Hollywood has a problem with sex and killing. In our filmic world (at least the one designed and marketed for true mass consumption), there is little of the former and much of the latter. This is puzzling, given that sex is a frequent occurence among many productive and worthy members of society; Murder, not so much. The why of it is difficult to parse. I think a large part of the situation is precisely because sex falls in the range of what we consider normal behaviour, with the caveat that it is perhaps the most profoundly private of the activities to be found on that hypothetical list. We are bombarded, daily and indeed constantly, with reminders of sex, and yet we rarely discuss it in public. Hollywood is nothing if not a reflection of societal currents (market research teams are really, really good), and so the movies shy away from sex mostly because we do. John McClane jumping down a 10 story elevator shaft and spraying a bunch of faceless Russian goons with a machine gun is clearly recognizable as fantasy, so we allow it in our blockbusters, secure in the knowledge that this could never happen in real life, so it doesn't much matter anyways…… Except that yes, it does matter. It matters a great deal. And, fortunately, one woman is taking great care to point out exactly how much it matters, and how dumb our current system truly is. Who? Glad you asked.
Before we get started in earnest, I need to say that this piece is not about how violence in movies and video games is corrupting our youth, destroying all sense of morality, creating gun violence, blah f-ing blah. That is a silly and reductive argument that masks the true root of these issues. Lunatics are lunatics, regardless of how many times Taxi Driver plays on late-night cable. Nor am I here to preach about the (absurdly pathetic) state of sex-education in our country. While it's an enormous problem worthy of great attention, this isn't the time or the place. What I really want to do is talk about movies and books. So….
In Mockingjay, culminating book of The Hunger Games trilogy, a popular and prominent character is torn to pieces by a pack of ravenous lizard mutations. The scene, if it can be called that, is handled in approximately three lines on the page. Later in the same book, a teenaged girl is killed, onscreen, when bombs are parachuted onto a group of innocent non-combatants who happen to have gotten stuck in the middle of a warzone. At the very end of the book, the protagonist Katniss reveals that she has had children with one of her suitors. It is phrased thusly. "He was there to comfort me in the night. With his words and, eventually, his lips."
His lips. So, basically, there was some PG kissing (which is the extent of the sex in those books), and then some kids popped out. This, from an author who is second only to George RR Martin in the graphic ingenuity of her death scenes. Now, I'm not expecting Collins to write "He comforted me in the night, then we had intercourse and I became pregnant." I'm certainly not expecting a blow-by-blow, pornographically precise detailing of said interourse. But still, doesn't it seem a little too…. tame? We've followed Katniss through true horror, watched her kill and scream and sob, seen her firends die horribly. And…. His lips?
I'm not in Suzanne Collins' head, but I have to think this is intentional. Her series is a vicious condemnation of, among many other things, the exploitative nature of American media culture. Violence, in her books and the later adaptations, plays very rough. Yes, the movies are constructed quite carefully to meet the restrictions of the much more profitable PG13 rating. That is well and good, and an economic necessity for big-budget films with a youthful fanbase. Even so, the films are remarkably blunt about the fact of violence, often between children and teens. Gary Ross, the first director, hid the worst acts in clouds of shaky-cam. Francis Lawrence, the second and final director of the quadrology, is a classical stylist and examines these moments with a cool, removed intellectualism. In so doing, he creates in the audience a rage that is much more true to his source-material.
Film, as I've said before and will again, is a more visceral medium than literature. This is largely because the sensory onslaught of image and sound creates an effect close to that of genuine experience, or perhaps memory. Literature requires an imaginative leap on the part of the reader, and so carries somewhat less of an immediate impact. That said…. Books take the reader inside the head of the characters. We feel Katniss' pain, know her fury, feel every stab and scream with her as friends die. Books can make it hurt. And Collins is very much out to hurt us. With the movie, the effect is simpler, achieved by the nature of the experience itself. We are voyeurs. We are the Capitol, watching Katniss suffer for our own entertainment.
And that, I think, is the root of why there is no sex in the books or the movies. The audience doesn't want it. The Capitol isn't interested in joy among their tributes, just as the real media doesn't want happy endings and easy answers and life among the white-picket fences. We want the finality of blood on the grass. Collins gives it to us, exaggerated just enough for us to recognize the black absurdity of our own enjoyment.
I've read these books three times, and seen both movies twice. At the end, when it's over and the lights come up, the image in my head isn't from that world at all. It's from Gladiator, General Maximus in the arena, blood on the sand and blood on the sword and snarling "Are you not entertained?"
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