I watched Mockingjay Part 1
23 November 2014 01:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
frayadjacentNote: major spoilers for all books and currently released films below!
I love the Hunger Games, but I don't love it the way I love other books and movies and television shows. I don't love it for the characters -- though there are many that I like, or admire, or care about quite a lot. I love it for the story, the themes, for what it does. (Not to say that I don't find much to love in story, plot, and theme in other media, but in The Hunger Games this plays a much more prominent role vs characters than in anything else I love.)
Or. put another way: my favorite characters in the Hunger Games are the revolutionaries. Most of them have fleeting scenes, no lines, no names. Many of them die that way. A few of them -- Paylor, Cressida, Johanna, Gale, Cinna, Beetee, Finnick -- play larger roles, but mostly they are in the background*. But it's their courage, their sacrifices, and their determination that makes the story what it is, what feels so unique to me among genre film and television.
A major theme of the story is how the District 13 leaders use Katniss, manipulate her, as part of their strategy. She is not the leader of the revolution, but she is its symbol. And while we see how hard this is on Katniss, the movies never set up a false equivalence between the District 13 propos and the Capitol's psychological warfare (mostly terrorizing the districts through public executions and mass bombings, but also through Peeta's pleas). The film -- both through its narrative and through Katniss herself -- also roundly rejects any false equivalence between the violence wrought by the Capitol and the violence that the revolutionaries use against it. And while, at the end of Mockingjay (the book), the leaders of District 13 do terrible things, worthy of moral condemnation, the books don't condemn the revolution itself because of these acts.
(You know what I wish? I wish that Snow and his speechwriter and Peeta had referred to the rebels as "terrorists". For one thing: they are. The main actions we see them take in Mockingjay 1 -- bombing the forests and breaching the dam -- are actual acts of terrorism, although the second one was just as much aimed at destroying Capitol infrastructure as it was about terrorizing the Peacekeepers or the Capitol. But secondly because of the way it would resonate today, the way that the FBI entraps activists and charges them with terrorism, because of the way that national elites use terrorism to control the people.)
As an anarchist/left communist, I usually have to dig a bit to find political meaning that I can really connect to in my media. But dig I do, and so for me, Angel is a show about people fighting for a better world, but feeling isolated and not sure if the fighting will ever do any good, if the real, tangible things they have sacrificed and lost in that fight are even worth it. Or if they can do better by "fighting from the inside". Buffy is a show about the meaning people can find, and the bonds they can form, though the (unalienated) work that they do, cooperatively rather than though top-down institutions like the Initiative or the Watchers' Council. Firefly is a show about a society deep in the throes of primitive accumulation (no, that's not why I like it, but I do see it.)
But with The Hunger Games, I don't have to dig as deep. In fact I suspect it is people politically to my right who have to do what I usually do: either intentionally misread the story, or ignore its politics altogether because it's an exciting story with characters they like.
Which isn't to say I don't do a little deliberate misreading myself. For one thing, I think both the books and films focus entirely too much on the image/propaganda side of the uprising. I'd have loved less emphasis on Katniss's singular role as a symbol of the revolution and a little more on how people in the districts organized themselves, how they convinced each other to risk their lives for the chance of a better future someday, and, most of all, how they decided and debated what they were even fighting for.
But I think that Snow's hatred of Katniss, and his obsession with the Mockingjay, was ultimately to his detriment. He let a mission from District 13 rescue Peeta, Johanna, and Annie because he thought that would stop the uprising by using hijacked!Peeta to defeat its symbol. But here's the thing: he allowed Gale, Johanna, and a few other skilled fighters escape when he did that. He could have captured them, tortured them for information about District 13, used them as examples in part of his psy ops program, but he was so focused on Katniss that he let them all go. And later Gale plays a key role in a major military victory.
Because the story isn't just about Katniss. This isn't Serenity or Dollhouse (ugh, I keep coming up with Joss Whedon examples, I swear I watch other stuff), where a small band of rebels changes everything through a single act of defiance. This is a protracted struggle, requiring the total dedication of millions (or maybe thousands, the population of Panem's districts, or at least District 12, is bizarrely small).
And it isn't a cautionary tale, like the Angel finale or The Dark Night Rises. This isn't about the old adage that we shouldn't rise up against the powerful because it'll only make things worse. In Angel, They Only Make Things Worse because the violence of the elites' backlash turns out to be much worse than the lower level everyday violence and misery they inflict**. In The Dark Night Rises, the audience sees mainly the violence of the bloodthirsty masses inflicting a reign of terror as soon as they have a little power. The Hunger Games doesn't shy away from any of these things -- the Capitol's backlash against the uprising is relentlessly terrible (sometimes too terrible; how the fuck do they get their coal after they've killed all their miners? I guess that's why the entire city relied on one hydro dam for its power in Mockinjay, lol.) And people -- especially the leaders of District 13 -- do terrible things in the name of the revolution. But there is no denying at the end of the story that those who survived the revolution, and those who will live on in the future, are better off for it.
This brings me to my final point. One of the two main feminist criticisms I've seen of The Hunger Games is Katniss having children at the end (major Gilmore Girls spoilers behind that link, BTW). And, OK, I am 100% on board with criticizing the whole "happy ending = marriage and kids" for all women characters, and I don't really care about Peeta or the love triangle except to be mildly irritated at times by it (unless they went OT3, I'd have liked that) but I feel differently about Katniss having children. The other children that she tries to parent -- Rue and Prim -- die in at the hand of the Capitol and the revolution, respectively. She says all along that she never wants to have kids, but that is expressly because of the Hunger Games. Because she doesn't want to send a child to die. Because her world is so profoundly fucked. The revolution gives her an opportunity to make choices she wouldn't have had before. She can choose to have children because the revolution created a better, much safer world for them. The revolution expanded her reproductive choices.
*Plutarch and President Coin are also revolutionaries and prominent characters, and I appreciate their role in the narrative, but they aren't my favorites. They aren't the heros of the story. And in my eyes, neither is Katniss really, though for very, very different reasons.
** Someday I'm going to write some meta about this, and I'm going to call it "The Cautionary Tale of Not Fade Away".
A little about Mockingjay the film specifically:
The first half of the Mockingjay book is probably the part I remembered least of the entire series, so I had very little idea what to expect. However, I was surprised by President Coin, because she was portrayed much more sympathetically than I remembered her from the book, where she was pretty clearly the sort of would-be dictator that revolutionaries should be wary of.
But maybe I'm more remembering her from the second half of the book, because she's clearly changing over the course of the film. Unfortunately that seems mostly to be due to Plutarch Heavensbee's machinations, which gives the character development an odious "a man put her up to it" air.
Anyway, I think we were meant to be chilled by the speech she gave at the end, where she takes credit for a victory that Snow handed to her, through its intercutting with Peeta strapped down, writhing and screaming. Given the response I've seen on Tumblr today, I think many fans (or at least fans who post on Tumblr) did react that way, but my feeling is that Coin isn't responsible for what happened to Peeta, and I frankly don't see why his welfare should rank any higher for her than the welfare of the people of District 13, or the revolutionaries in the districts.
Honestly for me the most condmnation-worthy thing I saw over the course of the film was what she didn't do: District 13 doesn't appear to have offered any real material support to the other districts, whose members are dying in the thousands because the have basically no weapons, no armor, and so they use their own bodies as both. It's not even clear if District 13 is giving them medical supplies and training at this point, though of course I know they do later.
Then again, I get the sense that District 13 isn't a dictatorship, so that's not just on Coin but on the whole decision-making body of the district. Which, like much of the political organizational stuff that I love geeking out about, is left so vague in the Hunger Games that I am at once frustrated with the lack of attention and delightedly filling in the gaps with my headcanon.
Anyway, I was surprised by how much I liked Coin, and I'm curious to see how it all shakes out in the next movie. In the books I saw her assassination coming from miles away, and I largely supported it. Given Moore's performance choices and the script changes, it's hard to see it being so cut and dry at the end of the film. Especially if they go the whole "Plutarch put her up to it" route. Oh god please don't let them go that route, it's so annoyingly sexist.
I love the Hunger Games, but I don't love it the way I love other books and movies and television shows. I don't love it for the characters -- though there are many that I like, or admire, or care about quite a lot. I love it for the story, the themes, for what it does. (Not to say that I don't find much to love in story, plot, and theme in other media, but in The Hunger Games this plays a much more prominent role vs characters than in anything else I love.)
Or. put another way: my favorite characters in the Hunger Games are the revolutionaries. Most of them have fleeting scenes, no lines, no names. Many of them die that way. A few of them -- Paylor, Cressida, Johanna, Gale, Cinna, Beetee, Finnick -- play larger roles, but mostly they are in the background*. But it's their courage, their sacrifices, and their determination that makes the story what it is, what feels so unique to me among genre film and television.
A major theme of the story is how the District 13 leaders use Katniss, manipulate her, as part of their strategy. She is not the leader of the revolution, but she is its symbol. And while we see how hard this is on Katniss, the movies never set up a false equivalence between the District 13 propos and the Capitol's psychological warfare (mostly terrorizing the districts through public executions and mass bombings, but also through Peeta's pleas). The film -- both through its narrative and through Katniss herself -- also roundly rejects any false equivalence between the violence wrought by the Capitol and the violence that the revolutionaries use against it. And while, at the end of Mockingjay (the book), the leaders of District 13 do terrible things, worthy of moral condemnation, the books don't condemn the revolution itself because of these acts.
(You know what I wish? I wish that Snow and his speechwriter and Peeta had referred to the rebels as "terrorists". For one thing: they are. The main actions we see them take in Mockingjay 1 -- bombing the forests and breaching the dam -- are actual acts of terrorism, although the second one was just as much aimed at destroying Capitol infrastructure as it was about terrorizing the Peacekeepers or the Capitol. But secondly because of the way it would resonate today, the way that the FBI entraps activists and charges them with terrorism, because of the way that national elites use terrorism to control the people.)
As an anarchist/left communist, I usually have to dig a bit to find political meaning that I can really connect to in my media. But dig I do, and so for me, Angel is a show about people fighting for a better world, but feeling isolated and not sure if the fighting will ever do any good, if the real, tangible things they have sacrificed and lost in that fight are even worth it. Or if they can do better by "fighting from the inside". Buffy is a show about the meaning people can find, and the bonds they can form, though the (unalienated) work that they do, cooperatively rather than though top-down institutions like the Initiative or the Watchers' Council. Firefly is a show about a society deep in the throes of primitive accumulation (no, that's not why I like it, but I do see it.)
But with The Hunger Games, I don't have to dig as deep. In fact I suspect it is people politically to my right who have to do what I usually do: either intentionally misread the story, or ignore its politics altogether because it's an exciting story with characters they like.
Which isn't to say I don't do a little deliberate misreading myself. For one thing, I think both the books and films focus entirely too much on the image/propaganda side of the uprising. I'd have loved less emphasis on Katniss's singular role as a symbol of the revolution and a little more on how people in the districts organized themselves, how they convinced each other to risk their lives for the chance of a better future someday, and, most of all, how they decided and debated what they were even fighting for.
But I think that Snow's hatred of Katniss, and his obsession with the Mockingjay, was ultimately to his detriment. He let a mission from District 13 rescue Peeta, Johanna, and Annie because he thought that would stop the uprising by using hijacked!Peeta to defeat its symbol. But here's the thing: he allowed Gale, Johanna, and a few other skilled fighters escape when he did that. He could have captured them, tortured them for information about District 13, used them as examples in part of his psy ops program, but he was so focused on Katniss that he let them all go. And later Gale plays a key role in a major military victory.
Because the story isn't just about Katniss. This isn't Serenity or Dollhouse (ugh, I keep coming up with Joss Whedon examples, I swear I watch other stuff), where a small band of rebels changes everything through a single act of defiance. This is a protracted struggle, requiring the total dedication of millions (or maybe thousands, the population of Panem's districts, or at least District 12, is bizarrely small).
And it isn't a cautionary tale, like the Angel finale or The Dark Night Rises. This isn't about the old adage that we shouldn't rise up against the powerful because it'll only make things worse. In Angel, They Only Make Things Worse because the violence of the elites' backlash turns out to be much worse than the lower level everyday violence and misery they inflict**. In The Dark Night Rises, the audience sees mainly the violence of the bloodthirsty masses inflicting a reign of terror as soon as they have a little power. The Hunger Games doesn't shy away from any of these things -- the Capitol's backlash against the uprising is relentlessly terrible (sometimes too terrible; how the fuck do they get their coal after they've killed all their miners? I guess that's why the entire city relied on one hydro dam for its power in Mockinjay, lol.) And people -- especially the leaders of District 13 -- do terrible things in the name of the revolution. But there is no denying at the end of the story that those who survived the revolution, and those who will live on in the future, are better off for it.
This brings me to my final point. One of the two main feminist criticisms I've seen of The Hunger Games is Katniss having children at the end (major Gilmore Girls spoilers behind that link, BTW). And, OK, I am 100% on board with criticizing the whole "happy ending = marriage and kids" for all women characters, and I don't really care about Peeta or the love triangle except to be mildly irritated at times by it (unless they went OT3, I'd have liked that) but I feel differently about Katniss having children. The other children that she tries to parent -- Rue and Prim -- die in at the hand of the Capitol and the revolution, respectively. She says all along that she never wants to have kids, but that is expressly because of the Hunger Games. Because she doesn't want to send a child to die. Because her world is so profoundly fucked. The revolution gives her an opportunity to make choices she wouldn't have had before. She can choose to have children because the revolution created a better, much safer world for them. The revolution expanded her reproductive choices.
*Plutarch and President Coin are also revolutionaries and prominent characters, and I appreciate their role in the narrative, but they aren't my favorites. They aren't the heros of the story. And in my eyes, neither is Katniss really, though for very, very different reasons.
** Someday I'm going to write some meta about this, and I'm going to call it "The Cautionary Tale of Not Fade Away".
A little about Mockingjay the film specifically:
The first half of the Mockingjay book is probably the part I remembered least of the entire series, so I had very little idea what to expect. However, I was surprised by President Coin, because she was portrayed much more sympathetically than I remembered her from the book, where she was pretty clearly the sort of would-be dictator that revolutionaries should be wary of.
But maybe I'm more remembering her from the second half of the book, because she's clearly changing over the course of the film. Unfortunately that seems mostly to be due to Plutarch Heavensbee's machinations, which gives the character development an odious "a man put her up to it" air.
Anyway, I think we were meant to be chilled by the speech she gave at the end, where she takes credit for a victory that Snow handed to her, through its intercutting with Peeta strapped down, writhing and screaming. Given the response I've seen on Tumblr today, I think many fans (or at least fans who post on Tumblr) did react that way, but my feeling is that Coin isn't responsible for what happened to Peeta, and I frankly don't see why his welfare should rank any higher for her than the welfare of the people of District 13, or the revolutionaries in the districts.
Honestly for me the most condmnation-worthy thing I saw over the course of the film was what she didn't do: District 13 doesn't appear to have offered any real material support to the other districts, whose members are dying in the thousands because the have basically no weapons, no armor, and so they use their own bodies as both. It's not even clear if District 13 is giving them medical supplies and training at this point, though of course I know they do later.
Then again, I get the sense that District 13 isn't a dictatorship, so that's not just on Coin but on the whole decision-making body of the district. Which, like much of the political organizational stuff that I love geeking out about, is left so vague in the Hunger Games that I am at once frustrated with the lack of attention and delightedly filling in the gaps with my headcanon.
Anyway, I was surprised by how much I liked Coin, and I'm curious to see how it all shakes out in the next movie. In the books I saw her assassination coming from miles away, and I largely supported it. Given Moore's performance choices and the script changes, it's hard to see it being so cut and dry at the end of the film. Especially if they go the whole "Plutarch put her up to it" route. Oh god please don't let them go that route, it's so annoyingly sexist.
no subject
on 23/11/14 01:21 pm (UTC)Trying to analyze why it didn't grip me, I guess partly it's that I don't find the writing to be that great, and partly that maybe the motif of a teenager coming of age and doing cool stuff like shooting arrows in the service of the revolution appeals to me less at 35 than it would've at 15. Conversely, I never really got The Dispossessed when I read it in my teens, but when I reread it a few years ago it appealed to me deeply.
no subject
on 24/11/14 12:11 am (UTC)Though, heh, at 33 I can still get a thrill when a teenage girl is shooting arrows in the service of the revolution. I'm easy like that. ;)
I read and loved The Dispossessed at 19 and again about 5 or 6 years ago. I keep thinking I should read it a third time, along with much of the rest of Le Guin's fiction. <3
no subject
on 25/11/14 07:04 am (UTC)I usually can, too! I just don't know why THG is not working for me that way. Ah well.
no subject
on 25/11/14 07:22 am (UTC)no subject
on 23/11/14 08:07 pm (UTC)no subject
on 24/11/14 12:12 am (UTC)no subject
on 23/11/14 10:35 pm (UTC)Yeah, when I first read the books, I tore through them really fast and was mostly focused on Katniss, but with the movies, I've come to really appreciate the courage of the revolutionaries, particularly the Victors in the Capitol like Finnick and Johanna. We know they've already paid an awful price when we meet them in the Quarter Quell, but they remain committed, and it's very moving. I was particularly impressed when the Mockingjay movie did not elide over Finnick being prostituted out by Coin. This is a series that never forgets the costs of either dystopia or revolution.
no subject
on 24/11/14 12:15 am (UTC)They are some of my faves. :D
I was particularly impressed when the Mockingjay movie did not elide over Finnick being prostituted out by Coin.
Wait, did I miss or forget something from the film? Or did you mean Finnick being prostituted by Snow?
no subject
on 24/11/14 12:22 am (UTC)no subject
on 24/11/14 01:46 am (UTC)