She’s just a hungry girl,
In a post-apocalyptic wooooorld…

When The Hunger Games came out, we were faced with possibly the most ludicrous and yet most predictable controversy in recent film history: was Katniss Everdeen too fat? More specifically, was Jennifer Lawrence the wrong body-shape to play the protagonist of these phenomenally successful novels, as a number of critics and fans said? One quotation from the New York Times can stand in for a lot of others:

A few years ago Ms. Lawrence might have looked hungry enough to play Katniss, but now, at 21, her seductive, womanly figure makes a bad fit for a dystopian fantasy about a people starved into submission.

I’m not going to answer the question, because, y’know. But I do want to talk about why the question matters, because it’s not something so ludicrous we can dismiss it.¹

Cover design for an early UK release of the Hunger Games, by Jason Chan

Essentially, these readers were arguing the case for realism. Katniss has access to limited calories (though more than some other people, due to her own skills) – this is part of the plot, theme and indeed title of the novel – so an actor of a certain body type might be less able to inhabit the role convincingly onscreen. Just as Renee Zellweger visibly put on some weight to play Bridget Jones², Jennifer Lawrence was expected to appear strikingly underweight to embody the theme of the narrative. It’s a simple biological fact.

Except, of course, that fact assumes that the Hunger Games trilogy, beloved of teenage girls in particular, is taking place in a cultural vacuum. That it just happens to involve a young woman with a fraught relationship to food, who is contrasted to the decadence and self-indulgence of the inhabits of the Capitol and other characters. I’m absolutely not arguing that these are harmful books, or that they’re written thoughtlessly. Nor is it my place to tell young women how they should interact with art. But I am pointing out that novels don’t become popular for no reason, particularly YA novels with strong female leads.

The cultural factors which bear on the novels increase drastically when it comes to putting Katniss on screen. Again, there is an argument that the fictional situation happens to involve a character who would have a particular physical appearance. But that discourse of realism and “accuracy” totally ignores the hundreds of images which young women are bombarded with every day. It assumes that young women are never told they’re too fat or too skinny, that they lack self control or a sense of proportion, that their success in life is directly related to their dress size. It assumes that when actors like Jennifer Lawrence relax in between film-shoots, there aren’t packs of photographers with zoom-lenses feeding the websites which police their bodies and point out how they’ve “let themselves go”. Talk about “accuracy” is deeply naive because it ignores the way actors’ public personas are constructed, how their lifestyle is carefully confused with the roles they choose and how their bodies are used in advertising. It also ignores the power of performance to draw us into a fictional world and convince us of its reality, surely one of the main reasons anyone films a book in the first place.

So much for the hungry girl, but I don’t think we can ignore the post-apocalyptic world and its relevance to this controversy. Katniss isn’t just a young woman who finds herself short on nosh after the shops have shut, she’s the central figure in a futuristic wasteland. “Post-apocalyptic” has also come in for a bit of controversy recently, with Mark Kermode demanding with typically entertaining zeal that if the apocalypse is the end of the world, then how can a film be post-apocalyptic? If the apocalypse has happened, and there’s anything left to have a film about, then that my friend is a shoddy apocalypse and you want to demand another one, that works like it says on the packet. Highly pleasing as this is, and far be it from me to out-pedant the worshipful Doctor, but apocalypse does not mean the end of the world.

Apocalypse means “revelation” or the “lifting of the veil”. The book we get most of our apocalyptic imagery from – four horsemen, 666, Whore of Babylon riding on a seven-headed beast, you know the drill – is referred to as both the Apocalypse of St. John and the Book of Revelation. The fact that the most famous one is most frequently framed as a vision of the end of the world means that we tend to assume that they’re the same thing (if we’re not massive pedants and unhealthily obsessed with etymology – oh no, wait…). But the crucial aspect is the “lifting of the veil”, the revealing of a deeper reality which is obscured by the world around us.³

I’m not bringing this up for the sake of sheer quibble (though that would be reason enough), but because I think a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction still has this original meaning embedded in it. So many post-apocalyptic films and novels have this sense of being not only “after the disaster” but also “after the revelation”, trying to strip back the complexities and confusions of modern life to get to what is basic and essential about us. In The Road, that’s the emotional bond between father and son, in Mad Max the depravity of humans as pack animals, in Escape From New York it’s a macho code of integrity.⁴

And in The Hunger Games it’s a famished young woman. If a deeper reality is being revealed in this apocalypse, a profound truth about humanity which lies beneath the surface of modern life, then it’s one which looks very similar to the line peddled by fashion magazines, diet books and vast swathes of Hollywood’s output. That young women should look as if they’re slightly undernourished. The tendencies of post-apocalyptic fiction mean that this film risks holding that image up as not only an ideal to aspire to, but as the most “natural” and “essential” state for them to be in.

Again, this doesn’t make The Hunger Games a bad book or a bad film, but it means that the way Katniss Everdeen is portrayed onscreen cannot be reduced to a question of “accuracy” to a description in the book. A film which presents a teenage girl as the prototypical member of humanity is a wonderful idea – not least because she’s active, intelligent and fighting on behalf of her people – but this one sits at the intersection of some very powerful cultural influences which we can’t ignore.

• Jem Bloomfield is an academic who works on theatre and performance. A longtime BadRep reader, he’s very excited to be on the other side of the line, and the references to gin and tea in the other team bios make him feel very at home. Four years working on The Duchess of Malfi has given him a taste for writing about other things, so he blogs on culture, politics and gender at Quite Irregular.

1. Though it is ludicrous. Let no doubt be left about that.
2. No, I know. It’s not like I don’t have a problem with that too, but it’s awful in a slightly different way…
3. The titles of The Vision of Ezra and the Sibylline Oracles – both around during the first centuries of Christianity though neither made it into the Bible(s) – underline this point.
4. And with more time we could read right back from Snake Plissken’s tattoo to the Man With No Name, and wonder how much the classic Western is also driven by a desire to get its characters out into the oddly moonscapey deserts, to strip away the civilization. Or look at the fistfight between two astronauts which starts Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers, suggesting that getting to the moon called earth morality into question…

A few points before we go any further:

• This is us revisiting Suzanne Collins’s books, mainly, and looking at the characters we like, and how the books – for us – jigsaw with other franchises out there. Back in the mists of time, Team BadRep’s Jenni also talked about the books on here in a more spoiler-free, introductory way.
• SPOILER WARNINGS are all over this. Do not read this post if you want to read the books unspoilered.
• Sarah’s been interviewing the cast of the movie over on Den of Geek, and you can read those posts here, here, and here.
• As Bucky and I haven’t seen the press screenings, we’ll maybe be back to talk about the movie later.

On Those Triangular Twilight Comparisons

Miranda: I made a blog post the other week elsewhere on the internets about how the movie franchise is being merched, as far as I can tell, in a way which visually dovetails with a lot of Twilight merch, and the disappointment I feel around that. Nonetheless, Suzanne Collins’s bestselling trilogy is, I think, using the love triangle motif in an effective, nuanced way. So while the Twilight comparisons might be short-sighted, they’re not unreasonable. But what do my friends think?

Bucky: OK, so here’s my big confession: I sort of love Twilight. It’s the reading equivalent of eating popcorn, plus I’m a sucker for romance, which should be apparent in the fact that even the most depressing things I write are always thinly-veiled love stories. My beef with Twilight was the general mormon-propaganda shittiness. I could totally have gone for a general horror-lite romance WITHOUT the abominable gender politics and chastity stuff.

Throughout the first book, it was apparent that this wasn’t just going to be a vapid romance, which was fine and the nature of pitting them against each other sort of insisted that the romance be downplayed, but across the three books I was disappointed by the things that didn’t happen – when the action/adventure/1984 stuff took over the romantic hook was still what kept me reading!

Sarah: I think comparisons to Twilight are kind of irrelevant here, because they’re completely different stories in completely different genres. Twilight is a romance, and The Hunger Games is… well, anything but that. It’s an action/thriller/horror with strong anti-war sentiments, and I think reading The Hunger Games for the romance is doing it a massive disservice.

In particular, getting overly invested in the love triangle element is missing the point, because Gale and Peeta aren’t really individuals, they’re metaphors.

Bucky: OK, I’ll give you that it’s an unfair comparison, but there’s no escaping the Love Triangle parallels, Collins just uses it as a device to much greater effect, rather than pinning an entire series of books on it.

On the Boys

Sarah: Like I say, I think the boys are, in part, metaphors – Gale in particular, which is why the idea that anyone would declare themselves “Team Gale” utterly baffles me. Because what does Gale stand for? Anger. Revenge. He’s a hunter; he’s kind of Old Testament-y. He’s very black and white, and not very interested in forgiveness. He’s initially presented as having the most in common with Katniss: they have the same background, they live in the same area, they look like each other, they’re very close friends and their lives seem very similar. But even right at the beginning, she’s restraining him. He’s shouting about rebellion in the woods while she tries to calm him down and keep him safe. He just gets more violent as the books go on, and it’s his bombs that kill a bunch of innocent children. Gale is basically a terrorist, and his is no way to build a future.

Bucky: I do like what you’re saying about Gale. I think all the main characters are realised brilliantly, because they’re people, compromised and damaged people with their own agendas, not pin-ups like they would be in Twilight. But I don’t feel like Collins had such a good handle on Gale’s character in the first book – I think his anger was hinted at but I don’t think she’d made the leap towards thinking that he’d become Anger, Vengeance etc – early on he still has the potential to be a romantic lead and not a product of his society. Peeta is pretty great, in retrospect. He’s a well created character.

Sarah: Yeah, Peeta is great. Peeta is so great. It’s not Gale that Katniss seeks out when she wants to feel safe, it’s Peeta. It’s easy to forget how strong he is, because he’s so warm and protective. But Collins makes sure – over and over again, especially in Mockingjay – that he needs to be protected, too. I don’t think I can quite forgive Gale for that line where he says Katniss will choose whichever of them she can’t survive without, because he’s wrong – she’ll pick whoever can’t survive without her, which is clearly Peeta. Peeta is preternaturally calm, loving, and forgiving (until the Capitol breaks him). I think it’s super important for them to be together at the end, because they’re the only ones who understand one another – and they make one another better. They’re different, but their differences make them better equipped to work towards a world that’s better than either the world they grew up in, or the one that Gale and President Coin want.

I think maybe the way Peeta gets broken in Mockingjay is the first time we really appreciate him for who he is. I dunno. I’m still thinking about this.

Miranda: What d’you reckon about this piece over on Bitch, about masculinity in the trilogy? I’m digging it.

Sarah: I like it too. I’m not keen on the view that Katniss isn’t a feminist heroine because she “ends up weak” at the end of the trilogy. YEAH ALRIGHT LET’S SEE YOU GO THROUGH WHAT SHE DOES AND SEE HOW BLOODY XENA-LIKE YOU ARE – I might love Katniss a bit too much. Hmm.

Miranda: I thought it was interesting that they picked up on the “does she need to end up alone? How do feminists find romance in books now?” thing.

Sarah: Yeah – I mean, surely we’re not gonna claim that women can’t be in relationships with men and still be feminist? I think the happy ending, with all of its caveats, was necessary.

The leading lady we've been waiting for? Katniss Everdeen takes aim

“Like Joan of Arc”

Sarah: Katniss’s attitude to sex is worth thinking about, too. She’s almost completely sexless (unless we read between the lines a bit with all the many nights she spends sleeping in Peeta’s arms?) and just not really that interested in romance… but she explains that quite early on, I think, because it’s not a safe enough world that she’s ever really thinking beyond her next meal. I bloody love her, in exactly the same way I love Buffy and Starbuck and all those other tough-because-they-have-to-be women out there in sci-fi/fantasy.

Bucky: I think it’s pretty awesome. I know I wanted romance, but it’s still cool that she just doesn’t have time in her life to care about “petty” stuff like that.

Miranda: This whole area fascinates me. I think Katniss’s story engages with the issue of ‘sexless action heroines’ really well. A lot of my early engagement with feminism came from a place where, sick of all the sexualising/objectifying/insert buzzword here, you know what I’m talking about – I constructed a sort of mental checklist for movies. It involved asking questions like “is the heroine SENSIBLY DRESSED?!” and “is she defined by her romantic attachments (usually to men)?” It was like Bechdel Plus.

I think these remain pertinent questions to ask, and I still ask them. But I also think I spent years mistrusting any heroine who dared to fall in love or wear a V-neck, just in case she was being somehow undermined from somewhere. It’s only recently I’ve begun to engage with heroines like Emma Frost, and also to confront the fact that ‘sexless heroines’ can also feel quite limited in their own way, depending on how they’re written. Often I think we cite a heroine’s lack of sexual desires as evidence for her liberated awesomeness, but this can feel for me like a bit of a red herring, and one that’s still being driven, in a sense, by the same set of patriarchal restrictions. The question about how to write “feminist romance” is therefore an interesting one.

Katniss directly faces off with these questions. The novels show her wrestling a load of societal pressure to live out a romantic narrative and define herself against one – her survival may depend on it. Uunderneath all that, she does struggle with genuine desires for Peeta and Gale, played out against a hugely traumatic backdrop.

I thought it was fascinating – she does find love, but it’s a struggle to get there in fair, real terms. I think Katniss – though Jennifer Lawrence describes her as a Joan of Arc figure in your interview – goes a lot further than many heroines in TVTropes’s Jeanne D’Archetype section because we get to see that struggle played out, with all the paranoia over who’s controlling the narrative that that entails. She moves through a sexless phase, in the process taking on an entire system of oppression in order to discover how she really wants to express her desires, and how to be able to do that safely rather than it being a capitulation of any kind. These are books about struggle, personal and political.

Illustration from the initial range of UK print covers for the books - by Jason Chan

Revolution!

Bucky: I almost like the books more now that you’ve both pointed out the media and propaganda themes that I took for granted – they are, in hindsight, pretty strong ideas to sell to a teenage audience. I like to think that I’m quite media-savvy, but I guess that if I encountered this at a time in my life when I wasn’t then it might have raised some interesting questions.

Sarah: I do super-love that tension Miranda pointed out in her blog post, re: merchandising this franchise when it’s all about the evils of capitalism and in particular the way we exploit people in other countries. I think they should’ve gone with more Mockingjay “symbol of the rebellion” stuff, but in a way Capitol-themed makeup ranges are perfectly apposite.

Bucky: Yeah, the merchandising is insane, especially because propaganda is insanely merchandisable (by its very definition) so to ignore that angle and create “straight” merchandise like a Katniss barbie instead of “in-character” merchandise is just batshit.

In Conclusion…

Bucky: The more I talk to you guys, the more I feel like it’s cool I enjoyed these books and all, but I’m not the person whose life this might make a difference to. I don’t need any more role models, but younger readers might benefit from Katniss and will almost certainly benefit from the way that she isn’t sexualised or defined by her relationships. So that’s pretty cool.

Sarah: I’ve just got back from a press screening of the film. I think Gary Ross really really gets the political aspects of the book, and he’s really explicit about it, and there were at least two new bits he’d put in that made my jaw drop. My review’s over here.

Miranda: ONE DAY TO GO!

“Happy Hunger Games! And may the odds be ever in your favour!”

– Effie Trinket, The Hunger Games

Occasionally billed as the ‘anti-Twilight’, The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins tells the story of Katniss Everdeen, ‘the girl from District 12,’ who has to fight for her life when she takes her sister’s place in the Games.

Basic plot: a long time ago, a series of wars brought humanity to the brink of extinction. The Capitol won out, and to remind the surrounding poorer Districts it rules over of the horrors of war and their allegiance to the Capitol, the Districts must send ‘tributes’ each year, one boy and one girl, chosen by lottery, to fight to the death in games shown on national television. For one winner comes fame, a life of guaranteed luxury, and food for their district for one year; for the losers, nothing save the knowledge that their last breath, every wound, every blow has been broadcast live to their loved ones back home.

The Districts work to provide food and goods for the ruling class in the Capitol; they’re poor, underfunded places where poverty and starvation are rife. Kids can take tesserae, meaning their names are in the lottery more than once, to get extra grain for their family for the year. Katniss Everdeen supports her mother and younger sister with tesserae, and through hunting illegally on Capitol lands, but when her sister’s name comes up on Reaping Day, the whole world watches Katniss step up on stage to take her place.

Journeying to the arena, Katniss is taken to the Capitol, where rich sponsors compete to back her and she gets to know Peeta Mellark, the boy from District 12. But when the Games begin, will she be able to shoot arrows not at rabbits and deer, but at other tributes?

Alliances will be made and broken in the arena, but there can only be one winner.

You can read the first two chapters for free on the official website, and I really recommend you do. If you like it, buy it, read it, and share it with the teenagers in your family, if you’ve got them. The first novel, The Hunger Games, is followed by Catching Fire, and the trilogy concluded late last year with Mockingjay.

“If I can shoot rabbits, I can shoot fascists… If you tolerate this, then your children will be next.”

– The Manic Street Preachers

Why would I recommend The Hunger Games to BadRep readers? Well, they’re great books, and I like you guys. Oh, you mean to a feminist website specifically? Well, in a genre that often seems to think it needs to write about boys to get boys and girls to read it, this series features a brilliant, central female character, and other great, varied female characters besides, including soldiers and powerful politicians.

It’s a successful book by a female author, in a genre where female authors are often dismissed as (paranormal) romance writers or feel the need to hide their gender by writing under their initials. Katniss is neither always a victim, nor a sexualised Lara Croft-alike, and while she is in some ways a role model for young readers, she’s not perfect, she does make mistakes, which make her all the more believable.

While she’s protective of her family, she’s uncaring, paranoid and mean when dealing with people who fall outside her circle. She’s not a dyed-in-the-wool Joan of Arc figure; the first chapters show her arguing against her hunting partner’s politically rebellious comments. She’s clueless when it comes to other people’s feelings, terrible at realising her own, selfish, dangerously impulsive, completely a product of the dystopian society she lives in, and yet…

… I am trying hard, very hard, not to say too much about Katniss, her actions, her choices throughout the trilogy, what happens to her, and the dark places Collins goes with this character, just because I don’t want to make this review too spoilery. Suffice to say, she had me by the heartstrings the moment she stepped up to save her sister, and it is this complex and unique character who makes the series for me.

Collins avoided easy stereotypes and did not write a setting where boys have the advantage in violent situations because of “higher testosterone levels than girls”, or “slightly larger body mass”, or any of those excuses that usually get used when someone is telling you that they Don’t Watch Women’s Football Because [insert reason here].

Girls have won the Hunger Games, and won often. Winning isn’t just about brute strength, it’s about courage, smarts, a certain unsqueamish, unthinking approach to violence and your own survival. It’s also about the skills learned in your District, (some contenders can fish, some know which plants will poison you) the advantages of your District (were you starving before you left for the Games?), and social skill: can you charm the cameras enough so that rich sponsors will pity you, or perhaps bet money on you, and therefore send you gifts of weapons or medicine during the Games?

Skillfully, Collins has included almost ironic echoes of other fiction aimed at this age-group. In another life, the ‘Careers’ in the arena (kids from richer, better-fed Districts who train and actually volunteer for the games, in a bid for wealth and glory) would be the ‘jocks’ of any high-school drama.

The beautiful dresses made for Katniss for her pre-game appearances – every tribute has an image consultant, make-up artists, their own fashion designer – would be the ‘prom dress scene’ in another work, were not for the fact that everyone attending these parties is quite looking forward to watching her fight for her life in the Games, her fashion designer has put more thought into her outfits than one might expect, and that oh, she better fill up on those party favours, because she won’t be eating properly for a while…

It’s refreshing to read about a heroine who’s actually thankful for what she has, and who would find the concept of dieting absolutely ridiculous.

Katniss’s potential romances, Peeta and Gale – and there are two of them, as is traditional – would be the Jacob and Edward, the Stefan and Damon, that this story revolved around, were it not that the reader, and Katniss herself, is far more invested in whether characters live or die than who they sleep with! Though I’m Team Joanna I’m Team Gale, if you’re asking.

“I really can’t think about kissing when I’ve got a rebellion to incite.”

– Katniss Everdeen

Er, sorry Katniss.

Did I have any problems with the series? Well, the final book kind of went against my own sense of who should live, who should die and how, and to be honest, it felt a little like it was rushed to hit the release date in the shops. However, in much the same way that a dedicated Harry Potter fan wouldn’t recommend that you skip the series just because they didn’t like the infamous epilogue and thought that JKR needed a better editor after book three (oh she really did), my problems with Mockingjay don’t stop me wanting to recommend The Hunger Games to every book-lover I know.

I’m feeling nervous about the upcoming movie. Considering the Hollywood treatment given to the last kid’s franchise I loved, I hope Katniss is cast with dark hair, with olive skin, the way she’s described – I hope Thresh and Rue aren’t white. On a more speculative note, I’d jump up and down in the cinema if we see Cinna flirting with men. I really hope the real message of the books comes across: that political complacency is the real enemy, that if we’re duped by ‘bread and circuses’ then we’re all culpable for what is done in our names.

But however the movie turns out, Hollywood adaptations always mean more book sales, and more kids reading a series that teaches them to question authority, to question the media, that teaches them that rebellious actions can lead to change… well, that can only be a good thing.