This Christmas, Jennifer Lawrence must join the revolution!

By Adrian Barnes

I don't know. I sat down to write a Christmas piece and this came out instead. Well, it's a sort of Christmas story...

The impetus for and title of this article occurred to me about 45 minutes into Catching Fire, the new Hunger Games movie which, I must say, I quite enjoyed. It’s a well-made film and Jennifer Lawrence is a gifted actor: her presence elevates the Hunger Games movies from Twilight-level sexy-teens-in-freaky-circumstances flicks to something perhaps slightly more substantial. That and the fact that these movies purport to talk about something very serious indeed--revolution.

Some background. The Hunger Games trilogy is concerned with a corrupt and decadent state called Panem where a small group of men and women (let’s say about 1% of the population--wink, wink) live in disgusting luxury--vomitoriums and all--while everyone else lives nasty, brutish, and short lives, existing solely to serve the elite’s need for raw materials and manufacturing. Lawrence’s character, Katniss Everdeen, lives in one of the 12 slave districts that make up Panem.

To make a long story short, Katniss doesn’t think much of all this and becomes a revolutionary.

The Hunger Games is a dystopian cautionary tale. The decadent rich of Panem are likely intended by the trilogy’s author, Suzanne Collins, to represent the elites of the Western world--the 1% who gobble up far more than their fair share of the collective pie. The rest of us are, presumably, the inhabitants of the slave districts. And so we munch our popcorn, rooting for Katniss and her oppressed brothers and sisters as Lawrence’s character begins to buck the status quo.

The only problem is that this analysis doesn’t make any sense at all.

The bulk (and we are bulky and getting bulkier according to all known measures of obesity, debt, waste, etc) of North Americans don’t live in abject poverty and are not especially oppressed. The truth of our world, and it’s a painful one, is that all but the most poverty-stricken of us (perhaps our poorest 1% or so) live in relative comfort behind the walls of Fortress North America.

The great majority of our poor have the same idiot fashions and dayglo-coloured doggie treats as those devoured by the rulers of Collins’ imaginary world. Our Cheetos and cell phones are provided by the real slave districts in places like China, Africa, and Indonesia. In other words, we are the corrupt elites of Panem. On an income graph that spans the full distance from Calcutta to Hollywood we find ourselves, not at the top, but close enough for any claims of solidarity with a sweatshop worker to be fairly absurd.

We all know this. Jennifer Lawrence may know this more than any of us given how close she is to the source of the wealth that is earned at the cost of so much misery for so many people in so many far-flung countries. So who should we root for when we watch the movie? Katniss? Jennifer? Does it make any sense for a member of the Panem elite to play the role of pretend revolutionary for the appeasement and titillation of her peers--ourselves? Isn’t this corrupting for both Lawrence as actor and us as audience? Is the purpose of a film like this to reassure us that we’re not the bad guys? And isn’t this all sort of...ugly?

Disconnects abound.

As the audience’s on-screen surrogate Lawrence plays one of the oppressed (read, akin to a resident of Calcutta or the slums of Shanghai). And yet, in ‘real’ life she is one of the elite--fabulously rich and famous. And yet she is also one of us. Lawrence comes from an average background and presents herself in interviews as a down-to-earth young woman who is relatively unimpressed by fame. In fact, she is regularly quoted as saying things that lampoon the very notion of her celebrity: “I always feel like an idiot every time I fly first class because I’m a kid. And I just sit there, and everyone’s got their newspapers and they’re on the computer, and I’m like, ‘Can I get a coloring book, please? Can I get some crayons?’”

Of course, such statements serve to support Lawrence’s popularity by downplaying the distance between her and her fan base, thereby making her more ‘relatable’. It’s the old American ‘aw shucks’ shuck and jive.

And yet, that doesn’t mean Lawrence is necessarily a phony--she may in fact be a decent young woman who’s doing the best she can in the absurd position in which she finds herself. In fact, I imagine that the energy and intensity Lawrence brings to her roles must come from a genuine source, especially given that she, famously, has no training as an actor.

Recently she said this in an interview: ''My personal life is now ruined. I've had to create a new one and get used to this new life. It's hard and it takes time, but I'm sure I will get it. I'm just mourning my old life...A part of me can't get used to it and it makes me sad.''

One wonders what it is she feels the need to ‘get used to’ and why.

All of this puts Lawrence and ourselves--as both fellow members of the World Elite and her audience--in a Twister-like series of awkward positions. How do we fit into the paradigm outlined in Catching Fire? How do we make sense of the film in its proper context and in the context of our own lives?

These aren’t difficult questions to answer, but the answers themselves are almost impossible to digest (which makes the local cinemaplex a sort of metaphorical vomitorium, now that I think about it).

Early on in Catching Fire, Katniss is forced to tour the slave districts, pantomiming love and complacency (“Can I get some crayons?”) for the cameras even as jackbooted thugs menace her people. This is not unlike Lawrence’s role in real life as she’s paraded around at Oscar ceremonies and film premieres in designer dresses. What, I wonder, would a young woman employed in Calcuttan sweatshop feel while watching those scenes? Would she feel that Lawrence was on her side? Or would she feel the whole thing was a sick and twisted joke at her expense and that we were all--actors and audience alike--just laughing at her expense?

And so here’s the paradox we all need to resolve: in watching The Hunger Games we, as audience, experience feelings of solidarity with the very people we oppress and murder in real life.

It’s an unsupportable situation, a mind fuck of the highest order. The movie’s premise is a sound one but the way it plays out is distorted and corrupt--resistance to very real oppression neutered and expressed as ‘harmless’ entertainment. But no entertainment is harmless. Neil Postman famously defined 'entertainment' as information denuded of context. And information without context is an exposed powerline flopping around on the ground.

To cheer revolution on film while oppressing people in real life is beyond wrong. It's beyond horrible as Syrian children freeze to death this Christmas.

The final shot of the movie is a brave and powerful one as Katniss/Lawrence’s face shifts from grief to fury. There is hope in that anger. There is truth in that face, truth behind the lies. There is truth as well as lies when we cheer Katniss' revolution from our seats. We all have hearts. We just need to do something with them.

Merry Christmas.

Adrian Barnes is editor of the Rossland Telegraph and president of Lone Sheep Publishing. If this sort of discussion interests you, consider joining Foment West Kootenay on facebook.