If speculative genres foreground dialogue with the worlds of their audience in pursuit of being almost believable, choosing the speculative label also connects science fiction to genres beyond popular culture. In this chapter, we are particularly interested in the dystopian tenor of the Hunger Games. The three sections of this chapter offer different approaches to power and politics in the Hunger Games, foregrounding how associations between youth, futurity, and both social change and social reproduction function in this dystopia. This chapter is thus also the one most concerned with the work of spectacle in the Hunger Games.
The problem of distinguishing reality from fantasy, from ideology, and from other kinds of image production threads through the Hunger Games, right up to Katniss’s final choice as executioner. But this narrative turns self-conscious when Katniss and Peeta first board the train for Panem. On this train, we have a respite from new urgent problems for Katniss and time for the audience to become acquainted with Peeta, Effie, and Haymitch, and thus the political geography of Panem. Peeta is a son of District 12’s merchant class and Haymitch its sole wealthy victor, and together they depict social differences Katniss (a coal miner’s daughter) does not. Effie represents life in the Capitol through her disdain for the poverty of District 12 and exuberant pleasure in the train’s luxuries, and together with Haymitch she also represents the difficult experience of mobility between them. This journey is a tour of cultural and economic relations between Panem’s districts, the Capitol, and The Games. For Katniss, it also crosses a threshold: these characters are now her guides through the other-worlds that follow, and all will become her friends – although at first, that seems unlikely. Finally, this begins a story about what Katniss might become through the revolutionary war she triggers, although not without Peeta’s contributions to inspiring people’s devotion to what she represents.
We do not need Suzanne Collins’s metatextual commentary to see that contemporary cultures of surveillance provide a visual language for the Hunger Games films that aids their almost believability. Reality television as a narrative genre is distinct from uses of surveillance technology for purposes other than entertainment, but as Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette suggest, ‘new forms of governing at a distance’ are ‘central to what is “true” and “real” for reality TV’ (2004: 8). The almost magically unseen and unlimited cameras of The Games arena replicate at presently impossible levels the multiple hidden cameras of sets that themselves work as arenas on famous reality television franchises like Survivor or Big Brother (both beginning in Europe in 1997). Reality television did not produce these technologies, however much it has refined their use and reception. Murray and Ouellette further claim that ‘Reality TV mitigates our resistance to … surveillance tactics’ for governmental and other purposes (9), and at least in part, reality television tells stories about surveillance as well as using surveillance to tell stories about social relationships.
The Games in which Panem’s youth fight to the death for the entertainment of an elite, and as a lesson in the power of the state for all, exemplify media spectacle. The series of life-threatening challenges set for Games competitors are undoubtedly real experiences for them, but they are just as clearly artificial and intricately stage-managed for political interests. In important respects, this is also continuous with Panem outside that arena. In the world that contains and consumes The Games, with its crafted personae of competitors who are also potential celebrities, individuals also manage more ordinary challenges by the careful maintenance of acceptable personae. In District 12, the Everdeens are careful that Katniss’s hunting and the mother’s healing services remain officially invisible just as the Mayor and his family pretend they do not buy Katniss’s game. For surveillance in practice, acknowledging the law is as important as its prohibitions.
We suggested in the introduction that the youth of Panem are constituted within what a Foucauldian approach would refer to as disciplinary power, even as the corporal spectacle of The Games is aligned with sovereign forms of punishment. Michel Foucault’s account of disciplinary power (1977, 1978) has been widely applied to modern educational institutions, and used to argue that modern social training centres on the definition of viable citizens by requiring specific social attitudes, with constantly visible possibilities for surveillance accompanied by status rewards for toeing the line, and penalties for stepping over it. The Games’ tributes offer visible reminders that everyone in Panem is, at any given moment, potentially being watched, and the Hunger Games allegorically suggests ways that disciplinary power is deployed in contemporary media culture and otherwise acts on subject formation, including political consciousness. The conventions of speculative fiction invite the audience to recognise the relevance of this story to their own world, including both echoes of brutal sovereign power and the interplay of entertainment and disciplinary example. Yet, power in Panem is exerted simultaneously through military force and by controlling how people know the world. While it is not Katniss herself but the media discourse surrounding Katniss that begins a rebellion, it still matters that this rebellion takes place through direct physical warfare.
The dominant power of surveillance in Panem, where every action is potentially scrutinised by systems that filter up to President Snow, is particularly evident in the films. In addition to imitating reality television footage and deploying classic science fiction images of technological observation, the sets, editing, and cinematography of the Hunger Games films often refer to surveillance footage associated with security, police, or military forces. They often position the camera looking through, behind, and in proximity to such surveillance cameras and the screens representing what they see – sometimes as if the audience were ordinary subjects of Panem and sometimes as if they knew about the surveillance of Panem in ways those subjects cannot. The Games is not the only ‘mandatory viewing’ in Panem. Media power is organised in a centralised sovereign triangle when the story begins, bringing together many forms of spectacle in a state-owned and state-controlled single media source that closely resembles television. This resemblance is close enough that we have referred to Panem’s single public media feed as television. But this technology is just different enough to convey a sense that this is where television might go in the future.1 The ‘public’ and the ‘audience’ are identical for this despotic media system. As there are no competing programmes, there are no ratings, but as much as it is a form of punishment The Games is also a populist rally, and a more fervent audience following is equated with greater political control. This is not as simple as enthusiastic viewers meaning support for the status quo. From the earliest scenes in Film 1, we know that hatred of The Games is widespread in the districts, and the unfolding story also suggests increasingly complex viewing perspectives in the Capitol. Film 1 summarises this in an original scene where Snow warns Seneca Crane against incautiously promoting Katniss fandom. The point of The Games is not just oppression, he says, but the seduction of ‘hope’; just not so much hope that it leads to ideas about viable social transformation. The Games are themselves a mechanism of surveillance that looks at the audience more than it looks at the arena.
In Book/Film 1, from the perspective of the state producers, Katniss is just another girl tribute, although a particularly attractive one given Cinna’s skilful styling, Peeta’s promotion, her own charismatic bluntness and understated beauty, and the ‘underdog’ status of coming from impoverished outlying District 12. Crane’s attempt to leverage this attraction backfires when Katniss finds a way to stalemate his planned climax. Instead of killing Peeta, who has been her ally in the arena and whose declaration of love in the pre-show interviews has built audience attention to their pairing, Katniss arranges what looks like a double suicide. Taken by surprise, Crane lets them both live. Although for both the diegetic and non-diegetic audiences, Katniss and Peeta’s victory offers a kind of closure, the interpolated scenes feature Snow’s concern with how this turn of events will be interpreted across Panem, punctuated by the implied execution of Crane. Katniss now constitutes a threat because her image is insufficiently controlled.
In Book/Film 2, using the threat of his all-seeing surveillance and right to kill, Snow convinces Katniss to collude with his media team and be represented as a harmless, adoring wife-to-be in order to quell the resistance she has inspired. This manipulation is visible to those close to Katniss and, although it is apparently invisible to the satisfied Capitol audience, Snow (correctly) believes it is suspected in the districts where scepticism towards the official media story is ingrained. The regularly scheduled ‘victory tour’ which takes Peeta and Katniss to every district, finishing in the Capitol, is a tour through attempts to represent this state-sponsored story, during which Katniss, Peeta, Haymitch, and Effie witness increasingly visible cracks in the Capitol’s hold on the districts and their economic functions. Although the final party celebrating Katniss and Peeta’s engagement still indicates general satisfaction in the Capitol, it also indicates these cracks are now the dominant concern of the media-state complex. While Film 2 continues to feature little direct television footage, it increases views behind the scenes of producing images of Panem, where politicians and cultural producers attempt to manipulate knowledge of both Katniss’s story and what else is happening in Panem (see Figures 1.1 and 4.1). These behind-the-scenes views imitate surveillance cameras more than reality programming until the 75th Games begin, when once again we enter an embedded story that blends televisual reception and cinematic action.
This speaks to Foucault’s argument that while sovereign power comes from visibility, disciplinary power ‘is exercised through its invisibility; at the same time it imposes upon on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility’ (1977: 187). It is a blend of visible and invisible modes of power. Snow and his machinations are coextensive not only with the very visible Big Brother of the reality television genre but with the invisible network sustaining the partially visible ‘Big Brother’ in George Orwell’s novel 1984. In the Collins novels, this reference to Orwell is fairly explicit, but in the films it becomes direct through the increasing use of a close-up of President Snow’s face delivering instructions to the public and invective to and about the resistance (citing popular recognition of Michael Radford’s 1984 film adaptation). The cameras in The Games arena also represent this, adding televisually visible threats to the tributes’ survival although the cameras themselves are only inferred. In line with Foucault’s metaphor of the panopticon (1977: 202–208), it is never possible for the tributes to know when these cameras are being utilised. Moreover, they are connected via the production centre to otherwise invisible streams of information from ‘trackers’ implanted in the tributes, with this entire system used to impose life-threatening situations and heighten the probability of combat or other drama. While The Games is both public execution and a reminder of the need for vigilant self-regulation, the dominance of things to look at on the state-media feed is easily reversed, and during war the same screens become dominated by statements about surveilling authority and also literal executions (Film 3). The struggle for control of the state-media feed in the last two films is thus never ancillary to the revolutionary war.
The only time a specific Games arena camera is visible to a tribute is when Katniss detects and looks back at one, having heard its whirring from her hiding place in a tree (Figure 4.2). She doesn’t avoid its lens – in fact, she goes out of her way to not only look back at its gaze but peer into its workings. This is only the most explicit of many times Katniss acknowledges the arena cameras in Films 1 and 2. The fact that she always seems to know where they are in order to confront their gaze represents both her singular command of the field and that they are (almost) everywhere she could possibly look. Despite Snow’s near-omniscience, Katniss is represented in such scenes as perceiving, questioning and resisting Panem’s pervasive surveillance. However, as she learns more about the possible repercussions of her relation to such surveillance, Films 3 and 4 are instead dominated by her attempting to hide from or use cameras, including hiding from the different but equally encompassing surveillance of life in District 13 and striving to voice her critique of Snow’s government within the frame of the rebels’ propaganda mission for the Mockingjay. Although Katniss’s survival initially depends on performing an identity that differs from her own, this too changes. The ‘girl on fire’ persona is certainly compatible with Panem’s hegemonic culture, but how Katniss understands her own relation to this persona, and to the Mockingjay that she rises as from this fire, remains one of the franchise’s unanswered ‘real or not real’ questions. However crafted, these personae are not just lies any more than her inspirational declarations to Panem are insincere because she is wearing Cinna’s mockingjay costumes. The politics of style and ornament are used to express identity and connection as well as for oppression, and they merit further analysis than the gendered dimensions we discussed in chapter three.
The mockingjay pin Katniss wears in the arena during the 74th Games becomes a symbol for resistance to the government as people take Katniss and Peeta’s refusal to kill each other as a call to choose death over continuing to follow the Capitol’s dictates. This symbol becomes conflated with Katniss herself as it is transported from district to district, displayed in graffiti in the train-tunnels that link them (Film 2), marked on pieces of bread carried by refugees (Book 2), or transmitted on underground airwaves (Book 2). The fact that Katniss rather than Peeta becomes this symbol, given his media popularity, deserves attention. The pin represents local resistance – the small mockingjay birds and a girl from District 12 – but it also begins as jewellery. In Film 1 it is given to Katniss by Greasy Sae, just because she admires it; and in Book 1 by her only girl friend, Madge. Either way, it is an ornament that marks her allegiance not only to the forest but to a pleasure in decoration now associated with girlhood. The pin is a sign that those not expected to take power might do so. As the suicide pact she proposes to Peeta in Book/Film 1 makes Katniss neither the one saved nor the one who sacrifices herself, but instead a heroic ally, this turn against expectations is crucial. What Snow calls Katniss’s ‘little trick with the berries’ exposes the fact that Panem ‘must be’, as Katniss replies, ‘a very fragile system’ (Film 2). Moreover, as Katniss becomes the Mockingjay – the symbolic embodiment of rebellion – she discovers that this role requires as much self-conscious performance as did The Games. As Kelley Wezner argues, Katniss ‘moves from being unknowingly shaped by Panem’s panopticon to actively participating in her own identity formation … It’s not about what’s real, it’s the fabrication of reality that truly matters’ (2012: 154).
Katniss sees much that is wrong with her world, even when District 12 is all she knows; but unlike her friend Gale she does not itch to change it. Katniss in Book/Film 1 has no vision of her own future and still less a vision of the world she should live in. What she has, instead, are valued private pleasures and a keen sense of injustice. Snow and Plutarch Heavensbee agree that ‘She’s not a leader. She just wants to save her own skin’ (Film 2). But if Katniss is not looking for revolution in her choice to save Prim, and then Peeta, her sceptical pragmatic sincerity nevertheless makes her, as they also agree (although with very different motivations, as Heavensbee is later revealed to be a resistance leader), ‘a beacon of hope for the rebellion’ (Film 2). While Katniss stands for action rather than deep reflection, why she acts and for whom remains important. With the gradual loss of her home, private self, friendship with Gale, and finally her beloved sister, Katniss becomes less a warrior than the one who knows. In the wake of the rebellion’s victory, she recognises that the world around her will only be structurally reproduced if one despot replaces another, and so the enemy she kills is not the now captive and dying ex-President Snow but the equally manipulative new President Coin. We should thus look more closely at the politics of the Hunger Games even if Katniss remains our focus – she is, after all, the Mockingjay, whose song reflects its surroundings.
In the introduction, we flagged the obvious relevance of Marxist theory to the Hunger Games. In Panem’s political economy, the labour of people is objectified in the production of commodities valued on their own terms rather than for what it took to produce them. Consumption is a social and aesthetic virtue in the Capitol, and in The Games people themselves are subordinated both to consumption and to maintaining a status quo which keeps the Capitol in luxury at the expense of labour in the outlying districts. Panem, described this way, resembles the classic model of capitalism dependent on class distinctions and the circulation of commodities (see Marx 1976). People’s lives appear to be determined by their different relations to the means of production, with manual labourers falling at the bottom of a hierarchy of both compensation and status, below a middle class of those who sell objects and services rather than their labour per se, and a ruling class whose work is entirely ideological. As in many classic dystopias, for example the citizens of Aldous Huxley’s London in Brave New World (1932), the Capitol is placated by consumption, unable to see past formulaic excitements to the fundamental cruelty of their social world. The equation of Panem and American consumer culture in Collins’s own comments encourage this reading.
At this allegorical level, the Hunger Games is closely aligned with a contemporary mode of dystopia predicated on, according to Fredric Jameson,
the conviction that rich societies like the U.S. will need to convert to another kind of ethic if the world is not to end up, as it currently seems destined to do, in the spectacle of a First-World gated community surrounded by a world of starving enemies.
(2004: 49)
Superimposing the geography of Panem onto a post-nuclear US emphasises this reading and activates a familiar trope for dystopian fiction since World War II. The books may be more literal about their placement in American geography, and most viewers would not associate the relevant set and costume design elements depicting District 12 with the Appalachian Mountains, although it was largely filmed there. But the image of District 12 is consistent with what the Appalachians have historically meant in US culture, and this includes clear markers of class difference. The films are, of course, also anchored in the US by casting American voices, well before the quickly displayed map in the background of a single shot (see Figure 1.1).
We might pursue this reading further using a later Marxist approach, to emphasise how the media feed in Panem works as an Althusserian ‘ideological state apparatus’ (ISA) that tells people what is acceptable, and even what is real (with the torture visited on Peeta in Book/Film 3 being its repressive counterpart). Louis Althusser summarised ISAs as a
quadruple system of interpellation as subjects, of subjection to the Subject, of universal recognition and of absolute guarantee, the subjects ‘work’, they ‘work by themselves’ in the vast majority of cases, with the exception of the ‘bad subjects’ who on occasion provoke the intervention of one of the detachments of the (repressive) State apparatus.
(1970: 180)
The climactic moment of Book/Film 1 is thus when Katniss reveals the berries and stops ‘working’ as a tribute subject. Moreover, this reading is compatible with Guy Debord’s account of ‘spectacle’ (Debord 1967) as the illusory world in which signs and commodities refer only to one another, detached from the labour and social structures that enable them. The Games is spectacle in Debord’s sense, obscuring both its mechanisms of production and the realities of the actors within it. Indeed, Panem’s version of reality television presents the apparent activity of the audience as just another carefully crafted product, as the faux participation that the Situationists and Debord associated with spectacle and opposed to ‘total participation’, which would be directly interactive.
Jameson’s argument, in ‘Magical Narratives’, that popular genre is the means of expressing ‘Utopian longings’ (1975: 105), points to the same dynamic identified when Snow cautions Crane not to offer The Games audience too much hope. In fiction, Jameson and Snow suggest, longing for another organisation of the world can find representation. This can be sufficient to satisfy a passing fancy (Snow suggests), or manifest desire for a broader critical reflection (Jameson suggests). Utopian fictions are intrinsically political, from the foundational Utopia, by Thomas More (1516) to Marx’s own work, where Jameson’s reflections on utopia begin. Gregory Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent also include Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ Communist Manifesto in The Utopia Reader (1999a), where they define utopia as ‘the imaginative project, positive or negative, of a society that is substantially different from the one in which the author lives’ (Claeys and Sargent 1999b: 1). This not only indicates how dystopia is a type of utopia but suggests the way, like all fantasies, it is tightly tied to a framing world – although we would stress that this can eventually be the world of an audience quite different from that of any producer.
Having acknowledged the usefulness of this reading we should also stress that Panem is not, in fact, straightforwardly capitalist. Its workers are not all labour for sale, and its markets are not ‘free’; they are organised by government planning rather than demand. The spectacle defining this society is, overall, less seductive than demanding – fusing classical spectacle, capitalist spectacle, and state socialist spectacle. This is emphasised in the films’ costume/set design and staging by specific allusions to fascist monumentalism and Las Vegas-style hyperbolic advertising as well as classical Rome and zones of modern industrial poverty. The Capitol is nevertheless, as its name suggests, capitalist, with recognisable flows of consumer demand for commodity fashions. In the films, we see only the upper echelons of Capitol society closely, where all demands are met and supply overflows demand so continually that inventive forms of consumption are required to keep up – like the emetic drinks that allow revellers to go on eating after they are over-full (yet another reference to the Roman Empire). The books, however, reveal more about other layers of Capitol society, including Katniss’s makeup team, who worry about how much things cost, what is in fashion, and limitations on supply, and the Avox slaves who perform the most menial labour. This team brings the Capitol closest to the America that produced it, while the Avox push it further away, stressing that the Capitol’s capitalism is a literal slave economy under an absolute dictator who can both mutilate and kill on a whim.
Panem’s districts all also have hybrid economies in which the fascist state centrally distributes basic goods in return for dictated labour roles and a limited salary for which there are limited goods marketed under regulation. The mix of distribution, labour, and trade clearly varies between districts, while District 13 is pure state socialism, with all goods collectively produced, centrally distributed, and labour roles assigned in a team effort based on apparent capacities. Everyone is provided for equally at a minimal level from scarce resources and this is evidently a more just society than either the Capitol or District 12. But the problems of 13 are not confined to having to hide underground for generations. The films split Book 3 into two parts, but with an emphasis on military action that reduces detail about the regimented surveillance of life in 13.2 The revelation that Coin would not be a very different president from Snow is thus left to hinge on her willingness to sacrifice children and healers to win a war, and to kill Katniss to negate her political influence. This reduces questions about what a Panem governed by this militaristic regime would be like to Coin herself, making Katniss’s choice to kill her more simply justifiable.
None of this forces political or theoretical seriousness onto the Hunger Games, which was always a narrative about political power even when focused on media spectacles, lethal action sequences, or youthful romance. The films offer an unusual degree of political-economic detail for action fantasy. The fragmentation of resource production (one district has mines, another fishing, and so on) and centralised distribution means that in Snow’s Panem – the one that excludes District 13 – only the Capitol can function independently; and yet, paradoxically, it depends on district resources. To support this distribution, communication is centralised in the Capitol and no cultural practices can reach beyond the most local audience without state sanction. Thus, like the Mockingjay symbol communicated laterally between districts by diverse local tactics, Katniss’s folksongs become revolutionary. Transmitted to the viewing public, first from The Games arena when she sings over Rue’s body and then as propaganda over the hijacked state-media channel, these songs are more than just signs of a hero’s capacity for empathy and love. They are emblems of a life outside the rule of the Capitol, heightened by taking a pre-industrial form like song in an age of digital media technology. At the same time, introducing a crucial ambivalence, these songs only reach the pitch of communicability and popularity anchoring revolution via industrialised mass production, resembling the Nazi use of folk culture in Weimar Germany as much as the popularity of recovered and new ballad forms in 1960s alternative culture.
Katniss’s songs are thus not peripheral to the plot, and they begin and end the film series. Each song is sung multiple times. The first is a pastoral lullaby, called ‘The Valley Song’ in the books and ‘Deep in the Meadow’ in the films (with a version by Sting recorded for the soundtrack release). Katniss singing this song to comfort her sister is how we first meet her in Film 1, and she sings it a second time to the dying Rue at the turning point in the 74th Games. The second song is one she sings partly to comfort her companions – in Film 3, the Avox cameraman Pollux asks her to sing to the mockingjays – and partly as a eulogy to the ruined District 12. ‘The Hanging Tree’ loosely belongs to the ‘prison ballad’ genre as the song of a condemned man, and it is soon taken up by amassing rebels in scenes original to the films as they withstand heavy casualties to bring down fortified government facilities, and Lawrence singing ‘The Hanging Tree’ plays again during Film 3’s closing credits. This song is a call to die with the speaker, but its internal meaning remains unclear, as the book explicates in ways the film does not (Book 3: 146–148). More clearly, it reinforces opposition between the Capitol and a seemingly more authentic pre-industrial cultural life. Even hanging as a mode of execution is starkly opposed to the technological spectacle of The Games and a meaningful archaism in a science fiction story. When Katniss is appointed to execute Snow, the apparently direct method of shooting him with an arrow is mediated by a production team filming it for transmission over the same state-owned media channel that carried The Games, only now under new management. This echoes the moment when Katniss decides she will do anything to stop Coin from continuing The Games with a new kind of young tribute. The song’s ambivalent image of the noose as ‘a necklace of hope’ is also consistent with the ambivalence of the ending of the Hunger Games. Katniss’s world is undoubtedly improved by the defeat of Snow, but neither Katniss nor the audience have any idea what kind of world she has brought into being.
The importance of the narrative coda can hardly be over-estimated in this respect. A new government of unknown tendencies has been appointed, and Katniss has been exiled to the recovering ruins of District 12, but this ending does not promise any more resolution to the problems of Panem than did President Coin. Katniss has won: Snow is defeated, she has returned home, she eventually has both a chosen partner and children, and she is no longer hungry or openly at risk. But she is not triumphant. The books are emphatic about this, detailing not only her ongoing nightmares but anxiety about what the future holds. In both films and books, there is a measure of freedom and peace in Katniss’s new life, but it conveys little information about what Panem is now like except that it is not actively persecuting her. News comes to Peeta of her mother training healers, Gale keeping the peace where the peacekeepers were trained, and Annie’s joy in the child she has after Finnick’s death. Katniss, Peeta, and Haymitch watch a new president sworn in on television and remark that only Heavensbee seems to have won The Games. All of this remains non-committal about the larger political problems that the war contested. But the films give the very final scene a strikingly different tone (see Figure 3.1). Marked by shifts in every cinematic register, it is a soft-focus golden-lit pastoral scene with children playing and loving embraces that clearly echoes the lullaby with which Film 1 began, and over which the last credits now roll. In fact, the shift in lighting, focus, and sound is so stark as to make this dreamlike ending rather questionable, but certainly it is a world of private reward rather than political solutions.
It thus remains unclear whether Katniss’s success has changed or could change Panem. She has exposed forms of corruption and ended the repetitions of a traumatic history, but she has not solved its problems. The most hope the story offers is that someone (or ones) will be there to risk everything for the same critical purpose in the future. This also aligns with Debord’s own utopian vision, where
liberated from all economic responsibility, liberated from all the debts and responsibilities from the past and other people, humankind will exude a new surplus value, incalculable in money because it would be impossible to reduce it to the measure of waged work. The guarantee of the liberty of each and of all is in the value of the game, of life freely constructed. The exercise of this ludic recreation is the framework of the only guaranteed equality with non-exploitation of man by man. The liberation of the game, its creative autonomy, supersedes the ancient division between imposed work and passive leisure … So what really is the situation? It’s the realization of a better game, which more exactly is provoked by the human presence.
(‘Situationist Manifesto’ 1960)
We might consider here another account of utopia, this time as a mode of entertainment. Richard Dyer argues that entertainment itself has a utopian dimension:
Two of the taken for granted descriptions of entertainment, as ‘escape’ and as ‘wish-fulfillment’, point to its central thrust, namely, utopia. Entertainment offers the image of ‘something better’ to escape into, or something we want deeply that our day-to-day lives don’t provide. Alternatives, hopes wishes – these are the stuff of utopia, the sense that things could be better, that something other than what is can be imagined and may be realised.
Entertainment does not, however, present models of utopian worlds… . It presents, head-on as it were, what utopia would feel like rather than how it would be organized.
(1992: 20)
Dyer focuses on the experience of being ‘entertained’, seeing in this pleasure something with more potential for disruption than mere distraction. In making this case, he offers another perspective on the overlap between speculative fiction’s almost believability and utopia:
To be effective, the utopian sensibility has to take off from the real experiences of the audience. Yet to do this, to draw attention to the gap between what is and what could be, is, ideologically speaking, playing with fire.
(Dyer 1992: 27)
For Dyer, the spectacular effects of the blockbuster itself have a political dimension, offering an ‘intensity’ but also an ‘abundance’ and ‘energy’ to supplement the value of cinema itself as a ‘community’ experience, all of them (along with ‘transparency’, a key theme in the Hunger Games) responding to what he diagnoses as the inadequacies of contemporary social life (Dyer 1992: 26) and expresses in terms Debord would surely recognise.
The exaggerated closure of the Hunger Games may frustrate several possible readings of Katniss’s heroism, but it not only fits Dyer’s account of the possibilities raised by entertainment but also supports Jameson’s observation that utopian texts ‘bring home, in local and determinate ways, and with a fullness of concrete detail, our constitutional inability to imagine Utopia itself’ (Jameson 1982). In other cases, this may be because the utopian text fulsomely describes its ideal world but not how that might be brought about, as with More’s Utopia; but as a speculative dystopia the Hunger Games proffers no image of a better society. As Tom Moylan says, Jameson’s theory of utopia ‘does not directly invoke freedom but rather neutralizes “what blocks freedom” … Indeed, Jameson’s point is that Utopia is not about this or that narrated alternative’ (1998: 1). While speculative genres are often discussed as escapist fantasy, they often represent grim challenges to which there is no happy resolution.
The open secret of The Games, in a perverse reversal of its promotional slogan ‘May the odds be ever in your favor’, is that the odds are always stacked against the tributes. Until halfway through Book/Film 2, Katniss’s survival depends on appearing to be a compliant member of Panem society because the regime that determines her life is maintained by two core strategies. The first is a stranglehold on all consumer goods, from necessities like food to the most fleeting luxury. This control requires manipulating both economic and cultural capital, in the terms established by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, keeping the poor and the wealthy identified with their respective places. The second strategy is the web of disciplinary power that leaves citizens afraid of any visible misstep relative to the status quo, including local regulations, unexplained changes in the code imposed by peacekeepers and, of course, The Games. Indeed, The Games unites these strategies, given that the reward for winning is not just the absence of death but a life without scarcity.
The reproduction of labour within Panem is achieved by exercising heavy controls on the circulation of all kinds of capital (economic, social, capital, and symbolic), but the most important is cultural capital. Without a sufficiently agreed-upon set of pleasures and values, Snow insists, the empire of Panem is ‘fragile’ indeed (Film 2). Bourdieu himself likens the functioning of capital to a game of chance in which the odds are only with the elite, arguing that capital operates as
a lex insita, the principle underlying the immanent regularities of the social world. It is what makes the games of society – not least, the economic game – something other than simple games of chance offering at every moment the possibility of a miracle. Roulette, which holds out the opportunity of winning a lot of money in a short space of time, and therefore of changing one’s social status quasi-instantaneously, and in which the winning of the previous spin of the wheel can be staked and lost at every new spin, gives a fairly accurate image of this imaginary universe of perfect competition or perfect equality of opportunity, a world without inertia, without accumulation, without heredity or acquired properties, in which every moment is perfectly independent of the previous one, every soldier has a marshal’s baton in his knapsack, and every prize can be attained, instantaneously, by everyone, so that at each moment anyone can become anything.
(2002: 280)
In fact, he argues, social life is not a game of chance, and success goes to the ‘inheritors’ or ‘acquirers’ of capital. Its great illusion is people’s belief that, like The Games’ victors, they might become anything, despite the real odds against a change of status.
The odds in Panem are clearly stacked by both wealth and access to training (terms by which the outer districts are directly disadvantaged, and by which real-life disadvantage also often works), as well as by the naked odds of having only one victor out of twenty-four every year. The transmission of cultural capital (of what one knows and knows to value) is key to The Games. As Bourdieu puts it, cultural capital is mainly passed on to the young by access to training or education (2002: 86). Within Panem’s twelve subordinate districts, different forms of formal training are available and different kinds of knowledge are passed on through families. In District 12, the ‘merchant’ class to which Peeta belongs is more affluent and more attuned to the workings of Panem society, and has given Peeta greater social confidence as well as his other skills. Katniss’s mother is seen to have sacrificed this class standing, and the accompanying advantages of her merchant family, by marrying a miner. Her fair, delicate appearance, inherited by Katniss’s sister Prim, suggests a long line of maintaining such distinctions by bloodlines. Prim also inherits her mother’s capacity for healing, obviously by training rather than genetics. It is significant that, in District 13, where class privileges maintained along family lines have been minimised in the interests of survival, Prim’s nurtured talent provides a pathway to a medical career, while in District 12 her mother could only operate unofficially, paid by bartered goods.
In counterpoint, Katniss’s appearance and abilities seem to be inherited or learned from her father. Her features are often referred to as the darker, more ‘common’, features of District 12 workers and she is also presented as sharing her father’s interest in the outdoors, his exceptional hunting abilities, and his love of folk music (and in the books, his beautiful singing voice). These attributes associate Katniss with a mythical life before the Capitol (for the people of the districts) and by extension a life before industrialisation (for the audience). When troubled, Katniss finds solace in the uncivilised surroundings of the woods, a neo-naturalist in a world stratified by controlled urbanisation and state domination of media and technology (see Jameson 2004: 48). Thus, it is not formal education which allows Katniss to exceed expectations and become (at least symbolically) a revolutionary leader. Education seems to be mandatory and universal, but this is clearly not the assumed meritocracy of Bourdieu’s or, still less, ‘neoliberal’ society. Following their education, the youth of Panem will take up the work that their family of birth and perhaps their gender assigns them. In Katniss’s class in District 12, this is limited principally to coal miner (male) and mother (female). Like all other institutions in Panem, then, education works to maintain the current balance of power, rather than allow upward mobility, by maintaining what Bourdieu refers to as the ‘conversion’ of economic into cultural capital (2002: 285–286).
For young people of the districts, the only training that could change their lives is physical or weapons training. Katniss’s intimacy with her father, and then with Gale, gives her access to such training, which is officially forbidden in District 12. Like the black market where she trades her game, this operates under the blind eyes of the law. Similarly, the military training of children in expectation of the chance at mobility offered by The Games is an open secret in the most privileged districts – the one associated with producing luxury goods (District 1) and the one producing the peacekeepers (District 2). These ‘career’ districts help maintain their privilege by aiding their children in winning The Games, and thus the health-sustaining bonus supplies channelled to a victor’s district. Talented children are given special training and, perhaps, encouraged to volunteer. As fighting is not the only useful skill for The Games, however, the relevant specialist knowledge can involve more implicit cultural capital. Peeta’s knowledge of how to address people and present himself is one example, as is the apparent ease with gender performance shown by Glimmer and Finnick. This all seems alien to Katniss, whose life has been dominated by the struggle to survive. Peeta’s privilege helps him understand that they must provide entertainment as well as survival. He realises this means capitalising on Katniss’s charisma and producing a romantic storyline so appealing it can overwhelm the pleasures of The Games as execution spectacle. In addition to knowing what will be valued in the Capitol, Peeta’s command of sociality, including deportment, is a powerful form of knowing how to play the game. Although the class difference between Katniss and Peeta seems invisible to the Capitol, it is present in his greater social ease – what Bourdieu would call his ‘habitus’ (1977).
Both class and geography have additionally determining power in Panem, given that people are not allowed to move between districts, except in the service of the Capitol. Winning The Games means a comparatively luxurious home in the Victors’ Village, increased income for one’s family and community, a life of at least moderate celebrity, and the freedom to pursue elite pleasures, including travel. Very much like reality television competitions in the contemporary world, however, the celebrity assigned to victors may be a short-term benefit. It becomes increasingly clear that there is an ongoing price. Haymitch’s alcoholism, Annie’s madness, Johanna’s isolation, and the sexual exploitation Finnick suffers, all attest that the repeated pain of mentoring new tributes is only the most generic way victors are indentured for life. Given that we never know anything about the personal life of the ‘careers’, positioned as trained enemies, we do not know if this is universal. But where we are given access to what it means to ‘win’ The Games, it seems that any promise of freedom in success is also a lie. The suffering of the winners also draws the Hunger Games commentary on class mobility and reality television towards Bourdieu, who argued that ‘happiness’ also needs to be factored into economic decisions, for example as a price for certain kinds of ‘security’ (Carles and Bourdieu 2001). His ‘gilded ghettos’ in which the ruling class are sectioned off from problems that feel pressing elsewhere seems highly relevant to Panem, including to the alien problems of Capitol residents like Katniss’s makeup team in the books and the apparent racialisation of at least District 11 in the films – and thus of the key characters Rue and Thresh.
Beverley Skeggs, among others, has argued that what is missing from Bourdieu’s theory of capital accrual is an intensive analysis of where it intersects with gender (2004: 22). She suggests that, while gender normalcy gives boys an institutionalised form of capital, femininity has a more tenuous position as it is ‘a constantly transformable act based on attachment and detachment of practices and objects in a circuit of exchange, a wilful playfulness, performative and performing’ (2004: 28). Skeggs argues that femininity itself can thus work as capital, with particular reference to how working-class women approach the performance of femininity as a form of social and cultural capital when other forms are unavailable, a dynamic she also sees in reality television and its consumption (Skeggs and Wood 2011). In this respect, Katniss’s literal rags-to-riches story is both a hegemonic fantasy and the kind of independent success imagined by ‘girl power’, although it remains questionable whether it can be reduced to this label employed as a criticism. Like Angela McRobbie’s account of the modern girl as ‘an active and aspirational subject’ (2009: 73), Skeggs’ argument elucidates the affective power of Katniss’s narrative starting point, which has her poised on the brink of both starvation and adulthood, needing to fight her way to fame and fortune by appealing to others as much as by being able to hunt and hide. The almost believable attractions of the Hunger Games narrative are clearly about a recognisable desire for something more than is currently available, but also about what blocks these desires and limitations, and is hard to imagine away.
