If one scours the internet and looks up Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games trilogy, one may think that the teen novels had just been released. However, the first novel in the series is now almost four years old. Yet the novels' popularity nationally and locally has increased dramatically as of late.
According to The Boulder Bookstore's website, the trilogy is ranked number four in the local bestsellers list. The renewed popularity of the novels is primarily due to the film adaptation which is set to be released in March of this year. The film, directed by Gary Ross (known for writing such films as Seabiscuit and Pleasantville), and starring Jennifer Lawrence (X-Men: First Class, Winter's Bone) promises to be a giant release, following in the steps of other teen film adaptations that have dominated the box-office over the past decade.
Many think that the novels' success is similar to such block-buster teen novels as the Twilight series or J. K. Rowlings' multimillion dollar Harry Potter franchise. However, Collins' trilogy seems to differentiate itself from these two teen works in many ways. Where Twilight and Harry Potter are set, ostentatiously, in the “our world” with a few slight twists to it, Collins' is decidedly not our world. Instead, the world of The Hunger Games trilogy resembles more closely the world of such adult classics as Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, George Orwell's 1984, Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, and Adieus Huxley's Brave New World (and to some extent, Corman McCarthy's The Road).
Collins' novels, the first one appearing in 2008, are dystopian and project a world in which tyranny reigns, individual freedoms are smashed, and state control has become a spectacle for the masses (much like Stephen King's The Running Man of 1982, which similarly became a film in 1987 starring Arnold Schwarzenegger). Amazon.com summarizes the first novel of the trilogy, which gives its name to the series as a whole, as follows:
Katniss is a 16-year-old girl living with her mother and younger sister in the poorest district of Panem, the remains of what used be the United States. Long ago the districts waged war on the Capitol and were defeated. As part of the surrender terms, each district agreed to send one boy and one girl to appear in an annual televised event called, "The Hunger Games." The terrain, rules, and level of audience participation may change but one thing is constant: kill or be killed. When Kat's sister is chosen by lottery, Kat steps up to go in her place.
Indeed, it seems that the first novel, The Hunger Games, and the following two novels (Catching Fire, Mockingjay) treads very different territory than other popular teen novels of the past ten years. Where Harry Potter and Twilight may allude to heavy societal ills, Collin's trilogy takes them face-on, not batting an eye in the face of violent repression and the society which produces it. As Collins herself said in an interview that appeared in the May 2009 issue of the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy: “The sociopolitical overtones of The Hunger Games were very intentionally created to characterize current and past world events, including the use of hunger as a weapon to control populations.”
In an Orwellian style, Collins produces a world that at once reflects the real problems in our current time and at the same time hypothesizes how these problems are seeds which could easily spiral out of control and take root, distorting our society into a repressive and sadistically maintained system. The state that runs the Hunger Games in an effort to control rebellion and provide a type of entertainment that is, on one hand, reflective of our nation's obsession with reality TV and on the other, a re-imagined gladiatorial contest worthy of the Roman empire, is much like Big Brother in Orwell's 1984. In Orwell, the state proclaims: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” Collins' protagonist, Katniss, rebels in the face of such state control: “I'm more than just a piece in their Games.”
Besides these classic dystopian works, it seems the author had many other influences and ideas in mind. Collins, in the same interview quoted above, states that she was inspired by the ancient Greek myth of Theseus: “I appropriated the Greek mythological premise of a conquering power that bent all of its subjects to its will through violence and maintained fear and domination through a not so subtle reminder to the neighboring peoples that they are not free and autonomous.”
Collins also mentioned how she was inspired by reality TV and its effect on society: “I am fearful that today people see so many reality shows and dramas that when real news is on, its impact is completely lost on them.” Indeed, the invasion of Iraq, which was treated by many news organizations as a reality-TV series, seemed to be a vivid example of Collins' hypothesis. Like the Hunger Games, the line between reality and entertainment were blurred, epitomized by George W. Bush's premature proclamation of "Mission Accomplished" on an aircraft carrier. Yet, besides these issues, Collins' novels, which eerily began appearing the same year as the Financial Collapse of 2008, also have an economic aspect to them.
The people of the Capitol who summon the “tributes” to the Hunger Games from the conquered territories, are, like most controlling powers, wealthy. A clear juxtaposition to Katniss and her people who are mired in poverty. Katniss wonders: “What must it be like, I wonder, to live in a world where food appears at the press of a button? How would I spend the hours I now commit to combing the woods for sustenance if it were so easy to come by? What do they do all day, these people in the Capitol, besides decorating their bodies and waiting around for a new shipment of tributes to rill in and die for their entertainment?”
This may be, besides the obviously successful marketing campaigns behind the trilogy and the upcoming film, a key reason to the renewed and bolstered popularity of the novel in the US and in the Boulder community in particular. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, literature reflected (as it usually does) the state of society. Such novels as Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath are evidence of this (as is the decreasing popularity of F. Scott Fitzgerald's monied Jazz Age tales).
It seems that Collins trilogy seems to touch a chord in our troubled economic times. It could be that Katniss and her people potentially represent to readers the large population of economically strained people in the United States today, and that the Capitol, in some ways, represents Wall Street and other economically-untouched entities, such as the entertainment industry which still thrives on reality TV's increasing viewership. (Interestingly, there seems to be a metaphoric mirror with the Occupy Wall Street protests and the rebellions of the districts in The Hunger Games, a mirror Collins surely didn't know would develop)
Perhaps the people of Boulder, whether consciously or unconsciously, find a cohort in Katniss and her people's fight against the rich Capitol that is dominating them. After all, while reading The Hunger Games trilogy, one must remember, there is a reason Collins sets her dystopia in the former United States. Like Orwell or Bradbury, she could have easily made the past of the novels' world murky and lost. But instead, she chose to let the reader know that her vision is definitely an American one, on American soil and nowhere else.
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