Professor Sarah Hagelin

Brach 1

These monsters are my nieces: they are tributes and zombies at the apocalypse. Shooting arrowsand covering themselves in mud. Happy, confident, and full of potential!

Linda Brach

Professor Sarah Hagelin

ENGL5770

11 May 2015

The Hunger Games: The Portrayal of Heroines as Role Models for Twenty-first Century Girls and a Proxy Family’s Rolein Assisting their Emergence into Young Adulthood

As throngs of adolescents (and many adults, alike) have devoured the Hunger Games trilogy in both book and film form, I have largely ignored it. At the urging of many of my students, I read the first book; unimpressed and uninterested, I dismissed the films and the remaining books. Over the years, as an English teacher, I’ve taught – and embraced - much dystopian literature: The Giver, F451, Brave New World, 1984; and as a Matrix fan, I’ve often referenced its dystopian tropes as cultural references in my classroom. However, in examining the trilogy, and The Hunger Games film, in particular, I’ve determined the franchise has merit, at least as it pertains to adolescent females’ self-perception and beliefs about gender equality and female potential that moves beyond princesses, detectives, and vampire slayers.Despite some minor flaws, the film’s female protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, seamlessly and successfully blends ideal traits of both male and female genders. She wisely embraces the advice of paternal proxies while dismissing the maternal proxy advice that serves only to reinforce the typically gendered female as passive and compliant.The support she receives from her paternal proxies, on the other hand, proves beneficial and reassuring in times of great anxiety and danger. Therefore, adolescent girls are right to admire and emulate Katniss Everdeen and her heroic qualities.

According to Bartlett, in Screen Education, dystopian literature appeals to adolescents for several reasons. First of all, they are “confronting the collapse of their childhood verities. Secondly, authority figures [begin to] appear despotic which further alienates the teen[s]…who must now assert their independence” (11).Unfortunately, too often “Heteronormative ideals of tough males and submissive beautiful females are often present in Young Adult fiction [and film]. Girls are passive and peripheral…and often tied to traditional feminine norms and representations… needing rescue and confined to domestic roles.” (Tabera 1029).The Hunger Games defies these “ideals.” As a result, The Hunger Games book, and the successful films that followed, created an army of (pre)adolescent female archery enthusiasts imitating their heroine role model: Katniss Everdeen. Gary Ross’s cinematic interpretation of the novel positively impacts pre-adolescent and adolescent girls’ self-perception of their strength and ability in a culture that seems suspicious of the label “feminist.” While Hollywood’s standards of female heroines still rely heavily on physical attraction, The Hunger Games presents Katniss Everdeen as a true heroine with whom adolescent girls can and should identify in the twenty-first century third wave (or perhaps “fourth wave”?)feminism.

War violence is condemned in most societies unless absolutely necessary. Katniss’s judicious use of violence only as a last resort is part of what makes hera heroine. According to author Suzanne Collins, when asked about her label as a writer for adolescents, responded that she “doesn’t write about adolescents, [she] write[s] about war for adolescents; war as something humans carry within themselves, nurtured by a self-destructive impulse… a need to unleash violence” (Blasingame 726).However, even when Katniss has the opportunity to kill, she only does so when threated herself, or in the case of villain Cato (a “professional” tribute from District 1), as a merciful means for reducing his suffering. According to a study conducted by Calvert, Murray and Conger, heroes in the media “serve as role models” and “prosocial (not antisocial) qualities were the main attributes that made these heroic portrayals worthy of emulation by adolescent viewers” (702). Furthermore, “The template developed about heroes and villains by youth are a complex weaving of cultural influences, both real and embedded in cultural stories” (703). Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell note in The Power of Myth that “films come from artists and writers who address feelings of hatred, betrayal, and desires for revenge – all part of the human condition…a hero’s quest (even an unwilling hero such as Katniss) can elevate people, challenging them to go beyond their own morality rather than inevitably lead to their moral downfall.”

Katniss, a “tough action heroine” is a “transgressive character, not because she operates outside of gender restrictions, but because she straddles both sides of the psychoanalytic gender divide” (Bartlett 15). She is both subject and object: ass-kicker and love object of Peeta (her District 12 partner in the games) and Gale (her childhood male friend). In their domestic roles, during training, and in the arena, Katniss andPeeta, essentially reverse gender roles. He is the “sensitive new age male,” although some young readers imagined him as weak, suggesting the switch works for Katniss but not Peeta. Katniss blends positive traits of both genders, assuming many masculine gendered traits to complement her primarily female identity. For example, in the dining car of the “bullet train” to the Capitol, an eager and loquacious Peeta interrogates Haymitch about strategies while Katniss sits silently. Katniss becomes the “strong silent type” typically attributed to the masculine gender. Peeta believes it is permissable, even essential, to request help and to be collaborative. On the other hand, Katniss is deft, physically strong, and resourceful, but suspicious and quiet. Peeta is sensitive and works as a baker for his family’s bakery. He has an artistic knack for camouflage developed from his expertise decorating cakes. Brown argues, “action heroines can ‘put on’ the appropriate costume using preconceived gender roles to choose how they are viewed;” therefore, “playing to cultural prejudices to get what they want,” in Katniss’s case, staying alive and winning (152). Gradually throughout the film, Katniss begrudgingly concedes, realizing sponsorships gain her an advantage. Repeatedly Katniss is encouraged to sacrifice her ideals to “win” sponsors. She succeeds skillfully without compromising her integrity. She “sells out” without really “selling out,” to society,an abilityextremely appealing to young adolescents who increasingly distrust authority.

Katniss appeals to young female viewers as she moves between the public and domestic space (public as warrior and domestic as daughter and sister)as seen mostly through flashbacks. She moves capably and stealthily through the densely wooded forest, relying on readily available instinct and skills she honed while moving about with Gale, hunting in the woods. In one of the early opening scenes a close up of a sign on a barbed wire fence reads “Danger.” Another warns, “District boundaries. No access beyond this point.” Literally, Katniss violates the state’s boundaries as she climbs beyond the barbed-wire limits of District 12 to hunt in the forest. Figuratively, she goes beyond feminine gendered norms. She asserts herself by taking risks, rather than passively deferring to feminine compliance.

The need for proxy parents arises from a deceased father and an emotionally frail and devastated mother. Katniss assumes the patriarchal head of household after her father dies. When Katniss leaves her family for the Capitol, she screams at her mother not to “tune out again” and that no matter what her mother “feels” she has “to be there” for her little sister, Prim. Her demand that her mother suppress her feelings, shows Katniss’s alignment with a masculine gendered quality of stoic emotional stealth, signs of “strength” and a rejection of “weak” vulnerability. Viewers learn how her father died through Katniss’s hallucination that works as a flashback. Katniss’s violent reaction to a tracker-jack attack sparks the hallucination, showing that Katniss misses her biological father tremendously. He was killed in a coal mine explosion five years before. The scene shows the mine, the miners, and Katniss’s house all exploding. A shot of the house’s mantel alternates with a shot of miners on their way to work. Each shot zooms in closer and closer to a subject, Katniss’s father, as the shots alternate. The mantel shot zooms in to focus on a portrait of her father next to a clock. This precedes the slow-motion shot of the explosion. Then the same explosion shot, again in slow motion, REVERSES. Director, Gary Ross’s reversal of the slow motion shot ends with Katniss’s house and the mantle again intact. While this is not a dream, the hallucination suggests Katniss’s desire to have her father and her former life back. The mantel clock, that sits next to theportrait of her father,might also suggest that Katniss wishes to turn back time. The explosion literally destroyed her father, resulting in his death, figuratively destroyed the domestic space of Katniss’s house, and emotionally destroyed the maternal support of her biological mother. This scene, while appearing later in the film, provides justification for the parental proxies.

In another scene, Katniss displays a quick masculine-gendered temper and expresses impetuous anger when she has to “perform” for some members of the Capitol. She walks into a vast, wide, and deep interior space below the gaze of the Capitol game makers who consume and imbibe above her in a space lavishly decorated with a dining table replete with food and drink. She is required to demonstrate her ability with weapons and chooses the bow and arrow. Launching her first arrow, she misses. The game makers chuckle. Her second shot is a bull’s eye, but the game makers either do not notice or choose to ignore her. Angry in her final attempt she aims at a roasted pig with an apple in its mouth and shoots the apple right out of its mouth, alarming and the Capitol members who suddenly stop and turn to stare at her in shocked silence. This moment creates anxiety for the viewers who worry that she will be punished for her defiant act. But she continues in her audacity: after a moment she bows and says “thank you for your consideration.”Her bold gesture penetrates the gamemakers’ space and the arrow that pierces the apple, and thrusts it into a wall works as a phallic symbol. Katniss possesses a temper and reacts with a violent physical gesture that is typically gendered masculine. She demands attention, perhaps in a way similar to Linda Loman’s plea on behalf of her husband in Death of a Salesman that “attention must be paid” to the weak, to the marginalized, to those victims of the powerful. Initially, she is the unwilling object of the gamemakers’ gazes, but once there, she controls those gazes with her archery intrusion, making herself the subject, rather than the object, and usurping agency from the state gamemakers and onto herself.Katniss possesses a core sense of her own autonomy, despite the perceived power of the state gaze.

According to Brown, “The ability to see clearly in cinema is equated with power” (26). Blurred suggests confusion, weakness, vulnerability. Seeing clearly is to see truth and be powerful. Furthermore, “the ability to look in film… is a symbol of masculine power. To look implies a right to knowledge, a right that has traditionally been gendered male.” If a woman attempts to manipulate the male gaze (and take power) for her own purposes, she is punished. “The good women are passive, supporters of men,” possessing the “reactive gaze,” while the “assaultive gaze” is gendered masculine(27). The close up of Katniss pulling her bow back as she stares at her target, suggests she has the typically gendered and socially constructedmasculine power. Good for her! This scene is in stark contrast to the scene in which Katniss is “cleaned up” before her television appearance, the camera shows her in a sterile, almost hospital-like environment, lying down. She is at the mercy of the state power, as vulnerable as a patient about to be surgically “acted upon.” In a similar scene from The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy is also “cleaned up;” however, unlike Katniss’s experience, Dorothy’s is enjoyable. She smiles as she sits. Katniss rarely smiles. Her transformation is “necessary,” to the state for public appearances’ sake, but while she cooperates, she derives no pleasure from the experience, and at the mercy of the Capitol, she maintains no agency.

In the scene that follows the arrow’s penetration of the apple, Effie, her maternal proxy, fears that Katniss’s bold and risky violation of the game makers’ space will be perceived as a big “F you!” (is her name “Effie” intentional?) Ultimately she is proven wrong. Effie knows, as evidence suggests, that young girls who act aggressively are often punished and reminded of “their place,” next to – and in support of – their male counterparts, as nurses alongside soldiers in war, for example. This only reinforces the weaker female gender in deference to the hegemonic masculine male. In this scene adolescent viewers recognize her action as bold, audacious, and risky rather than ill-advised and foolish. If females get angry they aren’t “supposed” to react violently, like males, but Katniss does.

Effie often reminds Katniss to “behave” and “mind her manners.” Effie is invested in maintaining the state’sillusion by encouraging the female gendered “proper behavior.” She chastises Katniss; yet Katniss remains unfazed. The viewer also dismisses Effie. She is essentially harmless and simply comical in her white Kabuki makeup, ridiculously colorful costume, and exaggeratedly large accessories. Make-up serves as a marker of femininity: Effie is overly made up to look as silly as many oftelevision’s “Real Housewives” do. Male characters in the film, especially in the Capitol, wear make-up too.Residents of the Capital don ridiculous costumes, cartoonish, clownish makeup and absurdly severe hairstyles and colors.Even Cinna, who is 100% MAN(Lennie Kravitz! YUM!), subtly wears a little gold eyeliner (a subtle nod to the make-up habits of the Capitol?) on his eyelids. So while Effie looks cartoonish and ridiculous,Cinna maintains his manliness.

The viewers laugh WITH and AT Effie for comic relief. As an agent of the state and a District 12 liaison she is essentially a goofy clown, but never really a serious threat. Katniss dismisses her proxy mother, Effie, much as she does her own mother. While her biological mother is pathetically weak, emotionally vulnerable, and damaged, Effie is silly, comical, and even endearing. Her comic relief is necessary to lighten the serious tone of the film. Unlikeother feminist heroines Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Veronica Mars,for example, there’s no place for camp or irony in The Hunger Games, except in some of the appearances and behaviors of the Capitol’s citizens. As Benson-Alcott suggests in Film Quarterly, “the tendency to align action heroines with camp aesthetics” – as in Buffy and Veronica Mars – “challenges the sexist ideologies and fosters a legitimate sense of female progress…[Katniss’s] earnestness is genuine” (11). WAY TO GO, fourth wave feminism! However, Benson-Alcott further observes that while shows like Veronica Mars “mock the frat boys” (often represented as challenges to gender equality) these heroines“still conform to societal norms of attractiveness” (11). Buffy and Veronica dress up, wear make-up and shop. This is problematic because “young women are viewed as [girly] potent consumers. Heroism and girly pleasures are not mutually exclusive.” They love to go to the mall and shop, so part of “their power comes from consuming.” These “girl power” characters are “mass marketed through ancillary licensing deals far beyond the merchandising possibilities of” truer if not more mature “heroines like Ellen Ripley (Alien) and Sarah Connor (Terminator)” (11).

Katniss(the marketing of her bow and arrow to young girls aside) embodies the best of Buffy and Veronica with her youth, and the best of Ellen and Sarah with her non-nonsense maturity and her rejection of “girly” pursuits like shopping and makeup (except when forced in front of the capitol media for interviews or parades). When Katniss does embrace the gowns and makeup, it’s only because she’s learning how to “play the (necessary) game” because it’s a matter of life and death, rather than a desired pursuit of enjoyment. Furthermore, Katniss is not hyper-sexualized as many third wave feminism characters are. Benson-Alcott notes that “[t]hesexualization of the young girl heroine is not surprising given our society’s longstanding tradition of eroticizing adolescent female bodies” (163). Katniss rarely wears high heels (except during her interview) or outfits with plunging necklines, and her costumes are rarely form-fitting (except during training). Good for her. Another point for “fourth wave” feminism!