I finally saw The Hunger Games.  I had to wait until the initial furor passed so Bette and I could get adjacent seats.  I have read all three books of the series—of which I thought the first was by far the best—and was eager to see what they did with the movie.

Here is a truth I am just beginning to accommodate myself to: the movie you see is the movie you are ready to see.  Here are some of the themes I was ready for.  The courage Katniss showed helped her to prevail even in difficult circumstances.  Kindnesses showed (Rue to Katniss and Katniss to Rue, for instance) can make unexpected differences in the outcome.  An evil empire can sustain itself for a long time with the ritual humiliation of the provinces provided there are “Peacekeepers” around for the few times humiliation doesn’t work.[1]  True love will, in the end, conquer all obstacles.  The transition Katniss makes from Diana, the goddess of the hunt, to Aphrodite, the goddess of love, is amazingly effective.

I liked the movie.  I thought it added some very good information to the story the book offered.  The tech specialists in the booth targeting the fireballs and placing the beasts and rejoicing in their artistry—that was a good touch.  Seeing all the engaged participants at the arena is a lot more powerful than reading about them, especially watching them suspend briefly their taste for gore so they could enjoy a really stirring teen romance.

The book is much more subtle about a lot of things.  It is narrated in Katniss’s voice, so it can give us a lot of the anger and the self-doubt and the ambivalence that are hard to portray visually.  Because Katniss sees Peeta[2] more fully in the book, we see Peeta more fully in the book.

The movie I saw was the movie I was prepared to see and I regret to say that it was a movie about U. S. imperialism.  I wasn’t happy about that, but it is what I saw.  The gross discrepancies between life in the provinces and life in the Capitol really rocked me.  In Book 1 and in the movie, only the dissipated and avid, the fans of haut cuisine, haut couture, and violence (and their slaves) live in the Capitol.[3]  These people have no appetites except for vanity and entertainment; their rulers have no appetite except for dominant power.  It is those traits that make necessary the life in District 12 to which we are introduced first.

The gaps between rich and poor in the United States are among the worst in the industrialized world, east or west.  I remember the images of “poverty” that were broadcast and published when JFK “discovered” poverty in West Virginia in 1960.  He was surprised because he had been living in the Capitol.  It has gotten a lot worse since then.  Take a look at Richard Wilkinson’s richard_wilkinson.html .  It is seventeen minutes long, but the first 5:30 will make his point.  If the link doesn’t work for you, go to www.TED.com, type Richard Wilkinson in the search bar and click on the first video on the list that comes up.

Here’s an account of some food differences.  Katniss’s stylist, Cinns, is not presented as a bad guy, but the life he knows is the life where a fabulous lunch appears when you touch a button.  The appearance of this lunch causes Katniss to reflect on it this way.

Cinna invites me to sit on one of the couches’ and takes his place across from me. He presses a button on the side of the table. The top splits and from below rises a second tabletop that holds our lunch. Chicken and chunks of oranges cooked in a creamy sauce laid on a bed of pearly white grain, tiny green peas and onions, rolls shaped like flowers, and for dessert, a pudding the color of honey.

I try to imagine assembling this meal myself back home. Chickens are too expensive, but I could make do with a wild turkey. I’d need to shoot a second turkey to trade for an orange. Goat’s milk would have to substitute for cream. We can grow peas in the garden. I’d have to get wild onions from the woods. I don’t recognize the grain, our own tessera ration cooks down to an unattractive brown mush. Fancy rolls would mean another trade with the baker, perhaps for two or three squirrels. As for the pudding, I can’t even guess what’s in it. Days of hunting and gathering for this one meal and even then it would be a poor substitution for the Capitol version.

What must it be like, I wonder, to live in a world where food appears at the press of a button? How would I spend the hours I now commit to combing the woods for sustenance if it were so easy to come by? What do they do all day, these people in the Capitol, besides decorating their bodies and waiting around for a new shipment of tributes to roll in and die for their entertainment?

The politics of imperial control was familiar to me as a Cold War phenomenon.  I know we still maintain alliances in order to protect what we call our “national interests,” but the process isn’t as clear to me now as it was then.  We rationalized our support for the most brutal dictators because, as the more candid members of the foreign policy elites would say, they were “our dictators.”[4]  But I didn’t hear President Snow say anything, in public or private, that does not echo U. S. foreign policy themes.  It’s what you do and what you say when you have an empire to manage.  It’s not for the squeamish, we are told, but somebody’s got to do it.

The fashions that were prized in the Capitol were much worse in the book than in the movie.  You’d think it would be the other way around, but I think the director looked at the possibility of just filming the outfits described in the book and deciding he just couldn’t sell them visually.  They are made much more outlandish, of course, because we are introduced to the story through the eyes of District 12, the coal mining district.  Still, with unlimited money and no goals other than to outcompete the men and women you know who will show up at the games, these grotesqueries are what will result.  If that doesn’t look at all familiar to you, take some time to look through a really hard-edged fashion magazine.  The best I could do here is the contrast of the “dressed up in her mother’s dress” Katniss and the way over the top Effie Trinkett.  There is a level of U. S. society that really IS the Capitol and the money to do that comes from all the District 12s over which we maintain economic, political, military, and cultural dominance.

Let me conclude by reminding you and I liked the book and liked the movie.  I did not go to see the movie in order to see the pictures I did see or to be reminded of the contemporary realities I was reminded of.  But when I left The Hunger Games, I wasn’t hungry anymore.