Foucault is judging you Susan Collins...
So I saw the latest Hunger Games film, Catching Fire, this past weekend. As someone who dislikes children and loves war, this is pretty much the ideal franchise for me. I also love a good dystopia. In fact I think dystopia may be one of my favourite genres. But while I think the films are great, the actual Hunger Games, as a method for political control, are a terrible idea.
For those who haven’t seen the Hunger Games
films or read the books, the continent of Panem is run by a totalitarian regime
centred at the Capitol and surrounded by 12 impoverished districts. As
punishment for a past revolt, every year a boy and a girl ('tributes') are picked at random
and sent to the Capitol to fight to the death in the titular Hunger Games.
This is an utterly ridiculous method for
maintaining political control. Why take children as tributes? Why make them
fight to the death? Why have a victor rather than just killing them all?
To answer these questions, lets take a look
at the sociologist, Foucault, who wrote a lot about punishment and systems of
power.
According to Foucault, for executions to be
effective as political tools, they require three things:
- A public confession of guilt. Punishment cannot be seen as random or capricious; it needs to be linked to the guilt of the perpetrator.
- Linking the punishment to the crime. So, for example, scaffold for hangings was constructed near or at the location at which the original crime had taken place, thus linking the punishment with the crime geographically. Another method for linking the punishment with the crime was the use of ‘symbolic’ punishment. Blasphemers had their tongues cut out or murderers had a hand removed.
- Spectacle; It was important to see the criminal suffer.
So obviously the Hunger Games has the
spectacle part sorted. The games are televised and there’s a big build-up
before the games with processions and tv interviews. The tributes have their
own stylists and they are tarted up and paraded in front of the frothing
spectators of the capital. The Hunger Games themselves are also spectacular in
their raw brutality. Foucault explains that the spectacle of the public
execution has an obvious political use because it shows that the sovereign is all-powerful
and capable of unleashing his or her mighty wrath upon the guilty. When a criminal
breaks the law, it is not just a crime but an attack on the sovereign whose
responsibility it is to introduce and uphold law and order. A punishment is
therefore an act of the sovereign and a public punishment is a visible
demonstration of the sovereign’s power.
But the other two components are largely absent from the hunger games.
There is no confession of guilt because the
children cannot possibly be guilty for a rebellion that happened 70 odd years
ago. The tributes are also picked at random which further diminishes their
culpability for the crime for which they are being brutally punished. Punishing
the children can therefore only ever be seen as unfair. You could argue that
the districts have some sort of collective guilt that’s passed through the
generations but this implies a superstitious or religious society (i.e. a
belief that there is a ‘soul’ or some other ethereal entity beyond the physical
body which can be tainted) which doesn’t fit with Collins’s portrayal of Panem
as a largely secular society.
Finally, there doesn’t seem to be a
particular link between the punishment and the crime. There certainly isn’t a geographical
link because the location of the games changes each time. You could maybe argue
that it’s fitting for the districts to be forced to fight each other since they
tried to fight the Capitol but this seems a bit of a symbolic stretch. The
format of the games seems to be completely divorced from the rebellion for which
they are apparently a reminder.
So the hunger games only fulfills one of
the three essential elements that Foucault lists for a politically effective
execution.
In the first film, there is a scene between President Snow and
Seneca Crane, the Head Gamemaker, where they discuss why the hunger games are
used. President Snow says something about how giving people hope, but not too
much hope, is what keeps people in line. He offers no evidence or reasoning
behind this somewhat bizarre claim and were I Crane I would have insisted that
Snow provided a more detailed explanation of his theory (ideally with
appropriate citations and references).
Unfortunately, Crane does not challenge
Snow into providing a more intellectually rigourous explanation for his seriously
underdeveloped theory of political control. Instead Crane changes the rules of
the game so that two tributes can win the games instead of one. Thus Peeta and
Katniss can both win. This is, ostensibly, to give people hope because everyone
loves a romance story. But the rules are then inexplicably rescinded right at
the end of the games so that one of them has to kill the other. What is this
madness?! There is no way you could make this sort of last minute rule change
without invoking everyone’s collective ire. Having changed the rules to allow
for two victors, you can’t just change the rules again because this kind of
capricious application of rules just offends people’s socially conditioned
sense of fairness.
So I guess the conclusion is that the
Hunger Games is a great film about a highly flawed political tool. Perhaps
President Snow should take a gander at Foucault, then he would know that, “the
great spectacle of punishment runs the risk of being rejected by the very
people to whom it is addressed.”
Bibliography:
Go read Foucault's 'Discipline and Punish' - it's awesome...
