Read my first post on Suzanne Collins’s series – The Hunger Games: Panem’s Politics. As with that post, there are spoilers below!

The heart of The Hunger Games is the victory of imagination over the power of tyranny.

Katniss, Gale, Peeta and the others of the Rebellion are involved in a fight no one thinks they can win, because the Capitol is so unbearably powerful. The Capitol quelled a 13-District rebellion once before, and it keeps the remaining 12 Districts in check with The Hunger Games and the heavy hand of tyranny. Two tools are employed by the Capitol: military power and dehumanization.

Dystopia and The Fall

Tolkien wrote, in explaining his storytelling philosophy behind The Lord of the Rings:

“Anyway, all this stuff is mainly concerned with Fall, Morality, and the Machine … There cannot be any ’story’ without a fall – all stories are ultimately about the fall – at least not human minds as we know them and have them.”

I think this explains the appeal of dystopia. Why do we enjoy stories where everything seems to go wrong? Why do we enjoy fairy tales that keep the grim and Gothic details more than the sanitized versions? Because we know there’s truth in the simple belief that the world is not as it should be. Something is terribly wrong. So the appeal of The Hunger Games is a very human one.

The Fall and Power in The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and The Hunger Games

We’ve all heard Lord Acton’s famous statement: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The ideas of the Fall and the corrupting influence of power are related. Because the world is not as it should be – both on the whole and in each individual – things get corrupted. The achievement of power has an important corollary – the absence of restraint. The more power one holds, the less accountability, and the less one has to answer. If I’m your subordinate, I have to answer to you. If I’m your equal, we probably both have to answer to someone else. If I’m your boss, at the top of the chain, I answer to no one. Without restraint, corruption is more likely. We need not get into the Christian theology of sin to arrive at this point. All our history and stories affirm it well enough. The Lord of the Rings was very much about power and the corruption thereof. And remember what Dumbledore said to Harry about power:

It is a curious thing, Harry, but perhaps those who are best suited to power are those who have never sought it. Those who, like you, have leadership thrust upon them, and take up the mantle because they must, and find to their own surprise that they wear it well.

Much like possessing the Hallows, very few are the people who can handle power, and only those who do not want it.

Lord Acton believed the history of humanity was the history of the pursuit of liberty. The history of Panem is that same history. The first rebellion was quelled, and freedom has been prohibited since then. But another revolution is brewing.

The Capitol’s Power and Reality TV

The most obvious form of power the Capitol wields is its overwhelming military power. It can shut down rebellion with brute force with the use of weapons, something we see far too often in our own world. But it also has another, perhaps more powerful tool yet: subtle and slow dehumanization of its citizens.

The most sinister dehumanization has only been hinted at: the smell of blood on President Snow’s breath. No, I don’t think he’s a vampire. I think it’s possible he’s become so monstrous that he’s come to enjoy the taste of human flesh and blood. Along the same lines of dehumanization, we also see the Game Makers’ awful transformation of the fallen tributes into “muttations” – inhuman combinations of themselves wolves – to attempt to finish off the final three tributes in the 74th Games.

But the more subtle version is the dehumanization of the citizens of Panem. What is valued, as is evident by the Capitol, is melodrama, entertainment, and fashion. The stylists working on Katniss are so out of touch with reality that they don’t even think she looks like a human until they’ve given her an extreme makeover. This constant emphasis on the superficial creates a horrifying situation far too much like our own: Capitol people are scandalized when someone’s fashion isn’t right, but are entertained by gruesome violence and death.

I don’t think it’s coincidence that The Hunger Games bear resemblances to the TV show Survivor. Now, before you get upset – I’ve watched a lot of seasons of Survivor! I’m not saying to do so means you’re contributing to the dehumanization of America. But I do think Collins has a warning for us here – one that we might do well to heed.

Survivor similarities include:

• Survivor participants learn to survive in front of cameras.
• TV editors manipulate perception of the characters with editing.
• The 24 tributes are set in an environment, and each year’s is different than the previous. The Survivor castaways face a new location/environment every year, with a new batch of selected participants.
• Consider the usual intro to a season of Survivor: Jeff Probst announces, “Twenty people! Thirty-nine days! One Survivor!”
• The game is “controlled”, though obviously to a much lesser extent.
• Twists and turns are thrown in – including the random changing of game rules mid-season.
• Relationships have developed, and one season, one participant proposed to another on the reunion show. (They’re still married.)
• Participants almost always have to do what they think is wrong in order to win.
• There has even been something similar to the 75th Hunger Games. Twice now, Survivor has brought back previous winners/participants. The 10th season was an All-Stars show, while the current season is a Heroes vs. Villains set-up, all with previous popular players. It’s fascinating to watch certain participants stand in awe of other “legendary” players.

Now, Survivor itself is rather benign. No one ever dies on Survivor. But many similar elements to the Hunger Games are there: out in the wild with only your skills and a few items as resources. Competition against participants. Alliances are formed which will have to be broken in the end. And in fact, one of the ongoing debates of Survivor, season after season, is whether or not it’s required that you lie, cheat, steal, and betray in order to win the game. Usually, the answer is in the affirmative: Yes, you simply must stab people in the back in order to win. It’s just part of the game. This is the same thing The Hunger Games’ tributes must ultimately decide: Yes, I must kill innocent people in order to win this game.

Practically, Survivor was a good choice for Ms. Collins – a TV writer – to mimic because of the adventure element. But it’s also the “original” or first very successful reality TV show. And Ms. Collins is most definitely targeting the dehumanization that accompanies reality TV in these books. Watch this great interview where she calls her story a combination between gladiator games of antiquity and modern reality TV. This is an amazing blend of classical and contemporary.

The story, she says, was sparked by her sudden flipping from a Reality TV show to broadcasted images of the Iraq War. The way those two things fused in her mind created The Hunger Games story.

The blend of entertainment and war – or perhaps more accurately, the use of war by TV stations for the purpose of entertainment and profit (think about Rita Skeeter: “The Daily Prophet exists to sell itself, you silly girl”) – carries an inherent danger in it, because of its tendency to result in amusing ourselves to death. By creating a culture in which all that matters is the superficial and shallow, and war and violence are amusing past times like baseball, the Capitol wields is most dangerous power: the dehumanization of its citizens by stripping away everything that makes them human.

The Power of Imagination

I wrote in my last post about The Hunger Games that Katniss needed spirit-knowledge to participate in rebellion against the Capitol. This is because spirit-knowledge and imagination are the same thing, really. C.S. Lewis said that “reason is the natural order of truth, but imagination is the organ of meaning.” Katniss understood that the Capitol was oppressive, but she didn’t understand what it meant until she began to understand herself as a human being.

Katniss became the Mockingjay, the symbol of rebellion around which the rest of the Districts have gathered, when she began to understand herself. The remaining Districts do not have the military power to overthrow the Capitol, but in rallying around Katniss and the Mockingjay symbol, they have begun to overthrow the more potent tool of the Capitol – the replacement of imagination (the faculty of knowing the spirit of humanity) with superficiality. When imagination returns to the people, overthrow of oppressive power comes next.

Tagged as: Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games