My first encounters with Hunger Games
Recently I had to actually sit down and Consume Hunger Games Media for the first time. I never read the books when they were popular because they came out when I was in college, and I would have rather jumped off a cliff than read any YA whatsoever at that time.
I had plenty of friends who did read it all, and who kept me extremely informed about what precisely happens in the books, who the characters are, when and how they die, etc. I think I once sat silently on a couch listening to several completely wasted peers give me an elaborate description of Rue's death during a college party once (I was completely sober). So I've felt for a while that I did understand a lot of things about the IP despite not engaging in it very seriously.
I knuckled down to watch the movies recently and found myself mostly pretty impressed by how well they're made. I've enjoyed Jennifer Lawrence in a lot of things before, but I was still impressed by how sincere and extreme her emotional distress is in a lot of these silly teenage deathmatch fights. It's a movie that really desperately wants to be taken seriously, and the people performing in it are trying very hard to be serious with the material.
Nevertheless, the material is inherently extremely funny and juvenile, and for me this has been my favorite part of watching the movies. It's incredibly funny to watch a grim, grey-blue rendition of fascism where the fascist dictator is extremely concerned with who precisely the Coolest Teen Girl in the World is dating, what dress she's wearing, whether her rhetorically powerful dress is readable as a statement against his political system, whether anyone saw her kissing her boyfriend, and so on. Every time something like this happens, I'm reminded that these books were YA targeted at young girls, and that the fantasy they were trying to create is not a four-quadrant action hero fantasy at all, really, but a fantasy for little girls. It's incredible, and I genuinely love it.
Every time something important happens and Katniss's private fashion designer, played by Lenny Kravitz, designs her a powerful outfit with symbolic meaning with which to silence her enemies, I am hooting and hollering. Every time the fascist leader of the nation says "We must destroy her, and her boyfriends too!!" I am cheering. There's no amount of grimdark sci-fi the movies can throw on this to hide that obvious original intention: a power fantasy that follows the precise shape of teenage girlhood. But with like, murder and fighting and shit. Awesome.
So I'm enjoying it, but it's definitely way too much of a power fantasy to be genuinely great storytelling. A lot of the silliest stuff in the movies is connected to her TV Boyfriend, Peeta, who paints himself to look like a rock in the first movie and completely derails the entire thing with this profoundly sauceless, preposterous act. Usually, Josh Hutcherson does a decent job of elevating Peeta material, but there's a certain amount of navel-gazing just in the structure and focus of these stories that I don't think anyone could have ever transmuted into something better than what it is.
Anyway, I've been glad to watch this stuff, and I will continue! It's important research, on some level. I've only completed two of the movies, but I may as well go all the way!