The Hunger Games: A Dystopian Reality Show (Part 1)
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. At the first chapter of Catching Fire, President Snow visits Katniss in District 12 and lets her know that he knows all about her romantic relationship with Gale, whereas the Capitol wants her to be in love with Peeta. There are some futuristic spying technologies employed in the books. One of them is the Jabberjays, the genetically engineered birds, which were used by the Capitol at the time of the first revolution to memorize and repeat the conversation of the rebels to the authorities in the Capitol. But it must also be noted that this policy of snooping with Jabberjays failed miserably for the Capitol. Cara Lockwood points out:
The Frankenstein problem happens often to the scientists of the Capitol. When they made jabberjays – exclusive male homing birds designed to mimic entire human conversations as a means of spying on rebels – their living spy equipment was soon turned against them, as rebels learned to use the birds to their advantage. And while they were never intended to survive on their own (that’s why they were all male, so the Capitol would be able to control the jabberjay population), the jabberjays ended up mating with mockingbirds in the wild, creating mockingjays. … Mockingjays are a living symbol of the Capitol’s short-sightedness and prove that it isn’t invincible. That despite all its technological and scientific advances, it makes mistakes just like anyone else. That makes it vulnerable. (Lockwood, 122)
The war seems to be less about fighting over physical territory, and more about fighting over control of the airwaves
Katniss Everdeen’s story is undoubtedly inspired by that of Theseus of the Greek myths. The way Katniss volunteers for Prim to sacrifice her own life resembles Theseus’s deed of volunteering as a tribute to be sacrificed in the labyrinth of Crete, to be brutally killed by the Minotaur. Needless to say that the Game arena is actually a highly technical labyrinth and both Katniss and Theseus emerge victorious out of the impossibly perilous situation. But unlike Theseus, Katniss does the trick in The Hunger Games by giving the audience just what they want. Her experience of seeing the previous games has given her enough idea of what the spectators want and she just plays for the camera, keeping herself alive. She does not cry even when she was in great agony, because the viewers never liked a weakling. But in her ‘watched’ state, she begins to evolve. She cleverly uses her situation (for she knows that a lot of cameras are on her) to get what she wants. Lili Wilkinson rightly says:
At first, Katniss is just trying to play the game – to appeal to sponsors who can help her survive. But then things start to change. Katniss starts to use her position, her visibility, as a message. She decorates Rue’s body with flowers as a protest against the unrelenting violence of the Games. (Wilkinson, 71)
And then she threatens to commit suicide with Peeta by eating the poisonous berries. Wilkinson analyses:
Katniss realizes that she has the power to save both herself and Peeta. She threatens the Capitol and the Gamemakers with an Engineer’s disaster – a reality TV show with no ending. No winner. No Victory Tour. No interviews. The ultimate letdown. And so the Gamemakers relent, and let them both live.
Katniss’ power – the power of the Watched – lies in her ability to influence the Watchers. (Wilkinson, 71)
Whatever one sees on the screen must never be taken for granted, for every scene on the television is tailor-made for the audience, especially in a state like Panem. The authorities have always shown to the Districts the scenes of the ruins of the District 13, which, as they told on TV, had been destroyed in the earlier revolution. In Mockingjay, it turns out that District 13 is well-alive and fully functioning underground. The scenes of blood-bath in the arena no more move the Capitol audience’s hearts, for they think that these things just happen on TV, and they have been fully desensitized to the suffering of other people. When asked about the reality TV shows, Suzanne Collins comments:
The Hunger Games is a reality television program. An extreme one, but that’s what it is. And while I think some of those shows can succeed on different levels, there’s also the voyeuristic thrill, watching people being humiliated or brought to tears or suffering physically. And that’s what I find very disturbing. There’s this potential for desensitizing the audience so that when they see real tragedy playing out on the news, it doesn’t have the impact it should. It all just blurs into one program. And I think it’s very important not just for young people, but for adults to make sure they’re making the distinction. Because the young soldier’s dying in the war in Iraq, it’s not going to end at the commercial break. It’s not something fabricated, it’s not a game. It’s your life. (Hudson)
President Snow and President Coin both know the power of the media and both want to feed their own propaganda to the public. Snow wants Katniss to present herself as a love-sick girl, so that her act with the berries may look like a desperate act of a girl on the verge of losing the love of her life. On the other hand, Coin wants her to look rough and tough, the face of the rebellion. She wants to exploit Katniss’s huge popularity in the whole of Panem and goads her to become the Mockingjay, the symbol of revolution. In Mockingjay, Plutarch, the head Gamemaker who had joined the rebels, informs: “…we’ve handpicked the eight of you to be what we call out ‘Star Squad.’ You will be the on-screen faces of the invasion.” (Collins, 257) It is the stardom that makes them different. Katniss has become a popular face, a celebrity, in Panem, and her face was used by the rebels cleverly to advertise their cause. It is just another front of the ‘watching and the watched’ game; they want the people of Panem to watch Katniss in her revolutionary actions and hope to enkindle the fire of rebellion in the hearts of the common people. What the people would get to see is just a pre-planned act, but it will seem to them that Katniss is fighting for the rebels. Though this does not happen because of Katniss’s lack of spontaneity in front of the camera, the intention of President Coin becomes clear: she wants to bank upon Katniss’s screen presence.
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Both the Capitol and the rebels begin a war of propagandas and both of them think of the television as the means to reach the people of Panem. Wilkinson writes:
In Mockingjay, the whole of Panem is turned into a kind of giant arena – broadcast every night in full color, complete with titles and a stirring soundtrack. The war seems to be less about fighting over physical territory, and more about fighting over control of the airwaves – whose propo (short for propaganda) will dominate? Who can spin the war to the best advantage? (Wilkinson, 75)
We are reminded of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian world in The Handmaid’s Tale, where Offred, the narrator, sees the news of war on TV and muses: “They show us only victories, never defeats. Who wants bad news?” (Atwood, 93) And in the end, President Coin’s master-plan succeeds in overthrowing Snow, when the rebels in a Capitol aircraft drop bombs on the Capitol’s children, making it look like happening on Snow’s order. Everyone sees the massacre of innocent children and Snow loses the authority and control he had over his people. Again, it is the act of watching that paves the way of Snow’s downfall. And it must be noted that Katniss executes President Coin in front of the whole Panem watching the scene. Thus, the act of watching and getting watched is also about creating shifts in power and getting the needed support from the watchers. Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy proves that in a dystopian setting, surveillance and watching are integral to the state power, but at the same time, it must not be forgotten that this watching over the people by several means by the government is not very uncommon in today’s politics also, thus making the books very much contemporary, as they offer an oblique critique of our own present-day society.
Works cited:
- Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. London: Vintage. 1996. Print.
- Booker, M. Keith. The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature. Westport: Greenwood Press. 1994. Print.
- Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games. New Delhi: Scholastic India. 2008. Print.
- ———————. Mockingjay. Greater Noida: Scholastic India. 2010. Print.
- Garriott, Deidre Anne Evans. “Performing the Capitol in Digital Spaces: The Punitive Gaze of the Panopticon among Fans and Critics”. In Space and Place in The Hunger Games: New Readings of the Novels. Edt. by Deidre Anne Evans Garriott, Whitney Elaine Jones and Julie Elizabeth Tyler. North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. 2014. Print.
- Hudson, Hannah Trierweiler. “Q&A; with Hunger Games Author Suzanne Collins”. Scholastic.com. https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/articles/teaching-content/qa-hunger-games-author-suzanne-collins/ Accessed 28 March, 2018. Web.
- Lockwood, Clara. “Not So Weird Science”. In The Girl Who was on Fire: Your Favourite Authors on Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games Trilogy. Edt by Leah Wilson. Dallas: Smart Pop. 2010. Print.
- Orwell, George. 1984. New Delhi: Pigeon Books. 2015. Print.
- Seed, David. Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. 2011. Print.
- Wilkinson, Lili. “Someone to Watch over Me: Power and Surveillance in the Hunger Games”. In The Girl Who was on Fire: Your Favourite Authors on Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games Trilogy. Edt by Leah Wilson. Dallas: Smart Pop. 2010. Print.
- Zamyatin, Yevgeny. We. London: Penguin Random House. 2007. Print.
