, including by differences of language, class, geography, race or ethnicity, age, education, and other variables that are not only about the distance of more than 150 years. But this self-evaluating girl identity, endlessly stressing statements about the self in contexts which question whether she has any self-worth speaking of – where she is both everygirl and merely herself – has become fundamentally girlish, even when taken up by boys or women. Otherwise quite different modern-girl types, from coquettes and tomboys to colonial and frontier girls, are recognisably continuous with this aspect of Alice.
Another reason for stressing this example is that ‘Alice’ is the first girl-oriented transmedia franchise. Following the books, Alice’s story quickly became a play and over the following years was translated into books for different versions of a girl-centred audience. Alice became an iconic reference for ideas about girlishness in popular media, from political cartoons to Halloween costumes. Inspired by Carroll’s stories, Walt Disney created a popular series of animated/live-action hybrid films called ‘The Alice Comedies’ (1923–1927) well before Mickey Mouse, and spent decades developing his influential full-length adaptation, Alice in Wonderland (Clyde Geronimi and Wilfred Jackson, 1951). While there have been many non-Disney Alice cartoons, movies, and illustrated books, the Disney Company returned to Alice again in the 1990s. A television series, Adventures in Wonderland (Disney Channel, 1992–1995), preceded Tim Burton’s two updated Disney Alice films in 2011 (Alice in Wonderland, directed by Burton) and 2016 (Alice through the Looking-Glass, directed by James Bobin). And between these films was another series, Once Upon a Time in Wonderland (ABC, 2013–2014). Disney trades on nostalgic images of girlhood when re-adapting its female characters (Heatwole 2016), but the timing of this Alice renaissance is significant, with this series of texts re-interpreting Alice’s blend of curiosity and self-conscious agency, along with her age, for different audiences.
While 1951 Disney Alice was a hybrid child/adolescent/young woman, the Alice of the 1992 series is a preteen role model whose interactions with Wonderland’s inhabitants teach her about relationships in the real world, very much in line with campaigns for ‘can-do’ girlhood. Burton’s Alice is very specifically heroised in opposition to Carroll’s books, where she can make no difference to either world she inhabits, becoming a teenager surrounded by threats of matrimony but also literally a knight in shining armour. And Alice in the 2013 series is a young adult, also very much ‘unlittled’ and refitted to the role of speculative hero. These and other re-imaginings of Alice are informed no more by Carroll than by the proliferation of Alice stories and images since his books. Transmedia Alice is a symbol of girlhood tensions and potential transformations but also a manager of risk, including the obstacles of her own self-doubt. This evolution maps onto changing ideas about girlhood that have become their own popular cultural currency.
The contradictory attributes of modern girlhood apparent in Alice impact all the important girl characters in the Hunger Games, but we will close this section by noticing how they dramatically expand the role of a girl mentioned but not characterised in the books – the granddaughter of President Snow (see Figure 2.1). The books represent no girls in the Capitol, except as tributes or mutilated prisoners, but towards the end there is passing reference to Snow’s granddaughter as a tribute for the new Games that Coin is planning to punish the Capitol’s residents. The films make this girl a minor motif with, eventually, a developmental narrative all her own. Just before we meet her, Haymitch is visibly disconcerted by the sight of young Capitol children, one boy and one girl, play at killing with swords as if they were in The Games. This brief scene, inserted into the lead-up to the 74th Games, and lit as luxuriously as the children are costumed, concisely conveys the corruption Capitol culture imposes on its own children. But the recurring original scenes with Snow’s granddaughter represent something else.
This unnamed girl appears three times, always in the company of her grandfather. In Film 2, she stands for the girls consuming Katniss in the diegetic audience, first wearing her hair like Katniss and attesting that ‘everyone at school’ does so now, and, later, wishing for a love like Katniss seems to display for Peeta on screen. While the gap between these scenes suggests a move from imitative play to romantic objects often cited in accounts of girls’ development (e.g. de Beauvoir 1949), her appearance in Film 3 suggests something more dramatic. As her grandfather announces that any reference to ‘the mockingjay’ will be deemed treason, the girl, lined up with her family as accessories to Snow’s broadcast, and looking far more adolescent than one year would suggest, shows an immediate fearful consciousness of what this means for her, and quickly unbraids her hair.1 While the plan for a new Games that would kill Capitol children always proved that Katniss was right to believe Coin would maintain the violent state-media complex, the passing threat to Snow’s granddaughter is far more meaningful once she has been given this face and character. At the same time, these scenes collectively represent different ideas about consumption than the debauched excesses of Capitol parties. To read this granddaughter as a naïve consumer of images that do violence to girls by making them consumers is to ignore the way identities are routinely formed by imaginative identification. She consumes the political and romance narratives centred on Katniss simultaneously and identifies this as a shared social feeling. Moreover, what she admires about Katniss is neither simply inauthentic nor purely authentic. Katniss is useful to her – as Alice may be useful to those who consume her – as a manifestation of her own desires, however many Gamemakers, stylists, and commentators were involved in packaging Katniss for television.
Given the books’ use of first-person narration, all the production and meta-production scenes representing the state are original to the films, explaining events Katniss only deduces (or is never sure of). This transforms her story into one with multiple simultaneous locations and perspectives, as mainstream cinematic adaptation requires. But even when Snow’s or Coin’s positions are explained, we are never party to their thoughts and feelings, largely because both performances are so carefully impassive. Although Katniss does not always tell us how she feels, and sometimes expresses herself confused, cinematography and editing offer an array of close-up information about her responses that keep us engaged with how she feels. To a lesser degree this is true of Peeta and Gale, as well, and later somewhat true of Finnick and Johanna. While we may be surprised or intrigued by the actions of the adults, the interest of the camera is overwhelmingly in the adolescents. For this reason, the first properly cinematic genre to consider when analysing the Hunger Games is teen film.
As an identity crisis bound to both emerging sexuality and training in citizenship, adolescence was ‘discovered’ around the turn into the twentieth century at the same time as narrative cinema. This modern adolescence was viewed as a sign of both cultural change and social needs, and soon as in distinctive conflict with traditional cultural forms.2 Teen film emerged around this distinctive symbolic life, drawing on fiction for youth, including new adolescent girls’ magazines, but also on fiction about youth designed for a broader audience, like flapper novels of both the pulp and literary kinds. A new sense of the distinctiveness and importance of everything that appealed to youth became core to new cinema genres about and appealing to youth (Driscoll 2011: 9–25). Although what David Considine (1985) calls the cinema of adolescence has changed dramatically in some respects since the early twentieth century, the sense that youth involves a distinctive experience as well as specific cultural spaces and practices remains crucial to teen film.
While the Hunger Games films focus on youth, they may not initially seem like teen film. Some of the genre’s current core conventions seem to be entirely absent – most notably, any reference to a separate youth media culture internal to the story world. Youth in Panem lack any distinctive realm of cultural practices and objects, and still less visible youth sub-group or ‘subcultural’ identities articulated through clothing, music, language, or other tastes (see Shary 2014). There are marked cultural differences between districts, but these also extend to adults. Across the franchise, districts are distinguished by labour, politics and training, so that 4 specialises in fishing but 12 in coal, 1 and 2 are richer and overwhelmingly more likely to produce peacekeepers and victors, and 3 is educated to specialise in technology. The books also stress other differences in music, styles of bread, and marriage ceremonies. But as the young do not move between districts except as tributes, none of these cultural specificities affect their relations with each other. In the Capitol, we also see no distinctive ‘youth culture’ between the play of small children and the stylized hedonism of adults. When Films 3–4 introduce the director Cressida and the cameramen Castor and Pollux as young adults from the Capitol (they are less specifically aged in the books), Cressida’s shaved head and tattoos and Pollux’s beard do refer to young adult fashions of 2014–2015, but without any additional narrative support or context.
However, many other teen-film conventions characterise these films’ focus and tone. They emphasise youthful romance, intensified age-based peer relationships (both friends and rivals), conflict with a distinct older generation, and the institutional management of adolescence by families, school, and other powerful social forces. Moreover, Katniss begins the films as a resentful teenager, alienated from the habits of her community and intimacy with her mother by anger at her father’s death and the material injustice of the world. To the extent that she fits a teen film type, however, she is closest to the tomboy, or the tough girl who learns her value to herself and others. There are thus also remnants of a coming-of-age plot, including first love (although the Hunger Games evades the usual progress of this plot, as we will discuss in chapter three). Many other teen-film tropes are raised only to be thwarted, or even seem inappropriate to the story. Katniss’s makeovers do not seem to internally transform her, for example, and there is no emphasis on virginity or relevance to formal education beyond basic knowledge. Although the films include images of passionate consumption, peer identification, and youthful impressionability, the archaically explicit mode of sovereign power that forms the dominant plot obstacle leaves little room for the peer-group crises of teen film. Nevertheless, while there are no high school cliques or street gangs, no house parties or illicit drugs, and the narrative resolution may be too ambivalent for coming of age to really dominate, the larger idea of modern adolescence remains crucial. The simultaneously physical, social, and psychological transition from childhood to adulthood, and adolescence as both object of training and subject of crisis, anchor the Hunger Games narrative. Similarly, while there are no classic juvenile delinquents, the categories of young tribal warrior and troubled youth are blurred in the ‘career tributes’ of Districts 1 and 2, and youth remain the right symbols for social alienation and upheaval, which is why the rebellion needs Katniss. Themes that underlie all teen film, including the rite of passage to social independence and the bodily and social trauma of developing a coherent individual identity, are woven through the Hunger Games’ larger dystopian narrative. If it is impossible to see a common youth experience in Panem, this is one key to its dystopia.
Encounters with mortality are part of the ordinary lives of district youth, for whom people starving to death in streets is not unmarked but not shocking either, and for whom a lottery of death dominates every year. This is beyond the usual limits of realist teen film, where encounters with death and intimations of mortality are crisis events, even in gangland dramas. But the heroic romance structure requires an experience beyond this ordinary world. Katniss is familiar with death, if in a more banally grim way in the books than the films, including the death of loved ones (her father), of neighbours (Gale’s father, among others), and the regular massacre of strangers and acquaintances on television, and has even come close to starving to death herself. But being dragged into The Games nevertheless crosses a limit that makes her different, and not only in the eyes of others. Having returned home, nothing about Katniss’s ordinary world fits in the same way, and nor do the ordinary people. In The Games, Katniss finds new doubts and new certainties about herself, as well as coming to an awareness of, as Peeta puts it, ‘the effect she can have’ (Book 1: 36). Peeta also is transformed. His first journey from District 12 to the Capitol marks the emergence of his character, unfolding him from an unidentified extra (for the audience) or a once-helpful but half-forgotten neighbour (for Katniss), to a master of public persona. Neither these skills nor his artistry seem to have been noticed by his family or neighbours, yet both help save Katniss and position him as a popular icon and an influential voice that some of the rebels would rather save than Katniss.
Arguing that the Hunger Games films are teen films supports the case against any ‘mimetic understanding of teen film in which teen film represents adolescence’ (Driscoll 2011: 6). This is not, however, to deny the importance of the historical context from which the films emerged. If, as Benton, Dolan, and Zisch argue, analysing teen film ‘is an important way of understanding an era’s common beliefs about its teenaged population within a broader pattern of general cultural preoccupations’ (1997: 88), then how teen film conventions work in the Hunger Games matters. The ideas about youth that seem most pressing around these films might, somewhat contentiously, be called post-adolescence questions, in the sense that they set aside the developmental certainty adolescence came to describe. While modern adolescence described an extension of dependent immaturity well past the end of puberty, this remained a naturalised developmental model. It proposed that every child should enter adolescence at a developmentally appropriate time (despite some uncertainties about when), and should leave it in order to become adults (despite similar uncertainties about when). As we have already suggested, many of Panem’s adolescents are old before their time, some are never allowed to be children, and many apparent adults live in a prolonged state of unmodified childish indulgence and demand. This depends on the precise social conditions in which they live, as well as on individual experience, but it detaches adulthood and maturity from any clear endpoint for adolescence, an idea that has been percolating in teen film for decades.
Of course, the audience for the Hunger Games films is by no means exclusively teenagers. But teen film has never been a matter of assessing which films ‘teenagers’ watch. Early twentieth-century film industries around the world identified youth as the core returning audience for film, and this claim has continued to be made, despite changing times. Emma French has noted that a range of studies of young audiences, including a 2000 survey by the Motion Picture Association of America, acknowledge that the audience for teen-oriented films is not confined to teenagers (2006: 104–107). This is different from noting that the audience for blockbuster film, seeking the widest possible appeal in order to ‘bust’ the expense of an entire season’s film bookings (once referred to as a ‘block’ booking in the US), must access this large market and so elements of youth appeal are routinely included in any big-budget film. The ‘teen film’ is different than youth appeal. It is focused on the liminal experience of adolescence – on young protagonists confronting generationalised challenges through narratives centred on coming of age (learning the way of the world) and rites of passage (becoming another self). Not only the psychosexual drama that runs through the films but also the social drama in which Katniss eventually takes a stand on behalf of the world in general, as well as those she loves, are typical of this genre.
The Hunger Games films are oriented towards action in their pacing, framing, and in the time taken up by dialogue-free action on screen. They often use special effects to further the plot and add dramatic content, and often use action in place of characterisation. Just as importantly, they depend on identification with an action hero. Katniss was always not only a girl hero, but more specifically a girl action hero (see Figure 2.2). The style of the novels is deeply indebted to a cinematic language for how things would be seen, and for communication without dialogue. The scene in which Katniss addresses the people of District 11 is exemplary, predicting exactly how it would be filmed:
I stand there … thousands of eyes trained on me. There’s a long pause. Then, from somewhere in the crowd, someone whistles Rue’s four-note mockingjay tune … What happens next … is too well executed to be spontaneous, because it happens in complete unison. Every person in the crowd presses the three middle fingers of their left hand against their lips and extends them to me. It’s our sign from District 12, the last goodbye I gave Rue in the arena.
(Book 2: 75)
The books also emphasise sequences of combat and physical danger, leveraging the established success of the girl action hero across many media formats by the time they were written. Katniss’s action-orientation has important antecedents, in the same way that 2017 Wonder Woman contains echoes of the story of Atalanta as well as the DC comic books, running since 1941, and the television series starring Lynda Carter (ABC/CBS, 1975–1979). Katniss primarily belongs to the array of newly action-oriented girl heroes since the 1990s, but these depend on a transformation of screen roles for women from the 1970s onwards. Katniss and her peers – all those girls who heroically act on the world in effective and sometimes violent ways that we overviewed in chapter one – are inseparable from a renovation we will discuss as the ‘girling’ of the film action hero.
Opening a volume of essays on speculative television, Elyce Helford argues that, up to the 1980s, and for example in the figure of Princess Leia from the Star Wars films, speculative films had not moved beyond the recurring figure of ‘the “plucky” but compromised heroine’ (2000: 5). But, she adds,
A few years later, film began a new trend of female representation within the science fiction genre, marked by tough, buns-of-steel heroines, such as Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley and Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor of the Aliens and Terminator series, respectively.
(4)
In the 1970s, films like The Exorcist (William Friedkin 1973), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper 1974), Carrie (Brian De Palma 1976), and Halloween (John Carpenter 1978) used twists on the familiar trope of the girl victim to renovate the horror film genre. That these are contemporary with other more physically active – but less confronting – young screen women, like Wonder Woman, the detectives in Charlie’s Angels (ABC, 1976–1981), and Leia, should of course be tied to the visibility and impact of feminism in the 1970s. But Ripley and Sarah were heroes of a different order of toughness, and this type of heroism began to extend to girls in the 1990s.
It matters that all the most successful examples of this girl-ed action hero belong to speculative, rather than realist, genres. A speculative girl hero can act more violently and still remain both heroic and girl-like, given that neither her skills nor the dangers she must confront are checked by realist believability. One of the speculative franchises with the most influence over the increasing physicality of girl heroes since the mid-1990s is ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ (the 1992 film was followed by a 1997–2003 television series and then a comic and novel series which is ongoing). The problem with Buffy, according to Helford, is that she may act heroically but her story also depends on long expected girl-centred storylines, including romance plots and related anxieties. This critique brings Helford to Carol Clover’s well-known discussion of those new screen girls and women who fight back (1992), and to Elizabeth Hills’ less-well-known reply to that analysis (1999). Because Clover’s theory of what happens when girls (or young women) inhabit the space of action also begins with the 1970s, and because the Hunger Games franchise seems particularly ripe for a critique using Clover’s ideas, this account, and Hills’ counter-argument, are worth considering in detail.
Clover questions ‘the “authentic” status of these heroines as heroic’, suggesting they are ‘simply mimicking the hero: a “figurative male”’ (E. Hills 1999: 39). The example Hills and Clover share is Ripley, from the ‘Alien’ franchise. Ripley’s role in Alien (Ridley Scott 1979) accords with Clover’s account of the ‘Final Girl’ from slasher films appearing in the wake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). That is, partway through a film that lacks any clear point of heroic identification, she comes to the foreground, and is eventually the sole survivor (Clover 1992: 41). Clover argues that
the Final Girl is a male substitute in things oedipal, a homoerotic stand-in … to the extent she means ‘girl’ at all, it is only for purposes of signifying male lack, and even that meaning is nullified in the final scenes … To applaud the Final Girl as a feminist development, as some reviews of Aliens have done with Ripley, is, in light of her figurative meaning, a particularly grotesque expression of wishful thinking.
(53)
Hills responds that this interpretation is stuck in a ‘binaristic logic’ where masculinity and femininity are mutually exclusive (1999: 39). By this argument, women on screen are excluded from a whole array of actions which are defined as male and which would render them only artificial men (Clover’s – and later McRobbie’s – ‘phallic’ girls).3 Instead, Hills insists, ‘action heroines’ ‘cannot easily be contained, or productively explained, within a theoretical model which denies the possibility of female subjectivity as active or full’ (39) or by constructions which fail ‘to engage with new characters and changing contexts’ (40).
For Hills, reading the female action hero as tokenistic when she takes on traditionally masculine characteristics, and cliché when she takes on any associated with femininity, is an example of ‘what Gilles Deleuze calls a “philosophy of capture”’ in which the innovation of a new concept is contained and interpreted in an endless being-made-what-one-is-a priori’ (E. Hills 1999: 44, citing Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 424–473). Hills goes on to suggest that such new forms of ‘activity’ are new ‘assemblages’ of, for example, women and weapons, and that new assemblages/activities practically produce new bodies (44). This is where Deleuze’s use of ‘girl’ as a figure for difference itself once more becomes relevant. This girl, sometimes also called ‘becoming-woman’ in Deleuze’s work with Guattari (1987), escapes capture by default definitions of the adult subject citizen.
This speculative ‘final girl’ is both transgressive and heroic through her own self-protection. However, it remains important that across the sequels to their spectacular first appearances, Ripley and Sarah Connor were not only made over into tougher-looking female fighters – very explicitly in Sarah’s case, and accompanied by a far tougher character as well. They were also made over through stories of protective motherhood, as, in a sense, was Buffy, when the protection of her magical sister Dawn became more pressing after the death of her mother. Heatwole has written elsewhere that contemporary girlhood stories often collapse temporality to ‘absorb motherhood into a postfeminist life narrative, which is necessarily that of a girl’ (2016: 17). The maternal roles taken on by Buffy and Katniss (in her protection of Prim and Rue, and her own mother) may be thought to leave actual motherhood irreconcilable with the youthfulness of the contemporary girl hero, and relegate it to her after-story.4 When Sarah returns in Terminator 2 (James Cameron, 1991), she is dramatically no longer who she once was, a warrior mother rather than a brave and resilient everygirl. However, the explicitly girl action hero also acts on behalf of others, and like Sarah from The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984) her story is often about her learning this is possible. The girl-centric maternalism of feminism from the 1980s to today (Henry 2004; Eisenhauer 2004) may well influence this typical story, and Buffy awakening all the Slayer ‘potentials’ at the end of that television series is also exemplary. At the same time, many of these stories reinforce reinstall motherhood as essential to the feminine bildung, and we will return to the fact that this eventually applies to Katniss too.
We agree with Elizabeth Hills that the concept of becoming is clearly relevant to the new gender formations apparent in women and girl action heroes. However, a caveat is needed. The girl heroism of Buffy and Katniss does not occupy what Hills refers to as ‘a nonhierarchical state of pure difference’ (45). Instead, she acts with explicit reference to the dominant hierarchical opposition between two genders even while evading full explanation by that opposition. The difference she introduces always also represents the standard it varies, which is why she can continue to work as a twist on generic expectations. It is often reported that Ripley in Alien was originally scripted as a male role (Schubart 2007), and the fact that the twist of discovering the hero is a girl still works for Katniss demonstrates the real-world continuity of expectations that girls are not action heroes. We do not require a theory of ‘phallic’ mimicry to acknowledge that the female action hero still intervenes in cinematic expectations; she is able to generate a narrative around her very revelation.
The youth which distinguishes Buffy or Katniss from Ripley and (later) Sarah also affects how viewers are invited to respond to their expertise in hunting and killing. We will return to the link between spectacle and the girl image, but here it matters that cinematic representation of the same action changes when it draws on the additional frisson of visualising girlhood. It is in dialogue with the pressures of visualisation we discussed previously, as well with reality television, that Katniss helps craft herself as the ‘girl on fire’ before she enters the arena. She assumes, when she first meets Cinna, that he must be there to ‘make [her] look pretty’ (Film 1). Once in the arena, however, her constant reflection on how she appears is not about her looks, or what she is wearing, but instead about what she does looks like. In the books, this interrogation of what people are thinking about her centres on trying to divine what messages Haymitch is sending through sponsor gifts. But the films are more ambiguous. Sometimes she clearly considers what Haymitch wants her to do, for example when one of his notes hints that she needs to kiss Peeta more passionately if she wants real audience/sponsor attention. At other times, the emphasis is on trying to divine what is meant by the actions of other tributes, including potential allies, and what the Gamemakers and Games audience want. At the same time, in the arena Katniss is in her element, because there is rarely time for self-analysis; there is only time for action.
The primacy of action was always key to the hero formula and its emergence out of myth read as speculative fiction in the modern world. Vladimir Propp (1968) argues that it is actions which offer consistency between stories set in intrinsically variable worlds. As David Bordwell summarises Propp’s point: ‘Because the motifs or objects and persons can vary from tale to tale, only the actions – giving, or removing, or battling – can form the constants that trigger our intuition that two tales are similar’ (2013: 9). The actors in a folktale do not need to be characters per se and are primarily effects of narrative ‘structure’. Organised relative to discrete ‘moves’ or actions they form a ‘sequence of functions, a distinct line of action’ (10). Bordwell believes that Propp exaggerates the formulaic dimensions of folktales to make this argument, and that pressing it to discuss film only stretches the exaggeration further. However, while a combination of agency and mastery is required for any hero, the action hero introduces greater physicality and urgency, bringing it closer to Propp’s mythic structure. The action film, when it does not prioritise action at the expense of characterisation, at least uses action as a key mode of characterisation.
Katniss stands for action. We do not mean that she is action opposed to thought, however many experts watching her within the story claim that her charisma is only apparent when her actions are un-thought. Rather, Katniss’s action, which seems to escape mediation by television genres, fashion, or politics precisely because she is not thinking about those things but only about a transient goal, stands for immediacy. Katniss represents the immediacy of violence, suffering, affection, and freedom. Katniss is not only becoming, in Deleuze’s sense – on a trajectory engaged by contingently arranged forces. To take up other terms from his work, she could also be discussed as a ‘war machine’ in her ‘deterritorialisation’ of the state’s productions of meaning; and she could also be discussed as an event, the repercussions of which make the conditions that led to it visible (Deleuze 1993; Deleuze and Guattari 1987). In all these senses, she is evading that ‘philosophy of capture’ which would reduce her to roles assigned by a dominant social order.
We do not necessarily need Deleuzean philosophy to see how Katniss’s capacity for action constitutes a ‘line of flight’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) from the claims of the state and the ways it makes meaning from its subjects. Although primed for self-sacrifice, Katniss comes to reflexively understand both the symbolic power of that sacrifice and its pointlessness. Going to battle as the Mockingjay, one of her minders asks what they should do if she is killed: ‘Make sure you get some footage,’ she says. ‘You can use that, anyway’ (Book 3: 90). Katniss is not a sacrificial girl, though, but a hero who can refuse sacrificial and other symbolic roles, which is the choice she makes at the narrative climax. Katniss continually strives, and usually succeeds, to avoid being scripted and directed by others even though she remains constantly in touch with the judgements and values of others. After the end of Film 1, much of the Hunger Games’ narrative drama is focused on forces trying to contain Katniss’s action by translating it into something more amenable or otherwise channel or restrict it. She is rarely allowed to be alone after she leaves District 12 for the second time in Film 2, and yet she manages to act independently of any of these other, ostensibly more powerful, demands. While, technically, the sovereign state selects Katniss for likely death, in fact she elevates herself into this arena where she will become meaningful for others. While she does not choose, and is not even initially aware of, her revolutionary meanings either as a televisual commodity or a political slogan, Katniss knows that when she is reduced to her iconic status, her own character and situation no longer matter. This does not mean that icons are not effective stories or sometimes stories worth telling. Becoming the Mockingjay is a bargain Katniss makes for the sake of others – for a chance to save Peeta’s life, for the happiness of her sister, for their cat’s right to exist – but also for herself, because no other choice seems bearable.
