Welcome back to Pandora Locks, a story of hopefully inquiry. This week we will be talking about a cultural resource (movies, books, media, etc.) and the imaginative innovation that breathes through its pages. Chill out and put on your reading glasses, it is time for today.
Today’s cultural resource is the movie called The Hunger Games (the book). Suzanne Collins’ tale is an imaginative alternative to the USA, military industrial complex, U.S.A. as a company, and the USA’s 2000s affairs in Iraq and the greater middle east. This book as a cultural resource is evident by its AAA publishing, immense success and popularity/subsequent impact on the young adult genre and YAs themselves. The imaginative alternative aspects are in the novel’s portrayal of war and scarcity as a tool of the oligarchical government powers. 12 (13, spoilers) sub-cultures of people live under this culling where a teenager of both the sexes portrayed is taken from their home to fight for the entertainment of the members of the Capitol, a dystopian version of the highest-class bourgeoisie. The resulting twenty-four teenagers battle to the death in the Hunger Games.
The chosen children perform in this way to present a good show, but they are also fighting for their lives with the possibility to attain riches and fame. This is a clear imaginative parallel of the capitalistic methodology creating ruthless citizens pulling their way to the top while ensuring others do not rise out of fear they’re beating them, with only their success in mind; Once sweet children, before the concept of “win everything or die” took them. In this fictitious world, instead of a democracy/democratic republic in the USA, The Hunger Games portrays a government led in the ruling city, The Capitol, in the country of Panem, by a dictator, President Coriolanus Snow.
The alternative here is its similarity to DC and the President of the United States: We have the perception of voting and impact of your action; the citizens of each district know their situation can only be hopeful if they work within the system and make no waves or improve their lives by somehow winning the hunger games. Katniss only exists to ensure the cycle continues and if successful in her efforts, be a testament to the virtue of participating and doing well in this game. Luckily this version of the world is not true to life’s culture, mindset, and technology. That is, not yet anyway.
The alternative is imaginative only in the extent of its dystopian landscape, there would need to be technological changes for the controls The Capitol employed: genetically spliced animals, as well as isolated geography with no certain life outside the admittedly confined districts. Systemically, it is complicated to explain that the USA has a deep permeating oligarchy, but only in practice (don’t worry about it). There is a gridlock in the USA’s political ecosystem that could help or hinder this idea of a country and a people bound to glorified violence and praise of the most heartless, bloodthirsty, and self-centered. In some ways it is more confusing, as the US finds itself calling the veterans the best of us while providing no practical support after they either get back from their compulsory call to arms or worse their volunteer, as the reality equivalent Katniss. Disparately, the winners of the hunger games are rewarded with riches and idolatry where the US seemingly forgets their veterans exist outside voting years.
During said voting years, if systemic change were to occur, the imagined new would require a charismatic leader with desires to mold the world in their design and the intent to subvert the processes and checks/balances in place to prevent this. Plausible, that’s what I would call the imagined alternative in place; we live in a more comfortable version of volunteering our bodies to the Sisyphean today, and we certainly had a potential to fall towards further ruin of Collins’ novel variety during the financial crisis that was occurring as this story was being told to the masses (Thanks for saving us from that timeline, Suzanne!).
The masses’ tendency to allow their lives to be obfuscated for the purpose of a minority of wealthy individuals expanding their empire is not ideal, but it is the current condition, and hopefully that is changing. We will see if and how society develops towards Collins’ cultural resource’s representation of the world: as social media plays a deeper role in society, the advertisement of US and allies military muscles being flexed will undoubtably shift social views, and the movies that show us who we are will hopefully spark a new light of reflection in the citizens who think its “just a movie.” If you like thinking about things as more than “just a” media works, please consider reading my other works on this website. Until then, read well, and think weller.
Warmly,
-pey
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