Thomas More, in his book Utopia (1516), first coined the term ‘utopia’ to name the imaginary island of ideally ordered state. Utopian writings often show a society where men and women live in harmony. David Seed, discussing the origin of the word, writes: “The term ‘utopia’ is a hybrid, as many critics have pointed out, meaning ‘eu-topia’ (good place) or ‘ou-topia’ (no-place)” (Seed, 73). Dystopia is a later development of the earlier utopias, and in a dystopian society, the controls of the state over the population is ultimate. Dystopia is often regarded as a mis-functioning utopia and, unlike utopia where people live in a perfect state of happiness, dystopias present a grim picture of the lives of people ruthlessly controlled by a totalitarian government.
Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy, published between 2008-2010, deals with the state of Panem, where the twelve districts are forced to send two people from each district to participate in the annual Hunger Games where the participants, or ‘tributes’, kill each other for the entertainment of the viewers in the Capitol. In this dystopian setting, the first novel, The Hunger Games, opens as Katniss Everdeen, the protagonist, volunteers for her sister to take part in the games, which ultimately leads to certain rebellious events Katniss could never have imagined. Throughout the novels, we repeatedly see how the characters are constantly watched by the government in the Capitol. This game of watching is at the heart of the politics of the state of Panem and, in the limited scope of this article, we shall discuss how this ‘watching’ has a long history in the world of dystopian novels and how Collins uses it to make her futuristic world more believable.
Although the utopian writings envision a future society where humanity will achieve harmony and perfection, the human history is a history of violence. The harmonious state seems to be an impossibility to achieve when we look at the annals of war fought through ages. In a world constantly haunted by the fear of oppression and death, man gradually comes to realise that ‘utopia’ is indeed a ‘no-place’ and dystopian thinking begins to surface as a reaction to the utopian thought. M. Keith Booker writes:
… [T]wentieth century literature has generally envisioned utopia as either impossible or undesirable. Powered by the horrors of two world wars, the grisly excess of totalitarian regimes in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, and the spectre of global nuclear holocaust, “negative” texts like We, Brave New World, and 1984 have been far more prominent in modern literature than the positive utopias of earlier centuries. Even genres like science fiction, initially informed (especially in America) largely by optimistic visions of the possibilities inherent in technological progress, have taken a dystopian turn in recent years with works… that show an attitude toward future technology that is ambivalent at best. (Booker, 17-8)
The idea of watching the citizens all the time is a characteristic in many dystopian novels. In 1785, Jeremy Bentham thought of a prison called ‘Panopticon’, which means ‘all-seeing’, where the officials would be able to see the inmates all the time.
The novelist Yevgeny Zamyatin uses this idea of panopticon effectively in his novel We where, in the 26th century, the citizens of the One State live in rooms made of glass, thereby allowing constant monitoring of themselves by the Guardians, the police of the State power. When the novel’s protagonist D-503 sees windows in an ancient building for the first time, he pities his ‘savage’ ancestors (or us) for their sense of privacy: “The only evidence of our contemporary, excellent, transparent, and eternal glass was in their pathetic, fragile, mini-quadrilateral windows.” (Zamyatin, 26)
The ruthless governments in many of the dystopian worlds watch the residents constantly to ensure a total control over the population. George Orwell’s Big Brother in 1984 is a prime example of this game of watching. The first scene of the novel introduces us with Big Brother and his all-seeing gaze:
On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran. (Orwell, 3)
In The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins gives this old watching game a twist by making the Games a thing to be watched. The inhabitants of the districts of Panem are forced to watch as their children brutally kill each other on live television.
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In fact, watching is a multi-layered thing in Collins’s novels. It is not only a way of exerting the power of the Capitol over the common people of the districts, it is also about propaganda to be fed to them. The Capitol openly declares that as a punishment for the revolution, the districts are to send two children from each to get slaughtered in the arena of the Hunger Games.
These children get chosen at the Reaping and since then, every moment of their lives is recorded for the camera. They are made camera-ready, even at the moments when they go to either run for his/her own life or take the life of his/her contestants. Katniss Everdeen, the protagonist, is so full of disgust at the way of living in the Capitol – always hungry for some new footage – that she asks herself in The Hunger Games: “What do they do all day, these people in the Capitol, besides decorating their bodies and waiting around for a new shipment of tributes to roll in and die for their entertainment?” (Collins, 65)
The books point out that the ultra-modern surveillance system employed by President Snow has turned the whole of Panem into a panopticon, an all-seeing prison.
Just like Big Brother in Orwell’s 1984, surveillance serves as the principal tool of control in the hands of the state. D. A. E. Garriott writes: “Collins’s Panem is the result of a large-scale panoptic society. Motivated by the gaze of the news and reality television cameras, Collins writes about a world in which all citizens fear being watched, perceive they are being watched.” (Garriott, 164) It is significant that all the citizens of Panem, irrespective of how poor they are, have a television set in the household.
This is not only to ensure that the new messages, or orders from the Panem might be delivered to them in time, but also to make them watch the proceedings of the Hunger Games. The people are forced to watch their children getting murdered, and it is the Capitol’s way of showing their power. This watching, as mentioned earlier, is multi-layered. Not only the people have to watch the Hunger Games, they themselves are watched constantly to ensure that everyone is watching the Games. Not watching the games results in punishment, and Capitol has its own ways – peacekeepers and mayors – to watch over the citizens.
As soon as Katniss volunteers for her sister Prim in the Reaping, she knows that every move of hers, every facial expression, will be watched by many drama-hungry viewers in the Capitol, and she refuses to show her tears, for that would make her look like a weakling, and she was determined to not give them that satisfaction. She hides her emotions in front of the cameras, and it implies that whatever the viewers see on the screen has a new layer of meaning hidden beneath the surface. It shows that even cameras can lie, and throughout the series we see that cameras do lie, for they are used as a vehicle for propaganda, firstly by the Capitol and then by the rebels in Mockingjay.
In many ways the Hunger Games resemble the arena of the ancient Roman Empire where gladiators fought to death for the pleasure of the spectators. Here also a likely scenario is given, although the trained gladiators in the arena are replaced by children in a wilderness. But the bloodlust of the audience (in the Capitol) and the state power’s obligation to provide more of it remain the same.
In The Hunger Games, after a day spent without gory deaths, Katniss correctly guesses about the mental condition of the viewers in Capitol who like to remain glued to the television screen: “Things have been too quiet today. No deaths, perhaps no fights at all. The audience in the Capitol will be getting bored, claiming that these Games are verging on dullness. This is the one thing the Games must not do.” (Collins, 173)
It is all about providing entertainment to the audience, somewhat like the Target Rating Point or TRP of modern times. The Games must be bloodily entertaining to remind the audience that the Capitol is in charge of the life and death of its people. Failing to do so, to provide a show that does not entertain the viewers, implies that the Capitol’s iron grip over the districts has somewhat loosened. That is one thing President Snow will never tolerate. In Catching Fire we learn that the previous Game-maker Seneca Crane has been executed only because he let Katniss live at the end of the Games, thereby unwittingly helping the spark of rebellion against the Capitol. So, it becomes clear that not only the labourers in the districts, not only the tributes in the arena of the Games, but also the Game-makers, the few people who are on the higher level of the predatory chain, too, are not impervious to harm: they, too, are being watched, and failing the cause of the Watcher, the snake-like President Snow, may lead to capital punishment.
To be continued….
