Posted on 03/27/2012 6:46:41 AM PDT by rhema
The importance of religion in the wildly popular "Hunger Games" books and new movie is a lot like the barking of a dog in the Sherlock Holmes story "Silver Blaze."
Holmes directs a police inspector's attention to "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time." "The dog did nothing in the night-time." "That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.
The dog, of course, did not bark.
If you've been cut off from all popular culture for a while, "The Hunger Games" and its two sequels are novels by Suzanne Collins. She creates a dystopian future where the remnants of the United States are ruled by a despot who enforces his rule with an annual "game" that's a cross between Roman gladiator contests and a modern reality TV show. A couple of people from each province are chosen by lottery to enter into a group battle to the death, all televised. Last person standing is the winner.
Eventually, there's an uprising.
The plot is a gumbo that includes elements from Roman history and mythology; "The Truman Show" movie; Robert Heinlein's 1960s novel "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress;" "The Lottery," a short story written in the 1940s by Shirley Jackson; Madeline L'Engle's "A Wrinkle In Time" and who knows what else.
The core conflicts that drive the plot are moral choices when there are no good answers. And yeah, there's a romance conflict.
For my money, it's better written than the Harry Potter books -- more internally self-consistent with much more sophisticated character development. Like the Potter books, it's marketed as "young adult" fare but includes plenty of adult adults in its fan base. The first movie in what will surely be a series opened last week. Critics were generally kind and the box office was tremendous.
So what about religion? There isn't any. Not a prayer. Not an oath. The word "god" does not so much as appear in any of the books. Nobody even says "oh my gosh."
There's no ritual that isn't totally grounded in some materialistic purpose. Not a hint of serious superstition. Unless I missed it, there's not a remotely idiomatic reference to the supernatural.
The story is plenty busy without it, but such an unequivocal expunging can only have been intentional. We learn fine details about fashion and food and weaponry and the shape of furniture and the color of dust and so on and so on. She easily could have dropped in a couple of casual references to faith.
I've not been able to find any interviews she's granted on the topic, but it's pretty clear that, like Gene Roddenberry did when he created Star Trek, Collins wanted there to be zero religion in her world.
Based on her source material, she could have used religion as a positive or a negative. Here in the real world, people have turned to various kids of religion in the darkest moments of history. Victims of the Nazis prayed in the death camps. On the other hand, religion has been a tool of oppression in much of real history, too. From the imposed state faith of the ancient Roman Empire to the Catholic Inquisition to the Muslim theocrats of our own era, faith has been used by despots whose histories parallel some of the villains of Collins' story.
It's hard for me to imagine a real human future where either use of religion vanishes without a trace. But for her own reasons, Collins went in neither direction. It's a curious incident, a dog that should have barked.
A friend of mine who has read the books asked me a much more interesting question than "where is the religion." Where, she asked me, was God in this story? Had he abandoned humanity?
My friend is a person of deep and abiding faith who has survived some hard times. Her question was heartfelt. I thought about all of the real-world examples in human history where one might ask the same question. Theodicy is the toughest challenge for any religion that posits an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good deity. Why does he allow evil to persist? Where is his hand in stories where horrors pile upon horrors?
Is God in the world of the Hunger Games? Religious commentators are trying to find him. There's a book titled "The Hunger Games and the Gospel." A paper titled "The Gospel According to ‘The Hunger Games' Trilogy." "Hunger Games" bible studies.
The authors focus on plot elements that turn on moral questions, on discussions about good and evil characters, on redemption and faith in family and friends. Even though there's not a scintilla of actual religion in the stories, they are able to find aspects that represent their own religious values.
Finding the Almighty in apparently secular details has an ancient and honorable history. Look no further than the Bible and the Book of Esther. This is the basis of the Jewish holiday of Purim. The tale includes violence and romance, sexual wiles and betrayal, despots and heroes. (And like the Hunger Games, the central hero is a young woman.)
What it doesn't have, famously, is a single unequivocal mention of God. Not one. Yet it made it into the canon for Jews and Christians. And generations of theologians have delved into it to find religious meanings.
So maybe it is fair to search for God in the world of the Hunger Games. But given how hard Collins worked to scrub her work so squeaky religion-clean, I wonder what she thinks of the bible studies.
The rise of ‘young adult lit’ has been a disaster for children’s literacy. There is plenty of genuine literature that kids can and should be reading. Instead we have an industry that caters and panders to them with lowest common denominator fare. And a good teacher will provide analysis. Usually Lit is presented as part of a class with a theme - American Lit, British Lit and so forth. It supplies a de facto analysis...a history lesson of what a culture was writing.
Yes that’s the one.
Interesting point about the Son/sun language dichotomy. That was the real plot twist at the end, kind of surprising (and a bit of welcome warmth), given the series’ staunch, cold secularism.
In high school literature is only used to buttress the leftwing ideology like history class. It is one of the big reasons that kids hate reading, they never learn to like it, just analyze it from a leftwing perspective. They’ll assign students to read novels like the Adventures of Huck Finn, the Great Gatsby and then give tests and assessments that lead them to conclusions about characters attitudes and motivations. Students come away never learning to appreciate literature but to analyze it from a leftwing perspective. This is brainwashing.
Look at those who are Godless, they worship government as God or worship Gaia or their own bodies’ pleasure.
Everyone has a God.
Reminds me of the last few paragraphs of Brideshead. Something like the single lamp left in the [chapel’s] window guiding the crusaders home. But the passage you cite describes the entire notion of modern “art,” banal, venal, mindless precisely because of the absence of God.
Somehow Waugh slipped under my radar for many years, and I’ve only started really getting acquainted with his work in the last year or two...truly a fascinating individual.
-—No they’re not. The kids know them because the kids read them and talk about them. Kid culture self perpetuates very well without any help from the schools.-—
Like Harry Potter, it’s not an either/or, it’s a both/and.
Read ‘A Handful of Dust’. It’s great.
That episode was titled, "Bread and Circuses." Coincidental to it's references to Imperial Rome, its original broadcast date was on the Ides of March, 1968.
It’s generally an either/ or. What does sometimes happen is schools realize that tons of their kids are consuming a media product and decide to try to figure out if there’s something in there that can be spun into their curriculum. But that isn’t pushing it as reacting to it.
Waugh anticipated post-Christian Europe, which could be the theme of “Brideshead Revisited,” one of my favorite TV dramas.
-—Usually Lit is presented as part of a class with a theme - American Lit, British Lit and so forth. It supplies a de facto analysis...a history lesson of what a culture was writing.-—
This means of categorization is like the Dewey decimal system, or alphabetical order. It’s not very informative.
It would be like categorizing religious beliefs by chronological order.
Like David Copperfield?
Is that the South American tribal chieftan who insists on captives’ reading Dickens to him? (I never remember titles!)
I think I saw that episode. Uhura realizes (I think toward the end) that the sun worshippers are actually Son worshippers, and she explains this to the captain or Spock or somebody. Am I remembering it correctly?
Right. Dystopian literature is almost always religion-free.
Copperfield sort of touches it because you get the idea that he’s actively telling you the story now. But most of the story is in the past. Most of the time you see present tense it’s in spy stories, it adds a lot of immediacy to the story, especially if it’s first person. First person past tense you always have the nagging feeling that the narrator lived through the current scene because he’s telling you it happened in the past, move it to present tense and the poor slob could die at any time, of course they don’t but it feels that way.
Yes, you are. Ends with her declaring “...he is the son of God!” A hard-to-find episode.
Very well said. Whether Hollywood or the author intended to, the film is a conservative tour de force about the evils of a dictatorial central government that oppresses and enslaves its citizens, and the flickering of freedom and the spark that will start a revolt to throw off the yoke of the oppressor. Seems very topical to the US, the Obama Administration,and what conservatives need to do.
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