Showing posts with label Suzanne Collins. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Suzanne Collins. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games Trilogy is Anti-war and Anti-government?


From the beginning of the Hunger Games, I imagine it’s fairly easy for readers to get caught up in the pageantry, the romance, the intrigue of the Games and Katniss Everdeen’s war against the Capitol. This is so much the case that readers tend to laud the books for their strong heroine, their encapsulated and far-fetched view of teen romance (more than one man wants me at once! Whatever shall I do? It’s a tale as old as time), that the same readers don’t see through to what is probably the most important messages of the trilogy: War is Bad and so is Controlling Government. According to Collins’ narrative, those two things actually go hand in hand, as when in the last book the Capitol’s power begins to disintegrate, District Thirteen takes an even greater interest in war-mongering. And Katniss has demonstrated through her regret at the death of her friends and countrypeople, the destruction of her homeland and the murder of her sister, that the violence and so-called casualties of war are exactly what makes war so undesirable.
Thus, at the end of the Hunger Games, we find Katniss in a position strikingly similar to that of a veteran who didn’t want to serve a second term after the horrors of a first. To carry this rusty metaphor further, Katniss began the 74th Hunger Games in the position of a drafted soldier, but a soldier grudgingly willing to follow orders (orders that she set herself, yes, but orders reinforced by the “kill-or-be-killed” rules of the Hunger Games) and she promises her sister that she will, in fact, “Really, really try” to win the Games. She consoles herself with Gale’s advice that if she forgets the other tributes are human, than she won’t have any trouble killing them at all. From there on, it’s perhaps too easy to excuse Katniss’s actions of murder: she’s defending herself, her sister, and the people she kills have been manufactured by Collins to be real villains, seen as fully-formed killers and baddies while Katniss retains her purity as a girl who’s been forced to grow up too soon in a situation one of her age should never be in. 
Old enough to kill people, old enough to become
reluctant figurehead of a rebel army, I always say.
As the novels develop, Collins allows Katniss to maintain this innocence and bewilderment towards horrors of violence, victimizing her character at every turn with the crushing control of first the Capitol, and then through a wary alliance with District Thirteen.
Thus, at the end of Mockingjay, the final book of the Hunger Games trilogy, veteran Katniss is quite literally battlescarred, a recluse, terrified of what the future may hold, refusing to play any part in the new system of government installed and well aware that more violence is likely just around the corner, for as Plutarch says, “We’re fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self-destruction.” In this way, Collins’ Katniss rounds off her argument about the horror of war and the unnecessary control of government.

What is the greatest challenge to Collins’ dilution of an anti-war, anti-government trilogy? There always is one. In this case, there’s going to be three huge ones: the movies. The small message Collins did create by her trilogy will not translate into the trilogy of Hunger Games movies, blockbusters though those movies may be, for the movies are at their basic level an insult to the readers of the books – by watching the movies, the readers become the very spectators of Hunger Games and violence, fans of the Hunger Games and supporters of the tribute Katniss, we've been educated by Collins’ trilogy to dislike. In an unfortunate turn of events, stardom, screenwriting, and popularity have tragically caused the Hunger Games books to be regarded with the same youth angst and enjoyment as Twilight and Harry Potter, examples that do not carry the same enduring message through their sequels. Collins spent three whole novels criticizing the controlling viewers of the Hunger Games; with the movies, we're all made into hypocrites.