{"id":11440,"date":"2012-07-10T08:00:53","date_gmt":"2012-07-10T07:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.badreputation.org.uk\/?p=11440"},"modified":"2012-07-10T22:56:45","modified_gmt":"2012-07-10T21:56:45","slug":"guest-post-clothes-horse-of-the-apocalypse-katniss-dress-size-and-the-book-of-revelation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/badreputation.org.uk\/2012\/07\/10\/guest-post-clothes-horse-of-the-apocalypse-katniss-dress-size-and-the-book-of-revelation\/","title":{"rendered":"[Guest Post] Clothes-horse of the Apocalypse: Katniss\u2019 Dress Size and the Book of Revelation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s a post from Jem Bloomfield<\/a>. If you have an idea for a guest post brewing in your brain, email us: badrepeditors@gmail.com<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

She\u2019s just a hungry girl,
\nIn a post-apocalyptic wooooorld…<\/em><\/p>\n

When The Hunger Games<\/strong> 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<\/strong><\/a> can stand in for a lot of others:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019m not going to answer the question, because, y\u2019know. But I do want to talk about why the question matters, because it\u2019s not something so ludicrous we can dismiss it.1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

\"Artwork<\/a>

Cover design for an early UK release of the Hunger Games, by Jason Chan<\/p><\/div>\n

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) \u2013 this is part of the plot, theme and indeed title of the novel \u2013 so an actor of a certain body\u00a0type might be less able to inhabit the role convincingly onscreen. Just as Renee Zellweger visibly put on some weight to play Bridget Jones2<\/a><\/sup>, Jennifer Lawrence was expected to appear strikingly underweight to embody the theme of the narrative. It\u2019s a simple biological fact.<\/p>\n

Except, of course, that fact assumes that the Hunger Games<\/strong> 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\u2019m absolutely not arguing that these are harmful books, or that they\u2019re 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\u2019t become popular for no reason, particularly YA novels with strong female leads.<\/p>\n

\"Poster<\/a>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 \u201caccuracy\u201d totally ignores the hundreds of images which young women are bombarded with every day. It assumes that young women are never told they\u2019re 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\u2019t packs of photographers with zoom-lenses feeding the websites which police their bodies and point out how they\u2019ve \u201clet themselves go\u201d. Talk about \u201caccuracy\u201d is deeply naive because it ignores the way actors\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

So much for the hungry girl, but I don\u2019t think we can ignore the post-apocalyptic world and its relevance to this controversy. Katniss isn\u2019t just a young woman who finds herself short on nosh after the shops have shut, she\u2019s the central figure in a futuristic wasteland. \u201cPost-apocalyptic\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Apocalypse means \u201crevelation\u201d or the \u201clifting of the veil\u201d. The book we get most of our apocalyptic imagery from \u2013 four horsemen, 666, Whore of Babylon riding on a seven-headed beast, you know the drill \u2013 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\u2019re the same thing (if we\u2019re not massive pedants and unhealthily obsessed with etymology – oh no, wait…). But the crucial aspect is the \u201clifting of the veil\u201d, the revealing of a deeper reality which is obscured by the world around us.3<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

I\u2019m 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 \u201cafter the disaster\u201d but also \u201cafter the revelation\u201d, trying to strip back the complexities and confusions of modern life to get to what is basic and essential about us. In The Road<\/strong>, that\u2019s the emotional bond between father and son, in Mad Max<\/strong> the depravity of humans as pack animals, in Escape From New York<\/strong> it\u2019s a macho code of integrity.4<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

And in The Hunger Games<\/strong> it\u2019s 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\u2019s one which looks very similar to the line peddled by fashion magazines, diet books and vast swathes of Hollywood\u2019s output. That young women should look as if they\u2019re 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 \u201cnatural\u201d and \u201cessential\u201d state for them to be in.<\/p>\n

Again, this doesn\u2019t make The Hunger Games<\/strong> 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 \u201caccuracy\u201d to a description in the book. A film which presents a teenage girl as the prototypical member of humanity is a wonderful idea \u2013 not least because she\u2019s 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\u2019t ignore.<\/p>\n