Hunger Games: Sick or Meaningful?

Thank you to all who have made comments on my posts about The Hunger Games over the past few days (See Hunger Games? Parents Do Your Job! and Hunger Games – Disturbing?  Indeed…).  Your thoughts and questions as well as reading the thoughts of others (including my huz and a good friend) continue to push me to think more and more about the books (yes, I have read all three through one time and should probably read them again) and the movie.  I find this helpful, and I hope that you find it helpful as well.

While many put these movies and books into the same genre as the Twilight series and Harry Potter series, I would oppose that sweeping generalization.  The young adult literature (or teen fiction) genre has been flooded in recent years with books that are meant to draw in the teen readers. It is excellent, of course, that teens are reading given the state of reading abilities and test scores in our country.  However,  I would not say that Twilight has the same literary value as The Hunger Games.  In fact, seeing a trailer for the last Twilight movie was the worst part of the theater experience for me last Friday.  Those are 90 seconds that I will never get back…

And I digress…

If one does any Google searches to read up on The Hunger Games (which, by the way, I think is fine as long as there is caution not to critique until one has actually read them…sorry – pet peeve) and on the author Suzanne Collins, one will likely come across the reading list of Collins herself as a teenager.  When I saw that Lord of the Flies, Slaughter-House Five, and 1984 were on her favorite list, I realized that The Hunger Games are a culmination of what Collins has read as well as experienced.

1984, Brave New World, and Lord of the Flies met with similar opposition when they first published. Each of them describe what could be in the future. When 1984 published “way back” in 1949, the world could not conceive of the concepts that Orwell suggested. However, the work has remained relevant to this day and continues to warn even our society of the potential harm to society when government gets into our private matters.

Consider the November 2011 question before the US Supreme Court when the US government argued that it should be allowed to continue to use GPS tracking of peopl without first seeking a warrant. Justice Stephen Breyer stated: “If you win this case, then there is nothing to prevent the police or the government from monitoring 24 hours a day the public movement of every citizen of the United States. So if you win, you suddenly produce what sounds like 1984….”

In the Scholastic interview with Collins, she cites her interest in Roman history as well as Greek and Roman myths as laying the foundation for the books, but it was not until one night as she watched television that the story started itself:

I was channel surfing between reality TV programming and actual war coverage when Katniss’s story came to me. One night I’m sitting there flipping around and on one channel there’s a group of young people competing for, I don’t know, money maybe? And on the next, there’s a group of young people fighting an actual war. And I was tired, and the lines began to blur in this very unsettling way, and I thought of this story.

If I imagine myself in the shoes of Collins, I have a rich literary background including mythology, history, and ground-breaking futuristic novels warning about what society could become that collides with an evening of shocking television (trust me – I can understand the way that reality tv and something about war could seem to be shocking).  What would I have done?  Well – if I had any writing talent, which Collins already had proven she had, I would have had to write the story that came to me.  I would have been compelled, as compelled as I have been to write my thoughts about the movie, to write that story to demonstrate what could happen in our society if we do not pay attention to the path we are on with entertainment.

This is not Twilight with vampires or Harry Potter with wizards (both stories, by the way, do have “human” characters, but we tolerate them better because they are not “real”) because, in The Hunger Games, we face ourselves – there is no mistake that these children could be our children or us.  Instead, these books and this movie fall into a category that is typically saved for historical tellings of past tragedy. 

As I went to bed on Tuesday night, I read the following comment from a reader (whom, by the way, I thank for commenting at length!):

Throughout the movie, I felt myself being pulled into the story and then I would stop and remember that these were children with parents watching and probably hoping that their child survived. Even as good as the movie appeared to be, it wasn’t good enough to negate the disturbing idea behind it. … Would that have sucked me in even more? To accept the idea of children having to live in fear in this type of society? I don’t see how all the people sitting in the movie theaters watching The Hunger Games is any different from the spectators in the movie who were watching on and enjoying this and calling it entertainment.

As I read the comment, the memory of another movie popped into my thoughts – Schindler’s List. I was a freshman in college when the film version of the book Schindler’s Ark (published 1982) came out in theaters. The film received seven Academy Awards, and high schools around the country took students to see the movie. I saw it twice in the theaters – once with my parents and younger brother and once with my grandmother. The first time I saw it (with my grandmother), we sat in silence at the end of the film…glued to our seats in shock and despair at what humanity is capable of doing to its own. Tears spilled out of our eyes throughout the entire film. My grandfather and my grandmother’s brothers had been in the military during World War II; there was much for us both to process.

In our collection of movies in our basement are two movies that I consider to be ones that are not for entertainment purposes but rather for remembrance or warning purposes.  They are not movies that we watch over and over again; in fact, I have not yet seen The Passion by Mel Gibson although I will likely need to do so before my children ask to see it.  They are nearing graduation from high school and will soon make their own choices about what to see and what not to see.  I want to maintain my influence in their lives, and the best way to do that is to be credible by knowing what I am talking about.

Schindler’s List is as horrific, if not moreso, that The Hunger Games.  With its R rating, the historic retelling in very graphic details of the Holocaust is sickening.  But it was also so meaningful.  I left the movie theatre sick with grief that this could happen and that it had happened in my grandmother’s lifetime…but I also left the movie theatre with hope – hope that we could change things, that my generation would not tolerate this, and that we would take the lessons from the past and make sure that this did not happen in the future.

That has not been the case as there are genocides and holocaust-like actions every day…but I still have hope that we will continue to learn and apply the lessons learned from history to make the future brighter.

One of the main themes in The Hunger Games is the tension between fear and hope.  In one of the scenes that only exist in the movie (because they are outside of Katniss’s first person limited narrator perspective), President Snow and Head Gamemaker Seneca Crane discuss the power of fear versus hope.  Click here to watch the scene.

“Seneca, why do you think we have a winner?,” Snow asks while cutting a white rose.

“What do you mean?,” Seneca asks.

“I mean, why do we have a winner?,” Snow repeats, before pausing. “Hope.”

“Hope?,” Seneca replies slightly bewildered.

“Hope, it is the only thing stronger than fear. A little hope is effective, a lot of hope is
dangerous,” Snow declares.

Hope is stronger than fear.  In the arena, Katniss finds hope, and that is how she survives.  It is not by becoming driven by fear to the point that she actively kills off the other participants. Rather, she learns to protect because of hope.

This lesson is, in my opinion, the strength of the books and the strength of the movie.

In what do we find hope?  How does hope shape our outlook on the world today and in the future?  And – perhaps most importantly – what do we hope will change in our world?

Once we can identify that, we then need to act on that hope and make changes in our own lives, model change for others, and encourage change so that hope is possible for all.

The Hunger Games – sick or meaningful?  I vote “meaningful.”

Hunger Games: More Thoughts from Others

As one Facebook friend stated yesterday, there is a “hunger” for some knowledge, information, and common sense when it comes to The Hunger Games.

In that spirit, I would like to share links to two other blogs who have posted incredible thoughts about the violence in the The Hunger Games or have offered thoughts about whether children should read the books or attend the movie.

ParentFurther is the parenting “arm” of the Search Institute, a research organization that promotes building assets in youth.  In their blog article titled, “Hungry for Knowledge: A Multi-Generational Take on the Hunger Games,”  the staff and a staff person’s teenage daughter weigh in on their thoughts about the books and the movies.  Excellent thoughts!

My friend Marilyn Gardner and I have been sharing a similar brain this week. It has simply been a conversation back and forth.  So fun!  Today, she posted what I had hoped she would post after she had commented at length with similar material.  You can find her blog by clicking here, but she has granted me permission to simply cut and paste her content here.  Please visit her blog and comment there as well as here (if you choose to do so).  We would both love to hear from you!

When Kid Kill Kids by Marilyn Gardner (originally posted on her blog).

When our daughter Annie was two years old she saw television for the first time. We were in Islamabad, Pakistan and she was invited to a birthday party of some older children. My husband took her while I stayed home with our brand new baby boy. When they came home he relayed to me her reaction to this first time of watching TV. She was watching a cartoon and the character was hit over the head with something. As often happens with cartoons, there was a bonk, birds flew over the head of the character and then the scene faded out. She began to cry. She thought the character was dead and was inconsolable. In her 2-year-old mind she was unable to distinguish real from imaginary on the screen.

This is huge. Until a child is seven years old, they cannot differentiate between imaginary and real; fantasy and reality. So when young children see television violence, it’s accepted as not only real, but a part of “normal” life.

Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman, in an article released in 2000 called “Trained to Kill”, speaks in-depth to this problem. In nature, he says, “Healthy members of most species have a powerful, natural resistance to killing their own kind.” So while rattlesnakes bite others, they wrestle each other; while piranhas use their fangs on others, they fight each other by flicking their tails. So it is true with humans – we don’t naturally want to kill, we are taught to kill.

He talks about three ways of being conditioned to kill – the first is something we would think of when we think of boot camp. Everyone is taken and their heads are shaved, they are shouted at, they get up at unearthly hours and go through relentless discipline and violence. At the end the recruit believes this is normal. This is a perfect segue into a war zone.

The second is “classical conditioning” where violence is associated with pleasure. The author would suggest that “classical conditioning” takes place in kids as they watch violence while eating their favorite foods of popcorn and soda, or smelling a girlfriend’s perfume, all while watching horrific movie violence as “entertainment”.

The third is “operant conditioning” which is a stimulus response. This is where in target practice a target shaped like a man would pop up. If you shoot the target correctly, it will fall, and so on. Contrast this, he says, to video games, where for hours at a time a kid is pointing and shooting, pointing and shooting, getting better and better at hitting the targets and gaining points every time they do so.

The article is well worth looking at and provides irrefutable evidence of the problem: all this is teaching kids how to kill. The evidence is present in the tragedies that read like headlines from newspapers – because they are.

• Jonestown, Arkansas Massacre 1998 – An 11 and a 13 year-old, camouflaged in the woods kill four kids and a teacher with ten others wounded.
• Paducah, Kentucky 1999 – A 14-year-old opens fire on a prayer group at school and hits eight kids.
• Columbine High School, 1999 – Two kids in trench coats terrorize the school ultimately killing twelve students, one teacher. 21 other students are injured and ultimately the kids kill themselves.

There are more but this makes the point. All of these have one thing in common – they are kids killing kids. It begs the question: Why are we shocked when we see child soldiers from the widely seen Kony 2012 video?

So why am I suddenly bringing up violence and kids killing kids? In the newly released movie “The Hunger Games” that is the premise and it has some people disturbed. And that is the very point of the author. My friend Stacy, who blogs at Slowing the Racing Mind, wrote an excellent post on this called “Hunger Games – Disturbing? Indeed” Suzanne Collins, author of The Hunger Games, wants us to be disturbed so that we can discuss this and question it, talk with our kids and know that there are times where we must stand up to what is wrong.

I won’t go into The Hunger Games further, as others have done a fine job of doing just that, but I would argue books like these, and movies like these, are not what creates violence in our kids. It’s gratuitous violence in movies and video games that evokes laughter as opposed to tears, mocking as opposed to compassion. That’s what we should be worried about. Crying because a 12-year-old was killed in a society’s sick attempt at control is a human response; laughing when a teacher tells you that a middle schooler ambushed a school, killing kids and a teacher, is a an inhuman response born of inappropriate exposure to violence at young ages.

It’s a big issue – What do you think?

“On June 10th, 1992, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published a definitive study on the impact of TV violence. In nations, regions, or cities where television appears there is an immediate explosion of violence on the playground, and within 15 years there is a doubling of the murder rate. Why 15 years? That’s how long it takes for a brutalized toddler to reach the “prime crime” years. That’s how long it takes before you begin to reap what you sow when you traumatize and desensitize children. (Centerwall, 1992).” (from Teaching Our Kids to Kill)

RELATED ARTICLES

• A Conversation with Suzanne Collins – author of The Hunger Games
• Let the Hunger Games Begin

Thank you, Marilyn!

Hunger Games–Disturbing? Indeed…

Last night, feeling the pressure to get a post up on the blog because many were asking my opinion of the movie, I published a 1300+ word post (reading it now, it seems like a bit of rant) about why young children should not see the movie of The Hunger Games.  I have to admit that it was a hurried writing and not the most logical or organized. It was passionate, though, and it seems to have resonated with many readers. Thank you to those who have shared it with others. I am honored any time a reader thinks something that comes from these fingers is worthy of sharing.

Obviously, I hit some kind of nerve, or else I just finally boarded The Hunger Games trend cycle.  Right now #HungerGames and @TheHungerGames as well as many variations are all over Twitter.  It’s times like these that make me realize why Twitter has its name: when we like something, we go all “a-twitter” about it, and we get “twitter-pated.”  But seriously – I published the post at 7:01 p.m. last night, and at that time only 18 people had read my blog on Saturday.  By midnight, over 200 people had read just the post about The Hunger Games with readers from Thailand, Canada, Australia, and Japan.  Wow!

In some clear thinking after publishing the post and in reading some of the comments from readers (as well as those from many Facebook friends), I wanted to follow up on a thought that was simply lost in all of my ranting yesterday.  In other words, why was I so passionate about young children not seeing the movie?

Marilyn, a friend whose blog is Communicating Across Boundaries (I know her in the flesh as well as in the blogosphere although we have not had the same state of residence for over 10 years now), made the following comment on yesterday’s post:

…you were disturbed because we are supposed to be disturbed. Suzanne Collins wanted to make a point, and she did it well. It sounds like the movie is accurate in that it made it so real. That’s partially the issue – if kids are too young to understand the concepts then it’s not appropriate to show them. A last thought – I’ve never liked reality TV and we have never watched it (our tv watching is limited anyway, probably because of so many years overseas) but the books push reality TV to a whole new level that, given human nature, may not be that far off.

This comment made me glad that I had ranted. There are some things that kids should not read. There are some things that kids should not see.  Even if children have read the books, they may not be able to handle the screen images.  I had a hard time with it, and I am nearing 40 years of age!  And, as Marilyn stated, I should have a hard time it!!  It really should not matter how old we are, the deaths of children at the hands of children (or in any way, really, but especially in this way) is disturbing.  There is no other way around it.

Marilyn’s comment made me sit back and think really hard.  Our family is similar in that we do not watch much TV.  What we do watch tends to be rented seasons of shows after we have heard or seen from various sources that we missed out on something great.  We are also the devouring type (example: we watched the entire season of Lost from April to September two years go). We are also not really into reality TV although the girl and I did catch an episode of The Bachelor which made me wonder, “Why does anyone watch this?”  That is abusive – even if there is no physical violence occurring.

I decided to consult one of my favorite parenting “check” sites for movies – PluggedIn – and found that one of the Scholastic editors, David Levithan, concurs with my friend Marilyn about the purpose of the violence in the books and the movie.

“What Suzanne [Collins] has done brilliantly is create a series that is a critique of violence using violence to get that across and that’s a fine line.”

I found the books and the movie disturbing…importantly so.  The books are like a shake awake, but the movie – with its images – truly drove it home.  Watching one of the tributes stung to death by a swarm of genetically engineered wasps was disturbing.  I literally covered my eyes, held my breath, and nearly prayed for the fictional character.  Even watching Katniss shoot her arrow and kill a tribute to defend little Rue was disturbing.  Their government was making them kill each other off, and the country watched on Times’ Square sized jumbo-trons in their districts’ main square.  This is disturbing.

But what are some of the messages that we are to take from this trilogy and this movie?  Are we just going to “enjoy” this movie for the sake of the violence because we have come to enjoy that as a society?  Or – are we disturbed by what we see and understand the critique of violent acts?  And what are we supposed to do with our understanding?

Have we, like the first century Romans, become so caught up in violence that it is the only thing worth creating for television?

A Facebook friend with whom I also attend church stated it this way: “In two thousand years we’ve only gone from ‘gladiators’ to ‘teenagers’ and from ‘coliseums’ to ‘theaters’.”

Will the viewing of The Hunger Games make us ready to act?  Or do they only feed our “hunger” for violence?

Are we ready to act?  Seriously – the networks would not make violent shows if we, as a society, would stop watching them.

In The Hunger Games, Gale (good male friend of main character Katniss) asks, “What if one year everyone just stopped watching? Then they wouldn’t have the games.”

Gale (a much more developed character in the books than in the movie) recognizes the power of the people (which, by the way, becomes even more of a message in the second and third books). He realizes that there is a way to firmly say no to the Capital, but he knows that it will take the masses to do it…he cannot do it alone.  And I cannot do it alone.  My one voice…my ten fingers…will not change our society’s hunger for violence.  Child psychologists can say all they want, but they have little power.  Parents and children have the power.

What if one day everyone did not watch television, did not rent movies, did not stream movies, and did not attend movies?  One day – a burn out – could we do it?  How about one month?  One year?  Could we stand up and say, “We want quality entertainment.”?

Sadly, I fear we could not do it.  Too many of us do not see the need.  Too many of us hunger for action.  Too many of us have lost the understanding of what is good and what is right… of what challenges our mind rather than numbing it.

It is my hope that we all find the books and movie disturbing enough to take this message and make a change.

Note: there are many more messages in the books and the movie.  Would you be interested in reading more about those messages or have I run this dry?  Please let me know!

Hunger Games? Parents: Do Your Job!

On Friday night, the fam headed to St Anthony Main Theatre to take in the much awaited Hunger Games movie.  This theatre is a great find for those who live in Minneapolis, by the way.  I work a few blocks away, and it turned out to be one of the few theatres with tickets available in the Twin Cities on Friday.  We all headed there a few hours before the show started. The huz and the girl started the line while the boy and I ate at Tuggs Tavern and then got food to go for the huz and the girl.  I have to say that the theatre staff is by far the best movie theatre staff I have ever encountered.  They let us eat food from a different location while in line, and a staff member actually brought us glasses of water.  This is good customer service!

A few months ago, one of my favorite bands (The Civil Wars) mentioned that they had written a song of their own and had co-written a song (Safe and Sound) with Taylor Swift for a companion album for The Hunger Games soundtrack. The boy had read The Hunger Games triology a few years ago as they had come out, and several friends – near and far – had read the books as well.  The huz started to read the books in anticipation of the movie (we tend to want to do that), and I followed suit. The girl finished the first book just in time for a family viewing of the movie.  There was some kind of unwritten rule that we all had to read the book before we could see it.  I do think that the boy  and the huz had threatened to go without us if we had not finished the book in time…

We all devoured these books.  The genre of the books is young adult/teen literature – a genre that currently pulls in children, teens, and adults alike.  Think Twilight and Harry Potter.  Books in this genre tend to push the envelope with themes in terms of whether or not children and young teens should read them.  They appeal to adults (often women) because there tend to be a strong female protagonist who reminds us of ourselves.  I would argue that Bella does not fit this description entirely – except that most of us have felt the draw to a “bad boy” at some point in our lives, but that was several blog posts previously.  And the reading level is not very stretching.  Even though they tend to be long, they do not tend to be difficult.

As I have mentioned in several blog posts, I am not good at summarizing.  Please refer to the Wikipedia summary as it does a decent job with it.  There may be spoiler moments in the summary and in the rest of this post, but I am guessing that you do not mind if you are reading this as a concerned parent.  What do people expect, right?  This is a book/movie about a bunch of kids killing each other.  I cannot share my thoughts with you and worry that I am going to spoil your viewing.  Sorry…

One thing that, as a former English teacher, I must point out is that books with similar themes have been around for years.  Whether we liked them or not, most of us had to read Brave New World and 1984.  My son said that more people would enjoy these if there were some action scenes in them like there is in The Hunger Games.   By the way – he has read both of them in the past year, so he knows what he is talking about.

In recent years, The Giver – another young adult lit book – explored similar themes.  Additionally, The Lottery is an excellent short story very similar to The Hunger Games.  All of these works have similarities in the sense that they attempt to warn us about handing too much control over to the government or about becoming a society so concerned about individual pleasure that we lose our way.  These themes are important for us to consider when reading The Hunger Games, but honestly most of the themes get lost on those who focus on the tensions of a love story or on the “excitement” (no matter how twisted) of the games themselves.

To answer most people’s first question – I thought the movie was excellent and would see it again.  I had my disappointments, but the huz and the boy have convinced me that most of my concerns were necessary in the condensing of a book with time to develop great characters into a movie.  What I appreciated most was being able to experience interactions between people outside of Katniss’s limited perspective in the books. In addition, the use of imagery hearkening back to German concentration camps (District 12), the costumes showing the stark contrast between the district people and those in the Capital, and the Capital bravado reminding me of scenes of Hitler or Stalin truly enhanced my understanding of The Hunger Games.

That being said…

My concerns are numerous when considering the age of children who are attending the movie.  I actually Googled this, and it is a hot topic!  As we sat in the theatre on Friday night, I observed several children between the ages of 7 and 10.  This is just too young, and I will not apologize for saying that.  If the children have read the books already, the parents are not doing a good job of being a discussion with their children about their reading lists.  Almost every website, reading list site, and the author’s own site recommend readers be 12 or older (and many stress that “older if child is sensitive”).

Schools should not be putting this on recommended reading lists for anyone under 6th grade.  If your child has a teacher in grades K-5 who has recommended the book, perhaps you should refer him or her to Suzanne Collins’ own website.  If the author is recommending her own book for an older crowd, perhaps we should listen.

The movie is rated PG-13.  We have ratings for a reason, and – as parents – we should consider this before taking children under the age of 13 to any movie with that rating.  The concepts in the books/movie are very complicated, the “love scenes” – though not explicit in any way – are confusing, and the violence is very real.

The violence is very real.  Overall, I thought that the violence was done tastefully. On most occasions, the “killing” scenes show blood spattering and weapons flying in the air. This takes the focus off of the act and action of the kills and instead on the fact that they happen. I appreciated that.

However, the entire concept of the games requires that children kill children.  This is unlike just about any other movie that has violent scenes in it.  In movies like Transformers, most children are able to distinguish between reality and fiction.  I doubt that most children believe that transformers are real.  They do not have that option with characters in the The Hunger Games.  Prim and Rue remind me of the local middle school girls who played nuns in The Sound of Music, the girls who live across the street, or some of my friends who have girls that age.  Peeta and Gayle remind me of my son.

To pit my son against the middle school girl who waits for the bus at the corner of my street in a televised “kill to death” match seems barbaric to me. I did not know the children personally in the movie or the book, but I was highly disturbed by their deaths.  The images now after seeing the movie could haunt me.  And I’m an adult…what about those 7 year old children who were in the theatre last night?

I would not have my friend’s third grade daughter or fifth grade son over to watch an episode of Survivor – in which no one kills someone else off, why would I take them to The Hunger Games?

Please do not argue with me that “kids see this stuff all the time.”  If they do, that is irresponsible parenting.  I spoke to a child psychologist on Saturday while at the kids’ speech meet about this very issue.  Our children are being exposed to far too much violence in media.  Although these books/this movie have many persuading reasons for allowing children to read them/see the movie, we need to have them wait.  I cried through the entire movie!  And I was not the only one.  My child psychologist friend works with kids every day who are impacted in some way by the poor choices they and their parents are making in terms of what they are viewing.

Please do not argue with me that you cannot control what your kids read or watch.  That is a cop out. Although I know that kids can get away with things from time to time, for the most part that is because parents are not paying attention.  We need to talk to our kids, talk to our kids, talk to our kids….and then talk some more!  We need to ask what they are reading, what they are watching, and find out why those things entice them.  We need to start at a very young age to gauge and intercede when our kids read books or watch shows/movies that we would not agree with.

How do we do this?  Well, one way is to saturate your kids with “approved” reading material.  Another is to be a parent – be nosy!  In my opinion, kids should not have an expectation of privacy except when they are changing clothes.  What they read, who they talk to, and when or if they are online are all things in our control!  Take them to the library weekly, know what they are checking out from there, dig through their backpacks, talk to their teachers, check the history on the computers…and the list goes on…

I realize that we all get busy from time to time, but our children are our most important resources.  Before we just assume that a movie made from a young adult literature book is going to appropriate for them to see, we need to do our homework.  You may have very different standards for your kids than I have for mine, but all of us care about our kids.  I feel strongly that children under 12 should not be seeing this movie, but I am not a parent of an 11 year old right now.  I have the luxury of having high school kids!

However, I faced this when the Harry Potter books and movies came out. One thing that I will never regret doing is putting off their reading of the books.  And even then, we read them as a family, and we saw the movies together as a family.  This is possibly the most important thing we can do as parents.  Read what they are reading (get it on CD for the car) and watch what they are watching.

Bottom line: we need to parent.

Parent well.