The Hunger Games on the Big Screen

I’ve been anticipating The Hunger Games for quite awhile and while I hoped it was going to be good (trying expecting too much), the film totally exceeded my expectations in terms of the translation of the ‘soul’ of the novel into its big screen format. One of the elements I was looking forward to most is how they presented the public screening of the games in District 12 since the urban screen is becoming a common feature of the town square or gathering place. The film presented an urban screen that, like the Capitol, loomed over the citizens watching their children die on television.

Here is a screenshot I found online of people watching Katniss onscreen. A mix between a sporting event and reality television show, these scenes from the Hunger Games make me recall fans gathering around screens during the most recent World Cup to watch their favorite teams, together, cheering with each other after every goal. The large screens, somehow, brought people together in an immediate and affective way – it created an audience albeit an audience much different from the atomized mass of the cinema. The same can be said for the urban screen mounted in the square, although rather than viewing the collective experience as something joyous, the film (and novel) symbolize the site of a collective punishment that transforms into a space of mourning. The screen functions as a public monument that conveys the memory of a failed revolution every year during the airing of the Hunger Games.

What’s fantastic about the film, however, is that the urban screen is only one of three different screen sites. The second site is the triptych of screens located within the arena that represent the camera’s looming vision that Katniss sees throughout the competition.

The scene represented by this image occurs after Katniss buries Rue. After her rebellious salute, the film cuts to a fight beginning in Rue’s district. The three screens heightens Katniss’ power as a symbol of that revolution, a theme that carries through in the second and third books. Throughout the games, however, the control room offers a very different vision of screened space. Below is a really fun GIF I found online of this particular space.

The control room includes these transparent, malleable, holographic interfaces in sterile blue. What happens in the arena plays out in the really cool 3D map in the middle that resembles something out of a futuristic video game like Mass Effect. This command center represents the complete control the Capitol has with what goes on in the arena, a perfect metaphor for these people’s daily lives. Ironically, however, the game depends on the action of its characters. It’s that even small amount of agency that Katniss and Peeta learn to exploit. It’s what drives them to threaten a double suicide, to stay true to themselves rather than submit to the complete will of the Capitol. Although a controlled and contained environment, the game isn’t determined. This is the power of gameplay, the power of the screen as a public monument of mourning. A representation of change.

A Play of Magical Surfaces

Although horrid reviews kept me from watching The Lovely Bones while in its theatrical release, my curiosity about Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Alice Sebold’s novel finally won out and I recently rented it on DVD. Yes, the film had major issues relating to the lack of character development and its narrative fell apart about midway through the movie and could never be repaired. Its visual spectacle, however, left me wishing I saw the film on a big screen. Why? Because The Lovely Bones, looking past its laboring plot, offers a cinematic study of the interface.

In the “space between” earth and heaven, the small moments that make up Susie Salmon’s short life transform into major events. A gazebo, the corn field where she was murdered, a snow globe from her childhood, her charm bracelet, and ships in bottles transform into a magical shelter in the middle of decaying earth, a sea of ice with charm-shaped glaciers and giant ships (still in bottles) cracking against a rocky shore, or a picturesque tree a la Six Feet Under with leaves of birds that fly away in a golden sky. The beauty of these objects, however, come from their ability to connect Susie’s afterlife with the present tense of her family struggling to live after the death of a daughter, granddaughter, sister, and friend. For instance, a moving image of a red rose blooming permeates the ice as the camera glides across the frozen seascape. The rose is paramount in Susie’s life and death since she has taken a photograph of her future assailant cutting his blooming roses. The ice-as-screen becomes a site of connection between the Susie’s past and her present as a rape and murder victim.

The presence of the rose on the ice, both symbol and reflection of the living in Susie’s afterlife, serves as a visual transition between the two parallel “spaces” that comprise the film’s narrative. Another illustration of a type of interface is the ship in a bottle. A hobby that Susie and her father, Jack, share together while she is alive returns as a dramatic symbol of a pain that continues to connect them after her death. During one of those few compelling scenes in the film, life-sized ships still contained in a bottle sail along a balmy, cliff-lined sea. Susie sees Jack’s face reflected onto the giant bottles; through this screen she sees him mourn and struggle to try and come to term with his daughter’s absence. When Jack destroys his collection he and his daughter built, the life-sized versions in Susie’s world break against the cliffs in a moment of narrative continuity.

The use of the ice and bottle as a kind of metaphorical screen occur in the afterlife, enabling Susie to connect with the world she is no longer a part of. A third example in The Lovely Bones of an interface does the opposite, connecting the world to Susie. Jack sets up a candle in a window on top of an empty bottle in order to help his daughter find her way back home, a common gesture (without the bottle, of course) for the loved ones of missing children. In one of the more eerie sequences (though not as effective as it could have been because it was featured in the preview) of the film, the flicker of the candlelight as Jack stares at it does not match its reflection. He stares through at the light and then glimpses something through the window, but his daughter is contained in the pane of glass – the materiality of the screen – rather than behind it.

Each of these objects turned screens – the ice, bottle, and window – offer a means through which a connection can be established between Susie and her prior existence. However, the image of the rose, face, and candlelight are neither reflections of the living world nor of the dead. Their importance lies not exclusively on the quality of the content, but in how they seamlessly connect people, spaces, times, and realities. The interface in The Lovely Bones establishes a sense of continuity between these elements, gathering them up in a single constitution powerful enough to affectively connect a father to his dead daughter.