by Leah Wilson, Jennifer Barnes, Mary Borsellino, Sarah Brennan
These days, of course, “Big Brother” means something completely different, as it is the name of one of the first of the wildly popular shows in the reality television genre. In Big Brother, a group of people are thrown together in a closed environment and watched by audiences at home. Big Brother is watching them, and we are watching Big Brother.
President Snow, in controlling the districts via the Hunger Games, is both Big Brothers at once: the dictator and the reality television producer. The Hunger Games series very consciously plays with the fact that it follows not only Orwell’s novel, but also the entertainment revolution it inadvertantly spawned.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four there is another equivalent to President Snow, a character named O’Brien who, in describing how his government has achieved such total power over people, also neatly sums up the Capitol’s intentions:
We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman.
This is what makes Katniss’ self-sacrifice for Prim such a powerful act. If the Capitol had really succeeded at severing those links, then it would have been Primrose Everdeen who went into the arena, not her older sister, wouldn’t it?
And there is a love story in Nineteen Eighty-Four, just as there is one in the Hunger Games. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is between a man named Winston and a woman named Julia. Like Peeta in Mockingjay, Winston and Julia are punished for their rebellion by being tortured in specific ways that make them hate the person they were once in love with. Like Katniss, their wills are finally broken when they are presented with what, to them, is the worst thing in the world. (The worst thing for Katniss was losing Prim, but for Winston it is much more banal: he has a phobia of rats, and is threatened with being eaten by them. Julia’s worst fear is never revealed to the reader.)
When the two love stories are compared, you can see much of Winston and Julia in the way Suzanne Collins has written Peeta and Katniss’ story, and in just how important and powerful the romance Peeta and Katniss put on for the cameras through the first two novels of the trilogy is in stoking the flames of the rebellion.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston and Julia’s love story starts when Julia slips Winston a piece of paper as they bump into one another one day.
Whatever was written on the paper, it must have some kind of political meaning.... He flattened it out. On it was written, in a large unformed handwriting: I LOVE YOU.
If that sounds like a bait-and-switch—he expected something political, but really she’s in love with him!—think again. Love when there isn’t supposed to be love is a hugely subversive political act. If it weren’t, there wouldn’t be protest marches in countries all over the world demanding same-sex marriage. It was illegal until 1967 for black and white people to marry one another in some parts of the USA. A 2007 survey found that more than half of the Jewish people in Israel believed intermarriage between Jewish females and Arab males was equivalent to national treason.
When the love you feel is against the laws of those in control, then love is a political act. It’s true in the real world, true in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and true in the Hunger Games.
When Katniss and Peeta make as if to kill themselves rather than one another at the end of the first Games, it is seen by President Snow as dangerous because it could be interpreted as an act of rebellion. In Catching Fire, he demands that Katniss convince the districts that she acted out of love for Peeta, not out of defiance against the Capitol. As far as Snow can see, her actions are either/or—either Katniss looks like a rebel or she looks like a girl in love; her motivation can only be one or the other.
What President Snow never understands is that choosing love over survival is the ultimate act of defiance Katniss can make. It’s not one or the other; the love and rebellion are one in the same.
The Capitol teaches almost everyone to see the tributes as less than human: when Katniss is first being styled by her prep team, they wax and scrub her and then declare happily that she looks almost like a person. Before that, when Katniss says good-bye to Gale, he tells her that killing the other tributes won’t be any different to killing animals in the woods. When President Snow’s scientists hijack Peeta and make him think that Katniss is a mutt it is only another example of the Capitol’s commitment to dehumanization.
But Katniss doesn’t accept that. She sees the value in human life, even as she is forced into becoming a killer and soldier. She teams up with Rue in the arena, rather than simply killing the little girl and taking out some of her competition. When Rue dies, Katniss sings to her, and covers her with flowers.
The effect of this tiny, humanizing act—singing to a dying child—has immediate and far reaching consequences. Rue’s district sends Katniss bread. Rue’s fellow tribute spares her life when they face off later in the Games. In Catching Fire, it’s Rue’s song that the district whistles to Katniss to show their support for her, and in Mockingjay Boggs offers Katniss’ singing as a moment when he was touched by her.
Do you begin to see what President Snow couldn’t?
Love, like fire, is catching.
Katniss, going along with Snow’s plan to make the romance with Peeta seem to be the cause of her actions, can’t see it either. But with every interview and appearance, she declares herself loyal to something other than the Capitol. And love has already proved to be more powerful than the Capitol, because both of District 12’s tributes have survived the Games.
Another post-apocalyptic political story of recent years was the graphic novel, and subsequent film, V for Vendetta. It, like the Hunger Games, is the story of the figurehead of a rebellion, and of a teenage girl, Evie. It, too, shows clear echoes of Nineteen Eighty-Four in its storytelling.
When Evie is captured by the police and taken to jail, she finds a letter hidden in her cell. It was from an earlier prisoner, Valerie, and tells the story of Valerie’s life. Valerie was gay, rounded up and put to death in a concentration camp. In the letter left behind, she wrote:
Our integrity sells for so little, but it is all we really have. It is the very last inch of us. ... An inch, it is small and it is fragile, but it is the only thing in the world worth having. We must never lose it or give it away. We must never let them take it from us. ... what I hope most of all is that you understand what I mean when I tell you that even though I do not know you, and even though I may never meet you, laugh with you, cry with you, or kiss you. I love you. With all my heart, I love you.
Valerie died because of who she loved, but her love is stronger than the hate that executed her. It survives her death, waiting patiently in the cell until Evie comes and finds it later.
Julia and Winston’s love doesn’t survive the things that they are put through when they are captured—the tortures hijack that last inch of them. When they see each other again, as broken and hijacked as Peeta becomes in Mockingjay, Winston thinks of an old song lyric:
Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me.
The last time Katniss sees Peeta in the war, before trying to infiltrate Snow’s mansion and instead witnessing the violent and horrific death of her sister, she imagines Gale being taken by Peacekeepers and Peeta being forced to take the nightlock poison. She then thinks of “The Hanging Tree” song:
Are you, are you
Coming to the tree
Combined, the two songs become a question posed to Peeta and Katniss: will fear, torture, hate, lust for power, and the desire for self-preservation ultimately prove to be so strong that even lovers would betray each other? Are they coming to the chestnut tree, where they will sell each other out?
The Hunger Games, however, declare that no, love does conquer hate, even in circumstances as dire as Katniss and Peeta’s. Their love survives what Winston and Julia’s cannot.
Katniss and Peeta both have moments of suicidal despair in Mockingjay. Peeta is tortured until he can’t even remember what his favorite color is, much less whether or not he loves Katniss. Katnis
s loses Prim, the sister she loves more than her own life. They are broken as absolutely as Julia and Winston are broken.
But Katniss is driven by love and compassion, even when the thing she loves most in the world is dead. When President Coin asks the surviving tributes whether another Hunger Games should be held, Katniss understands that Coin is no different, in the end, than Snow. In order to ensure herself an opportunity to assassinate Coin, Katniss gives a vote of yes to the new round of Games, and says that she does so “for Prim.”
The explanation seems, on the surface, to be one of vengeance: for Prim’s death, Katniss wants to see the children of the Capitol suffer in the same way. But in reality her motivation is self-sacrifice: Katniss began her journey when she put her own life in danger for Prim, for a child who would otherwise have died in the arena. Expecting to die after the assassination, Katniss once again places the life of children bound for the arena before her own by killing the woman who would have reinstated the Games. And Katniss does so out of love—she does it for Prim, even if Prim is already dead.
Katniss remains true, even in the face of crushing loss and the prospect of her own death, to an ideal that Winston has in Nineteen Eighty-Four but is ultimately unable to uphold himself: “the object was not to stay alive but to stay human.” Katniss retains that last inch of integrity and love that Valerie of V for Vendetta prized above life.
This is not to say that the power of love is always a triumphant force in the Hunger Games. Katniss’ mother is a skilled healer who can face terrible injury and illness without flinching, but losing her husband almost killed her and, because she was incapable of caring for them in her depressed state, almost killed her daughters as well. Prim’s death hits her so hard that she can not be there for Katniss in the aftermath.
Love is the greatest strength any of the characters have going for them, but is also their greatest weakness. President Snow was able to coerce Finnick into sexual slavery by threatening to hurt those that Finnick loved if he didn’t comply.
Yet the alternative—to have nobody you love—is infinitely worse than being made vulnerable by love. Johanna Mason explains in Catching Fire that there is nobody left whom she loves, and that this renders the jabberjays in the arena unable to hurt her through mimicking screams, though her meltdown during training in Mockingjay shows that even someone who loves nobody can still be wounded terribly by the Capitol.
When Peeta and Katniss are each wounded, just as deeply as Johanna, they have the other there to help them on the slow and rocky path to recovery. Johanna is no less damaged for her lack of love, but she doesn’t have anyone to help her back afterwards.
Like Johanna, neither Snow nor Coin indicate at any point in the Hunger Games that there is anyone or any thing that they themselves love. But both think that they understand what a powerful force love is, and both do their best to wield this power for their own evil ends.
In each case, however, their efforts backfire: by making Katniss emphasize her love story in Catching Fire, Snow does more to incite the rebellion against his Capitol than Katniss could have achieved on her own. And Coin, in attempting to reinstate the Hunger Games as a method of offering revenge to the districts, seals the death warrant on her regime and her self. The woman who views marriage as a reassignment of living quarters cannot anticipate the steadfast core of Katniss’ compassion. She nor Snow ever really understand love at all.
So what can we take from the stories of Winston and Julia, of Valerie, of Katniss and Peeta? Why does George Orwell end his love story with the lovers broken and defeated? Why does writer Alan Moore kill off the defiant Valerie? And, with these grim precedents in place, why does Suzanne Collins then decide to give Katniss and Peeta a fragile, scarred, but undeniably happy ending?
The answer may come from the connection Peeta and Katniss share to the land of District 12. The first time Katniss sees Peeta again, he is gardening, and it is the fearlessness Katniss feels in the wild that allowed her to survive her first trip to the Arena. Katniss and Peeta are both linked to the natural world, and in the natural world even the worst of winters is followed by a spring.
The epilogue of Mockingjay shows Katniss watching her children play in the Meadow, now green and lush once again. New life grows, even in graveyards. Rue’s funeral song is able to become a child’s simple tune once more. There are losses to mourn, but also children to love: Prim and her mother have both left Katniss forever, a discarded knitting basket remaining as a reminder, but Greasy Sae’s granddaughter is there to take the wool instead.
Katniss and Peeta are both terribly scarred, physically and psychologically, by their experiences in the arenas and the war. But they are able to go on, and survive the pain. Katniss describes the way she copes with her moments of terror and pain: “I make a list in my head of every act of goodness I’ve seen someone do.”
Katniss Everdeen can survive her darkness because she understands the same truth that’s expressed in that graffiti in Palestine. Her heart is a weapon, and the way to keep fighting against all the horror and cruelty of the world is to wield that weapon. To keep loving.
MARY BORSELLINO is a writer who lives in Melbourne, Australia. Her latest books are the acclaimed Wolf House series. Her website is http://www.maryborsellino.com and her email is [email protected]. She likes punk rock, cups of tea, and clever people. She cried really hard at the end of Mockingjay.
SMOKE AND MIRRORS
Reality vs. Unreality in the Hunger Games
ELIZABETH M. REES
Imagine living in a world where you can’t trust anyone—not your neighbors, not your friends—and you’re never alone or safe—not in the woods, not in your home, not at your job. Or just think about what it would be like to grow up in Panem. In such a world, the only way to survive is by learning to see through the deceptions that surround you and figure out how to use them to your own advantage. Here, Elizabeth M. Rees takes us through the layers of smoke and mirrors in the Hunger Games series and the challenges Katniss faces in her pursuit of truth.
smoke and mirrors: cover-up; something that is intended to draw attention away from something else that somebody would prefer remain unnoticed
—Encarta World English Dictionary
smoke and mirrors: irrelevant or misleading information serving to obscure the truth of a situation
—Collins English Dictionary
When I was a kid my favorite game was “Let’s Pretend.” Every child plays one version or another. You create a world for a day, or an afternoon, complete with rules, with adventures, with tragedies and silly happenings, everything from tea parties to out-and-out galactic warfare. But then your mom calls you in for dinner, or to do chores or homework, and game time ends. Poof! The pretend world evaporates into thin air, never to exist in exactly the same way again.
But what if it never vanished? What if all that pretense, that make-believe, wasn’t imaginary at all? What if your whole world, day-in and day-out, was made up of pretense, lies, and deceit? What if your life or your death depended on rules that change on a whim? What if to survive at all, you too have to learn to play a game of smoke and mirrors—to master a game constructed of lies, one that you can never control?
Katniss Everdeen, in Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series, is forced to do just that. Even as Katniss is engulfed in ever more vicious treachery, sinister tricks, and heartbreaking betrayals, her hero’s task is to penetrate the smoke and mirrors that delude herself and others until she can at last distinguish the real from the unreal, both in her own life and in Panem.
Homeschooled in Deception
At the beginning of the first book we are introduced to the convolutions of survival in Panem through Katniss’ daily struggles in District 12. The government masquerades as some kind of democracy: it does sport a president, albeit one with dictatorial powers.3 In Big Brother style, the Capitol suppresses any kind of dissent, behind the guise, of course, of “protecting” its citizens. Services that could ease the diffic
ult lives of the residents are meted out according to each district’s usefulness to the Capitol (electricity is sporadic, at least in the least-favored districts). Within each district resources are never fairly distributed in the markets frequented by the general public. Fuel and food are doled out in amounts that barely sustain the populace. Only the elite of each district, and mainly of the Capitol, benefit from the grueling labor of Panem’s citizens.
The government’s heavy hand hovers over the districts as it metes out draconian punishment for the smallest of offenses: illegal hunting merits a public whipping and/or time in the stocks, and even casual comments against the government lead to death—or to life—as an Avox, rendered mute and forced to live a life of slavery serving the wealthy denizens of the Capitol. To police its citizens the Capitol eavesdrops: during the first rebellion, it used muttations like the jabberjays, which could mimic human speech, to parrot back to the authorities everything they heard. Since then the government has employed alternate means mysterious to Katniss, but which we later learn include phone tapping.4 To insure that no one forgets the price of an uprising all of Panem is held in thrall by the Games and the terrible ritual of the reaping, where the child-tributes are ripped from their homes and families in order to kill each other.
Survival in such circumstances is difficult at best, but after Katniss’ father dies in a mining accident, survival for her and her family means constant negotiation of a maze of lies, pretense, and deception. The alternative: death by starvation, or an even worse fate than death. Rendered totally dysfunctional by grief, their mother couldn’t care for her children’s most basic needs, but if they look too disheveled, or grow weak and sick, Prim and Katniss would be taken by Peacekeepers to the Seam’s community home—an institution masquerading as a refuge. Community home kids arrive at Katniss’ school black and blue and battered.5 Katniss refuses to let Prim suffer this fate. But she has no “legal” recourse to stop the downward spiral of their existence. All she has are the forbidden hunting skills her father taught her. Though only eleven at the time, she braves the predatorfilled wilderness beyond the fenced-in borders and retrieves her bow and arrow to provide her first meager meal for her family.