I was almost
determined not to like it. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins is a phenomenon:
a Young Adult bestseller. And for me those words conjure up images of effete teen vampires, anodyne heroines and shirtless muscleboys who can't act. Given that
Stephenie Meyer herself had said such wonderful things about The Hunger Games, surely it must be on a
par with the ghastly Twilight books?
But I liked the
book from the start because I could identify so fully with the idea at the core
of The Hunger Games, that society will devolve so completely that one day we will actually be watching teenage kids fighting to the
death on a reality TV show.
I used to work
for Granada Australia, a subsidiary of the huge Granada TV production company
in the UK, which wanted a nice, little production arm in Australia to service
some of its massively successful ‘format’ shows. When I left, they were making a
program that is shot in Australia, but which – to my knowledge - hasn’t made it
to Australian terrestrial TV yet. The show is called, I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. It’s pretty much like Big
Brother, only the ‘house’ is an encampment in a hostile-looking
jungle somewhere in Queensland, and the various contestants have to tough it
out in a series of elimination rounds (‘challenges’) where they are forced to
do things that your average punter would rather not. Most of the challenges
I’ve seen have involved eating disgusting food or taking on a physical
challenge that is just quirky or potentially dangerous enough to entice an
undemanding and indulgent viewer. The ‘celebrity’ aspect
of the show's title is a bit of a misnomer. The last clip I saw was someone challenging
Colin Baker (only Whovians would know him from his thankfully brief tenure as
one of the Time Lord’s incarnations) and I don’t think he quite counts as a
celebrity, but I think the term covers any person whose name might have
appeared in the newspaper a few times and who isn’t averse to being belittled
on television in the hope of giving their ailing careers a bit of a shot in the
arm. Anyway, the Colin Baker bit that I saw made me recall why we all stopped
watching Doctor Who when he took over
the title role. I didn’t know the celebrity who had challenged him, but he
would have been known to UK viewers, perhaps as the man with the dictionary on Countdown or the one with the deep voice
who says ’Mind the Gap’ when you travel on the tube. Suffice it to say, his
celebrity probably wasn’t stellar. But, through a series of name
changes and takeovers, I was now working for a company that was well known for
its ‘reality TV’ formats. I’d enjoyed all the shows I’d worked on before the
English acquisition of Artist Services, which is the company I used to work
for, the one that made all those daggy Australian sketch shows like Fast Forward and Full Frontal. But it seemed fairly likely to me that I would end up
working on one of these reality shows. And I really couldn’t do it. I’d watched
Big Brother from time to time, not
least because handsome Alex, one of my fellow workers, ended up on series two.
I also kind of knew Johnny from series one, but then, it seems that everyone
kind of knew Johnny from series one. (Big
Brother was not a Granada production.) It was a crappy, mean-spirited
show that gave young viewers the idea that they didn’t actually have to learn
anything, achieve anything or have a particular skill to be famous. Hell, they could
just be ‘normal’ like the Big Brother roommates and that was enough to guarantee
stardom and public adulation. (Which of course it wasn’t.) Even after Four Corners did a particularly harsh critique
on how manipulative the show is, the Four
Corners forum after the show was flooded with requests from people about
how they might be able to get on Big
Brother. These people had just seen a documentary about how Big Brother was nothing but
self-abasement for the contestants, and that the show could be edited in any
number of ways to yield an infinite number of storylines. (Before I get too hot
and bothered about this I should add that David Attenborough nature
documentaries, which I happen to like, use exactly the same editing tricks to
kid you into believing you are watching a story. The brave mother penguin who
rescued a drowning baby penguin then reared it as her own, bravely fending off penguin
bullies, probably didn’t exist. She was probably six different penguins edited
together in such a way that we couldn’t help saying, Ahhhh!’ It helps, of
course, that humans are very bad at telling Penguins apart.) The people who’d
seen Four Corners give an absolute caning to Big Brother nevertheless wanted to be on it, so that they too could
abase themselves.
Peter Andre, no stranger to the recent batch of 'celebrity' reality shows.
The Hunger
Games’ author says she was inspired to write the book after watching one of the
reality shows. Of course she was! I would have done it too, if I’d had the
skill. Besides the Big Brother shows,
there were countless other global ‘reality’ shows which I got to preview, so
that we could edit together their worst excesses and make something called Unreel TV, a questionable clips show
whose only saving grace was having
Tim Ferguson as compere. He struck just the right level of enthusiasm and
disgust for clips of shows such as the one where contestants had enemas and
there was a prize for whoever could squirt out their colonic water the
farthest. (Seriously, it was on a Swedish show.)
So, I’m a big
fan of The Hunger Games, because I appreciate the desperation and despair that
caused Suzanne Collins to write it. I like the movie as well. Though one thing
that the movie didn’t seem to get is that Collins has a very dark sense of
humour. There are so many wry parts of the book that never quite made it to screen. (Though Stanley tucci and toby Jones as the commentators were suitably grotesque.) I
like the main character Katniss’s fear that her stylist might make her appear
completely nude on global television. The implication is that this had already
happened in a previous season. Apparently, one year there was a ‘nude Hunger Games’. There are regular references to Hunger Games of the past that have gone horribly wrong,
such as the one in a desert where all contestants merely had a slow death by
starvation. That one hadn’t rated so well. The nudism thing amused me,
because it was one of the more prurient aspects of Big Brother. If there was a jock in the house, the viewer could be
fairly confident that said jock would be parading his nudity before long. ‘But
that’s not fair!’ screech the producers. ‘We warn them that there are camera
everywhere, even in the shower room, and the contestants have the option of
showering in their underwear.’ – which of course no sane person ever does. And where exactly do you change out of yur wet underpants if there are cameras all over the place? There was a sauna in one series, though the girls didn't use it much. I used to wonder why the guys who used it
would look directly out at the TV viewers and not at each other while they were chatting, flexing their
muscles and readjusting their towels so that they were a little more low-rise
and titillating. Were they really doing a sort of
testosterone-fuelled strip-tease for the viewer? It occurred to me then that
the entire sauna wall opposite them and unseen by us would have been a one-way mirror behind
which the cameras were filming. So of course the two jocks were looking at it
constantly, flexing and preening appropriately at their reflections. They were
doing it for themselves.
The Hunger Games made me laugh and kept me reading. I’m glad that
such an inventive book did so well. (And yes, I know about Season Seven and Man Bites
Dog, two cult movies that cover very similar ground to the Collins novel. But
so what? Collins does a great job of keeping the reader intrigued, while I had
no trouble whatever in turning off the relentless and revolting Man Bites Dog.)
The Hunger Games makes almost every comment about the media’s
plummeting depths that prompted me to leave the industry for a bit. It was
clever and fresh in a way that Twilight
absolutely wasn’t. It’s interesting to read the reviews for the movie on IMDB.
People are very polarised. Many critics would have liked less of the morbid
violence, many others would have liked more. I think the movie got it about
right. Bot movie and book stand as clever bits of dystopian fiction, and give
us all plenty to think and talk about.
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