Solidarity Above Circuses
A Personal Reflection on The Hunger Games Franchise
[This review contains light spoilers, my political opinions, and is written as a stream of consciousness to preserve the heart of the reflection]
The Hunger Games Franchise – Personal Reflection
With the fifth film in The Hunger Games franchise set to release 17 November, I wanted to do something a little different this week. We’re in a moment of extreme political tensions, war, and crises of humanity across the globe, and fictional media can help us sort out some of the fears, confusion, concerns, and emotions we have towards seeing these escalating conflicts and living through them, especially as spectators in areas external to the heated confrontations on the ground. So, this week, instead of spinning the wheel and instead of reviewing a 20th century film, I want to take you through my personal thoughts when re-watching The Hunger Games franchise in this moment in anticipation of the prequel. For the record, personal reflection is an important part of reviewing anything, especially art, so while this is not grounded in a specific theoretical lens, it is the required human aspect of viewing actively before one can review academically.
I had not seen these films since their initial releases in 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015. I had read the novels before I saw the films and these years coincide with when I was an undergraduate student. Back then I had very few informed thoughts about politics and did not know what my personal political opinions were, so I don’t really recall what I thought about the deeply nuanced layers of The Hunger Games or whether they actually resonated at all at the time or if I created opinions over time thinking back to the series. I also don’t truly remember the differences between the books and the films, so with the acknowledgment that these are adaptations, here I will exclusively be discussing the films themselves and what the filmmakers chose to portray. What else I can say is that upon watching them for personal leisure viewing this time around, I was profoundly affected by those deep and nuanced political layers, and particularly with the sophisticated portrayals of propaganda and its creation and usage.
For those unfamiliar, the series is set in the fictional country of Panem that feels very much like a dystopian future of the US. Panem is divided into 14 areas: the Capitol where the elites live in luxury provided by the 12 districts, each responsible for supplying a different raw material or manufacturing service to support that lifestyle else they will be bombed and mercilessly murdered as is the common belief about the final district 13. Each year, the Capitol selects at random or by volunteer two children from each district to compete in the Hunger Games in which they are placed in a technologically enhanced harsh natural landscape arena where they must forage, hunt, and survive the elements as they attempt to murder each other until one child is left alive. The Hunger Games are a punishment for an uprising 74 years prior rebelling against the tyranny of the Capitol and are held annually as a constant reminder that the adults in Panem are helpless even to save their children let alone to openly rebel again. This premise is reminiscent of Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale (2000) and its 2003 sequel in which a futuristic Japanese government puts an entire ninth grade class on a deserted island with weapons annually to curb juvenile delinquency and set an example.
The Hunger Games films have the Games as their core concept and motivation for the ultimate rebellion against the Capitol that builds from the first film as the heroine Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) volunteers to take her young sister’s place as District 12’s female tribute in the arena. This act of selfless kindness is seen throughout the districts and echoed later in that first film when Katniss teams up with a young girl her sister’s age from District 11. She takes her time in the arena to arrange a flower display around the girl’s body when she is murdered, and as the Hunger Games are broadcast throughout Panem as the must-see live television event of the year, District 11 witnesses this care and emotional goodbye to their young tribute. The unimaginable cruelty of the Games in that moment is met with an equal but opposite amount of compassion on national television, leading some in District 11 to riot in pain and anger against the Capitol for the death of one of their own. This is the first instance of true rebellion stoked by decency, respect, and solidarity between the districts. As the series continues, the districts must learn to come together to successfully rebel against the tyrannical and charming dictator President Snow (Donald Sutherland).
In order to survive and win in this rebellion, Katniss and her fellow rebels must leverage propaganda with tactics that she and the other District 12 tribute, Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) learned in the Games when they pretended to be in love to garner sympathy from the audience. The way these films depict propaganda as the emotional manipulation it is starts in the Games when they realise that appealing to the audience’s humanity and decency and desire for a good show of ill-fated lovers somehow prevailing will save their lives. This use of the Games as “just a good show” and leaning into the games within the Games of trying to win over the audience and win sponsors to make the Games more exciting is a brilliant addition to the construction of the eventual rebellion. Not only does the concept of sponsors who can send medication or food or tools into the arena for their favourite tributes root even further that the fate of the children of the districts is at the whim of and in the hands of the elites in the Capitol, but it also shows that the people in the Capitol may be influenced and affected so long as it makes the best reality tv possible. This film series seamlessly shows how cultural media can itself be a form of artistic propaganda and that these skills translate very easily to more direct political action, advertising, and recruitment to a cause.
The vast majority of the political power in these films and the rebellion itself are held and fought over screens. President Snow and Katniss face off in person a handful of times, but the threat is that he is always watching. She learns that even in her home district, the Capitol across the country is watching and listening; she can never escape the lie of the relationship she feigned to survive the Games. She can never escape, period. This surveillance state becomes helpful for the rebellion as they co-opt the transmissions for their own purposes of showing the other districts that there is a robust rebellion, showing them what happens to a district when the government feels threatened, using the rubble and destruction to their advantage in a propagandistic war of perception, lies, and manipulation using the same tactics Snow’s government perfected to keep the districts in line. Ultimately, the propaganda, the use of individuals to exploit their pain and fame on a national broadcast becomes a large part of the third film which is entirely concerned with creating the image of rebellion, the central figure in Katniss.
In one scene from the third film, Katniss goes to a district to show her face and rouse morale and support for the rebellion. In the makeshift hospital on the ground in that district, Katniss sees the faces of the people in this fight, the men, women, and children fighting for their own freedom with their resources cut off and dwindling. Snow learns she is there and sends bombers to kill her, a single individual in a whole district of people trying to live. The bombers target the hospital, compelling Katniss to shoot an exploding arrow at one and watch in horror as the entire plane itself flies into the hospital with a massive explosion, presumably killing every person, every child in the hospital. The rebellion’s leader, President Coin (Julienne Moore) uses the footage of Katniss shooting the bomber and cuts it off just before the plane hits the hospital so as to use this as a rallying advertisement she calls “propos” to recruit more districts to the cause, refusing to admit that her own face of the rebellion aided in the blowing up of that hospital.
The thing I found so engrossing when I rewatched these films in November 2023 was, in this scene in particular, Katniss’s gradual realisation that even when she is active, she is at best helpless and at worst aiding a corrupt system. The idea of a constant barrage of footage of crimes against humanity and humanitarian disasters on all screens being manipulated and used as propaganda to the point you don’t know what is true, with either side claiming the opposition is propagandising is a daily occurrence right now, on many fronts and with many conflicts that you may be rattling off as you read this. The confrontation that your country is committing those crimes or allowing them to happen in some way is harrowing, be they mass shootings of children in schools, detaining legal refugees, tearing families apart, human trafficking of migrants perpetrated by state governors, structural loopholes that keep a certain class of predominantly white men in power and everyone else in varying degrees of poverty and prisons, corporatist control over our cultural and news media, autocrats and oligarchs using their billions to singlehandedly and extra-militarily change the course of a battle in a war, your own government providing weaponry for murders you want to stop, and so, so many more crises we watch day in and day out play out with our complicit tax dollars.
And then these atrocities are used for that cultural and news media, crafted into sick entertainment for those in power, twisted lies that make you feel insane for questioning the cruelty and the horrors and the sedition and treason and heartless mass murders with your own eyes, told you’re vile for politicising the death of children after being shown their mangled bodies over the nightly news with your dinner and a tea.
And that realisation on Katniss’s face, feeling her pain as she realises she is complicit in all of it no matter how hard she rebels led to the further conclusion that brings the rebellion together: the fight is not and has never been between the people. There is a constant reminder in the films to “remember who the enemy is,” try not to kill in the arena, don’t give them the show they want, resist, organise, and fight back when the strength is there. That reminder as the most foundational piece of solidarity between the districts is one we can all benefit from.
Governments wage wars against other governments. In our era of blatant corruption with legal lobbying directly condemning our children to death in their schools or our citizens in a grocery store, or allowing millions to die from preventable illnesses because the costs of healthcare are too high, or any number of horrendous industries bribing our elected officials, can we really say they represent us, or are we in the US held hostage by our Congressional representatives? When over three quarters of the population agrees and has agreed for years on basic gun laws, a call for a ceasefire, abortion with certain limitations, etc. but our representatives refuse to vote with their constituents, are we represented?
The heightened tensions recently and eagerness of many official outlets to embrace nationalism with no nuance at all and the condemnation of those who do not support that nationalism wholly with extremist rhetoric are terrifying trends that encourage the brutality and cruelty of stripped back humanity. It is possible to care for the citizens of a country and condemn its government – most Americans who are sharply aligned with their own political party have used the phrase “not my president” about two different presidents in the last 7 years. We do in fact understand the nuance when it aligns personally, and I firmly believe that without the propagandising, the rhetoric, the constant gaslighting of purposeful misinformation blasted 24/7 on social media, the destruction of the mind of that social media, and the glamorising, the making of murder into entertainment, the sensationalising of thousands of murdered children across the globe, most people would choose humanity. Most people would recognise that governments wage wars against governments and send their nation’s children into their own Hunger Games to be broadcast internationally to maintain order.
Watching The Hunger Games as an immigrant in the UK who can’t move back to my home country because its elected officials take legal bribes from pharmaceutical companies, and therefore I cannot afford to live healthily in that country with my chronic conditions, and as a human watching the unfolding of daily war crimes supported by my own tax dollars to a government I’ve been blocked from voting for, and as an adult who still has dreams about the school shooting one district over when I was in middle school, I found a lot more to resonate with than when I was a teenager.
My ultimate takeaways from the franchise were the overwhelming and sophisticated importance the films give to how propaganda is constructed, how it is used to manipulate emotions, how cultural media is a form of political propaganda whether innocently or at an extreme, and also the beauty of how these films build solidarity between the districts despite being used and abused by two autocrats eager to commit war crimes if it benefits their side in the propaganda wars. Obviously I do not think The Hunger Games franchise is a one-to-one comparison for the things I am discussing, but rather I think they provide extremely fertile and thought-provoking ideas with which to think about your own personal politics.
Maybe I was eager for a piece of media to encourage these thoughts by which I had been feeling consumed for weeks and that made me more receptive to these elements, but even if that were the case, then the case for cultural media functioning as a form of political propaganda is even stronger, holding space for those receptive to tap into those messages when they are ready to read them in and out of the film itself. If you have never seen the films or even if you have, I recommend a viewing to see the franchise can awaken any personal reflections of your own.