All
through the month of February, as a lead up to the Academy Awards, I’ve been
giving sermons inspired by notable movies of 2012. Three weeks ago I preached on the
best-picture nominee Life of Pi and
last week I talked about a pair of controversial best-picture nominated films Zero Dark Thirty and Django Unchained. This morning I’m going to conclude this
series by talking about a film that actually wasn’t nominated for any Oscars
but was one of the most commercially successful films of the past year, raking
in more than $400 million at the box office.
I
suppose you could ask me why I’ve chosen to talk about The Hunger Games and not one of the other six best picture
nominees. Why not Lincoln? Why not Beasts of the Southern Wild? Why not preach on Amour, as former UUA President John Buehrens challenged me on
Facebook to do? The answer, to be
perfectly honest, is that with a new baby I don’t exactly have a lot of time to
go to the movies, and I’ve only seen the films that I have through Anne’s
extraordinary grace and generosity. And,
the excuse of saying, “But, Anne, this is a work obligation,” doesn’t exactly
cut it.
Despite
not getting any recognition from the Academy, The Hunger Games movie and the young adult novel it is based on are
still worthy of attention. The Hunger Games is the most popular book
for younger readers since the Harry
Potter series. There was even an
article in the UU World magazine about The
Hunger Games. (Let me dispel any
rumors. Despite the success of the Harry
Potter-based Hogwarts summer religious education program that ran successfully
over at All Souls for a couple years, we have no plans to offer a Hunger
Games-themed summer camp to your children.)
The Hunger Games is set in a
dystopian future in which North America is ruled by a cruel dictator named
President Snow. Under totalitarian rule,
the nation is divided into twelve districts with each district slaving in
poverty to produce goods for the excessive appetites of the Capital, whose
residents exhibit the worst stereotypes of superficial celebrity culture. There had once been a populist uprising
against the Capital, but it was squashed and resulted in the creation of an
annual tradition known as the Hunger Games, designed to punish the districts
and remind them of the price of rebellion.
Each year a lottery is held and one teenage boy and one teenage girl
from each district are selected to participate in the games, a cross between
the obnoxiousness of reality television and the sadism of the Roman
Coliseum. I don’t watch reality TV, but
I imagine The Hunger Games could be described as a combination of Survivor and
Extreme Makeover, only the contestants compete to the death. The winner of the hunger games wins a
lifetime of individual, personal comfort and a year’s worth of
slightly-better-than-starvation rations for his or her district.
At
the beginning of The Hunger Games we
meet Katniss Everdeen, a 15 year-old girl who lives with her mother and younger
sister, Primrose, in District Twelve. District
Twelve’s industry is coal mining; we learn that Katniss’ father was killed in a
mining accident. Early in the movie we
see that Katniss has snuck out of her sooty town in order to hunt and gather
provisions for her malnourished family in a pristine wooded forest. Such trespassing is a crime punishable by
death. One of the earliest images in the
film is of scarcity in the midst of abundance.
The narrative of the film is set into motion when a lottery is held to
select the tributes from each district.
Katniss’ vulnerable young sister is selected and Katniss volunteers to
go in her place. The boy selected from
District Twelve is Peeta Mellark, a doughy boy who is also the son of a baker.
We
find out that Peeta and Katniss have a shared past. A few years earlier Katniss had been
wandering the streets of town at night desperately searching for food for her
famished family. Seeing her, Peeta had
taken pity on her and slipped his classmate an armful of bread from the
bakery. For this act of charity, Peeta
had been reprimanded by his mother.
Times were tough and they had to take care of themselves first, his
mother had reasoned.
The
success of The Hunger Games trilogy
of books as well as the movie is probably due to several factors. The story contains the thrills of
heart-pounding action. Katniss is a
compelling heroine. At a somewhat deeper
level, the story is powerfully resonant with the social pressures and identity
questions of middle school and high school youth. A member of our church’s Worship Team is also
a librarian specializing in young adult literature. She sent me an article about dystopian young
adult novels in which it is argued that The Hunger Games “are a fever-dream
allegory of the adolescent social experience… The rules are arbitrary, unfathomable, and subject to sudden
change. A brutal social hierarchy prevails…
Everyone’s always watching you, scrutinizing your clothes or your
friends and obsessing over whether you’re… getting good enough grades, but no
one cares who you really are or how you really feel about anything.” That The Hunger Games should be so popular
with adult readers may be due to the fact that for much of our adult lives
we’re surrounded by people who act like they’re still in high school. Or it is we ourselves who act like we’re
still in high school.
There is a point that I want to make about The Hunger Games book and film that I think works equally well
regardless of whether we take the story at face value or treat it as an
allegory for young adult experience. I
want to make a point about the worldview of the dystopian future where the
story is set. It is a worldview that
makes possible the very existence of the games.
It is a worldview of scarcity.
One child out of twenty four to enter the arena shall survive. One district out of twelve will receive extra
food rations. Scarcity is the
fundamental element of this worldview. Of
course the people in this dystopian future live under totalitarian rule. Of course none of them chose this life. But it is also true that no one really wins
by playing this game. The game is
rigged. The districts continue to
sacrifice their children. They continue to
barely survive under a brutal regime.
The Hunger Games
movie presents a foreshadowing of the rebellion that takes place later in the trilogy. This uprising is sparked at the precise
moment that Katniss shows compassion and concern for one of her competitors, a
young girl named Rue. Under the logic of
the hunger games, under the logic of scarcity, Rue’s death means that Katniss
is one step closer to winning the prize of being the one who gets to stay
alive. However, Katniss reaches beyond
this scarcity worldview and honors Rue’s human worth and dignity. This act of abundance transcends the
winner-take-all nature of the hunger games and inspires the residents of Rue’s
district to a larger imagination of the possibility of freedom.
This sense of scarcity exists not only between districts, but also
within them. Witness Peeta’s mother
chastising him for sharing bread with Katniss.
The world in which they live is very small indeed. Don’t give away bread to a starving child
because if you do it is coming out of your mouth. It is no surprise that it turns out that Peeta
has the largest heart of any character in the book. This incident of Peeta sharing bread with
Katniss actually reminds me of one of the stories from the Gospels.
All four of the canonical Gospels contain the story of the
multiplication of the fishes and the loaves.
The story goes that Jesus is preaching to a large crowd, a crowd that
may have traveled quite a distance, may have had to wait longer than they had
thought. Anyways, the day wears on and
the crowd begins to grumble that they are hungry. Jesus calls for food to be brought forward
and his disciples bring forth a couple of loafs of bread and a single fish. A miracle happens. Five thousand are fed. There is a liberal religious interpretation
of this miracle. The interpretation goes
that as the day wears on, people begin to worry about whether there will be
enough to eat so they start to conceal whatever food they may have carried along
with them, worried that others will see what they have and ask them to
share. Jesus’ miracle, according to this
interpretation, is getting people to share freely, to partake of the abundance
that exists rather than closing themselves off from one another because of a
sense of scarcity.
We’re told that good dystopian literature exaggerates realities we
see within our own society. So, let’s
take the mythical hunger games and compare it to a contest that is a part of
our culture, the TV show Survivor. Now, I’ve never actually seen an episode of Survivor. But, I gather that it involves a group of
people forced to live somewhere challenging and having to compete to be the
last one on the island, or wherever it is they are, for which they win a
lucrative cash prize. “Outwit, Outplay,
Outlast” is the motto of the TV program, and from what I gather the
competitiveness is fierce and the competitors can be downright mean to each
other. There is deception. There is back-stabbing. Alliances are temporary and
self-serving. The contestants on
Survivor are competing within a scarcity scenario; there can be only one
million dollar winner. (Following the
service, a person in the audience approached me and told me that her good friend
had been a finalist to participate on Survivor and had been flown to Los
Angeles for a final round of interviews to try to make it on the program. Her experience had been one of suspicion. She constantly wondered who might be already
plotting against her and tried to figure out who around her would be a useful
ally.)
I would just point out how different this is from an actual
situation in which a dozen people found themselves having to survive in the
wild. In such a case, I would imagine, their
actual survival would depend on them being able to get along, work together
towards a common cause, share, cooperate, and generally work as a team. The irony here is that the skills and attitudes
that you need to win the reality TV show – selfishness, self-centeredness, and
deception – are the exact opposite of the strengths and attitudes that would
lead a group to survive and thrive in an actual survivor scenario.
There is an abundance approach to life and a scarcity approach to
life. There is also an abundance
approach to faith and a scarcity approach to faith. Scarcity religion tells us that heaven is
only available to those who hold the correct theological beliefs or practice
their faith in the correctly prescribed ways.
There are even some fundamentalist Christians who read an obscure
passage in the Book of Revelation as saying that heaven has a maximum capacity
of one hundred and forty four thousand.
So, heaven’s maximum occupancy is about twice as large as Arrowhead
Stadium. That’s scarcity faith.
A contrasting description of abundance faith is found in Forest
Church’s book, God and Other Famous
Liberals, in which he writes,
“Every word I can conjure for God is a synonym for liberal. God is munificent and openhanded. The creation is exuberant, lavish, even
prodigal. As the ground of our being,
God is ample and plenteous. As healer
and comforter, God is charitable and benevolent. As our redeemer, God is generous and
forgiving. And, as I said, God has a bleeding
heart that simply never stops. Liberal
images such as these spring from every page of creation’s text.”
We’ve traveled far afield of the world of The Hunger Games. However, I would say that one of lessons that we can take away from this film is that a world shaped by an idea of scarcity is dysfunctional. In such a world, people are suspicious of one another, always seeking our own advantage. It is a world where otherness is a threat to our survival. It is a world where many are harmed by the failure to find common cause. It is a world where our humanity is diminished.
Contrast this world with the idea of a world shaped by an idea of
abundance, where the betterment of others results in our own betterment. In this world, our ability to see past our
own smallness and find common cause with others is what saves us. This abundance is what sustains our humanity.
Liberal religion – whether it proclaims the idea of a heaven
without a maximum capacity, or a God whose nature is munificent and lavish, or
a sense of expansive sisterhood and brotherhood here on earth – always sides
with the side of abundance. We need to
do this if we are to survive.
