The Girl Who Was on Fire

by Leah Wilson, Jennifer Barnes, Mary Borsellino, Sarah Brennan

  Katniss gets put through the gamut during her media training. Prior to her interview, Haymitch attempts to have her act humble, cocky, witty, sexy, and mysterious, to both of their frustration. “‘[P]retend I’m the audience,’” he advises. “‘Delight me’” (The Hunger Games). Katniss does not, and soon enough Haymitch is throwing up his hands, drunk. As a veteran of the Hunger Games he should know better.

  “Being aware of the audience leads to overeagerness,” Jessica explained, “which television cameras register as fakeness.”

  “Is that why so many people seem fake on TV?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes they really are fake. Want to try again?”

  I nodded. Jessica was my Cinna. Luckily for Katniss, it is Cinna, the unexpected voice of reason, who gets the final word before her interview. He contradicts Haymitch’s advice and asks her the question that spurs her to greatness: “‘Why don’t you just be yourself?’” (The Hunger Games).

  After her triumph in the Hunger Games, Katniss finds it difficult to stay herself. Her heroism, which begins in authenticity and solidifies in skill, comes under fire as soon as she slips into a public persona, first as victor of the Games and then as the Mockingjay, face of the rebellion. Readers can likely relate to Katniss’ struggles to reconcile her personal and private lives, as they also have public profiles to maintain.

  It started with blogs; now, through social media, anyone who is active on the internet creates a digital projection of themselves for public consumption. We are all stars, all heroes in our own online productions. What does this do for our authenticity? It destroys it.

  The problem is that anyone who checks into Facebook, Twitter, and the like is automatically shown how their profile is trending through wall posts, messages, and friend requests. Anyone who Googles him or herself engages in a form of selfregard that used to require highly paid analysts. A truly authentic hero would not care what others thought; he or she would be comfortable enough to ignore the chatter of digital friends and strangers in lieu of the strength of his or her convictions. But a person who uses social media does care what others think—demonstrably. Looking at ourselves on the internet, we are not ourselves, and no amount of rationalization makes us seem like anything other than egotists.

  Katniss avoids this pitfall in the Hunger Games through the circumstances of the competition. Thrown into an arena without media access, she cannot tell how she is doing. (Luckily she is not as addicted to social media as the rest of us; for many Hunger Games readers, the lack of an internet connection might be the most difficult part of the Games.) She knows that she is on television but cannot watch it; she must rely on her hunches, which are unquestionably hers, to survive. She is not only genuine, not only skilled; she is incapable of cheapening herself by checking her own profile. The facade she creates is fully removed from her ego, cementing her heroic persona. Even as she becomes aware of the camera (“I am live on every screen in Panem,” she notes in The Hunger Games), she is real, both to the viewers of the Games and readers of the Games, since by not watching herself she cannot be seduced into being what people want her to be. She can only be herself.

  This trick has been pulled before by young people playing with American imagery. Kurt Cobain, the apotheosis of the reluctant media hero who came to power in the age of The Real World, made himself famous by being real, by being good, and by convincing the public that he did not care about his appearance. MTV pushed authenticity in large part by splashing Cobain across its screens; there were times in 1992 when “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was on television as much as the Hunger Games are on in Panem. When asked about the situation, Cobain had consistently ego-demolishing responses. (To a friend who remarked that he was on TV all the time, he said, “I don’t have a TV in the car I live in.”13) Although contemporaries report that he was as crafty and controlling of his media image as Katniss is of hers (“I pause a second, giving the cameras time to lock on me,” she says as she slips out of a tree during the first Games), his suicide solidified his realness by erasing any chance of him slipping into a self-aware persona, and now he lives on as a saint of unadulterated artistry in a world that seems more artificial since his death.

  Compare him to another rock star, Noel Gallagher of Oasis, who once said: “[B]eing famous is great. I love it, man. I think it’s the best when you get stopped walking down the street for an autograph, that’s the best feeling in the world.”14 A person who was truly busy being a heroic artist would not have time to be self-aware in such a manner. Whoops—Gallagher just checked his Facebook in front of everyone.

  By the time Mockingjay begins, Katniss has gone from Cobain to Gallagher, fully aware of her image and struggling to maintain it. Asked to film propos—“propaganda spots;” wasn’t Katniss fighting propaganda?—to support the rebellion, her prep team now “has to make me pretty and then damage, burn, and scar me in a more attractive way.” Katniss’ scars used to come from actual combat, unquestionably earned by her greatness; now they have to be rendered. Asked to say canned lines to inspire her followers, she suffers from stage fright; only when she is dropped into battle does she deliver inspirational speeches that are worthy of broadcast across Panem. Plutarch, Gamemaker and rebel leader, commends her spontaneity (“the audience eats that up,”) even as he stages a wedding and dance in District 13, which normally holds neither, for the cameras.

  Like many a hero and rock star before her, Katniss is trapped in her own persona. As early as the end of The Hunger Games, she has difficulty distinguishing between her real self—the girl who entered the arena—and the media powerhouse she has become: “I stare in the mirror as I try to remember who I am and who I am not.” By the time she is filming propos as the face of the rebellion, others have noticed her confusion. “‘I can’t tell what’s real anymore, and what’s made up,’” says her lover Peeta, describing his confusion at who Katniss really is (Mockingjay). How can she escape? More than once, she considers the ultimate way, but when she sees herself shot on television, she inoculates herself against the escape hatch that lured Cobain.

  Four years after my media training, I was given the chance to put Jessica’s advice to the test on the Today Show. I was there to promote my second book, which had just been selected by the Today Show Book Club; it was the kind of pie-in-the-sky opportunity that authors get once if they are lucky.

  I showed up early, as I was told was an absolute must. I went into the green room, which is never green, and saw the most unappetizing spread of donuts and fruit that I have ever seen to this day. It looked plastic, as fake as Katniss’ propos. I sat in the room alone and watched the broadcast of the Today Show with the happy people on the street in New York behind the TV personalities waving signs. “Those are the people are you aren’t supposed to think about,” I reminded myself. I was nervous, sick to my stomach. Jessica told me that the key with stage fright was to embrace it and convert it into energy. I tried, furrowing my brow and scrunching my guts. Soon enough I was called into makeup and then I stepped out under the lights to do the interview.

  Like Katniss’ talk with Caesar Flickerman, it was short. I sat up straight; I looked at the camera but did not look at the camera; I smiled. When I saw the tape later, I was dumbstruck.

  How come no one ever told me that my mouth was so crooked? Why did I have my hair cut short so that I looked like a hedgehog? How was my head so skull-like? I seemed nervous, hyper, self-aware. I was self-aware. I could try and hide it through mental trickery and media training, but I had been self-aware the whole time I was getting ready for the interview and the whole time I was being interviewed. I am self-aware now, and barring a Buddha-like moment in middle or old age I will continue to be. I put the interview on YouTube, where it still resides,15 but stayed away from television in the years that followed. I prefer email and phone. I prefer the control. I do not have the heroic, authentic persona necessary for TV.

  Reading Katniss’ interview in The Hunger Games, however, gave me hope that I was be
tter than I thought. Before she goes on with Caesar, after she has been through her own media training, following the first question, when she is tongue-tied and about to ruin everything, Katniss thinks, “Be honest.” This mantra, given her by Cinna after Haymitch’s haywire advice, carries her through, and I, too was honest on the Today Show. I am honest now: I check my online persona regularly and am ashamed of it. I try to write and hope that people like it. I tried out for The Real World once and failed miserably. I was almost on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, but the people in my building would not allow the camera crew. I play the games necessary to achieve success in my field. I have moments, like Katniss at the end of The Hunger Games, where I try to remember who I am and who I am not. I do not want to be famous for no reason ... but I would take it. I can only hope the honesty of admitting these things outweighs the self-awareness of doing them.

  Katniss ultimately reconciles her public profile with her real life by eliminating the former, leaving the Hunger Games and the rebellion behind to raise a family with Peeta. This is an act of self-denial that is unheroic for her public, but necessary for herself. The unadulterated heroism that she shows in the Hunger Games could only come out of a shining moment in youth, a time when she was firing on all cylinders; success brings reflection and reflection erases the authenticity that makes a modern hero. Transitioning to motherhood is a brave decision, both on Katniss’ part and Suzanne Collins’.

  At the end of Mockingjay, I was reminded of the Henry Hill monologue that closes Goodfellas: he says that after a lifetime of adventure, “I’m an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.” A schnook is not a hero. But Katniss is nothing if not a survivor. She does what she needs to to stay alive. And after she picks Peeta and retires from the public eye, into what spurious nest of lies does her other lover, Gale, go?

  He goes back to District 2, to do television.

  NED VIZZINI is the author of three acclaimed young adult books: It’s Kind of a Funny Story (now a major motion picture), Be More Chill, and Teen Angst? Naaah ... Ned has spoken at over 200 schools, universities, and libraries around the world about writing and mental health. He writes about books in the New York Times Book Review and the L Magazine. His work has been translated into seven languages.

  PANEM ET CIRCENSES

  The Myth of the Real in Reality TV

  CARRIE RYAN

  We’ve tuned in to a lot of reality shows in the last decade or so, from the relatively harmless (Dancing with the Stars, The Amazing Race) to the somewhat more shameful (Temptation Island, Jersey Shore). We’ve watched, rapt, as contestants struggled to succeed and as relationships formed and fell apart. We’ve hung on every success, failure, and humiliation. But all of that is still a far cry from the Hunger Games ... right? Carrie Ryan makes some troubling connections between reality television and the Hunger Games, and highlights just how fine the line between reality and fiction really is.

  In the Hunger Games trilogy, Suzanne Collins takes our obsession with Reality TV and extends it to the most horrifying ends: a society that views kids killing kids as entertainment. It’s easy to find this an uncomfortable premise—to turn our noses up and say that while we may enjoy Survivor or Big Brother every now and again, we’d never let society slip to such levels. However, there’s also a deeper, more difficult message in the Hunger Games series: the extent to which media can be manipulated as a means of controlling the populace and how we as viewers have abdicated any agency in the process.

  This then leads to an even more troubling aspect of the trilogy: our complicity in said message. But for the viewers’ participation, the Hunger Games would not exist in the same way that, but for our tuning in, Reality TV wouldn’t exist. By watching, we increase the ratings, and as our interest wanes the shows must become “more” to recapture our attention—more compelling, more extreme, more dangerous. And the only difference between us and the viewers in the Capitol is that we have agency to turn off the television at any time; we just choose not to. As Suzanne Collins shows us, the obsession with ratings, which is driven by our desire for more and more compelling narratives, can turn ugly when such a lens is applied to news reporting—especially that of war—rather than so-called Reality TV.

  Ratings, Not Reality

  With any television show, what matters are the ratings; getting enough people to tune in to make it economically worthwhile for the sponsors to pay for advertisements, which in turn feeds the ability of the show to keep filming. Reality TV is no exception. After 51.69 million viewers tuned in to watch the finale of the first season of Survivor in August 2000, the television industry realized that Reality TV could bring in ratings and turn a profit for a fraction of the cost of a fully scripted television show filled with professional actors. This started a trend that turned into a landslide, making the first decade of the twenty-first century one dominated by Reality TV. By the 2009–2010 television season, nine of the top twenty shows among young viewers were Reality shows.

  For all its marketing advantages, though, Reality TV has to comply with some of the other basic rules of entertainment: to hold on to these viewers, the producers have to make each season fresh and new. In the absence of a script or predetermined plot, viewers would quickly get bored with simply watching a new group of people (or, in some cases, the same group of people) tossed into the same situation over and over again. Dealing with this problem largely translates into a perpetual upping of the ante, a constant raise of the stakes so viewers won’t get bored.

  Survivor is a key example. In the earlier seasons of the show, contestants brought a selection of clothes to the filming location, and the producers then chose what they could ultimately wear (camera-friendly colors, variety so not everyone wore the same thing, no logos). They were also sometimes allowed to bring a luxury item (such as when Colby brought a large Texas flag that he later used to help build a shelter), and the show provided necessities such as clean water, rice, and tools to build a fire.

  Compare that to later seasons, where contestants were sent into the game wearing the clothes on their backs (whether that was a business suit or a sundress), weren’t allowed any luxury items, had to hunt for their own water, and weren’t provided food or any tools to make fire (though there were opportunities for teams to win these items at challenges—effectively inserting another level of competition for the base level resources that used to be a given). As the show grew and struggled to retain its dominance among the viewership, it became less about watching people live and scheme in a difficult environment and instead became about actual survival—the struggle of finding food, shelter, and water. In essence, the show became more brutal, and the driving force behind it all was the viewers—us.

  The Hunger Games function the same way. Year after year, the Gamemakers struggle to make the Games appear fresh and new, crafting new arenas and devising new, increasingly sadistic challenges. What might one year be dense forests could in another be a vast arctic wasteland or a picturesque landscape filled with carnivorous squirrels or a dam that bursts, drowning half the tributes. The only criterion is that each year’s arena has to outdo the one from the year before.

  Ostensibly these machinations are intended to prove the power of the Capitol; however, a single, simple gladiatorial arena would have been sufficient to accomplish that. But while the Hunger Games are viewed as a punishment to those living in the Districts, in the Capitol they are entertainment and, as with any other reality show, the Capitol is concerned with ratings. Not for dollars, as in our world, but for something far more important: societal domination. The Games are symbolic of the Capitol’s power and dominance: a boring game means the Capitol may appear weak and shy of resources in the eyes of its own citizens, who might then start to reconsider their allegiance to the Capitol they perceive as all-powerful.

  Ultimately, as Plutarch points out in Mockingjay, the Capitol’s main concern with the Hunger Games is providing panem et circenses: bread and circuses to keep the populace
entertained enough that they won’t consider rebellion. To do this, the Capitol continues to up the stakes, game after game. As Katniss realizes when the rules of the game shift again to pit her against Peeta at the end of the first Hunger Games, “They never intended to let us both live. This has all been devised by the Gamemakers to guarantee the most dramatic showdown in history” (The Hunger Games). Put another way: it’s all about the ratings, and exploiting that very drive is what allows Katniss and Peeta to survive.

  As Katniss and the leaders of the rebellion learn, if they want the citizens to revolt, they have to become Gamemakers themselves, appealing to those same sensibilities according to the same terms: presenting a compelling and entertaining narrative, not the truth.

  Narrative, Not Truth

  There’s a famous line from the movie The Usual Suspects, where the narrator, Verbal, says of the enigmatic Keyser Soze, “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” To a certain extent the same quote, slightly modified, works for Reality TV: “the greatest trick Reality TV producers ever pulled was convincing the world what it’s watching is real.” Even the term Reality TV itself is part of the trick: it presumes Reality TV is an accurate representation of reality, when in actuality there is a difference between what is presented in these shows as reality and what most people would consider to be objective truth, which operates on several levels. (In recognition of this, there is a drive among some factions to change this to the somewhat more accurate “unscripted television.”)