Tag Archives: Hunger Games

Is Katniss Everdeen a Superhero?

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At first glance, the answer seems pretty obvious: No way! I mean, where’s the mask? What’s her codename? And what about superpowers—strength? flight? speed? The girl can’t even talk to fish. But first glances can be deceiving. Take a sec to adjust your X-Ray Goggles, and you might be surprised what’s under Ms. Everdeen’s seemingly non-superheroic skin.

Let’s start with those superpowers. You don’t need Hulk-like strength or Flash-like speed to join a superhero union. Of course Katniss actress Jennifer Lawrence knows all about mutant shapeshifting from playing Mystique in soon-to-be three X-Men films. In fact, it was 2011’s X-Men: First Class that flung Lawrence’s career into full flight, setting up her even greater success the following year in the first Hunger Games. But even though Lawrence is Katniss, Katniss isn’t Lawrence. Her character has to earn her own super skill set.

Which she does. As a top-notch archer, Katniss would fit into both DC’s and Marvel’s universes.  Green Arrow debuted in More Fun Comics back in 1941, and actor Stephen Amell has been having even more fun playing him on the CW series Arrow since 2012. The character started off as a modern-day Robin Hood knock-off, complete with a feather in his goofy tricorne cap—so if nothing else, Katniss wins on fashion points. I say she has the Avengers’ Hawkeye beat too. Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Hulk, they’ve all had their own franchises. Marvel has been mumbling about Scarlett Johansson staring in a Black Widow movie since 2010, but Hawkeye? Not even actor Jeremy Renner holds out much hope for that starring role. Meanwhile, Katniss hits her fourth bullseye with Mockingjay Part 2.

Okay, but Hawkeye and Green Arrow, like all self-respecting superheroes, wear nifty costumes. And so does Katniss. Tons of them—literally tons if you count that flaming chariot. Hell, she even has her own costume designers. Superman needed Ma Kent to sew his outfit, and the Fantastic Four were hanging out in mufti till Invisible Girl discovers her unexplained fashion powers in issue #3. At least it makes sense that Peter Parker would develop needle-and-thread skills from that radioactive spider bite, but where are all the other superheroes buying their superthreads? Only millionaires can afford a private butler named Alfred to maintain their wardrobes. So thank you Hunger Games for an unexpected nod toward reality.

But the key to a superhero’s costume is the symbol plastered on the chest—a spider, the number “4,” the letter “S,” whatever is literally closest to your superhero heart. For Katniss, that’s her mockingjay pin. It’s her personal symbol, and soon the symbol of the whole rebellion. The bird is also a super-bird, a genetically engineered hybrid that has an almost mystical meaning to those who respect its human-like singing. Like Bruce Wayne’s bat, the mockingjay represents Katniss’s mission, the next checkmark on her superhero trait list.

The two oldest comic book superheroes, Superman and Batman, spelled out two very different but complementary ways of defining a superhero’s reason-to-be: the Man of Steel dedicates himself to serving as a “champion of the oppressed,” while the Dark Knight vows to “war on criminals.” One is about victims, the other villains. Katniss covers both. She champions the oppressed citizens of District 12 while bringing her war to the Capitol. And if you think superheroes can’t fight their own governments, that tradition is even older than comics. Look at Zorro and Robin Hood. Or the Scarlet Pimpernel’s battles with the France’s Revolutionary government. Even Superman and Batman aren’t shy about roughing up a few wrong-headed cops or army battalions when the greater good is at stake.

Which gets us to motivation. What’s at stake for Katniss? Well, she’s been wronged, and she’s going to fight those wrongs until she’s fixed them. That’s the oldest superhero motivation of them all. Batman best embodies it—he crushes criminals because criminals killed his parents—but Alexander Dumas’ Count of Monte Cristo started exacting his personal revenge on wrong-doers in 1844. Plenty of 1930s pulp heroes started adventuring after the death of a loved one too, including one of the very first superheroines, the Domino Lady: corrupt politicians in league with a KKK splinter group murder her dad, and next she’s pulling on a domino mask and, well, a dress and high heels.  Again, Katniss wins on fashion sense. But she also wins additional points for giving the you-killed-my-beloved-family-member trope a much needed revamp. In the Batman formula, Katniss’ sister Primrose would have died in the Games—but Katniss begins her superheroic career not as a too-little too-late reaction to that wrong but instead by preventing it. Imagine if little Bruce Wayne had stopped that mugger in Crime Alley by volunteering for his Batman mission before his parents could be killed. On my scorecard, that makes Katniss better than Batman.

This is all looking pretty good for Super-Katniss, but she is missing some key superhero traits. First off, no secret identity. Of course Hawkeye and Black Widow don’t have ones either. And neither do any of the Fantastic Four. They do all have those fancy codenames though, something else Katniss is missing. But without a secret identity to hide, why does a superhero need a codename? Sure, Hawkeye and Black Widow are S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, but Nick Fury is just Nick Fury. Thor used to be mild-mannered Donald Blake, but Marvel Studios jettisoned his alter ego, so now Thor is just Thor.

So you could argue that codenames and secret identities are no longer a necessary part of the superhero formula. In which case, Katniss is in. But there’s another side to Thor that Katniss lacks. In fact, two sides. He’s a god who trades in Asgard to hang with us humans. If Odin decided to war on Earth, I have no doubt which side his son would fight for. Masks and codenames are important because they embody a superhero’s two-sidedness. You take your superpower-bestowing origin point—Asgard, Krypton, cosmic ray-infested outer space—and use it in service of your human half. Super-heroes are always straddling that perilous hyphen, keeping their two sides in balance. But Katniss is just Katniss.

Though, to be fair, she does have some duality. She performs her Hunger Game persona in front of actual cameras, while keeping her true self hidden. You could even say she uses her Capital persona to battle the Capital on behalf of District 12—the same way Batman takes the darkness of Crime Alley and directs it against the cowardly criminals of Gotham. But is that enough to earn Katniss a final make-or-break checkmark on the Superhero Census Bureau Questionnaire?

I’m going to leave that one for you to decide.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 opens November 20.

The Best Music You’ve Never Heard

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This is a sideways introduction to our roundtable on The Best Band You’ve Never Heard Of, which will begin next week. An index to the roundtable is here.
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The Hunger Games is a best-selling book that pretty clearly always intended, or at least wanted, to be a best-selling book. Katniss has become a recognizable one-word brand, like Beyoncé or Rihanna — and that iconic fame in our world simply mirrors her celebrity status in the world of the book. The Hunger Games can be seen in some ways as a satire of reality TV and the rapacious culture of fame, but the emphasis on viewing and spectacle also seems like a kind of dream, or wish — Suzanne Collins imagines everyone watching Katniss as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Everyone will watch Katniss; she is, and was always meant to be, a rock star.

“Dr. Franklin’s Island,” by Ann Halam (Gwyneth Jones) on the other hand, is an unknown YA book that seems like it always intended to be unknown. The novel is told from the point of view of Semi, a shy science nerd who’s won a trip to a research facility accompanied by other science nerds and a couple of television personalities. Semi finds the pospect of interacting with all the other kids, much less being televised, terrifying — and in response to her wish, the plane crashes in the middle of the sea, and everyone dies except her, a cool girl named Miranda, and a cranky, unpleasant boy named Arnie.

The three have some amazing adventures; the island is controlled by mad scientist Dr. Franklin, who injects them with animal DNA and transforms them into superhero animal people. But this isn’t a superhero story where the hero saves the world and everyone cheers. Instead, the action of the story is all almost completely private. One of the loveliest passages in the book, and in some sense the most spectacular, occurs after Semi is transformed into a manta ray.

I was floating in water. It was over me, under me, all around me. It was the air that I breahted. I wasn’t frightened. I still felt good, and delighted with my new body. Sunlight was warming my back, and that felt very nice. I glided up toward the shimmering liquid light, until I was breaking the surface and looked around.

Katniss’ big moment is triumphing on TV; Semi’s is just the sensation of being in her body; of swimming within the prose, quiet, unobserved, inward turned.

Shortly after this, Semi sees her friend Miranda, transformed into a bird, and then realizes that the two can’t speak to each other. The isolation is terrifying…but

Next thing I knew, everything was white. It was like being inside a cloud: like being surrounded by the dazzling, soft, white cloud-country you sometimes see from a plane window. I saw Miranda, standing with her back to me. I knew it was Miranda at once, Miranda the way I remembered her from the beach.

From the isolation of the water, Semi goes to a no-space. This turns out to be a kind of imaginary meeting place enabled by telepathy — but it also could be read as reading; the white cloud-country is the blank of the page, and the connection between Semi and Miranda is the private, quite connection you have when you have with Semi when you read the book. Rather than a hero who competes and wins and gains the adoration and pity of crowds, Halam’s book leads her shy character through a series of escalating isolations — from island, to manta ray, to cloud telepathy. There are adventures and dangers and friendship, but none of it is acted out in public; it’s all a secret. The world never finds out what happens to Dr. Franklin, or hears about his experiments; the kids manage to change back to human, and have the ability to resume their animal forms, but they’re (understandably) afraid of being experimented on, and never tell anyone. This is the last passage in the book.

I know that we can transform again. I believe it will happen, some way, somehow. I think about breathing water and swimming through the music of the ocean. I think about having a skeleton of supple cartilage instead of brittle bone. I think about feeling my whole body as one soaring, gliding, sweeping wing. I know that Miranda will never forget being able to fly. I dream of another planet, with an ocean of heavy air, where I can swim and she can fly, where we can be the marvelous creatures that we became; and be free, together, withno bars between us. I wonder if it exists, somewhere, out there….

An uninhabited island isn’t enough; Semi wants to go away to a whole different planet, where she and Miranda can change and be together, alone. In part, this seems like a gracefully hyperbolic extension of the closet; a gay utopia of sensuous transformation where the atmosphere is different enough that unnameable love is possible. But it’s also a dream of invisibility — to be lost, in a different form. It’s even a kind of invisibility within invisibility; this isn’t something that “really happens” in the novel — it’s a wish, a coda, outside the narrative, a fantasy within the science-fiction, imagined within imagination, both buried under and outside the story. It is displaced; a vision without a viewer.

The pleasure of The Hunger Games seems like it is in large part, and is meant to be in large part, the pleasure of participating in a pop culture phenomena; it’s about watching with everyone, and being part of the everyone through watching. Dr. Franklin’s Island instead enjoys being somewhere, and something, unseen. While everyone else is talking about Katniss, Semi swims on her own page, through music no one has heard.

The Romance of Dystopia

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The Hunger Games and Divergent may have romance elements but they’re not romance novels. Katniss and Tris don’t, for the most part, have time to focus on boyfriends; they’re too busy trying to stay alive and fighting their oppressors. Romance is about love; the most popular YA dystopias are about freedom. That’s a fundamental difference.

Or is it? When you actually read romance novels, it’s not so clear. Especially in historical romances, the parallels with YA dystopias can be startling. For example, Laura Kinsale’s 1993 classic For My Lady’s Heart is set in Medieval Europe — a setting as alien, and in many ways as authoritarian, as Tris’ future Chicago or Katniss’s District. The Princess Melanthe, like her peers in YA, is hemmed in by rules and proscriptions, her every move monitored and enmeshed in plot and counterplot. Born in England, Melanthe married into an Italian house, and her husband’s death set off a cascade of political intrigue as various suitors vie for her lands and power. One of her husbands’ Italian rivals has forced her to travel with his son, a castrated assassin who sleeps in her bed to make sure she doesn’t betray his father even in her sleep. Her entire life is devoted to concealing her real feelings under an icy veneer of calculation. Her husband “had trained her to trust no one and nothing, to lie of everything to everyone.” That’s how you live under totalitarianism. Katniss pretending to love Peta;  Tris concealing that she’s divergent; Melanthe pretending to marry a man when she has no intention of doing so — they’ve all learned to dissemble in the face of power.

Rose Lerner’s recently published Regency romance Sweet Disorder is less grim — no one is threatened with death — but there are still parallels. Phoebe Sparks is a poor widow whose sister has become pregnant out of wedlock, and faces exile and shame As a woman without much money, Phoebe’s options are constrained by rules which are both arbitrary and cruel. There’s a local election, and both sides are willing to provide her with much needed cash since her vote is needed — except that it’s not her vote, but her husband’s. should she remarry. Because of the elaborate mores of a strange society, she has to sacrifice herself to save her sister…which is exactly the dilemma which faces Katniss in the Hunger Games.

All of these books, then, are devoted to dystopias, past or present — they all involve women trying to live their lives in the shadow of repressive power. Or, to look at it another way, they all concern women trying to negotiate between patriarchy and love.

It’s true that the exact nature of that negotitation is somewhat different in Hunger Games and Divergent than it is in For My Lady’s Heart and A Sweet Disorder. Most obviously, the YA novels involve significantly more guns. Katniss and Tris protect their loved ones, or try to, through violent political action; the response to exploitive power structures (which, significantly, aren’t always run by men in either book) is revolution. Romance novels, on the other hand, tend to look for non-violent, personal solutions to political problems. Pam Rosenthal’s Regency The Slightest Provocation, for example, concludes with the protagonists, an estranged husband and wife, reconciling and declaring their love as they work together to prevent agent provacateurs from goading laborers into a demonstration that the government can bloodily quash. Injustice is undermined by peace and love, both personal and political. YA responds to patriarchal dystopia with violent political resistance; Romance with nonviolence abetted by personal affection .

Again, though, the binary is less clear than it appears. The Hunger Games, for instance, is acutely aware of the limitations of violence as a response to violence. Katniss’ embrace of revolution ultimately destroys the sister who she was fighting for in the first place. The rebellion in The Hunger Games, led by a woman, doesn’t challenge the patriarchy. It just replaces one boss with another, cosmetically different, but every bit as vicious. And for its part, For My Lady’s Heart doesn’t exactly forswear violence; Ruck, the hero, fights for Melanthe on a number of occasions, and while the tourneys aren’t to the death, the novel still unequivocally glories in his prowess, and in might asserted on behalf of right.

Rather than seeing YA dystopias and historical romances as opposed, then, it makes more sense to see them as thinking through related questions in complementary or overlapping ways. Can you use the tools of patriarchy, such as violence and paranoia, against patriarchy? Does forswearing those tools leave you defenseless? Is love a weakness, which gives patriarchy a hold on you, sending you to the Hunger Games (like Katniss), or into an arranged marriage (like Phoebe, in A Sweet Disorder)? Or is love a strength,  which gives you the heart to resist oppression?

Despite the similarities, I wouldn’t necessarily insist that YA dystopias should be shelved with, Romances. Genre markers are fairly arbitrary. But as in YA and historicals, that arbitrariness is itself indicative of lines of power. YA isn’t generally seen in the context of Romance novels because Romance novels simply aren’t seen; mainstream conversations about genre fiction include sci-fi and mystery and children’s lit and YA, but the genre with the largest sales and readership is almost entirely ignored.  Seeing Hunger Games and Divergent as future historicals is a way to see them as not just about the dystopia to come, but about the dystopias we’ve already (and continue) to have. And it’s also a way, perhaps, to grant Katniss and Tris their love along with their violence, and to see that they aren’t the first to wrestle with those options. They have many sisters who came before them.

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

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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.

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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.

Gay YA: Harry Potter, Twilight, and Nora Olsen’s Swans and Klons

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51arZc21phLYA fiction often has a complicated relationship with gay content. On the one hand, writers for young readers are often leery about presenting homosexuality.  J.K. Rowling, for example, has famously said that Dumbledore was gay  — but that revelation came at a Q&A with fans, not in the books themselves.

But while gay characters tend to be closeted or simply absent in YA, the gay experience is oddly and insistently prevalent. YA is, for obvious reasons, often focused on the process of growing up; it tends to be structured around the division between adults and children. And one of the main ways that the division between adult and child is explored, or dramatized, is by making more or less explicit parallels with the division between straight and gay.

In Harry Potter, for example, Harry’s move from childish oppression to magical power and fulfillment is accomplished through the discovery of a secret subculture living hidden in plain sight, recognizing one other through secret signs and rituals.  In Twilight, similarly, the world of the vampires and werewolves is a metaphor for the passage to adulthood.  But it’s also a queer closet which contains both pale, effeminate Edward’s refusal to have sex with Bella and hyper-masculine werewolf Jacob stripping his clothes off in front of Bella’s father.  Even in the Hunger Games, the Capitol’s Roman wrongness is visible mostly through the effeminate styles and carriage of its inhabitants. Katniss’ too-quick adulthood in the games is also a too-quick introduction to decadence, partially defined (as decadence often is) through gay tropes.

The point here is not that these series are “really” gay. Rather, as critic Eve Sedgwick argued, the point is that the queer/straight division has huge cultural power and weight. YA books tend to be about marginalization, about identity formation, about the way that you can occupy one social category one day and another the next without feeling or even looking any different. With such themes, YA authors almost can’t help using queer tropes, or being used by them.

In this context, it’s interesting to look at an actual honest-to-God, openly queer YA novel.  Nora Olsen’s Swans & Klons is set in a future where a plague has killed all the men. Women form pair bonds with each other, but reproduction is handled by the ruling doctors, who supervise the cloning of a few hundred established genotypes (or Jeepie Types.)  Some of these clones are humans, who spend devote theirs lives  to art or science or intellectual pursuits.  Others are Klons, genetically manipulated to be a docile, strong, loyal servant class.

The novel focuses on two girls — Rubric and her girlfriend (schatzie) Salmon Jo.  They’re both about to move out of the children’s dorms and onto their apprenticeships.  They are, in other words, on the cusp of adulthood, with all its queer secrets.

There are a lot of those secrets. Virtually everything you first learn about the plague and men and Klons turns out to be a lie. (Spoilers coming up, if you care about that sort of thing.)

It turns out that the Klon are not genetically different from humans after all.  They aren’t engineered to be happy servants. They just have a different tag put on their toes when they come out of the vats. They don’t lack human “intelligence and emotional development”.  The “humans” are simply taught to think they do.  Moreover, Klons are, again, drawn from the same genetically identical Jeepy Types as everyone else.  There are Klons who look exactly like Rubric, who think in much the same way Rubric thinks, who have the same genetic aptitude for aesthetics that Rubric has.  But Rubric gets to spend her  life making art, while the Klons that look just like her toil in factories or clean up filth.

The drama in Olsen’s book, then, doesn’t come from elaborating differences, or even from bridging differences, as it does in Harry Potter, or Twilight, or The Hunger Games. Rather, the plot is propelled by the realization that differences, and for that matter similarities, are arbitrary.  They’re not magic truths we understand when we become adults, but categories we impose. They may determine us, but we’re also responsible for them. To be an adult, or a child, or queer, or straight, isn’t as important as how we live in those categories, and, even more, how we make others live in them.

Rubric and Salmon Jo, horrified by their discovery, eventually free a Klon and escape from their city across the border into the wilderness. There they find that not all males have died. The Barbarous Ones (as they’ve been labeled) still bear male children, though the genetic plague causes those children to be mentally and physically deformed. Though these males will never, in some sense, become adults, the  Barbarous Ones raise them with great affection and love,

Rubric finds the males repulsive; she argues that just as her own society has bought into the delusion that Klons are nonhuman, the Barbarous Ones “have just bought into a mass delusion that Cretinous Males are really glam.”  Salmon Jo replies:

“Maybe every place has their own delusion. But I think the one here is better, kinder. You know how before we left home I said I didn’t know what human was? I know now. The Sons taught me what it means to be a human being. Even if they’re sick or not brainy, they’re just as human as us. I think they make you learn more about yourself, and that’s why the Barbarous Ones think they’re such an asset.”

It may seem odd for a lesbian novel to locate humanity paradigmatically in males, or for a Bildungsroman to find its most eloquent moral experience in perpetual childishness. But both choices are, I think, a measure  of Olsen’s refusal of easy categories. Perhaps because her queer themes are more acknowledged and controlled, she’s able to tell a YA story that isn’t about growing up to know the truth of difference (“Vampires are real!”  Magic is real!”) Instead, Swans & Klons urges its readers to define humaity as broadly and generousy as possible, so that it includes adults, and children, and everyone on the margins.

Dystopian Fashion

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Hollywood loves dystopias. They’re blockbusters with brains – mass market morsels with box office potential just waiting for grad students and culture writers to dissect, contextualize, and elevate. Regardless of whether the movie is meant to be camp or self-serious, the stories and themes need to be as intricately drawn as the world creation of fantasy films and novels, yet still rooted in some recognizable reality. In the simplest, and perhaps most confusing of terms, a dystopia is the opposite of a utopia. Dystopias aren’t the same as post-apocalyptic anarchy. That might be the origin of the dystopia, but after the chaos comes control. In a dystopia, the miserable structures are institutionalized – whether by a government, a corporation, or technology.

On one level, dystopias are entirely artifice. Everything is manufactured and tightly controlled to support whatever claim the controlling force has given for its power, from language, to information, to material goods. Individuals are dehumanized, and uniformity reigns. But with all the deconstruction of the plots and themes and texts and Cave allegories, it’s easy to overlook how the films are styled to show the audience a new and bleak world. What might seem an afterthought can become one of the most important elements of telling the visual story, exposing informative elements and details of the society that’s been created. Along these lines, I’m most interested in how wardrobe choices can illuminate something crucial about the world of a film.

Or: what will we wear when everything turns to shit? And why does it matter?

Why, for example, do all of the characters in the “real world” of The Matrix have to wear thin, holey, ill-fitting sweaters? What, beyond its blatant gesture to noir, is the meaning or significance of Rick Dekard’s trench coat? Why do all of the clothes in Children of Men just look…normal? In this essay I want to examine the great costumes in Gattaca and The Hunger Games — two examples of films with particularly weird dystopian fashion — to suggest some ways to think about costumes in the broader context of Hollywood’s visions of Dystopia.

Just as there are half a dozen varieties of dystopias in films, the costumes are similarly varied. Broadly speaking costumes in these films tend to fit into three categories: minimalist, over-the-top gaudy and garish, or retro poverty. Even something as straightforward as minimalist clothes can mean different things in different films. In Los Angeles Plays Itself Thom Anderson notes that films like to put the bad guys in modernist homes. Though of course not the point of modernist designs, the starkness of the sleek minimalism can easily be manipulated to signify some sort of deranged obsession with the superficial. Perhaps the ubiquity of high design might make that jump more difficult today, but with the right tone and the introduction of a pre-established villain, the minimalist home itself becomes the opposite of the calm utopia it was intended to be. Instead, the home becomes sinister, vapid and empty, not only of furniture, but of tenderness and humanity too. In other words, the good guys are never as well dressed as the bad guys.

Andrew Niccol’s 1997 film Gattaca presents the audience with a “not-too-distant future” where potential is predetermined by genetics. Employment and educational opportunities and advancement are set from birth, and liberal eugenics are used to manipulate genes to ensure the best possible outcome for people before they are even born. In this world, there are the successful and there are the defective and there is no real in between. Your genes tell the only story that employers need to know. Ethan Hawke’s Vincent is one of the defectives, with a life projection of only 30 years due to a heart condition who uses the black market to assume the identity of a genetically ideal person in order to become an astronaut.

The clothes in the world of the genetically superior are sleek, modern, and minimalist. The men wear impeccably tailored suits, All of the colors are either dark or neutral. Men and women wear their hair slicked back neatly and tightly. At the highest level of genetic perfection, and correspondingly prestigious places of employ, everything is pressed and starched. The white cotton shirts that peek out of the somewhat androgynous suits are flawless. In essence, no individuality needs to be shown through the clothing, because anything that you’d ever need to learn about a person you could learn through a simple gene report. Though we never find out where the mandates for these sorts of clothes originate, it would be reasonable to think that it likely started with the government or a corporation. In Gattaca, individual agency is rare. But the clothes represent an implicit acceptance of the world that they’re in – the shame of their flaws and individuality are so deeply ingrained in all of the characters that a different way of life and dress likely does not even occur to them. Even Jude Law’s crippled Jerome who doesn’t leave his home dresses in bespoke suits and vests.

Those outside of this top echelon still dress in muted colors, but the outfits are ever so slightly more rumpled. The cops and private investigators sport noir like Fedoras and unassuming suits. Those at the lowest level, the janitors, wear uniforms too. Everyone has their place, and every place has its predictable dress. No one would be mistaken as being part of an elevated status. Genetic makeup and class are intertwined.

There’s a brief suggestion of subversion when Uma Thurman’s Irene goes out for the night with her hair down and wavy, in a form fitting gold sequin gown. In this scene she even acknowledges that the pianist that they’re watching couldn’t play as beautifully as he does without his flaw (extra fingers). Perhaps the wild hair and seductive gown represent individuality peeking through outside of the workplace. But the shame permeates the night off too. Work, perfection, and the company define and shackle our characters, and it’s where this otherwise “perfect” society starts to crack. Though it might be beneficial for insurance agencies and companies to know the exact genetic potential of all of its employees, once genetic discrimination becomes institutionalized, leaving no room for individual advancement or self-betterment, the individuals begin to falter. Jude Law’s character commits sucidie after realizing that his life in a wheelchair in this society is no life at all. Afraid of their own humanity and fearful of flaws, the characters resign themselves to the standards of their own society, reinforced by dress and presentation. It’s not an injustice, it’s just the way things are. Ethan Hawke’s character subverts the system only for his individual gain by conforming to its expectations – altering himself to meet their demands and exfoliating away as much of himself as possible.

Gary Ross’s adaptation of The Hunger Games is somewhat more simplistic and ultimately more frustrating. In this post-revolution world, there are the haves and the have nots and material goods are the only determinant. In the movie we get no explanation as to why the society is divided as it is. Why do the people in the Capitol get to be there? Intelligence? Money? Birth? Maybe it doesn’t matter. Much has already been made about the disappointment that some avid fans of the book felt upon seeing some of the film’s representations of the costumes, but for our purposes we’re only going to talk about what we actually saw on screen in light of what the movie tells us about the world.

Those in the Capitol dress in lavish and gaudy clothes, reeking of invasive and discriminating excess that suggests both Marie Antoinette and a 1980s Wall Street Banker. The ladies wear puffy sleeves, full faces of white makeup, 1920s bee-stung lips, and neon shade of hair color. The men wear sparkly suits and facial hair so intricate that it resembles a tattoo. Grooming and appearance are clearly of great importance in the Capitol and everyone who resides there has both the money and the time to execute these looks daily.

In contrast, Katniss’s mining town of District 12 looks straight out of Harding-era West Virginia coal towns, with the earthy colored trousers and suspenders for the men, and modest knee length, short sleeved cotton dresses for the women. Makeup is non-existent, hair color is natural, and faces are smeared with soot. This is supposed to be a desperate people. Putting the citizens of District 12 in frocks that look like they were transported from The Great Depression could be a way to keep morale down. Not only do they have to lead miserable, impoverished lives, but they don’t even get any updated poverty clothes. It’s likely this was just an affectation of the movie, though, trying to make poverty look prettier thanks to the blinding revisionism of a style of clothes almost 100 years old.

Excusing the poverty porn of District 12, the initial division is striking. The contrast between Katniss in her drab blue dress and Effie in her magenta power suit sharing the same stage perfectly conveys the vast wealth disparity. Effie has everything, and Katniss has nothing. But once the film moves forward, and the tributes are transported to the capitol, things become less coherent. After examining the controlled and limited options for dress in Gattaca, The Hunger Games looks like it is verging on potential anarchy already. The varieties of dress are just too great. Everyone in the Capitol is so loudly individualistic, authoritarian control is hard to reconcile. But perhaps this is where The Hunger Games is a bold departure from the Gattaca-like uniformity. The control and the power is so pleasing to folks in the Capitol that they are willing to support the state since it allows them a superficial leniency in dress and decoration.

The makeovers for the tributes, though, seem inconsequential to the society in the movie. It’s all for show and entertainment and essentially looks like little more than fattening the pig before the slaughter, and has little to do with the power structures in place. Perhaps the fire costume was indeed more subversive in the books, but in the filmed adaptation it was more difficult to find the significance.

We could assume that the effeminate clothes and seemingly relaxed gender standards in The Capitol represent the government’s half hearted way of convincing those privileged enough to live there that they are indeed part of a liberal society. But when we step back and look at the evil oppressors in The Capitol as those in the districts might, it seems a strange choice on the part of the author and filmmaker to dress the bad guys effeminately. Is the point to just scoff at the excess and stop there, or is there something inherently dangerous in equating gay identity with the immorality of The Capitol? It becomes even more problematic considering the fact that beyond the suggestive clothes and makeup, we don’t see any sort of realized gay identity on screen – things are aggressively heteronormative. The ambiguity of the purpose of putting the bad guys in effeminate clothing ends up hurting the story, because it shouldn’t be a question that we have to ask, and it is irresponsible to leave it to unclear.

There are many other films to investigate. Sometimes clothes are just clothes, but in these dystopian films, they can be as meaningful and telling as a working knowledge of Huxley and Plato, even when the choices don’t quite seem to work.

Edward, Daddy

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In his book Forbidden Partners: The Incest Taboo In Modern Culture, James B. Twitchell argues that the gothic romance, and particularly the vampire story, is built upon the fascination/titillation/horror of the incest taboo. Twitchell points out that the vampire is typically an older, powerful man who attacks a younger, often virginal woman, forcing upon her an intimate encounter which involves a sex-like, perverted mingling of blood. Twitchell also reminds us that:

The most startling aspect of the folkloric vampire is that he must first attack members of his own family. This prerequisite has been lost in our modern versions, but it is clear in almost every early story in almost every culture. We may have neglected this because we find it too dull and predictable, but it may also be…because this familial tie makes all too clear the vampire’s specific sexual design.

The most popular current version of the vampire story is, of course, Twilight. Twilight differs from Dracula in many ways — but it definitively retains the gothic fascination with inbred family structures. Bella, notably, calls her father “Charlie” — his first name — and when she moves back in with him, she cooks for and takes care of him more like a wife than like a daughter. Bella’s surrogate vampire family is even more flagrantly incestuous; Carlyle’s “children”, turned vampire by him, all live together as brothers and sisters — and, at the same time, as paired husbands and wives. Even Carlyle himself, and his wife appear no older than their “kids” — who they create not by having sex with each other, but by having sex with the children themselves. Father/mother/brother/sister — the familial roles are all, for the vampires, arbitrary, interchangeable, and interpenetrated with sex.

If vampires are both daddies and lovers, Edward is certainly no exception. In fact, much of Meyer’s incomprehensible plotting is suddenly clarified once you start to view Edward as a father surrogate. Edward is, of course, much, much older than Bella (while still being, also, magically, 19.) And his relationship with Bella is defined by his overwhelming desire to protect her…not merely from others, but from himself. His stalkery behavior is often specifically explained as a paternal desire to keep her from harm — he disables her car, for example, to keep her from being hurt by Jacob. Meyer also is oddly fascinated with scenes in Bella’s bedroom — scenes in which Edward does not have sex with Bella, but rather spends hours watching her sleep…like a doting father. Edward’s continual refusal to have sex with Bella, and/or to turn her into a vampire, are also consistent with his fatherhood; he loves her, but incest sex would be so right wrong.

Obviously, incest is definitionally squicky, and it’s no surprise that Twilight’s flirtation, and more than flirtation, with the taboo have repulsed many, feminist and otherwise. At the same time, Twitchell notes that the gothic — incest and all — has long appealed strongly to young women. Why should this be? Twitchell doesn’t have any very good explanation — he mutters something vaguely about false consciousness, stammers about symbolic representations of hymens breaking, waves his hands, and scurries on by.

Gale Swiontkowski in Imagining Incest: Sexton, Plath, Rich, and Olds on Life With Daddy provides a somewhat more convincing explanation of the appeal of incest narratives for young women (if not of vampires per se.) Looking at American women poets, Swiontkowski argues that for daughters incest with the father can be a kind of symbolic grasping of patriarchal power — a repudiation of passivity in favor of the phallus. Obviously, this is a fraught and potentially damaging transaction, especially in the not-nearly-infrequent-enough-cases where there is actual incest and abuse. Still, Swiontkowski argues:

An advocacy of incest by men, as in pornography, is a regressive move toward social and psychological hoarding that enslaves women to men’s desires, especially if it is taken as a literal enactment of the right of males in patriarchy. The advocacy of symbolic incest by women is an enlightening and advancing move because it breaches the social restrictions on women that determine their subservience in a patriarchy.

This does seem to be in large part what Meyer is trying to do in Twilight. Meyer’s world is one in which the incest taboo is destabilized; fathers are brothers are husbands; siblings are lovers…and, as a result, ultimately, daughters are fathers. Edward is Bella’s lover and her father — and he is also Bella’s self. Edward’s paternal desire to keep Bella safe is ultimately accomplished by making Bella into Edward — by turning her into a vampire who is (the text is careful to note) stronger than Edward himself. Marrying her father makes Bella her own father, and she has the phallus/fangs to prove it.

Bella’s fatherhood is achieved by giving birth; it is tied into, and comes out of, her motherhood. Twilight, in other words, wants to allow Bella to retain her gender even as she grasps the phallus; being a vampire does not unsex or transex her, but actually reinscribes her femaleness. Bella can be structurally father without being male, just as the vampires can all be structurally siblings while sleeping with each other. Instead of incest leading to horror as in the traditional gothic, for Meyer it opens up onto a utopia of sexy, happy families and sparkly vampires.
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While writing this, it suddenly occurred to me that there’s a vampire in the Hunger Games too. President Snow, with his breath that smells like blood, surely functions as a Dracula surrogate — the older, powerful, seductive patriarch. One of the creepier moments in the book is when he leaves a rose for Katniss in her house; a symbolic and squicky father/daughter rape.

Katniss, of course, has lost her own father — which perhaps explains the intense personal relationship she develops with Snow. Certainly, Katniss’ hatred of Snow in the book seems weirdly unmotivated. Snow does many horrible things, of course…but those horrible things seem almost too much, the personalization of the evil of the regime almost too intense, as if Suzanne Collins is desperate to find an excuse to place Snow at the center of Katniss’ mental and emotional world.

Given Snow’s role as demon/father, and given the series’ fascination with intensely gruesome and macabre violence, I think it’s possible to see The Hunger Games as itself an example of the gothic. In many ways, too, it’s a much more traditional gothic than Twilight. Incest leads to horror — and to punishment, not just for the father, but for the daughter as well. Katniss’ punishment is precisely that she doesn’t get the phallus; repudiating the incest storyline means that she must also repudiate personal power and agency. She can’t actually admit to her love of dressing up (good girls don’t do that); she can’t admit to an investment or interest in politics (good girls don’t do that); she can’t even really enjoy the denoument of her romance storyline (the boy is nice enough…but he isn’t daddy.) As with Mina Harker, the dull live with the socially acceptable doofus can’t quite compete with the rush of the blood, the horror, and the power — the violent daddy things you’re not allowed to say you want.