The Hunger Games and the Allure of Dystopia
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Big Brother and the Memory Hole. Guy Montag and his fire hose. Ranks of Gamma and Delta children conditioned in their sleep. From 1984 to Fahrenheit 451 to Brave New World, dystopian novels have become cultural touchstones. Who doesn’t get a delicious, horrified shiver at the thought of involuntary behavior modification via drug injection, Ã la Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, or being forced to bear children at the order of a repressive patriarchal government, Ã la Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale? Our eerie fascination with the grotesquely possible is nothing new. Yet the popularity of dystopian literature has exploded over the last five years, and nowhere more so than in the young adult genre.
So the question is – in brief – what gives? Why have these novels begun popping up like Whack-A-Moles? It’s not as though their authors have built identical worlds. Open one book and you find yourself stuck in an ever-changing stone maze filled with hideous monsters; open another and you’ve been sent to a shadowy fort miles from anywhere to undergo psychological treatment for your fears. Or – to take one of the most prominent and popular of the New Dystopias – open Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy, and suddenly you’re in a post-apocalyptic America where, as ongoing punishment for a long-ago rebellion, conquered districts are forced, every year, to send 24 children to battle to the death on reality television. Whatever nerve these books are hitting, it’s a general and deeply enough rooted one to transcend the particulars of setting.
If we’re to believe the critics who like to pontificate on such matters, there are two possible explanations for the insane popularity of these books. (I do mean “insane popularity”: Though its original print run was just 50,000 copies, there are now more than 7.2 million copies of The Hunger Games in circulation in the United States alone, and the movie version has made almost $700 million worldwide since its release.) To wit:
1. Dystopias appeal because they are morally simpler than the real world, and therefore we wish we could escape to them.
2. Dystopias appeal because they are absolutely terrible compared to the real world, and therefore we are super pumped that we never, ever have to go there.
Alas, like Mama and Papa Bear’s respective too-hot and too-cold porridges, these explanations constitute a false dichotomy worthy of storybook history. In other words, they’re both wrong.
Arguing for Team Moral Simplicity, Maggie Stiefvater, bestselling author of The Scorpio Races, thinks that kids relish the lack of ethical ambiguity presented in dystopian novels. It’s pure escapism: The clean, obvious divide between Good and Evil in these worlds offers relief from the murkier realities of our own.
Stiefvater’s point isn’t totally empty, but neither is her explanation comprehensive. Take, again, The Hunger Games and its later installments: Sure, the books have certain unambiguously evil elements – most obviously, the repressive and authoritarian government of Panem, headed by the sadistic, poison-drinking President Snow. But the trilogy’s driving concern is how to determine the best and most righteous response to evil – and this question, it rapidly becomes clear, is anything but straightforward. How much death and destruction does it take for a revolution to become worse than the society is meant to replace? What’s moral and what’s practical don’t always dovetail, and throughout the series, Collins’ characters wrestle with anguished, unflinching questions about when, whether, and to what extent ends justify means.
Meanwhile, over in Team Schadenfreude’s corner, Karen Springen, a journalist at Publisher’s Weekly, proposes that dystopias appeal precisely because they’re worse than reality. Kids love “what-ifs,” she argues, and the dismal conditions of dystopian societies remind readers to appreciate how lucky they are.
But this theory, too, for whatever germ of truth it contains, is overly simplistic. We’re always sensitive to, and on guard against, some impending doom. A generation ago, it was the threat of nuclear war. Today it’s – among other things – the threat of terrorism, the specter of climate change, and the reality of global economic instability. However lucky we may know ourselves to be, most of us aren’t complacent about it.
No, dystopias aren’t appealing because they offer a shining example of moral clarity, nor because their horrors are utterly, fascinatingly alien to us. They’re appealing because they offer a dark mirror of our own present reality. The images may be distorted, but they’re recognizable, and in being recognizable, they are validating. As Ursula LeGuin said, famously: Science fiction doesn’t describe the future; it describes the present.
As for the fact that it’s YA dystopias in particular that have exploded in popularity of late, rather than all dystopias in general? Adolescents are inherently more likely than readers of any other age to find such stories resonant. When else but adolescence do we become newly, brutally aware of all that is already broken in the world around us – the way the stories on which we have grown up are broken? When else do we chafe so strongly against powerlessness, and vow so strongly to right the wrongs inflicted upon us by the generations that have come before us? What The Hunger Games and its ilk lose in pure escapism, they gain in honesty.
The final, key piece of the puzzle is that if adolescence is ripe for outrage, it is also ripe for hope, and YA dystopias first tell the truth about what merits outrage, and then insist on the possibility of change. The protagonists of these books share a fierce determination to uncover hidden truths. To read about them is to watch them, against all odds, succeed. Following Katniss Everdeen through The Hunger Games as she fights to save first her skin and then her society gives readers hope, and it’s a hope that’s curative.
It happens, also, to be a hope that’s well-written. Collins’ prose is skilled, and her exaggeration of present social ills is both gripping and credible. And so it’s a contagious hope, too, appealing ultimately to adult readers as well as YA audiences. Which is all to the good. We can, all of us, use a little courage. We can, all of us, use a little cure.
