Friends of mine who have read The Hunger Games books tell me that it is a story about corrupt government, coercive economic planning, and the wonders of self-sufficiency. If that’s true, then it would appear that author Suzanne Collins has taken up the mantle of Ayn Rand in producing libertarian fiction for the masses. Indeed, certain Rand-ian elements show up in this first cinematic installment of The Hunger Games: inane government administrators, virtuous country folk, and the triumph of independence over coercion, to name a few.
Yet, unless Hollywood has engaged in some major narrative obfuscation (not out of the question), there is little to suggest that this series is primarily about social theory — libertarianism or otherwise — as was unmistakably the case in Rand’s work. Rather, the first Hunger Games film seems to be a story primarily about physically talented youths who get plucked out of their rural hometowns, polished up, brought before the social elite, and then fashioned into entertainers of a very particular sort — inflicting violence on one another to satisfy the latent bloodlust of society’s leisure class. If that story arc sounds familiar, it may be because you know something about the world of professional sports in America.
Certainly, there are other ideas at work in this film. We can’t hold back our sense of shame, for instance, over the way these kids, who seem naturally inclined towards teamwork and self-discipline, are brainwashed into a vicious winner-take-all mindset and then exploited to the point of their own demise. It would be hard not to see that as a critique of run-amok capitalism, and if so, would counter the suggestion that Suzanne Collins will be voting for Mitt Romney this November. But for whatever reason — familiarity, excitement, box-office sales — this film seems most clear-headed as an indictment of the ways in which the professional sports industry and class divisions mutually reinforce each other in our society.
For evidence, look no further than the film’s hero and moral center, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) — a humble young woman who sacrifices for her family, sticks by her friends, controls her passions, and wields a crossbow better than most people do a fork. Katniss is at once the all-American girl and the athletic icon whom we have all come to adore; she is how we would all like our daughters and sisters to turn out. She also happens to be quite poor (a recurring flashback shows her friend, Peter Mellark, tossing her a loaf of bread as she sits helplessly in the rain), and her entry into the Hunger Games is less a matter of athletic accomplishment than lack of better alternatives. Still, we cannot help rooting for her to demonstrate her prowess, slay her competitors, and emerge the victor.
I certainly found myself rooting for her thusly, and as the film wore on I began to wonder how much of the suffering and angst she had to endure was also true of real-life sports figures I have come to admire. A typical sports broadcast shows top athletes in top form — fearsome, strong, elegant — but we typically do not see what they go through when they are off the field. Pain, anxiety, and discomfort must account for some of it, as it does for Katniss and her peers. The tribute ritual, whereby the players are selected for the games, seems like a thinly-veiled analogy for professional sports drafts, and the scenes in which Katniss and the other young competitors are trotted out on stage to conduct interviews with the moronic Hunger Games commentator (played by Stanley Tucci) could have been lifted right from ESPN. The physical skill of these kids, it seems, just isn’t enough for us — we want to control their fate, and then we want them to charm us.
In the film it’s clear why the kids play the Hunger Games — they have no other choice. In real life, by contrast, we are able to carry on the illusion that the men and women who dazzle us on television and in arenas across the country are doing so not out of coercion, but out of passion for the game. That may be true on the margin, but it’s undeniable that professional sports serve audiences and owners well above players. What has long been true is that gladiatorial entertainment unites us as a people — far more, in fact, than any one theory about political or social order that might be floating around in this film. We yearn to watch our fellow humans do battle on each other for sport, and the more gifted the battlers, the more enticing the spectacle. There is no language that we speak better than that of victory and defeat, no concept we grasp better than that of pain and triumph, and no pastime we cherish more universally than sport. After all of our bickering over politics and the well being of our country is done, what do we all sit down and do? Watch sports. And that’s where Katniss Everdeen comes in. To us she is an athlete, a role model, and a heroine; but the blunt reality, which we are reminded of in this film, is that she is little more than an entertainer, and one whose shelf life will probably prove quite fleeting.
That is not to say that professional sports are evil, but if The Hunger Games is clear on any one point, it is that the immortality of violent sport rests on the demand among those who do not play rather than on the passion of those who do. The character of Haymitch Abernathy (played by Woody Harrelson), Katniss’ grousing mentor and a former Hunger Games winner, provides a nice coda to this point. What becomes of our greatest victors? Invariably, they become drunken louts, or descend into obscurity, or some combination thereof. In no time, we fear, the great Katniss will walk in Haymitch’s shoes.
Mack Lannahan 