The Hunger Games
depicts a dystopian society. What is haunting to realize is that we are that
dystopia. In their world they watch people fight for their lives under a
corrupted system. In our world we are watching people watch people fight for
their lives under a corrupted system while living in a corrupted system of our
own. This corrupted system (ours and theirs) includes, but is not limited to,
the government, the media, and big business, which all work together to produce
the same thing with the same agenda and motives and are essentially the same
thing themselves.
In Adorno and Horkheimer’s “The Culture of Industry:
Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” it describes the media as self-perpetuating.
Society has made media an industry for it’s culture. It produces what it wants
and is reinforced by what it produces. There are several points from their
essay that are supported and paralleled by examples from The Hunger Games.
“Like its adversary, avant-garde art, the culture industry
defines its own language positively, by mean of prohibitions applied to its
syntax and vocabulary. The permanent compulsion to produce new effects which
yet remain bound to the old schema, becoming additional rules, merely increases
the power of the tradition which the individual effect seeks to escape.”
(Culture of Industry, p. 101) New things in popular culture only further define
it and make it more rigid. When it’s added to, it gives the culture scope to
squelch change and difference. In The Hunger Games the rules are revised
to broaden the terms and enforce the system. They announce that two people can
win because they know this will keep viewership and avoid a rebellion of an
idea where Katniss, the lead of the movie, will not follow the rule anyway so
they turn her ideals into part of the rules. This happens twice as her and
Peeta try to commit a double suicide to stick it to the man, but instead the
system turns it on them to keep them under control of the system.
Adorno and Horkheimer write, “The subject matter itself,
down to its smallest elements, springs from the same apparatus as the jargon
into which it is absorbed… Deals struck between the art specialists and the
sponsor and censor.” (p. 102) The apparatuses of media and government make
popular culture and prime the audience to receive it the way they want to
because what it has already fed us, and the support we feed back by buying in.
Katniss is a prime example of this because she is against the system, but makes
deals with the system for her own purposes. She fakes love to please the
sponsors in order to save her self and her family, and perpetuates the drama
that will keep the show going just as we get roped in and get upset about the
injustice of the events in the movie while and perpetuate the system that makes
it by using it as our entertainment.
We inadvertently view The
Hunger Games thinking that we are experiencing the knowledge effect (and
learning the corruption of the system), when in fact The Hunger Games is part of the system it purports to expose and is
actually part of the reality effect, or the system hiding itself by producing
ideas about itself.
As I watched The
Hunger Games with my roommates and made exclamations on the ridiculousness
of the game maker’s staff being captivated by and believing in Peeta and
Katniss’s romance—a romance that is their own creation—one of them commented,
“That’s the point.” The point is that we believe in the creation, too.
To be continued... (Just like the trilogy! :P)
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