Survival of the Purest: Neoliberalism in The Hunger Games and Battle Royale

Having only just escaped my own teenage years, I have a lot of mixed feelings about adolescence. Listening to people older than me, I often hear that teenagers are mean, histrionic little know-it-alls with nothing but angst, self-absorption and empty-calorie cynicism flowing through their veins. And having only just been a teenager myself, I can’t also say there’s there is no truth to that; teenagers are insecure, they’re hormone-addled, and in the 21st century have access to an array of technologies that let them broadcast versions of themselves they might later wish to live down to the entire world. But even if contemporary wisdom dictates that adolescence has always been a time of angst and cynicism, there seems to me something far more cynical about the way that teenage suffering has been normalized, made into something that everyone between the ages of 13 and 19 should anticipate. Emotional suffering doesn’t simply arise in a vacuum; it is almost always created through external conditions, and even the most banal teenage whining should be assumed to be grounded in some outside social forces. But what is the cause? Is it all hormones? Is it insecurity? Is it just a natural part of “finding yourself,” as so many young adults narratives stress? These could all very well be central factors, but a recent strain of young adult narrative – the “kill your friends because you are forced to” kind – seems to suggest something more systemic at play.

patrick1

The general premise of Avengers Arena, an ongoing series written by Dennis Hopeless and illustrated by Kev Walker, is one that’s become strangely familiar in the past 5 or so years; a group of teenagers, isolated and rendered helpless by some outside force or organization, are forced to run around killing one another until only a single person, the Übermensch among them, still stands. Some of them will refuse to fight (and they die quickly), some of them will try to run (and they die just as quickly) and some will take to the game immediately, thrilled to finally have the chance to release their inner demons and kill everyone who’s ever said something rude to them. But mostly, it’s a brutal game of survival, a literal dog eat dog nightmare designed to breed the most ruthless, brutal and efficient members of society. Sounds like High School, right?

We all probably know where this train starts; when Koushon Takami’s novel was released in 1999, and adapted into a film in 2000, Battle Royale created an enormous stir in Japan and a significant one abroad. Coming out at a time when Japan was just getting out of its Lost Decade (only to fall headfirst into another one, as fate would have it), Battle Royale combined the titillation of a slasher film with the concrete issues facing Japan’s youth at the time, namely the plight of the precariat (precarious proletariat, those unable to find work beyond temporary, part-time positions) and the consequences of a prolonged recession that forced young people to go at each other’s’ throats constantly in their attempts to secure stable employment, which was thought of as a birthright just a generation before. It takes place in an alternate-world 1997 Japan, where the country’s economy has collapsed and unemployment has become so rampant most students have stopped attending school, seeing it as a waste of time. Seeing the very foundations of their society crumble, Japanese authorities pass the Battle Royale Act, stipulating that once a year a randomly chosen 8th grade class must fight to the death until only one student remains standing.

While the Battle Royale bills itself as a celebration of the idea of survival of the fittest, it is clearly a battle of the most aggressive; any alternative means of survival, such as hiding, escaping or simply choosing not to fight are cancelled out with the inclusion of an island location, detonating collars and mines that force students to continuously come closer to one another until all are dead. Class 3-B, the class chosen for the Battle Royale, initially has no idea what is going on when they’re kidnapped and spirited away, but soon after the game starts, several students take to it quickly, especially Kazuo Kiriyama, a mute, psychopathic character who willing signed up for the Battle Royale because he thought it might be fun. The movie is in turn a character study and a bloodbath, intimately concerned with the psychologies and motivations of these young people forced to kill one another. We have Mitsuko Souma, a child sexual abuse victim who ultimately killed her abuser and learned to never trust anyone, Hiroki Sugimura, a boy whose tracking device would let him easily win the game, but who ultimately uses it to track down his fellow classmates to make amends over past wrongs, and the protagonist Shuya Nanahara, whose only motivation is the protect his friend Noriko, determined not to lose anybody else after his father’s suicide and the murder of his best friend at the beginning of the film. These students are not angels, nor are they “tragically flawed” in the half-assed way slasher films make their characters to justify their deaths; they’re teenagers, hormonal and exuberant and forced to murder one another so that the adults can keep their society the way it is.

The killing, of course, is metaphorical; we can’t simply allow all these teenagers to waltz into adulthood, they’re not prepared! Adulthood is a brutal exercise in Social Darwinism, where only brute strength and cunning can be relied on for survival. But even if the forces that be in Battle Royale use this idea as a theoretical justification for their systems of domination, the practice is much different; rather than work communally towards mutual survival, the students of Class 3-B are forced to kill each other, or else be killed by their detonating collars. The artificial conditions of the Battle Royale parallel the artificial conditions of the world that created it; a system of exploitation, a neoliberalism that always reproduces conditions of deficiency and inequality so that it may continuously justify its own existence. Not enough wealth, not enough resources? Let the free market take care of it! It’ll find a place for everyone and everything. Except when it doesn’t, as is the case in capitalist crises and the system must find new means of justifying the accumulation of capital at the top at the expense of everybody else. In the case of first world countries like Japan, this usually entails an assault on a middle class anxious about their own socioeconomic status. By ensuring the middle class, and in particular the youth of that class, must cull their own numbers (quite literally) to ensure its own survival, the ruling class stays on top; while the students must kill one another, the teachers idle their time away.

The notion of class is taken a step further in the most famous American manifestation of this genre, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. In the book and film, two children from each of the twelve outlying Districts of the nation of Panem (a dystopian, post-nuclear America because we’ve never heard that one) are forced to fight to the death as a means of paying tribute to the Capitol, as penance for a civil war waged 74 some-odd years ago. The very name of the nation references its predication on inequality; the tribute the districts pay, called the Hunger Games, are a form of Panem et Circenses, bread and circuses built on the back of the lower class for the enjoyment of the higher ups. And just to keep future generations from ever questioning their position, the Capitol makes sure to keep them busy and divided by making the Games into a public, much spectacle and a means for any given District to win glory (and much needed food) for themselves.

While Battle Royale shifts panoramically across different characters and storylines, Hunger Games focuses on one character, Katniss Everdeen, a girl from the lowliest beginnings who volunteers to participate as a means of saving her little sister who is originally chosen. In her own way, Katniss represents a contemporary conception of the American dream; throughout the games, she manages to succeed not by brute force or cunning, but by being charismatic and resourceful, kind to her allies and smarter than her opponents. When she’s in danger, she is often saved by others (like Peeta, a boy enamored with her, and Thresh, who does so as part of a blood debt), and when she kills, it is only to survive or out of righteous fury, as when her friend Rue dies. Ultimately, her actions begin to sow the seeds for open revolt throughout the nation, and when it comes down to her and Peeta as the final two survivors, she chooses to take her own life alongside him, forcing the Capitol to call of the games and name them both winners.

If one continues reading the Hunger Games series, they’ll see it ultimately plays out in a similar style to Battle Royale; the system of domination and exploitation, targeted primarily at young people but also at the middle and working classes in general, cannot be defended or sustained, and must be subverted and overthrown so that the cycle of violence may end. But in the course of the killing spectacle itself, the characters of Battle Royale are often fleshed out, developed, made into believable human beings and then killed, while in Hunger Games, Katniss seems to survive without ever having to truly compromise her ethical values, the other characters either acting as shields or protectors of her. In Katniss, we see a character who manages to survive by doing just the right things at just the right time, succeeding with cleverness and just a bit of luck. In Battle Royale, the protagonists Shuya and Noriko only manage to survive when one of the teachers ultimately lets them, motivated by a combination of pity and obsession. While in Hunger Games, there is the suggestion that success in a system of domination, even a conditional, unstable success, is still attainable, still within the grasp of the most adept and resourceful regardless of status, Battle Royale maintains no such hope, acknowledging that ultimately it is only through connections and social status that one can survive.

Fans of both Hunger Games and Battle Royale vociferously argue that the two works are completely different, and to an extent I agree with them. For while both share a similar premise, one grounded in an understanding of systems of oppression as well as an anxiety regarding recession, the decline of the first world, and the long “crisis of capitalism” that has been ongoing from the end of the 20th century to the 21st, they ultimately approach their own metaphorical models in different ways. In Battle Royale, we find little reason to hope for anything but full overthrow of the system at hand, while Hunger Games seems to suggest there might still be hope for success. But even if we accept the intimations in Hunger Games and agree that even the lowliest and meanest among us can rise to greatness, what of the remaining tributes killed? Were they not resourceful, kind and determined like Katniss, with their own backstories and hopes and dreams? We never get to know, as the majority function either as allies dedicated to Katniss, evil enemies determined to kill her, or nameless, faceless casualties we never know anything about. For the Hunger Games narrative to work, we must believe in the power of the individual to overcome, even if this requires one individual being prioritized above all others. In Battle Royale, such a gesture is futile.

Is this difference in attitude towards the system a reflection of the mindsets within their respective countries of origin? In Japan, the economic recession has been an ongoing crisis for more than 2 decades, while we here in the States know it as a largely new phenomenon. In Hunger Games, we can still see the potential for success in a rigged system, however fleeting; in Battle Royale, there is an overwhelming sense of resignation, a sense that if we cannot escape the system of domination, we must enjoy it or seek to destroy it. And on the topic of enjoyment it should be noted that as a film, Battle Royale is far gorier than Hunger Games. W hile Hunger Games actively attempts to distance the viewer from scenes of gratuitous violence, Battle Royale revels in them and even sexualizes them, titillating the viewer with a spectacle they ought to otherwise be horrified by. While Hunger Games takes a principled stand against the violence, Battle Royale submits to it, even enjoys it.

So what can be said of this nascent genre? Is it political, or decadent? Should it enjoy its own violent spectacle, or take a principled stand against it? Will it become the new “zombie film” of pop culture? God let’s hope not. Although I haven’t read much of Avenger’s Arena, where it ultimately takes the genre will be most telling; it could go down the Battle Royale route, positioning itself along the lines of horror films in saying that hey, if we can’t escape the violence, we might as enjoy it, or the Hunger Games route of keeping one’s chin high even in the direst of circumstances. Neither approach is perfect, each has its merit; while Hunger Games refuses to revel in the spectacle of violence or enjoy it, Battle Royale shows that the only way you can hope to beat a system of exploitation is to resist it with everything you’ve got. Avenger’s Arena has the potential to push the genre in one of two directions; towards gory, ideologically hollow exploitation, or towards a political attack on the ways in which youth are brutalized, sexualized and forced to fight one another in media and society, a critique especially salient in this age of precariatism, unpaid internships and the never-ending recession. Either way, as long as it keeps being fun to watch and continues giving grown-ups the middle finger, it will find an eager audience amongst adolescents and young people alike. Whether it will be pure entertainment or motivation towards some greater, more nebulous and worthwhile goal, remains to be seen.

22 thoughts on “Survival of the Purest: Neoliberalism in The Hunger Games and Battle Royale

  1. I have not read Avengers Arena, but from what I’ve heard of it the background seems to be Hunger Games was big this year- so someone pitched the idea of taking the teen characters Marvel isn’t using, and do a Hunger Games knockoff– it seems sort of like sticking the middle finger out to any writer or artist who put their efforts into developing new teen characters for Marvel over the years, but so it goes.

    I mean, it seems if you develop a new character at Marvel, another writer will come along and rape or murder them to sell their new hot pitch. It doesn’t seem an ideal creative environment if you care about the characters you’ve created at any rate.

  2. “I mean, it seems if you develop a new character at Marvel, another writer will come along and rape or murder them to sell their new hot pitch.”

    Sort of meta; brutal war of survival for the characters, brutal war of survival for the creators.

    Oh…I wanted to say I don’t think your take on slashers is quite right Patrick. You say that slasher victims have tragic flaws, but I think that isn’t very accurate. Slasher victims are often quite despicable (see Hostel), and their deaths are generally presented as stupid/humilitating, rather than as particularly tragic.

  3. “But even if contemporary wisdom dictates that adolescence has always been a time of angst and cynicism, there seems to me something far more cynical about the way that teenage suffering has been normalized, made into something that everyone between the ages of 13 and 19 should anticipate. Emotional suffering doesn’t simply arise in a vacuum; it is almost always created through external conditions, and even the most banal teenage whining should be assumed to be grounded in some outside social forces.”

    I love this, but it leads me to think that stories/properties like Battle Royale, the Hunger Games and Avengers Arena are more complicit than rebellious… it’s not the young kids sticking the middle finger to adults, as much as the other way around.

    As for a source of the angst-expectation, why not the invention of ‘adolescence’ itself, which (I think,) arose out of mass marketing, industrialism and consumerism? I wonder how this angst and hormones narrative, and the metaphor of kids killing each other (its just like high school!) serves capitalism.

    My guess is it does, because the experience of adolescence, recovery from adolescence, and nostalgia for adolescence are all mediated through purchases– clothes, cars, and decreasingly, music.

  4. I think capitalism and identity are often symbiotic. That is, forming identities/demographics is often linked to marketable signs of identity. You make yourself a niche through purchases.

    Possibly with adolescence in particular, though (and as Patrick suggests) there’s a benefit of cheap labor? You push adulthood further up,and then there’s a class of workers who aren’t “really” workers who you can pay as if they’re just playing, or getting experience, or what have you.

  5. Noah, I think agree with your points (and Patrick’s, through his piece.) And as a longtime member of the cheap-labor, youth market (makes me think of yesterday’s piece,) I’ll give it more thought as to how it ties into things like HG and BR. Not sure I completely get the connection right now– we’re being used to send out Amanda Palmer kickstarter mailings, not kill each other.

    I didn’t really back up why I don’t think BR, HG or AA are very successful critiques of the mistreatment of middle and lower class adolescents within society (or maybe just all adolescents.)

    In a way, I guess they are better critiques than I initially thought– if capitalism benefits from inducing “crazy” behavior in teenagers, making them better consumers, there’s definitely room for an interpretation that capitalism enjoys adolescent self-destruction.

    What always drove me crazy about HG is it’s complete disregard of mob psychology and dictatorships– like how crowding a nation’s worth of disaffected people into public spaces to watch their children being killed doesn’t set off a revolution Every time. There’s a reason why systems like apartheid prohibited even small gatherings of black South Africans.

    I think your analysis of the differences between Battle Royale and Hunger Games is insightful, and already underscores this. I’m taking your point to mean that Suzanne Collins, the author of the Hunger Games, agrees with the book’s antagonists– that the Hunger Games are a legitimate way of determining human value. The books may be a about a revolution, but Collins couldn’t resist narrating another Hunger Games a second time.

    Which brings me back to a shaky point about why I think these stories are bad critiques, and don’t really serve adolescent rebellion. Capitalism wants teenagers to believe that other teenagers are out to kill them. It stimulates a lot of desperate, devotional buying behavior. These buying behaviors will be nostalgically repeated, once the stakes have dropped, you become and adult and are ‘settled.’ But the idea that teenagers really want to kill each other is a recent myth. Battle Royale and Hunger Games seem invested in this myth being a fundamental truth… I’m not sure it is. And I think I prefer Lord of The Flies, in all its required reading glory, to both.

  6. “Capitalism wants teenagers to believe that other teenagers are out to kill them. It stimulates a lot of desperate, devotional buying behavior.”

    I’m not clear on what you are trying to say. There’s probably a million stories marketed at teens that don’t feature them all killing each other with weapons. Hunger games is probably best read as a metaphor for non physical pressures put on teens, anyway. It doesn’t resonate because anyone thinks this sort of thing literally happens.

    But I don’t think the idea that teens have it tough is a myth created by Hunger Games or movie studios… it’s more art reflecting life in our society, i would think.

  7. Pallas, the argument I think is that it’s in part art reflecting life…but these things can go the other way too.

    Also…kids really do actually attack each other physically. Bullying isn’t just verbal. Obviously, folks aren’t generally sticking spears through each other, but harassment does frequently involve a physical component in these situations.

    Kaily, I would agree that HG’s presentation of how dictatorships work is pretty much nonsense. I think part of the disconnect is the effort to map reality shows onto dictatorships? It’s not crazy to see reality shows as perhaps oppressive, or about biopower, but the way they’re about biopower really has a lot to do with our particular system of late capitalist diffuse power distribution. You try to turn that into George Orwell, it just doesn’t really work. And the analogy to Rome doesn’t get at it either, or not without more work on the world building than she’s willing/able to put in.

    I don’t think Lord of the Flies is great, but it’s definitely got its ideology way better worked out than Hunger Games. It’s also not a genre work, and the genre elements of Hunger Games really mess with what she’s trying to do, as you point out, Kailyn. The demand that there be a restaging of the games over and over in the books for basically marketing reasons completely undermines her own moral position — and not in an even marginally self-reflective way, as far as I can tell.

  8. Hey Noah! I wanted to respond to a point you made w/r/t the whole idea of the “tragic” flaw; I don’t mean this in the sense that what slasher films present as “tragic flaws” are really just flimsy justifications for letting a character be brutally murdered onscreen, IE “she’s sexually active, he’s a nerd, he’s a jackass,” etc. I don’t mean that it’s tragic, but that these flaws in their own way parallel the achilles heels type weaknesses a lot of heroes in ancient tragedies have, albeit in a much more half-assed way.

  9. I saw the initial premise of Hunger Games as setting up the type of situation that Theseus and his cohort were in–a group of teens were given in tribute for a long past transgression of the parents. Although it plays out a bit differently in his case, I think the idea is the same, and a decent film in the same genre could be made. A bunch of teens get put on an island. They find death traps along the way and happen to be hunted by a big ugly monster. It is still the idea of survival of the fittest, and a rite of passage and supposed “honor” for those involved. It would have been an interesting story to hear of all the other captives with him and how they end up dying to leave only Theseus and Ariadne. I know that doesn’t specifically follow the myth, but it would make some damn fine television.

  10. Patrick…in tragedies, the idea is that you care about the character — the character is noble, interesting, valiant, worthwhile, what have you, but has a flaw in their character which brings about their downfall. It’s generally about nobility brought low through lack of virtue. And you’re supposed to be rooting for the hero usually.

    Slashers…it’s not that people have weaknesses that bring about their downfall. The logic is way more dream-like. It’s not that folks are flawed and so end up dying because they make mistakes; it’s that everybody is repulsive and deserves to be put to the scythe. And you basically root for all of them to be put to the scythe, basically including yourself.

    I don’t know…I can talk about slashers all day, but probably folks don’t necessarily want to listen…. There is some link between Katniss and the final girl trope, definitely….

  11. Yes bullying happens in real life… though I think maybe its rarely explicitly condoned by adults… the kids fighting each other because the adults made them seems more mapped to nonphysical pressures in real life, to me… although it’s really hard to pin it to one thing exactly, since I think some of the kids in Hunger Games were into the tournament and didn’t seem to be coerced. (Just going by the movie).

  12. Yes; in the book there are definitely some kids (from certain districts) who are into it.

    Bullying is rarely explicitly condoned…but I think it’s often condoned not quite explicitly? My gym teacher in elementary school made a point of singling kids out (including one kid who had leg braces.)

  13. I think it’s a great piece too. But zombie movies, Romero ones especially, though, have plenty of political readability– cf. Richard Dyer’s analysis of zombies and whiteness in his book _White_.– and that is probably the place to look for comparisons. We have all been objectified by commerce, individuals must find meaning, through love, hate, or fear, in the war of all against all. I think it’s pretty classically classic- in the Iliad type world of history as endless cycle.

    Shakespeare, according to Anthony Burgess (!) said something about how all youths between the ages of twelve and twenty were good for nothing but beating their elders about the ears and getting wenches with child. But of course he used adolescents as icons of pure humanity, which is I think how we see them today. Traumatized and autonomous, but without specific identitites,

  14. …shit, everyone’s talking about the precariat, and I only just heard the word. I enjoyed this; four thoughts:

    (1) it’s…hard to believe that Avengers Arena (as a product of Marvel Entertainment LLC (a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company)) will turn into a political attack on anything, except maybe by accident.

    (2) Is it worth mentioning that there actually are places around the world where teenagers are forced to kill each other? I assume we all know that, but lest we forget…of course, I don’t suppose those teenagers are the primary market for these films/books/comics.

    (3) You might compare these stories with The Long Walk, a book by (Stephen King pseudonym) Richard Bachman. It’s also about a national competition where teenagers must struggle to survive, until the last man standing, but the struggle is non-violent. They just have to keep walking, indefinitely; if they stop or slow down, they get shot by competition officials. This centres the responsibility for literal/metaphorical exploitation on the adults, not the kids, and absolves the kids from needing to compromise themselves in order to “win”. Rather more straight-up existential than any of the ones mentioned here.

    (4) Semi-infamously, the English translation of the Battle Royale manga messed with the world-logic. In it, the contest is for a reality TV show.

  15. ” it’s…hard to believe that Avengers Arena (as a product of Marvel Entertainment LLC (a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company)) will turn into a political attack on anything, except maybe by accident.”

    If the book is under the radar enough (i.e. unimportant) I’d think it could. Besides, Walt Disney owns something like 40% of all media in the world (okay I made that percentage up, but still) it stands to reason by sheer numbers that some of that media has to be political.

  16. Actually what makes adolescence so appealing as an insulated annex to childhood is how wish fulfillment can be projected thereupon with infinite enthusiasm, People want to watch people kill each other because people want to kill each other, and watching it is the next best thing,

  17. I’ve read a few essays in recent years claiming we are going the way of the Romans, who raised organized blood sport to an art in an effort to placate the masses.

    The whole capitalism thing is really a red herring, as any entrenched power, be it a monarchy, a national socialist government, a communist government, or whatever, will do anything it believes is necessary to hold onto that power.

    During the 1960s we saw popular culture conduits like “Rollerblade” and “Logan’s Run” suggest ways future governments would hold on to their power by using some mass socialization vehicle.

    As a child of the 1960s, I think all of the grim future scenarios were almost universally seriously overplayed, ala the “Soylent Green is people!” alarmists.

    “Hunger Games,” et al, is simply this generation’s alarmist tale du jour.

  18. I mean “Rollerball,” of course.

    My brain did an automatic roller skate/roller blade update.

Comments are closed.