This weekend, the phenomenally popular book The Hunger Games moves to the screen.
This dark, dystopian fantasy centres on Katniss Everdeen, who lives in District 12, a mining area that looks a lot like Depression-era Appalachia. Mired in subsistence poverty that often borders on starvation, the people of District 12 watch while their scant resources are shipped off to the wealthy Capitol.
And it's not just their resources. Every year the Capitol demands that one boy and one girl from each District take part in a televised battle to the death called The Hunger Games. The games are meant to punish the Districts for a long-ago rebellion, while entertaining the jaded elites in the Capitol.
Of course, book readers and soon-to-be movie viewers fiercely identify with Katniss, who volunteers for the games to save her younger sister. And why not? It's Katniss's viewpoint that drives The Hunger Games. Plus, she's awesome.
But when it comes down to it, most of us have far more in common with the spectacle-craving urbanites of the Capitol than the impoverished underclass of the outlying Districts. The middle class may have seen better days, but its annihilation is not yet at dystopian levels: HG fans are more likely to be suffering from a surfeit of reality TV than a want of food.
The Capitol looks like imperial Rome crossed with modern L.A. with just a smidge of the Third Reich. Capitol dwellers have loads of food -- they binge and purge and then binge some more -- but they hunger after novelty. Obsessed with surface and spectacle, they pursue outlandish fashions, dying their skin and sculpting their hair.
They also adore the cruelties and humiliations of reality TV, the Games being a lethal gladiatorial combination of Project Runway, American Idol, and, of course, Survivor, complete with makeovers, faked-up emotional arcs, camera-ready personas and sponsorship deals.
The Hunger Games' devoted teen fans share a lot of Capitol problems. They are beset by a celebrity-obsessed, media-saturated culture that encourages vanity and vacuity and voyeurism. But who wants to admit that they're struggling with these First World issues? In contrast, Katniss's big challenge -- staying alive -- is horrifying but also simple, direct, even pure.
In this way, The Hunger Games resembles the notorious Japanese film Battle Royale, also based on a novel, in which ninth graders are forced to slaughter each other in a 72-hour contest on a remote island. BR is often read as an allegory of the intense competition in the Japanese educational system, particularly the national exams taken in Grade 9 that can determine the rest of a student's life.
With this kind of unbearable real-world stress, Japan's young people seem to turn to BR's blood-drenched satire with a kind of relief. At least in Battle Royale the suffering is over in three days.
With The Hunger Games, it seems as if a lot of people don't get the social satire at all. Witness the gyms that promise to get their clients "Hunger Games skinny" with "killer workouts," forgetting that most of the HG characters are skinny because they're half-starved.
Witness the tone-deaf merch, like Mattel's Katniss Barbie doll. Or the creepy movie marketing, like a website called Capitol Couture, which offers advice for "Capitol fashionistas" through product tie-ins with labels like Alexander McQueen and Viktor & Rolf. (Because, really, who doesn't want to be associated with shallow, murderous decadence?)
Identifying with Katniss and the underdogs of the District is thrilling. Seeing the parallels between 21st-century North America and the Capitol is harder, but maybe more important.
alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca
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