Dystopian Fiction, Hunger Games: a Slade-Hall Dialogue
a couple of my Durham friends do some cultural crit…
Dystopian novels—stories of the future going badly wrong—have apparently now surpassed the vampire and fantasy genres in the young adult fiction market. The books, and the phenomenon of their popularity, have provoked numerous discussions online, in schools, and in the sort of serious, adult magazines that teenagers don’t read. (We know this, of course, only because we read about it in the New Yorker.) Some reviewers have interpreted dystopias written for and read by young people as social commentary, focusing almost exclusively on adult-generated problems such as war or oppressive states. But it seems important for teachers and pastors to think through ways that young adults of a book-buying economic class bring the story into the mess of their own day-to-day striving and loving. In this conversation, Kara Slade, a student in theological ethics and former Duke faculty member in mechanical engineering, and Rev. Amy Laura Hall, a United Methodist elder and associate professor of Christian ethics at Duke Divinity School, discuss how young people read and employ these popular books, particularly the Hunger Games series.
Kara N. Slade (KNS): The pressure to succeed in a hypercompetitive environment, to be the future, can become a heavy burden when borne in isolation. I remember that burden myself. In 1990, I arrived at Duke as a freshman with a trunk full of new clothes, a heavy accent, and a completely falsified air of self-confidence. My parents rode the wave of New South prosperity from Depression-era childhoods to the yacht club, and I was painfully aware of both the requirements for success and the consequences of failure. Although the economy of the South had changed…
DeAnander:
I’ll read this with interest soon, as I recently read the entire Hunger Games trilogy and found it (a) very compelling (b) very strange (c) rather depressing.
18 June 2011, 1:11 pmTom:
I am currently reading Albert Brooks (yes, that albert Brooks) first novel, “Twenty Thirty.” For someone who is a very good screen writer, the novel is not well written, but the content is very good. Definitely worth a read for several reasons, but if I had a do-over I would wait for the paperback or do a Kindle version.
18 June 2011, 3:11 pmAs for dystopian possibilities, I often wonder what would happen if everyone (Everyone – Corporate elite) would just stop doing anything, but taking care of their own individual and family basic needs as best they could.
Stan:
Sounds more utopian than dystopian. (-;
Last Monday, my back unaccountably went out – an L-5/S-1 sprain, very painful – and I’ve been eating Vicodin and Flexeril like M&Ms ever since. This has excused me from working, because I can’t think clearly enough to write creatively about stuff in which I have little interest. The good news is I have time to read things like this piece from Kara and Amy. The bad news is, I may not make a hell of a lot of sense when I write about it. This is so interesting, however, I am going to try.
Coupla years back, after watching a few movies and reading some sci-fi books De sent me, I got the idea to do a group study at church that involved watching films. The main idea was to make John’s Apocalypse (Revelation), the last book in the Bible, more accessible by sneaking up on the topic through “apocalyptic’ films. I had become preoccupied with how stories form communities (and am still preoccupied with it); and I wanted to move from the most familiar to the least familiar by having the groups study three movies before we began to read. The movies, in order, were a B-film with very predictable Hollywood conventions (Volcano), an indie-flick with more interesting themes and production values that was also dystopian (28 Days Later), and finally a very high-quality, independent, dystopian film that echoed some biblical themes (Children of Men).
The group study was called Apocalypse Now, and I put it up at the nearly moribund Insurgent American site.
Reading Amy-and-Kara’s dialogue put me mind of that study and also of my own childhood. Both of them talk about dystopian films that affected them while growing up.
I was born in 1951, and my mother started teaching me to read very early. It was an obsession with her, and it took. I read at three, phonetically, and when I was seven I got hold a book at the library that scared the pants off me. It was a novel by Nevil Shute, called On the Beach; and the year after I read it, they make an equally frightening movie about it. In the book and the film, nuclear war had broken out, and the last human survivors were left waiting for their inevitable deaths from radiation sickness.
As one might imagine, this was a terrifying plot, given that we did atomic attack drills at school, where we dived under our desks during simulated nuclear strikes from the hated Russians. My parents, like many others, discussed building or buying fallout shelters, and actually settled on a plan for sealing off the root cellar, whereupon my mom accelerated the pace of her canning.
This may sound silly now; but this was the peak of the Cold War, and we took that stuff very seriously. Until I read Kara-and-Amy’s remembrances of dystopian fiction on their own formative years, I hadn’t thought much about it for quite some time, since after 1970, my broken worldview evolved around my experiences in Vietnam more than anything else.
Now this dialogue has me thinking, first I feared communist bombs, then I wanted to kill communists, then the communists were replaced by terrorists, then there was the cynical period, followed by becoming a communist, then whatever I am now. I probably need to be on someone’s couch to figure all that out, but that was the general sequence. Certainly no straight line from reading On the Beach when I was too young to handle it. Makes me wonder about where young folks today, reading perhaps this series that is only a short step from the horrible “reality” shows that populate the tube now, will end up, given whatever actual dystopia awaits them.
The theme of their discussion is domination and solidarity, and if anything has changed along that nexus since I was a kid, it is that domination remains, even as solidarities have been further eroded by shallow-minded consumerism and the incessant message that we are each against all, trying to win, as they point out.
Amy’s reference to the disparity of response from her WASP students and those who still identify themselves more as members of more complex families bears that out. We seem to be plunging further into a period where there is no belonging whatsoever, and alliances such as they are are merely instrumental. The synopsis I read about the novel Hunger Games suggests that this is exactly the tension experienced by the female protagonist. Can she surrender to the fusion of love, or must she remain apart from her love interest for the sake of her survival. Not having read the book, I can’t venture any more than that.
I hope people who have read it will jump in.
18 June 2011, 3:34 pmKim Sky:
Dystopian Movie — Rollover – Prediction of collapse from 1981 in a movie
excerpts of the film can be seen here:
http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message1575317/pg1
wow. scenes from cairo to madrid.
17 August 2011, 12:04 pmaskod:
Very interesting discussion there.
I have not read Hunger Games, but I have seen the Japanese movie Battle Royal and its sequel Battle Royal II. I think a comparison might say something interesting, though I have to work from the description of Hunger Games.
In both stories kids are pitted against each other in a televised fight to the death of al but one, but there are some differences.
In the Japanese story the kids are all from the same highschool class, meaning they already have relationships and are roughly form the same social strata. In the US story they are individuals, the poor chosen by lottery and the rich by will. Says something about community and lack thereof perhaps?
In both stories the main characters survive. In Battle Royal they do so by faking deaths, killing their jailors and fleeing the scene. I gather from the article that the end of Hunger Games is not so much becoming fugitives as “We discover that Katniss and Peeta eventually marry each other, have children, and take up gardening.”
In Battle Royal II we meet the fugitives are fully-fledged revolutionaries, having travelled to Afghanistan and back to bring violence to Japan. The adult society answers by drafting highschool students to send against them.
Martial revolutionary dreamings versus dreams of being middle-class?
18 August 2011, 6:58 amSusan/catlady:
Book three of The Hunger Games features martial revolution, and the inevitable corruption of the newly empowered.
The gardening is more along the lines of Voltaire’s ending to Candide. Bernstein sets it beautifully: “we’re neither pure, nor wise nor good, we’ll do the best we know. We’ll build our house and chop our wood, and make our garden grow, and make our garden grow.”
18 August 2011, 10:02 pmaskod:
Sounds interesting, I will have to add it to things to read when I am in the mood for something depressing. Right now, the news are depressing enough.
23 August 2011, 1:09 pm