Spoiler alert: this
breakdown contains crucial information about the plot of the movie.
In spite of The Hunger Games’ massive success at the
box office, many viewers have complained that the movie is not as detailed as
the original novel. I always find this comment ridiculous. While novels and
films share hundreds of techniques that make for a good story, they also have
at least one major difference: novels are a narrative medium while film is a
dramatic one. When people dismiss the movie for not being as “good” as the
book, they fail to see the key story elements, found in book and film, that
make this a worldwide story phenomena.
The Hunger Games is the
latest example of a huge blockbuster hit constructed by combining the myth
genre with video game story elements. In my Genre classes, I have long pointed
out that Myth is the basis for more blockbuster hits than any other genre by
far. Book author and screenplay co-author Suzanne Collins understood this
powerful technique right from the premise. In one of the most important of all
Greek myths, Theseus and the Minotaur, every year King Aegeus must send seven
young men and seven young women to be eaten by the Minotaur in ritual payment
for a crime.
Like J. K. Rowling in the Harry Potter stories, Collins has woven
myth elements throughout her story. Main character Katniss is based on one of
the major Greek goddesses, Diana, the huntress. When she and her fellow
tributes show up in the arena, they are driving chariots. Like Romans watching
gladiators kill gladiators and animals slaughtering Christians for sport, the
rich dandies of the Capitol watch on live television as children butcher
children. When Katniss shoots an apple with her arrow she repeats the act of
legendary freedom fighter William Tell.
All of these mythical and
ancient historical references give the story an appeal that can transcend age,
gender and cultural boundaries. But that’s not enough for a hit. While myth is
the foundation of more blockbusters than any other genre, it is almost always
combined with one or two other genres to unify and update the myth form. In the
case of The Hunger Games, Collins has
combined myth with science fiction. This mashup of ancient past with distant
future gives the audience the sense that this story isn’t specific to a
particular time and place; it is universal. It is the essence of human beings.
Collins also uses science
fiction to take the capitalist foundation of America society to its logical
extreme, where competition for show and money has taken on life and death
stakes. Like Rollerball and Westworld, the players in this competition are
pawns to the big corporate money, and if you lose you die.
One of the biggest mistakes
that science fiction writers make is that they create a futuristic world that
is so bizarre, so unlike anything we know today, that the audience is alienated
from the story almost before it begins. They may continue to watch but they
will have a clinical attitude to the story throughout. And this is the kiss of
death, in fact the single biggest reason that many science fiction films fail.
Collins has avoided that
problem by creating a recognizable future world. Again her technique has been
to connect past to future. The rural mining town of Katniss’ District 12 reminds
me of 1930’s America, with the film’s shooting style reminiscent of Margaret
Bourke-White’s photos of the drought victims of the Dust Bowl. This familiarity
gives the audience an emotional connection to the story world. Although there
are many elements that tell them this is a futuristic abstraction, the multiple
references to America’s past, and in some cases present, tell them this is a
story about today.
Besides the myth genre, the
other key to the huge success of The
Hunger Games is its deft use of video game elements. Video games are a
relatively new story medium, and their massive influence on novels and film is
just starting to become clear. I’m not talking about transmedia here, where a
specific video game is turned into a novel and/or a film. These are almost
always failures because the creators/producers try to boil all the permutations
of a video game into a single story that can be written or filmed.
The trick to combining
video games with novels and movies is not to transfer a particular video game
story but to apply the story elements that video games do especially well and
that appeal to a large audience. For simplicity sake, let’s focus on two
elements, story world and keeping score.
Because video games allow a
player to take a number of different paths through the same world, there is an
extreme emphasis placed on a story world with lots of details and surprises.
The difficulty of translating this story element into a novel or film is that
these media have a single story path, so you can’t allow too much exploration
by the reader/viewer without losing narrative drive.
But, driven by the
phenomenal success of the Harry Potter
stories, allowing the audience to explore a detailed story world is probably
the single biggest change in commercial storytelling in the last ten years. The
exquisite detail of the Potter world was mind-boggling. And a big reason
Rowling was able to create that kind of detail in novel, and then film, is that
she had seven books to do so.
Collins has three books to
detail her world and uses the full array of techniques. First she creates the
overall arena, which is a totalitarian society within which this moral horror
can believably occur. She then sets up fundamental contrasts within the arena,
with the rich, powerful amoral Capitol set against the poor, starving rural
District 12. Within this macro-arena of high contrasts, she then creates a
second smaller arena, the field of battle. This arena must have a clearly
defined wall surrounding it to create the pressure cooker effect, whereby you
build the conflict under such extreme pressure that it finally blows sky high.
Keeping score is the most
obvious story element that distinguishes video games from other forms of media.
Video games are essentially the combination of sport and story, or quantified
drama. The biggest drawback to this element is that it destroys ambiguity; you
either win or you lose. This is the main reason many critics have not yet given
video games the accolade of unique story medium (they’re wrong, by the way).
But keeping score also has great value. Since in most video games you are the
main character, keeping score tells you exactly what you, as both main
character and viewer, have accomplished in the story.
In The Hunger Games, of course, the element of keeping score is so
fundamental it is right in the premise. This is a tournament to the death,
“Survivor” with life and death stakes. In Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, another book and film
heavily influenced by video games, we get a life and death fight between the
two titans of evolution, man and dinosaur. But The Hunger Games is even more horrific, because this is a fight
among children, and 23 out of 24 must die. Each contestant has different
psychology, skills and training. And as in any game, luck will have a big role
to play as well.
The game is also fixed. The
contestants from Districts 1 and 2 are the only ones trained for this event.
Naturally they usually win. But ironically, Katniss’ greatest weakness, her
home in the starving 12th District, is also her greatest strength.
She practices survival every day of her life, and she is a master of the bow
and arrow.
Collins does something very
interesting to turn the great weakness of keeping score into a story strength.
What the player/main character accomplishes at the end of a video game has a
very all-or-nothing quality. But in great storytelling what the character
accomplishes, known as character change, is deeper and more subtle. Character
change is not based on how many bad guys the hero has defeated, or on the
sensual charge the player experiences in the process. Character change comes
from how a character challenges his/her psychological and moral self.
In The Hunger Games Collins turns the tournament-to-the-death element
of keeping score into the lever by which Katniss can have both a psychological
and moral change. The tournament creates a Prisoner’s Dilemma on a massive
scale, representing all of society. Prisoner’s Dilemma is one of the great
insights in all of philosophy and game theory. In the classic setup, two
prisoners are placed in separate interrogation rooms and given a choice of
confessing to the crime or staying silent. But the authorities rig the choice
so that each prisoner, without knowledge of what his partner is doing, must
confess, because to trust his partner and stay silent risks death if the
partner is the only one to confess.
Because only one player can
survive the Hunger Games, the mini-society in which they live is one of total
paranoia and distrust. Katniss’s distrust is heightened even more when she
discovers that Peeta, her fellow tribute from District 12, has joined the
alliance formed by the trained killers of Districts 1 and 2. Yet, over the
course of the battle, she is not only able to trust him, but perhaps even love
him. And when faced with the ultimate Prisoner’s Dilemma – whether to kill this
person she loves – she makes the moral decision that risks her own death but
also takes her to higher humanity.
Some critics have pointed
out that The Hunger Games is a
breakthrough for Young Adult fiction, especially for girls. Maybe so. But the
big lesson of The Hunger Games has
nothing to do with the age or gender of the reader-viewer. Simply put, if you
want to give yourself the best chance of writing a blockbuster book or film – a
longshot at any time – write a myth-based story with video game techniques.
