Hungry for a message?
There’s no denying that The Hunger Games has a deeper meaning. The question is, what is it?
LOS ANGELES— The Hunger Games, the teen action-adventure film that opened to big numbers last weekend, is, without question, a parable of the Occupy Wall Street movement. It’s also a cautionary tale about Big Government. And undeniably a Christian allegory about the importance of finding Jesus. Or maybe a call for campaign-finance reform? Like the Suzanne Collins bestseller on which it is based, the movie about a teenage girl fighting for her life in a televised death match in a dystopian post-apocalyptic country that has replaced America has a whiff of political content. But that has been enough to make a lot of people sniff out their own messages. The Hunger Games has become the rare piece of Hollywood entertainment: a canvas onto which disparate and even opposing ideologies are enthusiastically projected. “It’s the 1 per cent (who are killing the kids),” Gossip Girl star Penn Badgley told the website Vulture recently, referring to the story’s elites who force young people from different economic backgrounds to hunt one another for the amusement of society’s elites. “I think you’d have to be blind to not see that.” Pundits at Fox News, however, see a different meaning. The Hunger Games is “a furious critique of our political system, in which the central government grows rich from the toil of the masses,” Fox News contributor James Pinkerton wrote on the network’s website, in a piece titled “Hunger Games Shoots Arrows at Big Government, Big Media, Hits Bullseye. Ordinary folks are good, government is bad — really bad.”
If Badgley and Pinkerton seem to be watching different movies, there are reasons.
Collins (who also cowrote the film’s screenplay) and director Gary Ross leave a lot of blanks: Viewers don’t know, for instance, how the country sank into the dystopia. And unlike other young-adult literary sensations that have become hit films, such as the Twilight and Harry Potter series, The Hunger Games exists in a world much like ours. There are no fantastical elements — boys can’t fly on brooms or turn into wolves.
“The Hunger Games has this feeling of being contemporary and political but without being really clear what its politics are,” said Robert Thompson, a professor of media and popular culture at Syracuse University.
Even Jennifer Lawrence, the star of the film, has gotten in on the act. She told Parade Magazine recently that she saw The Hunger Games primarily as an indictment of our obsession with reality television. “I was watching the Kardashian girl getting divorced, and that’s a tragedy for anyone,” she said. “But they’re using it for entertainment, and we’re watching it. The books hold up a terrible kind of mirror: This is what our society could be like if we became desensitized to trauma and to each other’s pain.”