I just finished reading all three books in the Hunger Games series. Suzanne Collins writes with a deep sense of the political reflected both historically and in a contemporary setting. Yet, the HG trilogy is limited in its political gaze, missing various radical possibilities of critiquing the state and its allied projects of sovereignty, legitimacy and citizenship.
The very obvious referencing of the reality shows apart, these books clearly invoke the penal regimes of post-war societies with their surveillance and disciplinary state apparatuses. The tryst with the early modern state is present too, though it may not have been fully intended. Half way through the third book, the reader may find resonances of the democratic premises of the French revolution gone awry in Katniss’s disillusionment with the power arrangements and authorities who set out to persecute figures and destroy remnants of Snow’s order. Collins may not have intended to recreate disenchantment with the French Revolution in particular – but the stark absence of humanitarian norms in uprooting the wasteful, pleasure-seeking, capitalist (by which I mean surplus-appropriating) political order of the Capitol may be instructive. The willingness to replicate the very insidious and degrading instruments of coercion that the Capitol used to terrorize districts into compliance – the Hunger Games – may not be mirrored in the French Revolution. But the Reign of Terror did significantly feature the use of the Guillotine and in the third book, Coin’s potential inconvenient detractors, including Katniss herself, are sought to be eliminated in a plot that could have been scripted by either the Capitol or the rebel forces.
Collins has got a firm grip of the political possibilities in iconography – the Mockingjay pin and outfits and the birdsong. As my friend G points out, the figure of the Avox or the voiceless, Panem and the Capitol, the names of so many characters like Cato and Cinna are inspired by Roman history and mythology and their functions in the novels partially reflect the symbols they represent. Some of this stuff is at best, plain cheesy and at worst, coarse as in Peeta Bread and the President cold as Snow.
So, what else is deeply political about her books? Walter Benjamin’s (and btw, Derrida speaks of it too) notion of foundational violence springs from almost every chapter in the three books. How can that which is completely lacking in justice at the originary moment, the moment of founding, be trusted to be just after it has been institutionalized and entrenched as legitimate power? The Hunger Games is only the monument to this foundational violence. The granting of tesserae or the food ration to those who are willing to insert their names into the draw for the Hunger Games reinforces and intensifies such violence. The arena of the Hunger Games themselves could be a scene straight out of Agamben’s Homo Sacer where the extra-legal flourishes, where people are allowed to die (“let die” in the famous words of Agameben), where people are reduced to a state of bare life, at other times, their deaths are staged by an all-powerful sovereign, with the additional elements of entertainment and spectacle thrown in. In fact, other strong indications lie in instances where Katniss tries to find an answer to the inexplicable question that torments her, why is she simply not allowed to take her own life, both during the Hunger Games and after she has killed a key figure of the rebellion? These are all themes Agamben explores quite rigorously in his writing – one can’t help wishing for a little more fictional padding that address these questions more elaborately in the HG books.
Another question that eludes me, why are concepts of democracy and human rights so alien to this book? Surely, post the World Wars, the centres or should I say, the capitals of affluence, consumerism and conspicuous wealth managed to appropriate the surplus value of the producers of such wealth (in this case, the workers in the mining, food, and industrial districts, etc) within the paradigms of the welfare state and liberal-democratic institutions? Yes, the right to exercise legitimate violence was violated in stark violation of human rights conventions in the contemporary histories of Western nations, but in the HG trilogy, you won’t even find a ghost of a tribunal of justice. Surely, even the most authoritarian and brutish regime needed the vote of popular sovereignty and surely, the profligate citizens of the Capitol could not have supplied all of it? The willingness to squander Beetee’s technology and Peeta’s leadership qualities in the Arena seems to be the antithesis of modern governmental regimes that are eager to evoke their citizens’ consent to fully exploit their utility. The only shadow of democracy one sees in either the Capital or the rebel organization vis-à-vis the districts is the procedural kind witnessed in the rebels’ use of the vote (the rebel forces ask the surviving victor tributes to vote for or against reinstating the Hunger Games in a post-Snow order) and the overwrought rules of the Hunger Games. And this brings me to the other frustrating aspect of the Hunger Games. This book, though it promises to be about so much more than power and resistance, is constantly lapsing into a book about an evil, unscrupulous dictator baying for the districts’ blood and brooking no resistance either from potential political rivals in the Capital or rebellion in the districts. There is little attempt made to disperse power or to deny the tendency to see authority as emanating from a single monolithic source. There is a tentative attempt to complicate power configurations with the figures of the district Peacekeepers and Mayors who are local strongmen. But these men are clearly agents of sinister forces ensconced in secured fortresses of power (read the mansion of President Snow). There is no attempt to understand the political economy or the cultural aspects of the power they wield. They are present only in their sadistic impulses (as in the case of Romulus Thread) or in their presumed desire to keep their families alive (in the instance of Cray and the older Peacekeepers)
The politics of the rebellion is set adrift from the violence of governmental regimes in recent modernity. Questions like these are coarse and insulting to a fictional enterprise, why does Plutarch seek to overthrow the Capitol, what are Coin’s motivations, what unites this disparate community of dissenters? Clearly, convictions of humanity are an inadequate explanation given what we know of both Plutarch and Coin. One could argue that this is exactly what Collins wishes to avoid, a petty description of intent and conflicting psychologies of personalities. And that would be entirely commendable if we could only have more credible narratives involving the rebellion that give us better insights into revolutionary consciousness. The Hunger Games dominates such consciousness while the regimes of life-denying rationing, the smothering of creative impulse, the quasi-citizenship of these district residents and the violence of a state committed to the protection of its subjects are all disappointingly understated in such consciousness.
We do however get a sense of how a rebellion is compromised in its critique of the incumbent political dispensation from the way it partakes of the same technological apparatuses of bodily tracking, propaganda dissemination and the ideologies of collateral damage (in many ways, Gale is the face of such a deadly compromise). But Collins cannot escape the pathological temptation to assign a face to the resistance (Coin) thereby diluting the inherent flaws of all such subversive formations.
One is seriously tempted to conclude that the Hunger Games offers tantalizing glimpses of the political lost in a populist desire for visual representations of the movie spectacle. But that would be denigrating the medium of Hollywood as lost to nuances of radical politics and surely, that cannot be the case? I wonder what then lies behind the squandered wealth of the political in The Hunger Games?
theorhetorique 