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…

Weird tales, well told

For one thing, her stories are more original, imaginative and accomplished than much of what is served up to young fantasy readers. The reason I reached for Red Spikes a few nights ago is because I wanted to be transported. I wanted a way out of my worries, and in her short stories Lanagan places you in an (often unnervingly) immediate, vivid and visceral other place.

She’s economical with the detail she gives you, winding her descriptions around dialogue or a protagonist’s thoughts rather than self-consciously setting the scene. The situations and societies she presents feel solid, brutally so at times, without you needing to be told what colour the sky is. The story is about the situation, not the setting, if you see what I mean.

And those situations are genuinely unusual, strange and surprising. You can set your story on the third moon of Azkablam and still make it clichéd, formulaic and dull as ditchwater (famed for its dullness). In Red Spikes and another collection, Black Juice, a girl watches her sister killed in a tar-pit as punishment for murdering her husband, while elsewhere in a circus-y dystopia two anti-clown vigilantes carry out a hit. A girl in a paper dress graduates from Bride School, and a boy finds some tiny figures of a bear and a heavily pregnant armoured queen who grow and come to life in the night. Naturally, he is enlisted as midwife.

Lanagan’s stories are bizarre, and even when you’re in more familiar terrain they’re often told from an unusual point of view. In Black Juice a village is periodically attacked by terrifying underground ‘yowlinin’ monsters. So far, so Tremors. But the tale is told by an ‘untouchable’ outcast, treated as a monster herself, who saves the life of the boy she loves only to be rejected. However, UNLIKE the Little Mermaid, she doesn’t wimpily dissolve into seafoam, but sees him for the coward he is and strides away into her future.

These synopses have probably given you a clue that as well as being strange, Lanagan’s stories are often pretty dark. And if you think Harry Potter is ‘dark’ you may be in for a shock: the first few chapters of her novel Tender Morsels include child abuse, incest, forced abortion and gang rape.

Tender Morsels

Here’s a review that describes why I think it’s a remarkable work. But it is distressing. Briefly: 14-year-old Liga lives in the usual cottage-on-the-edge-of-the-dark-forest with her father, who repeatedly rapes her. When she becomes pregnant, he forces her to have an abortion. He dies, but she discovers she has become pregnant again. She has her baby and lives alone in relative peace in the cottage until some boys from the nearby town come to find her and sexually assault her. Liga despairs, takes her baby daughter to a ravine in the forest and tries to kill them both, but they are magically saved and wake in what seems to be a parallel world in which she is at last safe. The townspeople have been replaced with kind, two-dimensional versions of themselves, and in this world there are no men. It seems to be a heaven that Liga has created to protect herself and her daughters (she has another baby). But as her daughter grows up the membrane between their protected world and the world Liga left behind starts to grow thin, and the story becomes a reimagining of the traditional fairytale of Snow White and Rose Red.

Of course, when it was published Tender Morsels met with a fair amount of controversy, but I agree with Lanagan when she says “I guess I’m not a big fan of corralling sex, death and war into the adult world and then giving children a terrible shock when they realise their existence.” Besides, there is nothing graphic, titillating or exploitative about the descriptions of the abuse suffered by Liga in the novel. One of the things the book is about is how people take refuge and heal from trauma.

Women in fairytales

It’s also about fairytales, and women’s lot in them. Asked in this interview why she was drawn to the Snow White and Rose Red story, Lanagan said:

Mainly I was annoyed by what the Grimm Brothers had done with Caroline Stahl’s story, that is, rewritten it to deliver a very oppressive message to girls and women: At all costs, however beastly your menfolk’s behaviour, remain nice, kind and always willing to come to their aid. This kind of message is not uncommon in the collections of transcribed and revised folktales of the 18th and 19th century, and it’s distressing that those versions are often mistaken for the root stories – although they still sometimes contain the germs of the originals, they are very much products of their times and societies.

So, the irritation was the main thing, but then I couldn’t resist a story that had such a great character as the ungrateful dwarf, the kindly bear and the three bemused women, trying to make good lives for themselves in an ever stranger world.

Like Angela Carter, Lanagan seems to be interested in the rawer, messier, less moral incarnations of our familiar fairytales, but where they differ is that Lanagan’s story fully inhabits the folkloric style where Carter’s versions are self-conscious and ironic.

The final thing I love about Lanagan’s stories is that they’re full of GIRLS and WOMEN! All kinds of different ones! With different personalities! And they do things! In Tender Morsels there are two witches, both distinct and full-developed characters, with powers and flaws and everything. The novel deals with violence against women, but also with women’s sexuality and desires.

I can’t say I’d recommend them to help you get to sleep, but Margo Lanagan’s stories offer strange worlds to be explored.

“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.