by V. Arrow
Obviously, the depiction of the Hunger Games in Panem is an exaggerated version of our own reality shows. But judging by the contents of the contracts participants are required to sign, it’s less exaggerated than one might think. It’s not just shows in the “life-threatening situations” genre (Survivor, I’m A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here!, Fear Factor) and popularity contest shows (American Idol, The X-Factor, and Dancing with the Stars) that require complicated contracts. Even “lifestyle” and dating-based reality television programs require releases that spare their networks from any culpability in the case of injury to contestants—even in the case of rape, disfigurement, paralysis, or death. The Real World’s contract, for example, stipulates:
•You may die, lose limbs, and suffer nervous breakdowns. (Stipulation 1)
•If you undergo any medical procedures while involved in the show, they carry the risk of infection, disfigurement, death. (4)
•You may be humiliated and explicitly portrayed “in a false light.” (12)
•Producers are under no obligation to conduct background checks on your fellow cast members. (7)
•Interacting with other cast members carries the risk of “non-consensual physical contact” and should you contract AIDS, etc. during such an interaction, MTV is not responsible. (7)
•If you get kicked off the show, it will be filmed. (14)
•You grant the Producer blanket rights to your life story. (49)
•The Producer can do pretty much anything they want with your life story, including misrepresent it. (49)
•Your email may be monitored during participation. (20b)
•You promise not to hide from MTV cameras in establishments where they can’t film. (20a)
•The production crew can show up at your personal house at any time to film and/or to take anything they want, as long as they return the objects once production has ended. (20a)xxxvii
The MTV contract seems like it would scarcely need to be changed to cover the risks in the arena in Panem—except in replacing a few “you may”s with “you will”s.
Exploitation as Entertainment
“There’s almost always some wood,” Gale says. “Since that year half of them died of cold. Not much entertainment value in that.”
It’s true . . . It was considered very anticlimactic in the Capitol, all those quiet, bloodless deaths. Since then, there’s usually been wood to make fires.THG39
In Panem, of course, the aim of the show is to kill off the majority of participants—creating an environment where, for their audience, the deaths themselves have become the entertainment. But although people like to think that Panem’s entertainment is far more gruesome than anything we’d allow today, there have been instances of rape, serious injury, and death shown on our own television screens . . . and they, too, have been branded “a part of the entertainment” and exploited as such.
In 2010, right around the release of Mockingjay, Capt. Phil Harris of Deadliest Catch suffered a stroke and died on-screen. Of the event, Salon.com reported:
Even a sensitive documentarian might look at the “Deadliest Catch” camera crew’s post-stroke footage and think, “This is a motherlode,” then set about repackaging pain as entertainment . . . in a genre that has captured endless humiliation, violence and other human suffering, here was reality TV’s first [on-screen] death.xxxviii
In 2002, while filming The Real World: Chicago, cast member Tonya Cooley of Washington was object-raped on camera by two male castmates and, as reported by TMZ, “producers not only knew about the rape, they even replaced the toothbrush but never told her what happened.”xxxix The idea of Capitol citizens taking pleasure in viewing the brutal murders of tributes (and/or the sexual display of them, as in Katniss and Peeta kissing in the cave or Finnick in general) is not so far-fetched. After all, just look at our own societal acceptance of the death and degradation of reality TV participants because “it’s what they signed up for.”
In Panem, the Capitol citizens understand the events of the Games as punishment for the districts; the tributes “deserve” their fates, ostensibly because of their great-grandparents’ roles in the First Rebellion, but reflexively because of where they are born, their families’ incomes and vocations, and the color of their skin. Some of our justifications for the sadistic enjoyment of reality TV aren’t far off. Consider the “guido” Italian Americans of Jersey Shore, who some viewers and critics claim deserve to be ridiculed because of their heritage and lifestyle. As one blogger explained in 2010:
Jersey Shore not only exposes, but encourages racism towards Italian-Americans through the slang words, “guido” and “guidette.” The word “guido” and its new, feminine counterpart are . . . uneducated vernacular . . . dating as far back as the early 1920s . . . frequently as a demeaning term to describe lower-class Italians in America. It was a racial slur that hurt feelings and segregated people from another, and should still be viewed as such.xl
The terminology employed by many viewers of modern reality television—from racial slurs like “guido” and “guidette” to misogynistic slurs like “bitch,” “whore,” “slut,” etc.—act as a means of divorcing the show’s “stars” from its viewers’ sense of empathy, based on ethnicity, race, or gender. Panem’s Hunger Games, by denoting its tributes by district identity and visually conforming to district stereotyping in their ceremony costumes, does the same.
MSNBC quotes Todd Boyd, critical-studies professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television, as saying, “We know all these shows are edited and manipulated to create images that look real and sort of exist in real time. But really what we have is a construction . . . The whole enterprise of reality television relies on stereotypes. It relies on common stock, easily identifiable images.”xli Often, those stereotypes and stock images are what attract audiences in the first place. Reality TV producer Naomi Bulochnikov, the brains behind Paris Hilton’s My New BFF and the unseen Bridge & Tunnel, says of the subjects of her shows—and most other lifestyle reality television—something implicit in Effie Trinket’s assessment of the District 12 tributes as “ill-mannered” and boorish: “You tune in because you hate them. You stay tuned because you start falling in love with them.”xlii
Reality shows focus at least in part on creating a sympathetic bond between the audience and show participants. But that bond, and the empathy it suggests, has distinct limitations. About.com columnist Austin Cline suggests our enjoyment of reality shows is a national case of Schadenfreude, the German word used to describe joy in seeing another’s pain. “If you laugh at someone slipping on the ice, that’s Schadenfreude. If you take pleasure in the downfall of a company you dislike, that is also Schadenfreude. The latter example is certainly understandable, but I don’t think that’s what we’re seeing here. After all, we don’t know the people on reality shows.”xliii
That last line is the key: we don’t really know the people on reality shows. Or at least we do not respond to them in the same way we do people we know in real life. One explanation that’s been given for this effect is that when we, as the audience, feel as though we’re watching a story—something that is encouraged by the heavily produced and even scripted “real” events on reality shows—we treat its players like fictional characters. Although we understand on one level that they are “real people,” the emotional engagement is different.
This seems to be the case for television producers as well as the audience. According to Los Angeles lawyer Barry B. Langberg, who represents several reality TV show stars:
Comments from various reality TV producers often fail to demonstrate much sympathy or concern with what their subjects experience—what we are seeing is a great callousness towards other human beings who are treated as means towards achieving financial and commercial success, regardless of the consequences for them. Injuries, humiliation, suffering, and higher insurance rates are all just the “cost of doing business” and a requirement for being edgier.xliv
Given the immense empathy that many fictional characters inspire, and always have inspired, in their audiences—just think of our own connections to Katniss, Peeta, Gale, and the rest of the world of Panem!—the theory that this disconnect stems only from fictionalization seems oversimplified. Instead, I’d argue that “reality TV Schadenfreude,” on which both the contemporary United States and the futuristic world of Panem rely, is predicated on a combination of elements: fictionalizing people, sensationalizing events, and the presentation of both as “reality” or “fact” when, in actuality, they are heavily manipulated to present a particular narrative.
Entertainment as Social Control
There is considerable danger in allowing reality TV to become a major source of public information, as the Hunger Games so skillfully shows. Those stereotypes and that sense of Schadenfreude on the part of the privileged audience become the socioeconomic and sociopolitical norm. Class hierarchies are reinforced. And when such sources of public information are used to maintain privileged sociopolitical ideals, they can be an effective method of social control.
Because Panem’s districts are all so isolated, the only representation anyone has of people outside their district, people who are not “them,” is through the horror of the Hunger Games. (Katniss says she had never met anyone from a district other than District 12 prior to being reaped, and it seems to have been the same for the rest of the district, outside of glimpses of past victors on tours.) And what the Hunger Games shows seems to be very predictable. District 1, District 2, and District 4 are bloodthirsty, nouveau riche Capitol lackeys; District 3 and District 6 are weaklings and unlikely to survive; District 11 and District 12 are capable of neither winning nor comporting themselves to the Capitol’s standards of etiquette. These kinds of negative generalizations are a common problem with stereotype-driven reality TV. As succinctly summed up by one anonymous blogger from Staten Island (speaking of the cancellation of MTV’s Bridge & Tunnel): “Thank Jesus that your children don’t have to grow up in a world where these people represent their hometown.”xlv
Most district and Capitol citizens only see people who are “the Other” at their very worst: when they are killing, maiming, and dying. Peeta’s assertion that he “wants to die as himself and not become a piece in their Games” gains another level of salience when you consider that he is representing not only himself, and not only District 12, but his class. He is most likely one of only a very few merchant-class tributes ever sent to the Games. Unlike Katniss, who is focused only on surviving (“I just can’t afford to think that way,” she claims), he understands the negative image that most of the audience will automatically have of him because of his district and wants to represent himself, his family, District 12, and the merchant class as positively as he can.
However, despite its immense flaws when it comes to representation, reality TV can be a major force for positive political and cultural change. In some authoritarian countries, reality television voting has been the first time many citizens have voted in any free and fair wide-scale elections. In addition, reality shows have the power to expose viewers to new situations, including ones that are taboo in certain orthodox cultures; for instance, Star Academy Arab World, which began airing in 2003, shows male and female contestants living together.xlvi In 2004, journalist Matt Labash wrote that “the best hope of little Americas developing in the Middle East could be Arab-produced reality TV.” He went on to describe how:
In China, after the finale of the 2005 season of Super Girl (the local version of American Idol) drew an audience of around 400 million people, and 8 million text message votes, the state-run English-language newspaper Beijing Today ran the front-page headline “Is Super Girl a Force for Democracy?”xlvii
If reality TV provides disenfranchised citizens with a voice in any way, that can be counted as a “good.” Still, we should not forget that what even these “benevolent” reality shows give their audiences, in our world as in Panem, is shaped by what the media producers and Gamemakers want those audiences to see. Although Caesar can spin every interview positively and stylists like Cinna and Portia can help every tribute look their best—or their worst, as Katniss notes with grim solemnity in her recollections of previous District 12 tributes “stripped naked and covered in coal dust”THG66—the editors, Gamemakers, and President Snow ultimately have almost total control over how any particular tribute is perceived by the audience . . . at least until Katniss’ stunt with the nightlock berries at the end of the Seventy-fourth Games, which is a part of what makes that act of Katniss and Peeta’s so revolutionary.
What makes a tribute appear powerful in the opening ceremonies can be used against them in the arena itself, as with Katniss, the Girl On Fire, and the fireballs. Although Katniss may succeed at refusing to cry and Peeta can refuse to live and die as anyone other than himself, the Gamemakers and government—Panem’s “big media”—can use their footage of the tributes to create almost any narrative they choose. Think, for example, of the lie the Capitol tells about District 13, pairing old footage with new threats to say the district has been decimated, when it has not.
Plutarch and Snow both have the means to create media that serves their unique political agendas, most notably seen in the Airtime Assault in Mockingjay, and today’s media moguls do the same:
[T]he coverage was a reminder of what we in the new media world should keep in mind: what a news organization with deep pockets can do, even now in this age of diminishment for Big Media. Top editors, once they’ve persuaded the financial people, can order a broad, strategic deployment of journalistic resources.xlviii
“Reputable” media sources that are free to report as they wish—of which Panem has none—often employ the same form of manipulation. In doing so, they can suffer from the same stereotyping and pandering to the most privileged audience members for which reality TV is denigrated. Time magazine, for example, frequently “tones down” its covers and lead stories for the US audience; on December 5, 2011, while the rest of the world (Europe, Asia, and South Pacific markets) saw cover images and headlines depicting rioters in the Egypt revolutions, the American audience was assured that “Anxiety is Good for You.”xlix A few weeks earlier, on November 21, while Time’s cover in European and South Pacific markets derided hugely corrupt Italian prime minister Berlusconi and the Asian market debated whether the Indian or Chinese economic system would emerge as the world’s most powerful in the 2010s, the US market was treated to a larger jingoistic cover story about the power and underappreciated valor of American soldiers returning from the American-led invasion of Afghanistan and simply waved a cheerful “Ciao, Berlusconi!” as a soft subtitle.l
This narrow focus on US events over international interests helps to maintain and promote a jingoistic view of the world: US events are the most important; US attitudes are the most valid; US viewpoints on other nations, or minorities within our own nation, are the most correct. This promotion of national stereotypes helps extend and reinforce them.
Panem’s system of information dispersal seems to work similarly, through limiting the information its residents receive; the Capitol controls all the news sources and means of communication. But even Katniss, who has been severely and strategically undereducated, can sense that something is afoot when it comes to what she’s been told about the state of the world:
I know there must be more than they’re telling us, an actual account of what happened during the rebellion. But I don’t spend much time thinking about it. Whatever the truth is, I don’t see how it will help me get food on the table.THG42
Like Katniss, the oppressed citizens of Panem are too busy trying to survive to spend much time thinking about politics or media, and that’s a big factor in the Capitol’s ability to keep the districts under its thumb. The distraction the Games present—either as entertainment or as threat—and the mutual mistrust they sow between the districts takes care of the rest.
1 Notably one of the only sitcoms ever to
feature an Asian American in a leading role, suggesting a previous engagement on Collins’ part with the importance of racial/cultural/ethnic presentation in media.
8
Gender Roles and Sexuality in Panem
From Katniss’ otherwise-concerned first-person narrative (at least until we read Finnick Odair’s confession of being tortured as a trafficked child slave in Mockingjay), it seems that the nation of Panem is sexless. Because Katniss does not take an interest in sex, or gender, one could come away from the Hunger Games trilogy believing that, at least for the purposes of this story, they are not especially crucial to the narrative. But although sex and gender are not a major part of the main plot of the Hunger Games, they play a role in the series that ranks second in importance only to race, class, and socioeconomic/ethnic privilege.
The Katniss-Peeta-Gale “Love” Triangle
The obvious exception, at least outwardly, to the aromantic tone of the series is the “love triangle” between Katniss, Peeta, and Gale. It’s important to address this up front because, though sex and gender may play a pivotal role in the trilogy and in Panem, that role has nothing to do with the Katniss-Peeta-Gale story—which is not really a “love” triangle at all.
The most frequent understanding of the Katniss-Peeta-Gale love triangle is purely allegorical. Katniss, at the precipice of inevitable war and experiencing her first true chance to make affecting choices, must choose between Peeta, representing noble intentions, and Gale, representing revenge. At the time of The Hunger Games’ writing, the United States was three years into the war in Iraq and just learning that Iraq did not in fact possess weapons of mass destruction.li Justification for warfare was a hot topic both in the media and among US citizens.