Capitalizing on The Capitol?: Hunger Games Hype

Last November, sometime between a ten hour marking session and a term paper, I promised myself I would read The Hunger Games trilogy as a reward for finishing my first semester of graduate school. I had heard some good things about the books in the blogosphere, and who am I to resist an addictive young adult series when I need a break from all that thinking? My boyfriend, the wonderful guy that he is, even had a copy of the first book waiting on the seat of his car when he picked me up from the airport for Christmas break. I subsequently ignored him for the five days it took me to finish off the series (Sorry!). Like others out there, I love that a popular young adult novel features a strong, intelligent female protagonist who does not need romantic love to define her. Yet, what is most interesting about the book is the world in which it is staged; a world of inequality and narcissistic consumerism/voyerism that leads the protagonist, Katniss, to become – whether she wants to be or not – a symbol of resistance.

The way the self-centered, exploitative and superficial ‘Capitol’ is portrayed in the book and disdained by Katniss is a large feature of the book, which is why I am struggling with THIS:

It’s a teaser Tumblr for ‘The Hunger Games’ movie to be released in March. With all of the interesting dynamics of the book, why choose the fashion of The Capitol to whet our whistles? The site has sarcastic undertones, as it is written in the kind of voice that readers of the series would expect in someone from the Capitol, but any satire in the text is completely overshadowed by blatant consumerism and nods to (expensive) real-life design houses like Alexander McQueen. The page even advertises a complementary line of nail polish! The nail tutorial that follows should teach us how to paint I-R-O-N-Y with toothpicks. I suppose this is what can be expected from the Hollywood corporate machine, but I thought/hoped the movie would be more sensitively handled given its overt political themes.

This branding is trivializing the message of the book, if not obscuring it all together. Young women have enough narratives thrown at them, telling them what is most important – appearance, fashion, and spending. The trilogy was a fresh alternative to these narratives, but the movie is being turned into a spectacle itself, stripped of its anti-materialist message, and fed back to young women with nail polish, shoes and fashion. Consequently, we get awareness, but with imagined and passive social resistance, a la ‘Avatar’ (“the world sucks, let’s get a smoothie”). Let’s hope the movie does better.