Hunger Games - Some Thoughts and Reflections

Jill and I went to see Hunger Games last night. It was excellent. I would even describe it as a work of art. However, like some good art, it was quite disturbing. In case you aren’t familiar with the plot, Hunger Games takes place in a dystopian future in which the United States of America has been replaced by twelve districts ruled by a totalitarian regime. Every year, each district contributes two children between the ages of twelve and eighteen to compete in a fight to the death. The fights are called “hunger games,” and the movie Hunger Games is about one of these fights. As you would expect, the movie contains many scenes of children killing other children. At this point, you might want to skip the movie. I know how you feel. Hunger Games is based off a popular book series, and whenever I heard someone praise the books, I thought they must be mad. How could any book about children killing other children possibly be worth reading?

Well, the movie is certainly worth seeing, and I am sure that the books are worth reading as well. I don’t think that Hunger Games is for everyone – I’m pretty sure Jill should not have gone to see it – but I think that it is a powerful movie that addresses some important themes in a way that few other movies have managed. I want to focus on a few of these themes. If you haven’t read the books or watched the movie, you may want to stop reading here.

One important theme of the movie is that human beings often respond very badly to injustice. The society of Hunger Games is loosely modeled on ancient Rome, and the hunger games themselves are clearly inspired by ancient Roman gladiator fights. In the movie, children are selected for the hunger games through a lottery. Once chosen, they are sent to the capital, where they are showered with luxury and greeted by legions of fans. They train, they give interviews, and the whole process is televised. When they eventually fight to the death, that too is televised. The hunger games are the biggest thing on television, the hottest bit of pop culture. And nearly everyone (at least in the wealthy capital) is a fan. The children are being forced to kill one another, but their society treats the games like they are just another piece of entertainment.

I was outraged by the way the society regarded the games, but I also had to ask myself – is my society really so different? We don’t force children to fight one another to the death on national television. In fact, we don’t do anything like that. But we are addicted to bad reality television and celebrity news, and we often turn real human suffering into entertainment (think of Charlie Sheen). Moreover, we are willing to spend a good portion of our lives watching bad television, but we are unwilling to spend any time addressing and combating the massive injustices that are being perpetrated around the world. How many hours of news coverage were dedicated to Kate Middleton’s dress last year? How many were dedicated to Darfur in the last five years? I don’t know, but I bet all the money in my pockets that the ratio was heavily lopsided in favor of Middleton’s dress. Yes, we need to live our lives. Yes, we are very busy. Yes, it often seems like there is little that we can do. But terrible atrocities are being committed throughout the world, and we have become largely indifferent to them. We have convinced ourselves that we can’t do much about these injustices, so we shouldn’t get too worked up about them, and we certainly shouldn’t feel obligated to do anything about them. One of the most powerful things about Hunger Games is that it reminds us how very wrong all of this is. In fact, Hunger Games suggests that we may actually be complicit in some of the great injustices that we ignore, and I am inclined to agree.

Another important theme of Hunger Games, one that is much more positive, is that human beings can find hope even in the darkest situations. A related theme is that human dignity is very difficult – perhaps impossible – to extinguish. Both before and during the game, the children were in an extremely dark situation, to say the least; in effect, they had been sentenced to a violent death. Nonetheless, many of the children found the courage to accept their fate, and they soldiered on. Some found friendship, and some even laughed from time to time. Of course, they were under no obligation to do any of this, and it would have been entirely understandable if some of the children had simply collapsed from the pressure. But they didn’t, or at least many didn’t, and I think this showed something of the spirit of human beings. Moreover, the children were treated like animals, and their deaths were pointless, but they never lost their humanity, and they never lost their worth. They mattered until the very end. This reminded me that while we can speak of people being dehumanized in some sense, we can never truly lose our basic human dignity. We are still made in the image of God, and nothing can rob this from us.

I think that Hunger Games had to be about children. We have become too inured to the deaths of adults, and of people generally. They have largely ceased to matter. When we hear about the hundreds of thousands of men and women who have been killed in Darfur the last several years, we are scarcely moved. If we hear that many thousands of children have been killed there too, we are still unmoved – they are just more people. But when children and children alone are targeted, then at least we may feel something. Hunger Games deals with important themes concerning the value of human life, the atrocities humans perpetrate against one another, and the moral complicity of those who witness these atrocities while doing nothing. If the movie and books had used adult victims, these themes would probably have been lost. I believe that this fact alone speaks volumes about the brokenness of our society.