Dystopia Now: Why ‘The Hunger Games’ Still Speaks Volumes About Teens, War, Propaganda, and More

The first quarter of the twenty-first century turns out to were an extremely complicated time to be a young person, which is reasonably the fulfillment. But take a look at the century’s maximum a success teenager franchise, the Hunger Games novels and films, a relentlessly grim collection that expanded this spring so as to add a 2nd prequel novel to Suzanne Collins’ authentic set of 3 books. That trilogy was once was 4 motion pictures between 2012 and 2015, adopted in 2023 via an adaptation of the primary prequel. All in all, that’s a large number of useless youngsters on display screen. Twentieth-century teenagers loved bloody entertainments just like the Scream and Friday the 13^th motion pictures, however the frame counts in the ones franchises are to Hunger Games slaughter because the crimes of Watergate are to any contemporary afternoon within the present White House.

You can measure Collins’ fulfillment in the most obvious tactics. The new sequel, Sunrise at the Reaping, moved 1.2 million copies in the USA on its first week off the block in March. All instructed, the books have bought greater than 100 million copies international. The 5 film diversifications are rated the 16^th highest-grossing movie franchise in North America via Box Office Mojo (regardless that I might argue with the way in which web page has sliced and diced quite a lot of franchises and would rank The Hunger Games #12). A Sunrise at the Reaping film is already scheduled to reach in theaters for Thanksgiving 2026.

A much less glaring approach to measure the Hunger Games’ good fortune is via how open to interpretation the books and flicks have confirmed—nearly as elastic because the Greek myths Collins drew on. (Reread Theseus and the Minotaur.) “I don’t write about adolescents. I write about war for adolescents,” Collins has mentioned. I believe that is each true and no longer. Yes, the collection is set battle, in addition to politics, propaganda, media manipulation, and gear in maximum of its manifestations. But while you create a futuristic dystopia arranged round a televised blood game through which teenage gladiators are compelled to battle to the loss of life, you’ve both wittingly or unwittingly created an attractive nifty metaphor for highschool—the social battlefields of The Breakfast Club and Mean Girls made literal.

There is intergenerational battle, too. Coriolanus Snow, the evil president of Panem, the tales’ dystopia, justifies the Games as “a pageant of honor, courage, and sacrifice” supposed to make stronger the bond between the ruling Capitol and its outlying, previously rebellious districts. “This is how we remember our past,” he says. “This is how we safeguard our future.” The common sense doesn’t monitor, even in context, however adolescent readers and moviegoers most likely listen a variant of the previous parental boilerplate: Someday you’ll thank me for this.

As for grander subject matters, perusing the intensive instructional literature dedicated to the collection, I’ve realized that The Hunger Games could also be a parable in regards to the risks of giant govt and thus an inspiration to younger Republican activists, however that it’s also a parable in regards to the risks of source of revenue inequality, pitched to the Occupy Wall Street crowd.

Or the story could be an allegory of the American Revolution . . . or of Christian love and sacrifice . . . or of the twenty-first century’s cutthroat school admissions derbies and ruthless activity markets. It could be free-market propaganda. It could be a veiled complaint of the Global War on Terror (getting into its 2nd decade when the primary Hunger Games movie hit theaters in 2012). The heroine Katniss Everdeen is an American frontier archetype, descended from James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo and the loners performed in film westerns via John Wayne and Clint Eastwood—until, what together with her deadly prowess and indifference to male suitors, she provides a proud feminist center finger to “heteronormative expectations.”

The Hunger Games may well be about some or many or a majority of these issues immediately: pop artwork that lands large isn’t at all times simple to parse—or essentially coherent in any respect. People can see what they wish to see in The Hunger Games, even the commentator at the Stormfront, a neo-Nazi web page, who hailed Katniss as a “Hitler figure, a veteran, a reluctant hero, an idealist.”

On 2nd concept, him we’ll forget about.

****

But most of the people don’t pass to the flicks to take in allegories and parables. I’m a fan of the conflicted enthusiasm of The National Review’s John Podhoretz in regards to the first Hunger Games image: “The thing is gripping as hell . . . I don’t know that these books or the movie that springs from them are morally defensible, really—they glory in the violence that they view with horror— but my oh my they do get under your skin and into your head.”

Simply put, the flicks are well-made, well-acted entertainments, suspenseful, and pleasurable. But “simply put” isn’t my activity right here. So what does it say about contemporary occasions that they produced this abnormal, convoluted, and brutal saga that has resonated so profoundly and lucratively with younger audiences—and older ones, too—however in every other technology would possibly have made a couple of ripples as a provocation when dropped into the pond however another way sunk briefly to cult exploitation film standing? (See: Death Race 2000.)

Simply put: what’s mistaken with us?

There are some glaring e-ticket solutions any individual may just recite with out an excessive amount of concept: 9/11, America’s blundering Global War on Terror, the Great Recession, the degradations of on-line tradition, local weather exchange, the upward push of right-wing populism and nationalism world wide, and Trumpism right here at house, the stain we will’t get out. The MAGA phenomenon postdates The Hunger Games, however each have been incubating all the way through the similar length (and proportion cosmopolitan elites as their leader villains).