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.
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