Anthony here. I recently
saw the movie The Hunger Games. I
thought it was well done. Well acted. Very intense in parts. And quite true to
the book.
I read the
Hunger Games trilogy a few years ago,
and thought the books were interesting. A lot of the themes, especially in the
first book, made savvy points about our own culture’s love of spectacle,
especially as exemplified by “reality” TV. We tend to filter out morality, to
suspend our judgment of right and wrong in the service of a show. This has led people
like Miley Cyrus to decide (not incorrectly) that what people want is
spectacle, and remake themselves in that image.
Suzanne
Collins, the author of The Hunger Games,
also links her imaginary world to ancient Rome. The name of her country, Panem,
is the Latin word for bread, a reference to the phrase “panem et circenses,” or
“bread and circuses” — give the people food and entertainment, and you can
effectively control them. As Bill Watterson observed when he turned Karl Marx’s famous phrase on its head: television is
the opiate of the masses. In many way we have already descended to the level of
ancient Rome.
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| Are you not entertained? |
So I think
that Suzanne Collins creates a very compelling dystopian future in which
disturbing trends in our society are carried forward to a logical, and
chilling, conclusion. Unfortunately, what Collins can’t give is any solution.
At the end of the trilogy (SPOILER ALERT) no true victory is won. Katniss, the
heroine, is a shell of her former self, slowly recovering after having gone
almost insane. But there is no true recovery. The best she can do is fall back
on her survival instinct. She will go on living because, hey, it’s what she’s
good at. But she is thoroughly disillusioned. The new society is not any better
than the old. She might have set them back a bit, but they have the same urges
as the overthrown Capitol, the same darkness inside, and she knows that sooner
or later it will come out again.
It is very
bleak.
And I
can’t help but contrast it to my favorite writer, J.R.R. Tolkien. A lot of what
is presented in The Hunger Games Tolkien would have agreed with. He sensed that
evil seems to constantly overpower what is good. He wrote in a letter, “I do
not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat.’” In another letter, he
expounded on the theme: “If anguish
were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a
dense dark vapor, shrouded from the amazed vision of the heavens! And the
products of it all will be mainly evil . . . [E]vil labours with vast powers
and perpetual success . . .”
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| Not exactly an optimist. |
Vast powers and perpetual success. Observation would appear to bear this
out. Evil seems more powerful than good. Good seems to be involved in a
constant defensive struggle. A long defeat.
But I haven’t given you everything. In both those passages, Tolkien
wrote more:
“Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ – though it contains (and in legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples of the final victory” (Letter 195).
“If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapor, shrouded from the amazed vision of the heavens! And the products of it all will be mainly evil - historically considered. But the historic version is, of course, not the only one. All things and deeds have a value in themselves, apart from their ‘causes’ and ‘effects.’ No man can estimate what is really happening sub specie aeternitatis. All we do know, and that to a large extent by direct experience, is that evil labours with vast powers and perpetual success—in vain: preparing always only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in” (Letter 64).
It is this glimpse of the final victory that Tolkien has, and Suzanne
Collins seems to lack. There is a moment in The Lord of the Rings in
which we find Frodo and Sam struggling through the benighted, dying lands of
Mordor, trying to accomplish a task so utterly beyond them that they have no
room for hope. They keep going because to oppose evil is the right thing to do,
even when victory seems impossible. They hide under some brambles against a
rock face, and Frodo, weary from his burden, goes to sleep while Sam keeps watch.
Struggling to stay awake, Sam looks out from the hiding place and glimpses,
just for a moment, hope:
Far above the Ephel Dúath in the West the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.
That moment hits me hard
every time I read it. I’m not sure there’s a more beautiful passage in all of
fiction.
Ironically, what makes that passage possible is also what
Tolkien’s critics have in mind when they speak of his story as being “simplistic”
and “black and white.” They say that the characters are either all good
or all evil, but this is manifestly untrue (Boromir, Denethor, Gollum . . .). So
where does the accusation come from? From the fact that while the
characters in Tolkien are not either all good or all evil, good and evil do
exist (well, technically good exists –
evil exists in the same manner that a hole does, as a lack or privation of some
existing good. But that’s a topic for another post). Tolkien treats good and
evil not as ideas that we create, but as objective, independent realities that
we conform to. The characters in Tolkien’s story align themselves to these
definite realities. So while a character might not be wholly good, he may still
serve Good. And while a character might not be truly evil, he may still serve Evil.
But this philosophy is alien to our modern world. The materialist worldview which
characterizes modernity reduces everything to physical cause and effect, and
thereby reduces good and evil to human ideas that do not correspond to any
greater reality. In this worldview, to think too deeply about the human
capacity for evil leads ultimately to nihilism. There is no solution, because there
is no meaning at all.
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| Oh, the emptiness! |
I don’t know Suzanne Collins’ background, but I
suspect that she subscribes to this worldview. Most people do, to one extent or
another, even if they don’t think about it directly, simply because it’s the
dominant worldview of our time. Her story, especially in the final book, Mockingjay, conforms much more closely to the expectations of the critics of Tolkien: moral dilemmas without apparent answers, good characters doing evil things, et cetera. There doesn't seem to be a true, transcendent good that can be grasped and held onto, even in the midst of evil. Good is overpowered by darkness. That is why there is no transcendence or hope
in the story. Ultimately, the best that the main character can do is simply survive.
And even that’s not all it’s cracked up to be.
Tolkien, on the other hand, believed in a final victory. While good
appears to be fighting a defensive battle, it continually subverts evil, turning
it to good in surprising moments. Tolkien coined a word: eucatastrophe, which
he defined as a sudden happy turn from darkness to light, from defeat to
victory, from sorrow to joy. The happy ending. In a letter to his son, Tolkien
wrote:
“I coined the word 'eucatastrophe': the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears (which I argued it is the highest function of fairy-stories to produce). And I was there led to the view that it produces its peculiar effect because it is a sudden glimpse of Truth, your whole nature chained in material cause and effect, the chain of death, feels a sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back. It perceives – if the story has literary 'truth' on the second plane . . . -- that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made. And I concluded by saying that the Resurrection was the greatest 'eucatastrophe' possible in the greatest Fairy Story – and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love" (Letter 89).
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| Eucatastrophe |
Make no mistake: Tolkien understood evil. In The Lord of the Rings, even the victory
over Sauron is just a respite. Sauron is defeated, but much good that existed before has been lost forever. Evil endures, and will
rise in other places and other ways. But here’s the kicker: it will be defeated
again. And again. And though it may seem that evil is constantly winning, still it will turn to good, again and again, until the final victory.
“Evil labours with vast powers and perpetual success—in vain:
preparing always only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in.” Even if we
suffer defeat now, even if we suffer it repeatedly, still we know that good
will ultimately prevail. That may strike Tolkien’s nihilist critics as
simplistic, but I, for one, am willing to live with it.
