On The Hunger Games and politics

For me, a fair proportion of the last week has been spent reading The Hunger Games trilogy. It’s a party that I’m a bit late to, considering a colleague of mine was singing these books’ praises a couple of years ago, and Lionsgate has already had the wherewithal to buy the rights, produce and then release a film version of the first book, but still, better late than never, as they say.

Like many other teen novels, these books make use of tried and tested themes and motifs: love triangles, absentee parents, world-saving antics. But what separates Suzanne Collins’ trilogy from Twilight, Harry Potter, et al is the social message weaved into the narrative. Panem – the dystopian world in which the writer sets her scene – is a paradigm of  heavy-handed state control, which at first seems not only abhorrent, but also unthinkable. After all, what kind of government sacrifices children to assert its control over the masses? But, as the novels progress, and the authority of The Capitol is threatened, glimpses of a world not so different from our own appear: surveillance is endemic (how did President Snow know that Gale and Katniss had kissed?), wealth distribution is massively uneven, embarrassments and scandals are covered up, and – most resonantly – the media is endlessly exploited for political gain.

When the parliamentary elections were heating up a couple of years ago, our soon-to-be Prime Minister, David Cameron, was often captured on camera, sleeves rolled up, collar undone, every bit the ‘man of the people’. Cynical as it sounds, this was no accident. A team of aides, spin doctors and stylists had undoubtedly decided that this was the way to make an old Etonian with views somewhere to the right of Atilla the Hun seem likeable. And it worked. In Mockingjay, the third novel in The Hunger Games trilogy, protagonist Katniss Everdeen is subjected to a similar make-over for the cameras as District 13 president, Alma Coin, sets her up to be the face of the rebellion.

Admittedly, our own government may not be using the media to subdue the general populus to such an alarming extent as we witness in Panem, but it’s not really such an unimaginable step, is it? After all, we only need to look at the level of state-controlled media in countries like North Korea, where the people are exposed to heraldic narratives of government victories (like, the decimation of District 13, perhaps?), to see that what Collins was depicting, is not an entirely fictitious society at all.

But Cameron and co. do not have the control of our media sources needed to establish such a distorted image of the world we live in, right? Right, they don’t. But, as the News of the World scandals of last year highlighted, Rupert Murdoch does. Or at least, is not as far away from it as you’d think. And, as the scandals also pointed out, our politicians have spent years sucking up to him.

In Panem, it is President Snow who has the power, and the control. It is he who chooses what should be shown and not shown. In 21st Century Britain, it is News Corporation.

So perhaps Collins’ novels can be seen as a warning against this kind of power. After all, our heroes, Katniss and Peeta, spend three novels fighting against the corrupt, controlling Capitol so that they can finally live a simple life together. And some of their most difficult battles are not in combat with other Tributes during the actual Hunger Games, but in trying to establish themselves as individuals away from the endless media spin of the government and the rebels. It nearly destroys them, and their fledgling relationship.

Nearly, of course. This is teen fiction, after all, and needs a happy ending.