Hungry for more

When the ancient Olympic Games were inaugurated, it was to honour the highest physical achievements of man but there were always people seeking an unfair advantage in order to be acclaimed, who brought the Games into disrepute.  One particularly grubby episode involved the Roman Emperor Nero on an official tour of Greece, who had the Olympic (and Nemean) Games brought forward for his own convenience.  Naturally, he carried off the prizes but bribed the judge and the best performers to be doubly sure.  There could be no clearer corruption of the ideal by Roman overlordship.

The Hunger Games combines the physicality of the Olympics with the degeneracy of those fighting to death in the Colosseum and other arenas in the Roman Empire, setting it in some quasi-fascist dystopia of the future so beloved of gloomy sci-fi writers.  It is based on a previous work and certainly William Golding’s Lord of the Flies has been referenced, both acting as a metaphor for school life.  Of filmic influences, The Running Man and particularly Battle Royale loom large, with the pitched killings taking place in a The Truman Show-style dome.  The message is, of course, that inside each one of us lies an inner savage, no matter how refined we portray ourselves.

I thought it was a very Southern take on the theme.  While not dismissing it out of hand, many of its motifs have been aired in the Republican primaries.  The era is undisclosed, taking place long after some apparently apocalyptic civil.  Nuclear weapons are deployed, as the apartheid-minded South Africans would have done had they feared being overrun by the peoples of the Bantustans they themselves had created.  The country is not named either, but as they all speak English with American accents, it is fair to say that it is a nightmare vision of the USA.  The history, written by the victors, not only claims the enormous destruction that took place, in addition portraying the breakaways as evil.  The tyranny of the federal government is enforced by jack-booted peacekeepers (a term redolent of the United Nations, another institution hated by American right-wingers).  The profiling of the children bring to mind Nazi labelling of Jews, though Southerners have never been slow to exaggerate the barbarity of the Beltway.  The inhabitants in the ‘treacherous’ districts are honest, hard-working, god ol’ boys and gals, while those in the Capitol (shorthand for Washington DC and New England) are preening effete and venal, kitted out in retro-futuristic post-Bellum outfits.  And, accused of long-ago treason, twelve districts.  Ain’t that a purty figure.  A number close to the eleven Southern states that seceded and let’s not forget the Confederacy was hoist by its own petard, when West Virginia in turn seceded from Virginia to stay with the Union, so really that makes twelve.

Jennifer Lawrence, the main protagonist, is used to acting in a backswood milieu, following on from Winter’s Bone.  Her girl-next-door looks shine through again – I think she could pull off a good Miss Elizabeth Bennett.  Keenly observing her range given her formidable reputation, she runs the gamut of emotions as artfully as she dashes through forestry.  There is a welter of supporting talent, each one sketched out to get an essence of the character – Woody Harrelson as a ragged mentor and previous winner of the Games who uses copious amounts of liquor to dull the pain of his past, Lenny Kravitz as a style guru who cares, Stanley Tucci as a supercilious TV host and so on.  Donald Sutherland’s stentorian yet vindictive president who does not like underdogs reminded me of the line that David Cameron enjoys laughing at those he considers losers.

The insidious nature of the games is enhanced in that children are selected as combatants.  The more they eat, the more (anti) credits they accumulate and so the more likely that they will be picked at random.  Inevitably, older kids, who have to eat more than their younger peers, have less chance to avoid the cut. 

Of the social landscape of this realm, those districts closest to the Capitol contain trained brats burning with arrogance and a tendency to wanton cruelty, as if to assign a corrupting influence to the Capitol.  Also, those males who live in the capital or close to it have Roman names corresponding with figures from the dying days of the Roman Republic – Stanley Tucci, for example, is called Caesar (incidentally, he wears a tie, an accoutrement most British office workers believe will disappear over the next 40 years, with a quarter convinced it will be obsolete in no more than a decade – this drama is set, at the earliest , towards the end of the 21^st century).  The country is run like an empire – raw materials flowing from the impoverished South, sorry, districts, into the Capitol for the metropolitan elite.  Divide-and-rule is in operation as the rulers set the districts at each other’s throats via The Hunger Games.  In events of failure, scapegoats are not just ruined professionally but forced to consume the equivalent of Socrates’ hemlock, for destabilising the constitutional arrangements.

As a side note, religion is not mentioned throughout and I think, rather than to try and avoid offence, the makers wanted it audible by the absence of discussion.  After all, Christianity played a crucial part in stamping out the gladiatorial bloodbaths.  Little tolerance or charity is displayed by the most of the characters.

The action is well-handled and genuinely surprising.  This movie treats its audience intelligently, unusual for its genre.  Many deaths happen out of direct sight or in an intentional jumble of hurly-burly cross-cutting and the film is not overly gruesome.  As far as possible, the producers give meaning to all those who perish, emphasising the importance and value of life.  The Hunger Games eschews the sentimentality of Minority Report (where the good guys triumph and the bad guys are ousted, against the odds), with an ending that is both uncertain and unsettling, as life can be.  Some find it dispiriting for the subject matter but I found it uplifting for the respect it imparts to us in the seats.  5 out of 5.