'The Hunger Games'

Although my feeling about The Hunger Games was that it was mostly CGI crap, annoyingly obvious spectacle, teensploitation, and not worth watching, I don’t understand how or why it became such a popular thing. Is it a sign of how deeply entrenched so many teens/young adults are in a media-loop closed-circuit, that it can suck them in at any small amount of signifier or prompting from a film as  cheesy and reliant on sleight of hand as The Hunger Games? Or is it that a film like The Hunger Games, however superficially, touches on something on a deeper level for a lot of ‘young adults’? I don't know, but the film often had a feeling of subliminal invitation to consensual emotional delusion; identifying with Katniss is not because Jennifer Lawrence had convincing plastic surgery, or any of the scenes had any feeling of emotional authenticity, but because most of the tropes are familiar rehashings of things that have been seen and have been emotionally effective thousands and thousands of times before. Its terrifying that so many people are so completely bogged down in mediated mind-loops that any of it is taken seriously, or that parents allow their children’s consciousness to be crammed with the affective garbage that the film emanates from the screen. I would say a film like The Hunger Games (existential spiritual hunger, in the case of the audience?) only contributes to the real dystopian problems of the landscape we already occupy; ‘ideological inoculation’ and nothing else.

The Hunger Games depicts a North America after a continent-wide civil war. The dress of the characters in the district from which Katniss came have a Puritan, Protestant, pilgrim-like appearance; in some way an Old America trope, or even banking on a subconscious nostalgia for a more 'pure' America? The camera work is often deliberately shaky and chaotic, and often cross-cutting quickly across the crowd, Katniss, and other scenery. I understand the intention of this was to draw the viewer emotionally head-long into the hectic atmosphere around The Hunger Games, where the ‘tributes’ are like gladiators fighting to the death. Often though it seemed like the tricky, lightning-quick camera work was more trying to gloss over cracks in narrative flow or the production design,  not allowing or wanting the viewer to think or see too much. Too much neat but intentional attempts of connecting the dots for the audience, so as to make them 'like' the movie more; too much drawing-into emotional complicity in cheap (though probably huge budget) spectacle. Hollywood filmmakers don't get paid based on how well a movie prospectively will do, though I'm sure a lot of work went into pushing its success over the top, but on how high a film's budget is. Filmmaking almost seems  like legalized criminal behavior sometimes in its manipulations of entire populations. 

Even though the film was intending to depict the decadence and pomposity of the Capitol, it only seemed like for all the effort it must have taken to do this, that the film itself came across as decadent and pompous: not a critique of wealth and power, but an expository for it. Nothing formed into a coherent or interesting vision. Nothing really is left to chance; the ending is right there from the beginning, just some thrilling visuals, action scenes, and emotional filler have to be plopped around inside the middle. PlaySkool dystopian collusion for already-ADDisordered young adults immersed in an already-dead U.S.A. culture that is as decadent and anti-reality as the moneyed power of The Hunger Games. How many experts were brought in to help the filmmakers achieve their aim of total-impact on the young adult market? The film stinks like a high school popularity contest, but they succeeded in their marketing strategies, sticking in a teenybopper dystopia to help control the fears of an emotionally disturbed young.