Story Remix: The Hunger Games.

I have every expectation that this weekend’s movie should be fun. What I’m wondering is if The Hunger Games movie will be more than fun—if it, like the book, will manage to be great.

It’s an interesting question because, despite the vivid action elements of the novel, the texture that really makes The Hunger Games jump out from the pack of YA fiction is, fundamentally, non-visual.

The passages in the novel that wrench your heart, that stiffen your spine with anger, that make you feel differently about the world?  They’re not the passages where something happens to Katniss, or even the passages where Katniss does something to her world.  Instead, the most compelling passages are interior monologues, where Katniss remembers something specific, or has a particular political (yes, political) insight, or makes a choice that crucially has no visible effect on the action she takes.

So translating the force of those memories, insights, and choices to film?  An exciting challenge.

Setting the Stage: Exposition and Focalization

When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold.

The Hunger Games, like many YA novels, has a tight first person narrative perspective.  I always tell my students, when reading a first person novel, to think about the difference between the narrator-as-narrator and narrator-as-character.  Here, as in Twilight, there’s virtually no difference. We’re not with a storyteller looking back on something they’ve learned, we’re with the storyteller as they’re learning something.

In the novel’s first line, above, the reader wakes up with Katniss on the day of the reaping. Our knowledge of Panem, the fictional world of The Hunger Games, comes entirely from what Katniss knows and what she, through the course of her story, comes to understand, and that nascent understanding is the emotional heart of the novel. Katniss quickly glosses the complexities of her world in the novel’s first chapter, through explaining her actions on the day of the reaping. As the novel goes on, we learn more through flashbacks and memories.

Despite the subtlety of the environment Collins’s novel crafts, this shouldn’t be a hard thing to translate to film. And yet, when beloved novels turn to film, exposition is almost always a sticking point.

Moviegoers are primed to recognize the cues of a dystopic, big-brother-ish world, and someone watching the movie without reading the books won’t need to know the details of this one in order to get the gist of what’s going on.  The problem is that filmmakers can be scared to sacrifice specific details that their core audience loves. This was the pitfall of the first Harry Potter movie, which left in every detail.   This makes for a tedious movie.

On the flip side, though, sometimes film adaptations opt the other way, and assume that all of their viewers know the story anyway.  This is what happened in Twilight: Breaking Dawn, which is shockingly bereft of any kind of helpful information.  I saw Breaking Dawn with a non-reader who spent the entire movie entertained, but baffled.

What I’d do: minimize.  Gloss the key points—Katniss’s dead father, her anger at her mother, and her worry about Prim—through conversation with Gale. Use the information to emphasize the importance of that relationship.

Protagonist and Conflict: Show Don’t Tell

The Hunger Games is about a young woman trying to win the Hunger Games.  She starts the story tenacious and scrappy, good with a bow. Can these qualities help her win?  Possibly. But, like most heroes, she mostly has to grow as a person—that’s what heroes (think Luke Skywalker, for example) do. But unlike most heroes, who triumph by becoming more fully themselves, Katniss can only triumph by becoming something else: a good actress.

I force myself to take deep, slow breaths, feeling quite certain the cameras are on my face.  I can’t show weakness at this injury.  Not if I want help.  Pity does not get you aid.  Admiration at your refusal to give in does. I cut the remains of the pant leg off at the knee and examine the injury more closely.

The Hunger Games novel carefully charts Katniss’s growing awareness of herself as someone always on screen. Her defining characteristic (or the problem, depending on your perspective) is her intense focus on figuring out what will allow her to survive, and I personally am drawn to her because of her intelligence, her calculation, her awareness that she needs to become the kind of person her audience wants her to be.

But intelligence and strategy are hard to make visual (think about the years it’s taken to make Ender’s Game into a movie). The Hunger Games has an even more complicated situation because the strategy it depicts is all about performance.

Jennifer Lawrence is a good actress.  But here she will be acting as an actress, for multiple audiences. Katniss is being watched by her family and by the capital.  Jennifer Lawrence knows that Katniss is being watched by the worlds of Panem, and by us, the real viewers in real movie theaters.  And these different audiences need different things: if Katniss needs Panem to think that she’s not overwhelmed by suffering, Jennifer Lawrence needs moviegoers to realize how much it’s costing Katniss to maintain that illusion.

The stakes of Katniss’s story-making are particularly high when Katniss’s acting moves beyond injury to personal interaction.

If I want to keep Peeta alive, I’ve got to give the audience something more to care about.  Star-crossed lovers desperate to get home together. Two hearts beating as one. Romance.

Never having been in love, this is going to be a real trick.

One of the bravest, most provacative tricks of Collins’s novel is to make the central generic expectation of the YA novel—the young girl torn between two loves, the young girl caught between the sweep of history and the pull of the heart—and make that expectation an overt subject for its heroine to grapple with. Katniss sort of is torn, she is caught—but  more importantly she knows that her audience wants her to be torn and caught. And despite the fact that she desperately wants the time and space to figure out what she really feels, her ever present audience means that, for her, there’s not really a gap between performance and reality (teachers! Take note!).

Jennifer Lawrence is skilled enough to let suffering, intelligence, and complex feeling play out over her face. But that is exactly what Katniss cannot, really, do.

So how will the filmmakers do it?

Well, they might forget it, and let Jennifer Lawrence do her thing—let Katniss’s performance-within-the-performance be less convincing, so that movie-goers get a sense of the information she’s trying to hide.  That’s probably the most immersive choice, even if it flattens out part of what’s important about the character, to the reader.

They could also do a voice-over.  But I don’t expect them to, because, annoying. I mean, I love a good voice-over, but I think it would register with the audience as too Carrie Bradshaw.

What I would do is work it through Haymitch.  Haymitch is Katniss’s mentor, but what he really is, is her director.  And if the games are Katniss’s stage, Haymitch is standing in the wings (probably with Cinna), urging her along. And they’ve got Woody Harrelson, there! When I first learned about that casting decision I was disappointed (no old drunks look that good, kids). But Woody—like both Haymitch and Katniss–can be convincingly menacing and smart, and as Haymitch he can show those qualities while Katniss works to conceal them.  If it were me, I would nest key scenes in Haymitch’s vision, showing Haymitch watching Katniss search for water, for example, and Haymitch watching the beginning of Katniss and Peeta’s real/performed romance.

The risk, though, is that those are the most intense emotional moments for Katniss. Showing Haymitch watching Katniss will show the most sinister qualities of what she’s forced to experience.  But it will also knock the viewer out of an immediate empathy with our heroine.  I see the decision, here, as figuring out how to balance showing how the scene feels with showing what it means.

Antagonist: Spectacle vs Suffering

If The Hunger Games’s protagonist must become a performer, it’s not surprising what role the antagonist will take: an audience.

The Hunger Games is a novel with a particular political vision of a dramatically stratified economic world, a world of Haves (the Capital) and Have Nots (the Districts).  (I won’t go to much into the novel’s specific critique, but the book came out in the midst of 2008’s economic crisis and was presumably written during the Bush presidency, so you be the judge).

And here’s the key thing: the novel stages the difference between the Capital and Districts as primarily a matter of spectacle versus suffering.

The Districts are kept in a state of near starvation, working long hours for little reward, turned against each other by fear and exhaustion.  The games are a real experience for them: they are required to watch the games in which their children die as a type of punishment.

In the capital, on the other hand, luxury protects everyone from real loss. Every year, the citizens of the capital watch children forced into killing each other.  But, crucially, they don’t do it because they’re mean. President Snow is mean.  Everyone else? Just clueless.

 It’s funny, because even thought they’re rattling on about the Games, it’s all about where they were or what they were doing or how they felt when a specific event occurred.  “I was still in bed!” “I had just had my eyebrows dyed!” “I swear I nearly fainted!” Everything is about them, not the dying boys and girls in the arena.

 

We don’t wallow around in the Games this way in District 12.

The novel makes clear that the Capital enjoys the games because they’re so far removed from the reality of suffering that they find watching it enjoyable, thrilling—and a meaningful emotional experience. (note: sound familiar?)

As a novel, The Hunger Games can easily register the difference between the games as suffering (something that’s actually endured by the Districts) vs spectacle (something that’s watched by the Capital).  And Collins doesn’t shy away from her critique of an opulent audience, tantalized by suffering they don’t actually share.

But how with the visual medium of film register the difference between these two ways of watching?

In the novel, Katniss imagines her audience—imagines what her actions, projected on screens across Panem, mean in the districts and the capital.

The obvious choice is for the filmmakers here to actually stage these scenes of viewing and I bet we’ll see that happen. We’ll see the thrilled stylists watching; we’ll see Gale and Prim. What I’m interested in, is: how will this seeing happen? How will the director stage the difference between the watchers in the Districts and in the Capital? Will the dangerousness of the Capitol’s unknowing cruelty register in…their context? Their costumes? Their enthusiasm?

Another way of putting this is: what ideas about spectacle will this movie force its own audience to see?

This, for me, is the real question of this new movie The Hunger Games, and what will shift it from fun to great.

People often point out that the Capitol satirizes Hollywood, celebrity-culture, image making.  That’s only the half of it.  The Hunger Games is a dystopic vision of a broader reality: a hugely and increasingly stratified world, not Panem but ours, and a powerful, wealthy nation trying to figure out how to look at the rest of reality.The novel is a smartly-paced, super fun, thriller.  But it also emotionally and politically effective.  It leaves me staring around the comparative opulence of my own house, looking at my own safe children, and feeling…feeling something dark.

My question for the movie is: will it, too, take its audience to a dark place, where serious questions about how we make our world demand to be asked?