I went, I saw (so you don’t have to), I wasn’t unduly bored — although “The Hunger Games” requires nearly half its two-hour-and-twenty-minute running time to get the show on the road. My neighborhood multiplex was virtually empty, which is hardly unusual for a Tuesday afternoon and perfectly logical since “The Hunger Games” — a movie in which parents or parental figures are ineffectual, ridiculous or evil and, despite a few meanies, the kids are all right — is certainly designed for a school-age demographic.
The premise is simple: Kids kill kids (down to the last kid) as entertainment, as well as means of bolstering the power of an epicene ruling order. Wondering whether this teenage gladiatorial spectacle had something to do with a hatred for society’s most powerless class, I initially imagined that “The Hunger Games” needed to be put in the context of the YouTube sensation “Kony 2012,” the nine kids (and eight adults) massacred in Afghanistan, or the killing of Trayvon Martin. Not to worry: As a vision of horror, “The Hunger Games,” which plays as something like ultimate Outward Bound, barely even exists in the context of “Survivor,” “American Idol,” and Shirley Jackson’s story (popular in middle school English classes), “The Lottery.”
Strictly from geezerville, the social satire is as feeble as one might expect from a director, Gary Ross, who used to write jokes for Bill Clinton, and so broad as to be toothless. Although the Hunger Game within “The Hunger Games” is supposedly televised live for the delectation of the elite and pacification of the masses, the movie audience rarely sees it so framed. No distancing or distracting alienation effects are placed between viewer and narrative. We’re into it. There’s an inoculation in that, like any self-respecting reality show, the Hunger Games are rigged — but so, of course, is “The Hunger Games.” The spectacle is being directed for us. (The Game managers calculate that their audience likes “young love” — as do we!)
Naturally, the movie is filled with lessons to be learned, mainly skewing left: Sisterhood is shown to be powerful, literally and figuratively. The validity of 19th century robber baron Jay Gould’s maxim (“I can always hire one half of the working class to kill the other”) is amply demonstrated. Racial injustice is acknowledged in an audience-flattering way, which is to say that in this future America as in today’s, the greatest moral endorsement a white American can get is the approval of a black American. Thus the one black member of the Hunger Games junta (Lenny Kravitz) is sympathetic to the movie’s protagonist contestant Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), who twice has her life saved during the Games by black contestants.
As many have noted, Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen (or Kindness Everteen) is a version of Ree Dolly, the tenacious, resourceful, fearless Appalachian girl that the actress played in the highly regarded indie “Winter’s Bone.” “The Hunger Games” is undeniably progressive in making its protagonist so plucky, independent, and self-actualizing a young woman. Perhaps the real context for the movie’s astounding popularity is the current war on female health and reproductive rights that has been waged over the past few months by right-wing politicians and presidential candidates.
And now please avert your eyes for The Spoiler! The movie ends, romance-novel style, with the heroine torn between two equally attractive, respectful, and doting lovers; the real question, however, is whether sequels will allow Ms. Everteen to evolve beyond the Artemis archetype (chaste goddess of the hunt and protector of small children) into the Rosa Luxemburg of the 22nd century.
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