Posted on 04/05/2012 8:03:40 AM PDT by SmithL
It's not until the final book of "The Hunger Games" trilogy that Katniss Everdeen learns that Panem, the capital of her dystopian world, comes from the Latin, "Panem et circenses." The phrase "bread and circuses," her mentor tells her, comes from a Roman writer who lamented that "in return for full bellies and entertainment, his people had given up their political responsibilities and therefore their power."
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Donald Sutherland is an idiot
If yu didnt see the movie then trust me, it does NOT come off that way
Watch for libtards to start to insists what you said is true, and we should not belive our lying eyes
Drug-addled, empty-headed commie. (See my tagline - Donald Sutherland is in the book.)
“Bread and Circuses” always reminds me of the Communist revolution in Russia.
The Soviet Communist revolution promised “Bread and Freedom!”.
Well they were not that forthcoming with the freedom - so they figured they could at least provide bread.
Bread was so cheap in the USSR that pig farmers fed their pigs bread instead of wheat. The pig doesn’t care that you cooked it and put in nicer ingredients. But if the bread is cheaper than the wheat that went into it - pig farmers will feed bread to pigs.
That is the nature of centralized control - perverse incentives - and wasteful feeding bread to pigs.
I guess I’m a libtard then, because the film came off as an Occupier’s dystopian fantasy about class exploitation to me. I guess there’s enough ambiguity that you can connect its dots in a way that finds a conservative message in it, but to do so goes against the movie’s natural grain.
Not sure what was conservative about it.
The book’s author said she was inspired to write it by the Iraq war.
Well, I realize now my use of "Capitol" in my post was both rright and wrong. I looked at the correct usage of Capital vs. Capitol and I think the book got it wrong (which is what I referred to). So I was wrong in my use. However, in the book, it is refered to as "The Capitol." So I was right with respect to the reference. A Capitol is defined as either the Capitol Building in the U.S. Capital of Washington D.C., or as a state legislature building. The correct usage should be Capital when refering to a city where the Capitol resides. I think Capitol was used in this case because it appeared more formal, but was not necessary.
It's also interesting that some of the districts raised their kids to believe in the honor of fighting in the Games. Again the underlying message was not hard to spot. These districts represented military families and military culture and patriotic institutions like the Marine Corps that are committed to the honor of fighting on behalf of the nation. The movie was slighting these people or suggesting that they are misguided or suckers.
Naturally it was the gung-ho pledges from these districts who were the main bad guys once the Games got underway. They banded together into a WASPy little gang that hunted down and killed the other pledges. Oh and by the way, the other pledges consisted of blacks and females and younger/poorer/weaker white kids. Anybody think there might be a message here?
Oh yeah, and then after Roux, the little black girl pledge, was killed by one of the white male pledges, there was a race riot in her home district. To complete the effect, the snappily uniformed all white police force hosed them down Civil Rights style. Hmm, I wonder what this could mean?
And of course the bad guys in the government were portrayed as stuffy aristocrats. The hostess lady was literally done up as a powdered Marie Antoinette. All of this to make sure that no skull full of mush could fail to understand that these were fundamentally class enemies, the One Percent.
But wait -- don't forgot the Lenny Kravitz character, Katniss's presumably gay "stylist" who functioned not only as the film's Magic Negro (per the LA Times definition) but also its Magic Gay Guy. He gave her the behind-the-scenes moral support she needed to fight the one percenters and win!
They could say the evil ones are the republicans in charge and the poor “Occupy District 1-13”(tm) are the oppressed, but that had not even occurred to me OR my children because the evil ones are the big central government in this movie - which is what the democraps want
Remember that The Hunger Games was conceived during the Bush years, back when the left was fearful of big "fascist" government. Their panic drove them to make several dystopian movies like V for Vendetta and Children of Men that expressed that fear. All had an oppressive right-wing government as the bad guy. The Hunger Games is part of the same pattern.
the 13th district does no exist, the people in the 12 have only heard of it’s possible existence as the capital bombed it when it rebelled and always show film footage of the bombed out area as an incentive to control the people in the other 12.
Groan. It’s a totalitarian government. Doesn’t matter whether it’s “right” or “left” wing, it’s the violent subjugation of all others to the service and pleasure of a central tyrannical power. When freedom is crushed, neither “left” nor “right” are laudable positions for the oppressor.
Yes, it does matter.
Uh, ok. So you’d rather have the right boot stomping your face forever instead of the left?
What I mean, obviously, is that it matters whether the movie portrays the government bad guys as being right or left wing. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but one of the ways the left advances its agenda is by slandering conservatives as fascist oppressors and by ginning up anger against its class enemies. That’s what I’m saying this film is doing. That’s why it matters. If you think this film is just an ideologically neutral warning against the general concept of totalitarianism, then you are awfully naive.
I haven’t seen it. But a non-political co-worker commented that she had and loved it. Then added that the notion that Obamacare can force everyone to buy insurance was like a beginning of the kind of government force portrayed in the movie. Hopefully there are alot of low-information citizens getting the same kind of messages from the film....
Yeah, hopefully, although I'm pretty sure that's not the film's intent. But it may be that its message is ambiguous enough, and Obama has people pissed off enough, that people will take something like that away from it nevertheless. If so that's good. But I think most skulls full of mush will take away a message that's more Occupy approved.
That said, the movie is pretty lame. I actually was more concerned about its message before I got a chance to see it. After I saw it, I realized how forgettable it is. Despite all the hype around it, I think its potential for getting inside people's heads and establishing a meme is fairly low.
Dunno about the movie, but the book is quite neutral about the nature of the totalitarian government. All it is interested in is maintaining its power over the oppressed. As portrayed, it is very easy for readers/viewers to project whatever group they want upon the characters depicted: if you want to see the future of the Obama, so President Snow is; if you want that evil to be Bush and the Republicans, that’s what you’ll see; if you want your favored group depicted as evil by the author/director so you can demonize the latter, so be it.
Insofar as politics go, this story is a Roarshach test. You’ll see what you want there, and I’ve seen a lot of people want a broad spectrum.
You should watch the movie and get back. It has a pretty obvious agenda to me, and frankly I’d be surprised if the book doesn’t as well (but I haven’t read it). If the book had anything like a conservative message, I doubt the leftist American Library Association would be recommending it.
I read the book (working on #2 now). No apparent agenda, aside from whatever the reader chooses to impute upon it. Not so much a “conservative” message as a responsible libertarian one. It’s freedom vs. tyranny, not liberal vs. conservative.
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