I realized another way that The Hunger
Games novel, the first one, didn't work for me. I was thinking about
this because I was watching the Rifftrax of The Hunger Games.
Anyway, uh, Peeta lives.
The Rifftrax guys were going on pretty
hard about their probable impending deaths and, yes, exactly, their
deaths were probably impending. Now, really, if you look at it,
Katniss – a skilled hunter and gifted archer – is the precise
kind of person who has a good chance of winning the games and, in fact, she's the odds on favorite to win at the start of the game. For her
to win, okay. Even for Peeta to win, okay, he is a strong guy,
physically fit, clever, so forth and so on. But what are the odds of
BOTH of them winning? Something that had never before happened in 73
years of Hunger Games? Basically zero, of course.
But then, thinking more (as I was
watching the movie), I realized having Peeta win was narrative
cowardice. I know that part of what the books were supposed to be
about were Katniss' feelings for both Peeta and Gale. But what's
better, narratively? A weak love triangle (Gale is barely in the
books and don't expect to see a bunch of him in the movies, either)
or Katniss having to kill Peeta to win. Think about that. At the
climax, Peeta and Katniss have the drop on each other. Neither one
moves. Cut to them being told if there is no winner of the Hunger
Games, their families will be executed. (You need to do something
like that so Katniss remains sympathetic. She doesn't kill for the
selfish reason that she wants to live, but has to make a Sophie's
choice.) Then, Peeta . . . does nothing and Katniss kills him. At
which point she realizes that he did, in fact, love her and none of
it was a lie, and she murdered him for the entertainment of the
Capitol.
OK, here's the real kicker, too. You
could still have the love triangle. Rather than Gale not really
being in the next two books, you can put him in there all you want
and he would be competing with Peeta's ghost. It is notoriously hard to win against a ghost. It would have also allowed Peeta and Katniss to develop real feelings for each other in The Hunger Games.
The book and movie both tried to make
you feel the horror of the Hunger Games by killing the little black
girl, Rue. I . . . didn't like that in either the book of the movie.
Yeah, good going, put in black people to be killed so white people
feel guilty. Not just the little girl but also Cinna. Jesus fucking
Christ, really? You're really just going to put black people in to
be killed so white people can save the world? Fuck you.
Anyway, that's how they tried to drive
home the horror of the Games. But the little girl we barely know so
her death means little. For other plot reasons, they should keep it
in – in particular because it also shows that Katniss is making a
connection with the people and is becoming a symbol – but it didn't
really drive in the horror of the games. What would do that is
killing someone we, the audience, has come to like rather than someone we had barely seen. To put Katniss
in the situation of having to kill this really nice guy who drive the horror home in a big way.
By having them both survive, well, it
was chicken. And weakens the overall story. It was a forced on
happy ending, yay, the good guys win, which was inappropriate given
the material of the book and movie.
**
I was also just struck, again, over the
general stupidity of the games. The Hunger Games is literally a show
where children are forced to murder each other. Worse, the richest
districts have ringers – they train kids from a young age to do
nothing but win the Games. So for districts 1 and 2, they have
volunteer ringers. So, not only do they win most of the time, when
they lose, well, they were volunteers. The other ten districts have
kids selected by lot, who generally watch their children get
humiliated and butchered by the kids from districts 1 and 2.
Like, whose idea was that? Because,
let me tell you, it takes a LOT less provocation than seventy-four
years of graphic child murder for the amusement of the ruling class
to spark a revolution among oppressed people. Every time a child is
murdered, that whole family turns instantly and irrevocably
anti-government. Sure, most of them won't be hardcore about it, but
some will be. That's tens of thousands of people ranging from merely
committed to hating the government to actively seeking it's
destruction. Not even counting those who are equally committed
simply over their horror and disgust over children being forced to
murder each other for the amusement of the capitol.
It doesn't even take a lot of thinking
to work this one through. Riots started in LA because Rodney King's
attackers were exonerated in court. King lived. The living
conditions in South LA aren't nearly as bad as in most districts.
Uprisings would be constant, every district would be littered with
resistance cells constantly plotting the overthrow of the government.
The districts would be under constant and massive police violence –
we're talking constant ID checks, weapons checks, cops kicking in
doors, public executions, the whole lot, if you're committed to
something as spectacularly stupid as the Hunger Games.
Yeah, yeah, the author says (in the book, if you just watch the movie you have no such knowledge) that a district was destroyed and that suppressed the revolution. Except that doesn't really work. It often creates addition opposition because then the people more forcefully believe that it is a fight of life or death. It wasn't the destruction of Fallujah that stopped Iraqi resistance to US occupation. It was the US getting out of Iraq, first of pulling back to our bases and then massively reducing our troop presence. The same was true of the US in Vietnam. Who districts were wiped out, two million Vietnamese were killed, but even after three decades of fighting overwhelmingly more powerful countries -- the Japanese, the French, the US -- they still found the will to fight. So, no, that's not really sufficient, either.
This confirms that it's really hard to make a plot. But it makes me realize something else, too. It's really hard to understand a plot. I hate to say this, but it sorta looks like plot doesn't matter very much, even in plot driven stories.
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