Lecture for Tuesday 3/31: May the Odds Be Ever in Your Favor

 Reality TV, Entertainment Culture, and Cruelty

Scene from The Hunger Games film - televised reaping in District 12

When Suzanne Collins wrote The Hunger Games trilogy back in 2006-2007, she could not have predicted that ten years later, Americans would elect their first reality TV star as President.

However, just as Ray Bradbury inadvertently predicted reality TV's rise with his parlor families in F451 back in the 1950s, Collins had her pulse on something in the early 2000s zeitgeist: the fact that reality TV was a big form of entertainment.

She saw the rise in certain early forms of social media (such as Myspace), that how these social media platforms were merging with our "real, offline lives" in all kinds of complicated ways that made the line between "reality" and "digital performance" very blurry. With the rise of social media, the idea that "life is a surveillance style performance" for an audience became more and more of a reality for us all. After all, one of the unique elements of reality TV, whether it is scripted or not, is that regular, everyday people get to be its stars.

The Hunger Games borrows and re-combines its reality TV elements from real sub-categories of reality TV in our world. These include competition shows such as Survivor or The Bachelor, where people compete with one another for essential resources like food, or for love. Collins saw how shows tanked or succeeded based on how audiences felt about them, and that often what audiences wanted to see on the screen was two things:

Competition & Cruelty

Competition may seem such a key aspect of reality TV shows that we take for granted that it must be that way. However, given that competition is an essential aspect of free market capitalism, and competition reality TV shows are especially successful in countries with particularly cut-throat capitalist economic systems and less than stellar social safety nets. One key element of many reality TV shows is that there must be very few winners, and a whole lot of losers.

 Bachelor Rose Ceremony, where many women get sent home every week

Another key aspect of many reality TV shows is that the losers (and the winners for that matter) must suffer. Audiences often experience what the Germans call schadenfreude, which means "pleasure in another's misfortune." Collins noted that on reality TV especially, when audiences are ostensibly viewing everyday people such as themselves, they particularly enjoyed watching people suffer. The way that empathy dissolves when watching people on screens can be likened in some ways to the Roman Coliseum, when audiences from ancient Rome watched people gore each other to death for entertainment (as well as get gored to death by animals like tigers).

 Gladiator killing another gladiator in the Roman Coliseum as a tiger looks on

One key form of dystopian control that you have learned about in our class is technological control. This form of control can manifest in different ways, including through surveillance devices (we will talk more about how surveillance operates in the Districts a little later on). But one way it can operate is through televised entertainment. What is seen as "entertaining," even if it is dehumanizing, effects the mental states of the population of a dystopia. In The Hunger Games, they see themselves on the screen, and/or know that their family members can be sent into the games to die on television. This keeps the population under control, in part by forcing them to watch their friends and family die as "entertainment."

I want to draw your attention to two reality TV shows from our world that have interesting parallels to The Hunger Games. One of the discussion questions for this week's class will ask you to draw some connections between one reality TV show and the book, so this can help serve as some inspiration for that discussion.

Alone (US)

Alone is a show on the History channel, which thus far has had six seasons. Contestants are left alone in the wilderness with only a handful of supplies (such as a knife, a tarp, a cooking pot, etc.) and whoever lasts the longest, wins $500,000.  The catch is that they have no idea how long that may be, as they are totally isolated from other contestants. They must film their every move and editors later piece footage together to create the show.

One interesting element of the show is that each season has become more deadly. As contestants who apply to be on the show watch subsequent seasons, they plan and prepare mentally and physically for how they can endure even longer in the wilderness than those on the earlier seasons of the show. This is similar to the Career Tributes in the The Hunger Games, who, like child soldiers, prepare for their time in the arena.

As the seasons have continued, more and more people have had to be sent home by medical teams because they have been close to death via starvation. Some have expressed that they need to win because they have no retirement savings. It's clear that the producers are exploiting the fact that more and more Americans live closer to the edge financially, and are willing to offer themselves up to the televised entertainment industry in order to survive. This is similar to the way that winning tributes are rewarded in The Hunger Games arena by food and supplies being awarded to their districts.

Critics have talked about a show like Alone would likely not exist, or at least not be so bleak, if late capitalism did not create such desperation in so many. Just as inequality is rampant in the fictional world of The Hunger Games, so, too, is inequality increasing in the reality of the United States.

Nasubi (Japan)

Cruel US reality TV shows are often given a run for their money in Japan. Please read here, or watch the short clip above, about Nasubi, the reality TV star who was forced to live in a tiny room for 15 months and could only survive off of sweepstakes that he won through the mail (similar to the gifts the audience gives tributes in The Hunger Games). The whole thing was livestreamed.

Battle Royale - The Fight to the Death

Speaking of Japan, I would be remiss if I did not mention one book (and film) that is a precursor to Collins' The Hunger Games--Battle Royale. Battle Royale was written in 1996, published in 1999, and turned into a film in 2000. During this time, reality TV was not huge -- and subsequently, the plot of story, while similar in some key ways to The Hunger Games, does not possess a televised aspect.

The story takes place in a fascist, dystopian Japan. After an economic recession the government decides to create a program where fifty randomly selected classes of third-year junior high school students are kidnapped, dropped into a remote location, and forced to kill one another until only one student of each class remains. Ostensibly, it is to help the government and its military research survival skills and battle readiness. In actuality, it is meant to instill terror and distrust in all of Japan's citizens to curb any attempts at rebellion, by showcasing the government's power and ability to target citizen's families and preying on the fear of being killed by a friend.

The book ends with the few remaining schoolchildren alive escaping to (fictional) democratic America. 

Video Games & Other Forms of Entertainment 

Reality TV is not the only form of entertainment that The Hunger Games references. 

Video games and celebrity talk shows are another two key forms of entertainment that are referenced in the book. The Game-makers envision the arena much like a video game (we will break this aspect of the book down in more detail next week), and Cesar Flickerman's televised interviews with the contestants of the games not only resemble Chris Harrison's fireside chats with Bachelor contestants, but they also mimic or reference shows like Ellen or Oprah. The fashion worn by contestants in these sessions is another reference to celebrity culture, paparazzi, and the red carpet.

 

Lady Gaga talking to Ellen