The thing about real life is that it’s weird. There are 7,000,000 worlds that exist almost entirely independently of what the other 6,999,999 worlds believe. Everyone is at the center of their own world, looking at the earth through their subjective lens. This almost always leads us to believe that our comfort is of tantamount importance, our lens is the most objective lens, our world is the most real. Facebook and the fragmentation of niche media markets help enforce this idea, we create our own stories based on our own dramas. We never have to interact with anything that invalidates our experience. My girlfriend is acting distant, I’ve got a job interview, I pulled an all-nighter studying for finals. All of these things become the hourly climaxes of our minute-by-minute stories.
Great art both enhances and shatters this notion. It broadens your perspective to a more inclusive one while at the same time lending credence to your unique subjectivity. This is why I’m hopeful for the popularity of the Hunger Games. The drama of the human element that exists in the relationship between Katniss and Gale and Peeta draws people in. We care about Katniss and we love Gale and/or Peeta.
But the story doesn’t end there, and that’s not really even the primary motivation of the story. Where the Hunger Games gets really great is where it uses those relatable elements to propel social awareness. The novel is acutely aware of its historical place in economics and politics, and is pretty effectively using dystopian tropes to further the awareness of these dangers, more so than any pop culture phenomenon within recent memory. The tyranny of the capitol is abundantly apparent from the reaping to the final blow in the last book. The people of District 12 are resigned to either increasing their odds of being picked for the Hunger Games in order to get food, eating food thrown in the mud, or breaking out of their enclosed district in order to get it. A small portion of the population (the Capital) controls the vast majority of the wealth and the means of production (the capital).
The citizens of the districts, especially the outlying districts, have lives that are so difficult that they are forced to focus merely on surviving. They work for a living, and then they go home and they try to relax and deal with their personal lives. They don’t have time to devote to overthrowing the Capital. Even if they did, they would barely be able to scrape together the means of doing so because of their economic position. But Katniss is able to fight back. Peeta is able to fight back. District 11 is able to fight back (despite being immediately quelled, that rebellion still counts). These small insurrections are all caused by personal dramas driving them, and they all (eventually) propel more massive and wide-spread action.
The Hunger Games is fiction- fiction is where you are allowed to test ideas and see what resonates. I’m not saying that we live in a society that is on par with the Hunger Games. I don’t even know if I buy into the arguments that the Hunger Games (well, primarily Suzanne Collins, as I doubt Lionsgate is interested in questioning the status quo) or accept her response to these issues. But, I like to think that the Twilight crowd is going to see this movie (and the LA Times tells me they are) and being forced to struggle with these issues. A movie that appeals to a younger demographic and deals with these large, over-arching themes rarely gets this kind of traction. I hope that this means something positive about the way that movie audiences are engaging with pop culture. Or, at the very least, that Collins is able to beat them over the head with the dystopian grotesque in order to raise the level of awareness. But I mean, it’s a good story nonetheless.
