We the Capitol: Spectacle and Perspective in The Hunger Games

“It’s funny, because even though they’re rattling on about the Games, it’s all about where they were or what they were doing or how they felt when a specific event occurred … Everything is about them, not the dying boys and girls in the arena.”

Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (2008)

But of course, it’s precisely because The Hunger Games belongs so well and readily and naturally in the medium of cinematic spectacle, that the story’s having been adapted for that medium from the original novel is such an unsettling thing.¹

Frankly, it stuns me that people lavish their phenomenal artistic talents all over the Internet and then allow me to freely purloin their work as adornment for my blog. This beautiful version of Katniss is by DocLew at newgrounds.com.

This isn’t, I don’t think, an altogether original suggestion on my part, but it would be altogether impossible to credit every half-remembered conversation and online post that germinated and nourished it in my mind. At any rate, I surely can’t be plagiarising too heinously if I can’t remember my sources well enough to lift material from them directly. Right?

So to return to the point, the thing about The Hunger Games is that cinematic spectacle is exactly what it’s about. Specifically, it’s about an overfed and oblivious elite goggling at a bunch of children who are being filmed murdering each other by whichever gruesome means they have available in order to secure their own survival. It’s about the broadcast on screen for entertainment of events which it is unambiguously reprehensible to broadcast on screen for entertainment. It’s about dazzling people with glitz and thrills and romance to the point where they become numb to the evil in which they are complicit. It’s about putting on a show compelling enough to distract people from the real problems.

The book – and I am, for straightforwardness, going to focus primarily on the first instalment of the trilogy – tells all this in first-person narrative voice. We the readers are granted privileged access to protagonist Katniss’ internal monologue; more than that, indeed, hers is the only perspective through which it is granted us to see the world in which the novel is set, and, for that reason, we are as constantly, inescapably aware as she is of the sickening vanity of the spectacle that is laid like a veneer over the real horror of the unfolding events. We are never allowed to forget that what this is really about is her trying to stay alive. All the pretty flame-adorned outfits and all the cute bits of dialogue and kisses exchanged with Peeta are contrived to win her favour with the sponsors in whose generosity her fate might rest. The audience within the world of the story are encouraged to direct their eyes to such pretty, cute, appealing things, but we, seeing through Katniss’ eyes, are always conscious that it is not these things themselves but the contriving of them that represents the true site of the drama.

When the story is transferred onto film, we lose that first-person perspective. We didn’t, arguably, have to lose it; plenty of films make use of spoken internal monologues to keep the viewers aware of what the characters are really thinking. Still, it’s a technique that can, unless done very well, come across as cheesy or lazy or amateurish, and I can see that it probably wouldn’t have worked brilliantly in The Hunger Games. And so we lose Katniss’ narrative voice. We lose that constant, inescapable awareness of her real motivations and the real appalling gravity of her situation. On top of that, we get to view her exploits in pretty much exactly the same way that the overfed and oblivious inhabitants of the Capitol do: broadcast on screen, edited for maximum entertainment value, sanitised to prevent us from grasping too fully and starkly the real horror of the unfolding events (and to keep the BBFC rating at a 12A, to avoid losing revenue from the very demographic that represents the story’s original target audience). Consider the moment in the film when the actual Games begin, and twenty-four adolescents rush to gather as many resources and slaughter as many competitors as they possibly can in the first few minutes of play: there is, if you recall, no sound (excepting music) for this portion of the film.² In terms of cinematography, it works well, in that it heightens the tension and keeps the focus on Katniss. Visually, we can flit from one bit of action to another before we have time to give any of them much thought: the glimpses we get of the other characters are brief and shaky, and the violence done by and to them is contained, limited to the quick thrust of a blade and spattering of blood across some foreign surface. Audially, things would have to have been a little more sustained. To have had our protagonist’s movements soundtracked by the choking and screaming and sobbing of the children being massacred by their peers all around her would have been … messy. It would have been overly busy. There would have been too much going on that we weren’t really interested in. Muting the story-world was an editorially sound decision for the audience’s maximum enjoyment of the scene.

I surely can’t be the only one who finds something at least a bit disturbing in that.

The nub is this: in reading The Hunger Games, we find ourselves in Katniss’ shoes, but in watching it, we find ourselves in the shoes of the overfed and oblivious viewers in the Capitol. Our eyes are directed towards the appealing veneer-story. Look at Katniss’ pretty outfits! Look at the exciting tension of her adventures in the arena! Look, above all, at the developing love triangle centred on her, and be sure to pick a side! It is so striking – isn’t it? – that the very element of Katniss’ story which most effectively garnered the attention of the viewers in the Capitol, namely the romantic one, has also garnered a rather bloated proportion of the attention of viewers in the real world. Katniss’ choice between Gale and Peeta is, I think it’s fair to say, frequently articulated as a if not the major plot point of the trilogy.³ Look at the glitz and the thrills and the romance, viewers! And don’t look too hard at what the story might be critiquing about our own society. Don’t look too hard at what it might be saying about wealth and poverty. Don’t look too hard at what it might be saying about political power. And don’t, whatever you do, look too hard at what it might be saying about media spectacle; about screened entertainment as the anaesthetic of the masses, bread-and-circuses style;⁴ about the exhibition of the suffering of some for the amusement of others; about the sacrifice of what’s true and fair on the altar of what makes a good show.

It’s not part of what I’m trying to do in this post to put my finger on precisely what The Hunger Games actually does say about the aforementioned concerns, but regardless, there seems little ground to deny that it says something about all of them. And in this way, turning The Hunger Games into a film sort of turned it into a target of its own polemic. Granted, it's not as if the actors featured in the film actually died the way the characters they were playing did, but the fact that one can have such an enjoyable time watching The Hunger Games makes it vividly and disturbingly clear how enjoyable a time one could theoretically have watching the Hunger Games, if you see what I mean. Either one goggles at the spectacle of death as blithely and numbly and engrossedly as the inhabitants of the Capitol, or one discerns in oneself the ability (or even propensity) to goggle at the spectacle of death in such fashion, and recoils. If the former is true, the film defeats the purpose of the book; if the latter, it defeats its own.

Or, alternatively, perhaps it in fact fulfils it. Perhaps the film is supposed to render us unsettled at our own voyeurism. Perhaps, indeed, there is no more effective way for it to do so than to place us in the shoes of the viewers in the Capitol. Reading the book, seeing everything through Katniss’ eyes, we were sure we were on her side; watching the film, seeing her from the same third-person perspective as the audience within the world of the story, we’re forced to confront the possibility that maybe we wouldn’t be. Maybe we would, in other circumstances, exploit her trauma for our amusement as readily as the people of the Capitol. By taking on this third-person audience role, they render themselves complicit in the evil at hand: surely nothing could show us the potential for similar evil in our own selves more compellingly than our being caused to take on that very same role.

Indeed, I reiterate, it’s precisely because The Hunger Games belongs so well and readily and naturally in the medium of cinematic spectacle, that the story’s having been adapted for that medium from the original novel is such an unsettling thing.

Footnotes 

¹ Surely you’ve read it. If not, do: https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Suzanne-Collins/The-Hunger-Games/5976467. 

² Here it is, if you’d like to remind yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oISBveQNkzA. 

³ As in a slick and hilarious trio of music videos by the superb Studio C, for instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=am1tzttZ8Pc. 

⁴ This famous phrase is from the eighty-first line of Juvenal’s tenth satire, talking about the common people having shrugged off any sense of civic duty: “For the one who once used to grant power, the office of magistrate, the legions, everything, now restrains himself and anxiously desires only two things, bread and circuses.” Translation my own from the text I got here: http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/juvenal/10.shtml.