The Washington Post republished an article originally published on The Conversation, “Why the message of the Hunger Games films is dangerous” (link to Washington Post article). The danger? “Although it’s a Hollywood blockbuster aimed at young adults, it presents potentially quite subversive ideas of mass revolution, economic sabotage and the populist fight against oligarchy.” The author, Peter Bloom, is a lecturer in organization studies in the Department of People and Organization at The Open University, and he uses every vile trick in the book to discredit anyone who might identify with the revolutionary message in the latest Hunger Games film, Mockingjay—Part 1.
The article drips with condescension.
Despite these heady sentiments, the film’s depiction of revolution is astonishingly simple, an adolescent vision of toppling an ‘evil’ authority figure. Sure, this isn’t surprising as it’s meant for young adults, but in the context of political spillover this anti-authoritarian vision becomes more troubling. It reinforces prevailing Western ideas of social change – fastening on the idea that all one needs do is eradicate the enemy. And worryingly, it appears that this sort of adolescent rebellion isn’t just consigned to teenage entertainment, but also increasingly forms our real adult fantasies.
“Simple,” “adolescent,” “‘evil’ authority figure” “adolescent rebellion” and “real adult fantasies”…you get the idea, and that’s just in one paragraph. A later paragraph is perhaps even more offensive.
This relationship with power is appealing, in part, exactly because of how it touches on our deepest childhood desires. In a complicated world we long for someone to blame, for quick fixes, for a personalized target to project our hopes and fears upon. It is only with maturity that individuals come to realise it is usually not a person that is solely, or even primarily, to blame. Instead, it is underlying system that drives their actions and therefore requires changing.
Well thank you, Dr. Bloom, for pyschoanalytically trivializing anyone who was inspired by Mockingjay’s revolution and sees parallels between the world of the movie and real life. However, if that group is guilty of childhood fantasy, its fantasy pales in comparison to Bloom’s. His attempt to convert the movies’ straightforward anti-evil-government message into a brief for statist-collectivism is fantastical farce.
These films tap into the real anger of many, on both the left and right, who see a world emerging composed of the “haves” and “have not” ruled by a privileged elite and their police forces.
The film’s fixation on overcoming the rule of a malevolent leader reflects an image of popular struggles as primarily defined by fighting those in authority. Ignored is the perhaps less dramatic but more important process of collectively transforming social conventions, power structures and identities.
“Collectively transforming social conventions, power structures and identities” is a dead give away to Bloom’s politics, and guess what, they are not the politics of the “government is the problem, not the solution” coterie. Some of us who see a have-have not world think that governments and there cronies are the “privileged elite.” But no, Mockingjay is supposedly concerned with the left’s perpetually lamented gap between rich and poor countries.
The idea of a rich capital and its citizens exploiting workers in peripheral territories resonates with existing global divides between richer and poorer countries. It additionally speaks to growing economic insecurities associated with the growing powers of the market and exacerbated by the 2008 financial crisis.
Who can forget that memorable scene where Katniss and Gale express their dismay at the rich-poor gap, rightfully attributing it the growing powers of the market? Actually, given the devastation in the districts, the inhabitants would probably have welcomed a market of any kind with open arms. And “a rich capital and its citizens exploiting workers in peripheral territories” sounds just like Washington D.C. and London, the richest metropolitan areas in their countries. Somehow Bloom misses that comparison.
The only astute comment in the whole piece is Bloom’s observation: “The latest Hunger Games has tapped into a certain zeitgeist of global rebellion.” Too bad his statist worldview won’t allow him to recognize that the contemporary spirit of rebellion is directed towards government and its often terrifying and tyrannical exercises of unlimited power, the same target as Mockingjay’s rebellion.
And so it is also necessary to celebrate the possibility of not just destroying but also recreating society. This demands thought about how to do more than merely depose those in power – to also constructively change the structures that legitimate and rationalise their authority. This is the difference between an angry rebellion and a transformational revolution.
The American Revolution didn’t become transformational until after the angry rebellion. The revolution makes for good drama, the Constitutional Convention does not. Mockingjay depicts the anger and rebellion, without devoting any time to tedious—albeit necessary-in-real-life—discussion about how the revolutionaries will replace President Snow’s tyrannical government. The movie has caught on because there is a lot of anger out there; rebellion is indeed the zeitgeist. Mr. Bloom tries to hide it, but the reader detects a certain fear. It’s the fear of a Tory in 1775.
“When the slaves revolt, they will seek the blood of their masters.” Daniel Durand, The Golden Pinnacle
Transforming a rebellion against an iron-fisted command-and-control system (aka communism) and its cruelly manipulative games into “anxieties about the growing powers of the market” — I gotta hand it to Peter Bloom, he’s doing something I couldn’t, and doing it very well. There were plenty of P. Blooms in grad school with me (they soldiered on to get Ph.D.’s in willful blindness, but I opted out with my M.A. in English and considered it a fortunate escape).
I think it’s worth noting that although (being novels and not political treatises) the books don’t concern themselves with the structural details of rebuilding society, they do hint at the need for a transformative revolution: in the end, with the deposed and powerless Snow in her sights, Katniss chooses to end a different tyrant’s life.
The happily-ever-after epilogue isn’t merely a nod to the conventions of YA fantasy — it implies that Katniss saw the truth, and that her final bowshot was a transformative act. Totalitarianism in any form is the true enemy, and The Hunger Games illustrates it brilliantly.