Artemis, also known as Diana the Huntress, lives on in The
Hunger Games — a movie which, perhaps not coincidentally, has
been setting box office records. The most evocative of the film’s
publicity photos features the film’s star, the lovely but tough
Jennifer Lawrence (Winter’s
Bone) in the role of Katniss Everdeen, got up a
la Robin Hood in rustic costume and drawing back her bow to
shoot at an unseen target. Even if that image in itself were not an
inescapable reminder that Artemis was the goddess of virginity, the
movie spells it out for us. Once, when the classical Diana and her
attendant nymphs were spotted skinny-dipping in a woodland stream
by a young hunter named Actaeon, she grew so cross with him that
she turned the unfortunate fellow into a stag and had him torn to
pieces by his own hounds. The supposedly 16-year-old Katniss proves
her equal in savagery, repelling the sloppy lusts of peacetime even
as she slaughters her coevals in the eponymous “games” for the
amusement of the grown-ups of the future watching her on
television.
Generally speaking, if I lived in the future I’m pretty sure I
would be a bit more squeamish than these futuristic guys, who are
sort-of-but-not-really modeled on ancient Romans, when it comes to
watching children kill each other for sport on reality TV. I hope I
would also have a better fashion sense than they do. But I can
totally see what they find fascinating about the killing spree of
the clean-limbed, athletic Katniss, whose Amazonian magnificence so
much resembles that of Miss Joan Hunter Dunn and other 1930s tennis
girls immortalized by the late Poet Laureate of Britain, Sir John
Betjeman. Another model might have been found in a recent
obituary in the British press of a young American swimmer,
Shirley May France, who electrified the nation by failing to swim
the channel in 1948:
Shirley May not only had a slender figure (though newspapers
waxed lyrical about her “ample bosom”), she was also extremely
pretty, with deep blue eyes, an upturned nose and a charming
dimpled smile. It later emerged that her cross-Channel bid owed
less to her own desire to break a record than to her father’s
ambitions and the machinations of a press agent who could see a
good story. As photographs of her swimsuit-clad figure appeared in
every newspaper in America and Europe, there was talk of a
Hollywood contract. The frenzy was heightened by a rumour
(incorrect, to the disappointment of her admirers) that she
intended to complete the swim in the nude. In the run-up to the
great event, a sailor who fell off the flight deck of his aircraft
carrier into the Mediterranean claimed that he had managed to stay
afloat for 12 hours by thinking of Shirley May.
There’s something like reality TV, and you don’t have to go back
to ancient Rome to get it! Like The Hunger Games, it even
has a malevolent older generation in the person of an exploitative
parent and press agent stage-managing the thing, though in 1948,
apparently, they were less prudish about the sex.
That’s because the movie bears the stamp of its origins in the
“young adult” fiction of Suzanne Collins, who collaborated on the
screenplay. Anything like adult sexuality would have blurred the
necessarily sharp line the movie draws between the tyrannical
parent figures who sponsor and cheer on the child-killing game and
their absurdly innocent victims. Of course, like most “dystopian”
fantasies, the thing is a mess — and one which is not made any
less messy by assurances that it all makes more sense in Ms.
Collins’s novels. There is a rather awkward account near the
beginning of a primordial cataclysm and civil war — or maybe the
cataclysm was the civil war — which resulted in the
virtual enslavement by the winners of large numbers of the losers,
from the youthful descendants of whom the contestants in the Hunger
Games are still being chosen, as they have been for the previous
seventy-four years, in order that their “sacrifice” may be the
means for the whole society “to remember the past and protect the
future.” Right. Whatever.
But if the fantastical drama doesn’t make any kind of
naturalistic sense, there is a symbolic side to it, summed up in
the Diana Huntress figure, and a child’s lively sense of the
intersection of sex and danger is an inevitable subtext to this
story of children being victimized by adults — as it is, too, in
Katniss’s rather disturbingly chaste relationship with the ultimate
in non-threatening boyfriends, Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson).
Even Peeta’s name is feminine. He escapes the hounds of Actaeon by
turning himself into Katniss’s obedient puppy dog as the two of
them are being hunted down by some very scary big kids with murder
on their minds. As this is plainly intended as wish-fulfillment
fantasy, however, not least in the politically correct pretense
that girls — at least the girls of the future – are to be as good
at fighting as boys, it’s pretty hard for the movie to generate
very much suspense about the outcome. Yet somehow, unlike Uma
Thurman in Kill
Bill, Katniss manages to rise above the
preposterousness of the drama into which she has been set and
resemble something almost too real.
Gary Ross, a former Clinton speechwriter who also made the
progressive parable, Pleasantville (1998),
directs, and he misses few opportunities to diminish even further
the picture’s already tenuous connections to reality — doubtless
in the well-placed confidence that this is what his audience
demands. Yet there is something rather splendid about the
Diana-like Miss Lawrence that almost redeems it. Almost. In an era
when it makes sense, if sense of an inevitably dubious and
disagreeable kind, to talk of a “War
Against Youth,” this almost mythological image of savage
innocence could be a worthy representative of her oppressed
generational cohort, helpless under the burden of debt their
baby-boomer parents have piled on their shoulders. And even if such
a grotesque indulgence in adolescent paranoia as the Hunger
Games fantasy of being forced to hunt each other with lethal
force partially discredits the young folks’ just resentment of what
their elders have done to them, it may nevertheless be a step in
the right direction towards their recognition of their real
grievance.
