Forgettable

I went to see the hunger games film tonight. I've had some issues about the adaptation, because I always have issues about adaptations of books I enjoy.  I am not an obsessive, rabid Hunger Games fan; I quite like the books, I find them fantastically useful for generating class discussion on all kinds of topics, I love the way Suzanne Collins ultimately depicts the costs and consequences of war.  But the series isn't dear to my heart in any particular fashion, so my level of investment is moderate - frankly, I'm more concerned with the effectiveness of the film in conveying the messages about power, violence, war, and spectacle.

The movie was, for me, strangely forgettable. I've been home from the theatre for about two hours, and already it's fading. Admittedly, I have a terrible memory for movies; unless I've seen it multiple times, or it really hits hard, I just do not retain films.

Some notes:
Though I still wish they'd cast a less-fair actor to play Katniss, I was satisfied with Jennifer Lawrence in the role. She's a very beautiful girl in an interesting way, and she's a good actor.  Oddly - and this didn't occur to me until just now - the amount of interacting she does is semi-limited; once in the arena, there's not a lot of dialogue for Katniss. It's all action shot after action shot, much grimacing and crying and moments of pensiveness. But when called upon, Lawrence pulls it out; good enough.

I didn't like the way they open the film; I think it should start with Katniss, and it should start in the woods. In my mind's eye, I think the way I'd have done it would be to open with a shot of Katniss hunting - bow drawn, possibly even aimed out at the audience - then the successful takedown of some animal. Alas, no one consulted me before they wrote the script.

District 12 looks just about right, though I realized that I've always imagined the Distric 12 scenes in my mind as if they were in black&white film - lots and lots of greys. The District scenes were filmed in an abandoned mill town in North Carolina, which strangely enough is up for sale; you can look at images of the "set" here.

Peeta. Oh dear me. When we first see Peeta on the screen, there was a wave of laughter through the theater, which was reasonably full (though small). It should be noted that we first see Peeta moments after Katniss and Prim have had an emotional, shrieking struggle with the Stormtroopers Peacekeepers, and seconds after Peeta's name has been drawn as tribute. It is not a lighthearted moment.
The audience laughed at Peeta a few more times; I laughed at him even more. I don't think Josh Hutcherson is a particularly good actor, and he simply looked odd - strange, gape-mouthed facial expressions. He just seemed goopy and uninteresting to me, and at times laughably so.  Liam Hemsworth as Gale is startlingly attractive (sort of like a very blue-eyed Darren Criss), and it's exceedingly hard to see him and wonder why anyone would be interested in a drip like Peeta.

One thing that I found unsettling is that the film falls back on a very Nazi Germany/concentration camp aesthetic. The drab shabby clothing of District 12, with all the kids and townfolk lined up in a yard, instantly recalled similar images from, say, schindler's list, of Jewish people being rounded up and sent off to camps. When the train arrives to take Katniss and Peeta to the Capitol, there's a very brief moment where it seems that Katniss is looking into a shadowy silver boxcar. I may have mis-seen - it's very brief - but whatever I did see registered in my mind as boxcar.
Once we get to the Digitally Animated Capitol, the architecture is all Albert Speer triumphalism: enormous, blocky white buildings with the VERY Nazi-esque seal of the Capitol.
[I think there were one or two more instances of this Nazi/holocaust kind of imagery, but as I said: I'm already forgetting the specifics of the film].
Collins has said, and it's pretty obvious in the books, that the Capitol is inspired by the Roman Empire. I would have much preferred an aesthetic for the Capitol that either harkened back to the Roman aesthetic, OR one that was sleekly futuristic - which is how I always pictured it myself.
The unease I feel about the Nazi aesthetic is that it's a very cheap way to point out that the Capitol Is Bad! It's become way too easy to use the Holocaust as shorthand for evil, terrible things - because it's become a shorthand, we don't think about what it means so much. I also object because the comparison is wrong; Nazi germany was terrible, and Panem is terrible, but not in identical ways. Panem doesn't do genocide (well, not anymore, not since they put down District 13); the power structure is difference, the coercive force is different, it's all different.

Which leads me to politics: the movie strips a lot of the political significance from the story. Gale, at the beginning, talks briefly about how everyone should stop watching the Games; Peeta has his spiel about not wanting to be changed by the Games. We see the machinations behind the scenes of the Games - Seneca Crane and the control room (a very freakish set that's a cross between Star Trek and a dentist's office), and President Snow, get a reasonable amount of air time. But the consequences of those machinations aren't made clear. Katniss looks far too healthy and clean, despite the drabness of District 12. The hunger she and her family experience isn't made enough of an issue. The scene when Peeta gives Katniss the bread outside the bakery is revealed in silent flashbacks; unless you know, you don't know that Katniss is starving and at the end of her tether.  For me, the consequences of the Capitol's policies are a hugely central part of the trilogy, but the movie elects instead to focus on the Games; it actually operates rather like an underdog sports movie.

Woody Harrelson as Haymitch was fine, though I have always imagined Haymitch as older. I did like the few brief moments during the Games when we see Haymitch watching, or working the crowds for sponsors. It's a very nice opportunity for us to see what Haymitch is giving for his tribute-mentees; we already know he's a cross, drunken bastard, so to see him laughing, schmoozing, turning on the charm demonstrates, to me anyway, that he's really putting himself wholeheartedly into supporting his tributes.

Lenny Kravitz as Cinna. NO. NO. NO.  I've mentioned before that I have found the perfect Cinna to match my mental image, and it's Raja from RuPaul's Drag Race Season 3. Old Lenny is too...tough, somehow, for Cinna. We never get to see the truly kind relationship that develops between Katniss and Cinna; all we get is Lenny Kravitz offering encouraging words in a rather rumbly, grimly serious, tone, and then a scene that read as creepy, when Lenny leans back, arm slung across the red plush settee he's on, watching Katniss right before she appears onstage in her girl on fire dress. Lenny tells her she looks gorgeous, and there's an uncomfortably long moment of tension that feels way too sexual. He looks like a hetero man sitting back and appraising/appreciating a high-class hooker he's paid for.

Amandla Stenberg as Rue is perfect. She looks just right for the part - small, cute without being cutesy, she just looks like a little girl. Which is precisely what she is, and is precisely why she's important in both book and movie. The friend I went to the theater with leaned over and said: "She looks like Prim!" and it's true: we can see why Katniss is drawn to this little-sister substitute.  Her death, and Katniss's grief and anger afterward, are one of the most affecting moments in the film (though frankly, I found very few truly affecting moments; one of the other major ones is when Katniss volunteers. Prim and Katniss both have just the right note of panic, hysteria, anxiety, fear in their voices).

There's not as much grittiness to the movie - obviously, in the book, we have to "hear" Katniss narrate every detail, which I think makes for a more intense experience. Onscreen, we can just see that she's been wounded, or stung by a trackerjacker; she grimaces in pain, and that's it. A lot of the violence happens offscreen - there are quick cuts away from the worst of anything that happens. The book doesn't linger over the violence, but it does make it present in a different way. And because Katniss is relentless in her hatred of the Capitol, her sense of the anxieties and fears of the people in her District, and so on, we're given a context for the violence that's very different than the film.

And that, maybe, is the thing that most felt lacking and made the movie forgettable: there was no context to give any of the actions of any of the characters real meaning. In the way that one gets involved in cheering for a sports team during a match, we're pulling for Katniss and Peeta; because we want them to win, not because there's any larger issue at stake. The Hunger Games happen almost in a vacuum - we see some of the grotesquerie surrounding the games, but not a lot of the real oppression and misery of the District people. That's what is conveyed so well through Katniss as first-person narrator; there's never a moment when she or we can step outside of a life of grinding poverty, fear, work, and hunger. But that life is all but invisible in the film.

The lack of emotional context also feels absent in most of the relationships in the film. We get so little of Gale, and none of Katniss's reflecting on him in the arena. We get even less of her mother's breakdown after her father's death, and Katniss's need to become the family's breadwinner. Peeta is so awkwardly acted that every scene with Katniss where he speaks is either a cliche or simply emotionally void. We get none of Haymitch's story, and not enough of his sullen, bitter, sorrowful attitude. Cinna and Katniss's interactions are stripped of all meaning and weight as well. The most successful interactions are Katniss and Rue, and Seneca Crane and President Snow. We see people in those characters and interactions, people with complexity and emotion and interest and motivation beyond an extremely basic drive for survival. The movie is one long example of telling, not showing (weirdly enough) and so we have, as an audience, very little skin in the game, so to speak.

I realized, as I watched the movie and afterward, that most of my emotional reactions were anticipatory: I knew the scene when Rue dies was coming up, and I started feeling teary. I knew Katniss was about to make the love & farewell gesture, and got choked up. I knew Katniss and Peeta would stand there staring at each other by the lake, and I leaned forward tensely. I think, as I watched the entire movie, I was more engaged with the book than with what I was seeing on the screen. I don't mean in a critical sense, either; I wasn't checking for flaws and failures (though I definitely noticed them), I was somehow trying to merge book and film in my mind. And I was reacting to the book, not the movie; when the film broke with my sense of the novel, it became flat and - at worst - laughable to me. When it meshed reasonably well, it was just a confirmation of the images I already had in my mind. I've never had quite that experience in watching an adaptation, and it's rather odd.

Ultimately, the movie doesn't do some of the things I was afraid it would do (namely, turn us into eager spectators), but then it doesn't really do much at all, other than tearjerk during Rue's death. What I was most anxious about in the adaptation was losing, or watering down, the politics at work in the text, and that's precisely what happened - but it also watered down everything else.
No doubt I'll go to see the sequels, once they're filmed, but I'll go with low expectations, and hope to be at least a little bit pleasantly surprised with what I get.

In the meantime, we can all contemplate purchasing the town where District 12 is set, or we can watch this absolutely delightful and funny video of the Hunger Games as performed by Beanie Babies (it really is entertaining. I especially like the way they represent Peeta disguising himself in the creekbed, a moment which, in the film, again provoked laughter from our audience).

A Question of Perspective

For once I was somewhat ahead of the craze over The Hunger Games; I got hooked when Catching Fire was still just an ARC. This means I've had several chances to teach The Hunger Games, and each time has been - as teaching any book often is - revelatory.

Now, just a few weeks away from the opening of the movie - which I will go see, though I am nervous - I'm thinking again of some of the adaptational issues that worry me.

There's the obvious critique of reality television, of course, embedded throughout the series, but especially prominent in the first book. The betting, the voyeurism, the enforced spectatorship in the Districts, the pre-Games television circuit, the Gamemakers' work to create the most riveting Games - for the audience - all of that is, I think, important to the politics of the series, though not necessarily to the plot. But what happens when the critiques of that culture of spectacle has been transmediated by nearly an identical culture of spectacle?

The homepage for the film announces that the 74th Hunger Games are about to start. But they aren't; we're about to watch a film adaptation of a book published four or five years ago. Everyone knows that, of course, and it's almost painfully literal - after all, isn't it more compelling for the viewer to be drawn into the Secondary World of the books?

Actually, NO.

It shouldn't be.
Panem is an appalling place, filled with appalling people - either appallingly oppressed or appallingly oppressive and oblivious. We don't - we shouldn't - want to align ourselves with the people of that world at all.

And here's the thing that teaching the book made crystal-clear to me: it is ESSENTIAL that Katniss narrates. It may even be essential that she narrates in the present tense. The only way we as readers can avoid complicity in the horrific spectacle of the Hunger Games is to be inside that Arena, to be looking at everything through Katniss's eyes. Otherwise, we are voyeurs - maybe reluctant, unwilling ones, but we are watching the spectacle, we are guided by the media's editing, we are caught up in the excitement and the dazzle and the suspense. If we're out in the Capitol, or even the Districts, we are not innocent bystanders. If we're in the Arena, locked inside the head of a tribute, then we are not reveling in the spectacle of the Games; we're aware of, alive with, the fear and horror and difficulties and pain of the Games. And that's the part that's important.

And how do you translate, transmediate, re-present, first-person, present-tense narration in a film?
Since you can't replicate it exactly, how do you counter the effects of losing that perspective, the perspective that guides your affective response to everything that happens in the story?

This is what has been worrying me since before I knew there'd be a movie. In class, we talked about the narrative perspective, and how important it is that we see things from Katniss's perspective. A few people thought it would have been cool for Collins to split up the narrative amongst a few of the tributes - Peeta, maybe, Rue, perhaps?  It may have been a student - I honestly don't remember - or it could have been me who brought up the problem of being a spectator versus participant in the Games. And they agreed; virtually everyone agreed that locating the narrative perspective outside of the Arena would NOT be good.

So when I came across this tonight, I was horrified. Capitol Couture. "Whether you're a Capitol fashionista seeking inspiration for your latest look or a District citizen tracking rumors about the Tributes and other celebs, Capitol Couture is the only place to turn for pictures and news reports on the fashion, trends and lifestyle that make Capitol living so grand."

No. No. No NO NO NO NO.

We aren't meant to be Capitol fashionistas. We aren't supposed to want to know the rumors or the trends. To use an unfair analogy, this is like setting up a page about the latest trends and rumors in the Nazi capital Berlin. We aren't supposed to sympathize with the oppressive, privileged class. They're shallow, oblivious, voyeuristic people who excitedly watch children kill each other on television, cheering and betting and getting emotionally involved in the forced plotlines.

We don't want to live in the world Collins has created. It's a miserable place full of want and hunger and sadness and instability and violence. It's a place where children are selected at random to fight each other to the death on live, national television. Where these Games are celebrated, memorialized, commemorated; there is Games-tourism to past Arenas, there are products and styles and trends, there's a huge economy around the Games, entirely aside from the enormous political and social power of it. You don't even need to read Foucault's Discipline and Punish to see the way power and discipline are being enacted here.

This isn't Harry Potter, or Middle Earth, or Narnia; this is a broken, post-apocalyptic world. There is no subject position in that world that we can successfully inhabit; at best, we can want to see things through the filter of Katniss's selfish, stubborn mind. We don't want to be her. We don't want to hold a 12-year-old in our arms while that child dies. We don't want to kill anyone. We don't want to have to care for Peeta, always worrying that he'll die, that we'll die, that the final moment of crisis has arrived. We don't want to have to hunt to scrape together food for our families, hunt and sell the meat and still be hungry at night. We don't want to be pawns in anyone's Games.

But the studio (Lionsgate) evidently wants just that. They want us in the audience of the Games, laughing and gasping and gripping the arms of our chairs and betting and reminiscing.
They want us to be complicit.

And by doing this, by creating a spectacle that draws us in irresistably, they become, like the Capitol, wielders of power. And we become the Capitol people, we become the District people.

They give us bread and circus, and we buy advance tickets for the midnight opening.

I'm worried about this movie.

breaking newsflash that will shock you shockingly

The New York Times has this incredible newsflash: many adults are buying The Hunger Games books - for themselves to read!!!!!!!

I know. Give yourself a moment. Maybe a sip of brandy, or cold water to revive your shocked senses. It IS kind of hard to believe, isn't it, that adults might buy books for young adults or children, for their own reading pleasure? Who would think that adults - and we all know how sophisticated American adults are, with their fondness for football and FoxNews and "Real Housewives" programs - would lower themselves to voluntarily read a trilogy of very smart, well-written books about politics and war and morality?
Actually, maybe it IS surprising that adults are reading these books, since most of America seems unable to confront these issues in real life.
But a good book is a good book is a good book, and after all, we routinely make young adults read "grown-up" books (please see any high school reading list) - why not flip it around? I do wish that media would stop behaving as if it's noteworthy that adults are reading books for younger readers, or at least stop presenting this as if it's something shocking! and surprising! and wow!  Because it's not. It really, really isn't. And - since the article invokes them, I might as well do it too - I think Harry Potter and those heinous Twilight "books" have proven, in eleven different books, eleven different releases, that adults read YA books.

Have you recovered yet?

The article accompanying this bombshell brings us tired tropes and the inevitable Harry Potter comparisons (the inevitability of these comparisons is really getting me down; I loved the HP books, but I am feeling sick to the teeth with them). Intrepid and evidently ill-read NYTimes writer Susan Dominus refers to Katniss as having angst like an S.E. Hinton character, which is a travesty in itself; Katniss's "angst" revolves primarily around providing food and money for her mother and younger sister; then, later, about keeping herself and/or Peeta alive. Worry about the availability of the necessities of life does not qualify, in my book, as angst. Further, Hinton's characters are all - well - dreamy caricatures, the kind of sensitive yet tough, emotional yet rough boys who populate hetero girls' daydreams and don't exist in too very many other places in reality.

We also get a description of Collins (her fine features and long, flowing hair), along with this chestnut: "Her life story may be less dramatic than the rags-to-riches tales of Rowling and Meyer — neither had published anything before their best-selling successes..."

Sigh. Neither Rowling nor Meyer (as in Stephenie, as in perpetrator of Twilight) were at anything like "rags" before their riches came along. Meyer seems to have grown up fairly middle-class; she attended Brigham Young University, got her BA, and married her husband. She was a full-time mom when she wrote Twilight. Rowling, of course, worked at a variety of jobs, including teaching in Portugal, before returning to Edinburgh to write her first manuscript and work towards a teaching certificate. The "rags" in Rowling's story comes, I suppose, from the fact that in the year she was writing and taking courses toward the teaching certificate, she was on the dole. I view this as being not terribly different than my own situation: working toward my degree, taking out student loans to pay for housing, etc. The difference is that Scotland, like most of the Western world, has a reasonable attitude toward public assistance. You don't have to be eating trash from a gutter to receive it, and you don't have to slink around in shame if you accept it.
Either way, neither Meyer nor Rowling was ever in rags, and neither was Collins (who, among other things, received an MFA in writing and worked as a writer on several children's television programs).

I hate the rags-to-riches myth, for a number of reasons. First, it's not true. None of these women were lounging in the diamond-encrusted lap of luxury, but none of them were living on the street or in true distress over where their next meal would come from. Second, I think it somehow obscures and glamorizes the work and craft of writing (okay, except where Meyer is concerned; you cannot convince me there's any real craft going on in Twilight, no artistry - and I have read the novel twice).
And finally, I simply oppose the rags-to-riches myth on general principles. I think it's unrealistic and counterproductive; it lionizes the wealthy as deserving of their wealth, and it similarly denigrates the poor for not having the gumption to become wealthy.

Dominus also refers to a New Yorker piece from Laura Miller, which I have not read, but which evidently suggests that The Hunger Games is "a fever-dream allegory of the adolescent social experience," a description or analysis that makes me want to throw up.
I do think The Hunger Games trilogy is doing something both interesting and important with regard to adolescence, but "fever-dream allegory" is not that something. For me, every single time I've read any of the three books, what strikes me most are the political and economic critiques. The way that war is figured, the way that power is figured, the way that corruption and decadence are figured; the way the book thinks of reality television and consolidation of power and complicity and superficiality and ignorance about the broken backs on which one's luxury rests - this is what the trilogy is about.
It is NOT an allegory (which, in its strictest definition, requires consistent one-to-one correlations of symbols and meanings). The brutality of the arenas is not a good analog for the brutality of the school locker room, or the school cafeteria, and I am committed to believing in the brutality of both of those. That is: I believe, deeply and sincerely, that high school is a miserable hell full of pitfalls and dangers and humiliations that are unparalleled in the "adult" world. But even I can't make the allegoric leap from gladiatorial arena to high school hallway.
This quote from Miller - or Dominus's use of it, anyway - sells short the very important work of the trilogy, which is not a happy set of books. The last pages of Mockingjay are chilling rather than consoling or uplifting. I wrote my opinion of Mockingjay right after it was published (I read it in a day) - that opinion is here.
Here's how I wrapped up my reading of Mockingjay, and the trilogy as a whole:

The dead stay dead, the broken remain broken. There is no recovery, there is no "getting over" the Hunger Games and their aftermath. This is not a book about glorious happiness arising from the ashes of difficult struggle. We're not left on a happy note, at all - we're left with the Hunger Games, with the reminder of the terrible possibilities in the world. We're left with the fact that terrible things happen, and scar us for life. That sometimes, the nightmares never, ever end.

The way both Dominus and Miller seem to handle the texts tries to cover this over, with suggested allegories and backpedaling references to history and to the author's biography. Suzanne Collins, who I am beginning to admire more and more, despite her gushing over the decision to cast Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss, resists this; Dominus quotes her saying "I don’t write about adolescence ... I write about war. For adolescents." This is entirely to Collins's credit, and should be unsurprising to anyone who has read her trilogy (at least anyone who wasn't primarily concerned with whether Team Peeta or Team Gale would win out - and as always, I recall with very deep fondness, the class of undergrads who were revolted when I mentioned the "team" language circulating around the book; those kids said "I'm Team Katniss").

I do wish the Times or someone would hire - even as freelancing contractors - people who really and truly know the field of children's and YA literature, to write about that literature. It deserves better contextualization that it's given by writers like Dominus and Miller, for all the good they may be at their jobs (an assessment I am not capable of making). Besides, there's a glut of smart PhDs or PhDs-to-be out there, lusting for a chance to earn a wage based on their years of hard work and study and reading and writing.

Good writers about books are almost as important as good writers of books. This is true for adult fiction, for nonfiction, for poetry - and it is most certainly also true of children's and young adult literature.

fantasy casting agent

One of the more enjoyable book-to-film adaptation games is Fantasy Casting. Inevitably, when any book I like is made into a film, I'm disappointed. No one ever looks totally right, important plot elements get changed, Hermione Granger suddenly says things like "I didn't know my hair looked like that from the back!"
But Fantasy Casting Agent allows me to have total control over who appears in my mental version of books I love. Usually, Fantasy Casting happens by chance; I'll see someone and think: {gasp!!!!} "there goes Katniss/Deeba/Count Olaf!"

I have two entries in the Fantasy Casting category, both discovered by chance.

First up, from China Miéville's  extraordinary, wonderful UN LUN DUN:

Explorer and adventurer Yorick Cavea!  This is a taveta golden weaver, and I think he's perfect for the role.


Next up, from The Hunger Games:

Cinna. Played by makeup artist and drag queen nonpareil RAJA (also known as Sutan Amrull), currently in season three of the incomparably great RuPaul's Drag Race.
This is an inadequate screencap of Raja, but she looks JUST. LIKE. CINNA. When I first saw Raja out of full drag, in the workroom on the show, I actually kind of gasped and jaw-dropped with the sense of recognition of Cinna. This is precisely, absolutely, completely how I have always pictured Cinna.

I have always loved Cinna; I always pictured him as being dark and incredibly attractive, obviously fashionable, and with that touch of gold eyeliner. Raja - Sutan, really, because Cinna has to be coded male - fits this to a a particularly gorgeous calligraphic T. I would really and truly LOVE to see Sutan be cast in this role; I don't know how great her acting chops are, but she's definitely got presence, and she loves performing. Cinna's role is small enough - and frankly, close enough to what Raja does in "real life" - that I think she could pull it off. And they simply are never going to be able to find anyone who looks more like Cinna. Ever.

Finally, I have discovered the home of Count Olaf, legendary villain from Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events. Turns out Count Olaf keeps a place in the southside of Pittsburgh - who knew?

After zooming in to this detail on the door of the house, anyone acquainted with the books will be unable to deny that this house is marked, distinctly and unmistakably, as Count Olaf's.

Mockingjay: an observation

It occurs to me, in mulling over Mockingjay (and my reaction to it), that the book makes a little more sense, and makes me feel better, if I think of it as a revenge tragedy in the best Jacobean tradition.

Because I think Mockingjay IS a revenge story, since I think Katniss is motivated largely by personal and/or selfish reasons - and most of what is selfish or personal to Katniss has to do with the people closest to her. She wants revenge: for Rue, for all the tributes, for Wiress and the morphling addicts and Mags, for herself and the Victors who have to live with what they've done, and what's been done to them. Her mission against President Snow is almost totally one of revenge.

And the classic revenge tragedy can really only have one set of outcomes: deaths. Lots and lots of deaths.
Which is precisely what Collins gives us.

So: Mockingjay = Jacobean Revenge Tragedy.

Mockingjay: all done [spoilers]

Putting the book cover here to blot out any unwanted spoilery things....I give most of it away, so if you don't want to know, STOP READING NOW. blindfold your tender eyes.

So I read Mockingjay in its entirety today, and I'm still a little shell-shocked. There was an awful lot I didn't expect - there's an awful lot that needed wrapping up, so Collins had her work cut out for her.
I had - and still have, five hours later - a sort of sickish, empty feeling as I reached the end of the novel. Not because I was unhappy with what Collins does with her characters and her plot, but because it's that kind of a book - that kind of a series.
One of the things that came up in class discussions about The Hunger Games - which the students always initiated - is the sheer violence of it. And how that violence is never gratuitous, and is necessary and profoundly affecting.
Collins seriously ups the ante on the violence in Mockingjay. This is a novel about war, about living in the heart of war; by the novel's final section, it's all ground-level guerrilla warfare, which makes me think that Collins is (intentionally or otherwise) referencing our everlasting and grim street battles in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Some of the main points that I especially moved/disturbed/interested me:
Finnick, and Finnick and Katniss's relationship.
The decimation, by novel's end, of the corps of Hunger Games Victors.
The death that tips Katniss past the point of endurance. It's ghastly. Some of those final scenes reminded me, in a terrible, terrible way, of Schindler's List, of the scene when Schindler sees the little girl in the red coat in the liquidation of the ghetto.
The terrible and relentless way that virtually everyone is revealed as untrustworthy, or as having ulterior (or at least more complex) motivations.
The hijacking of Peeta.
The epilogue.
The many, many children and young people (like early 20s and under) who die or are grievously injured.

This last item is of particular interest to me. Back in my youthfully ignorant early days of studying children's literature, Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire came out. I read it voraciously, having been sucked into the HP machine. And at the end I was shocked. I remember saying, repeatedly; "Kids DON'T die in children's book. they just don't."
Well, actually - they do. And they seem to be doing it more and more frequently. I know Death is a common one for YA fiction, but the deaths seem to be growing more frequent, and more intense. It's not just an elderly great-aunt dying, or a sister with leukemia in hospice (hi, Lurleen McDaniel!) - it's protagonists. Or it's protagonist's closest friends/family/allies, dying brutally in front of the protagonist's eyes.
I wonder about this, a lot.

I am very unhappy about the turn that Gale takes, and unhappier at Katniss's reaction to it.

Katniss is selfish; this book made that abundantly clear, although it's not exactly a secret throughout the other two books. But it made me uncomfortable this time, especially in regards to Gale. Every decision Katniss makes, every action she takes, is done because it will protect or help her family and loved ones. She protects Gale and Peeta, her mother and Prim, the other victors, herself (sometimes, but only sometimes; she is willing to sacrifice herself for them). Katniss is resolutely not political. She doesn't care about the revolution, the uprising; she wants revenge for herself and those she cares about, and that drives her against President Snow.  The compassion and loss and grief and anger she feels when the people she cares about suffer, or are killed, are real and deep and meaningful, but the fact remains: Katniss is simply not engaged in the larger political struggles. She is fortunate (?) in that her decisions and actions usually result in something positive for the many and not just for the few, but that's a secondary benefit, not her primary motivation.
Contrast this with Gale, who seems to grow more resolute, grimmer, harder, as each chapter passed. Gale is willing to do whatever it takes to defeat the Capitol. Even if it means killing everyone inside a mountain. Even if innocent people are hurt. He is not acting out of personal revenge (though he does also experience personal rage about the way he and his have suffered because of the Capitol) - Gale IS political, unlike Katniss. And while it's hard to feel good about some of Gale's choices, it's also hard to feel good about many of Katniss's. Gale is, essentially, utilitarian about the war, brilliantly so. You may kill 100 people, many of whom may be innocent, to save a country. It's the logic of the Bomb, of Hiroshima & Nagasaki. It's a cold, calculating, horrific logic, but if you can step outside your personal emotions, it's a logic that makes sense. And can even be a good thing.

The epilogue was, in the way of many epilogues, unsatisfying to me. I suppose it's better than ending on a "we looked into the clear bright future, my Love at my side." but.
the nightmares never go away. ever.
and the trick of evaporating time to age the protagonists, and give them children (you might as well just print HOPE in giant glittery letters, or perhaps REPRODUCTIVE FUTURITY!), is one that irks me. I am never sure why, except that suddenly, our protagonist/narrator is someone 10 or 20 or more years older. And that jump is unforgivable. What we lose in that jump is unforgivable.

This is a book about war - it's Hunger Games played large-scale, across a country. Katniss and Finnick realize this, when they see the obstacles and traps laid around the Capitol; they see it as just a huge games arena, though with higher stakes and more people. It's about survival, and death, and horror, and power - it is so much about power. The ways of hurting people that appear throughout this trilogy are mind-boggling. Collins doesn't back away from the fact that war - in any level, whether it is the annual Hunger Games or the Quarter Quell or full-on rebellion - was is a terrible thing that rips everyone and everything apart. No one is safe. No on comes out unscathed. The bright and shiny future never materializes. It is brutal and it is easy, this kind of battling and war.

This is not a happy book, and for this I applaud Suzanne Collins (loudly, and long). No one clasps hands and faces into the cold, clear light of a new day. No one faces the future bravely, with Love by their side, certain that the new world they've created will be a shiny happy gleaming tomorrowland. Collins make it plain that even "winning" is brutal - Haymitch is an alcoholic from start to finish. Annie is broken and disoriented and mad. The dead stay dead, the broken remain broken. There is no recovery, there is no "getting over" the Hunger Games and their aftermath. This is not a book about glorious happiness arising from the ashes of difficult struggle. We're not left on a happy note, at all - we're left with the Hunger Games, with the reminder of the terrible possibilities in the world. We're left with the fact that terrible things happen, and scar us for life. That sometimes, the nightmares never, ever end.

Mockingjay

It's Mockingjay release day, and very soon I will be zipping off to my bookstore to get my copy. I plan to spend the day comfortably curled up on my bed, reading my eyeballs out.

I've been waiting for this one for quite awhile; I was lucky enough to read Catching Fire in advanced reader copy, which has meant I've been cliffhanging for a very long time now.

I'm very excited and quite a bit nervous about this concluding book to a very great series. The series has gotten so much buzz, too, in the last year - I have that vaguely snerky, totally immature feeling one gets when suddenly something you love becomes hugely popular.  I was geeking out over these books over a year ago, and now suddenly, everyone I know is picking up The Hunger Games for the first time and going bonkers.

But!! No matter! I'm ready to discover Katniss's fate. And Cinna's - I adore Cinna.
I hope - gods I hope - this final book isn't all about the Love Triangle of Katniss, Peeta and Gale. I am not "Team Peeta" or "Team Gale," and I'm kind of irked that such things even exist. Those relationships are important, yes, but not central to the books' narrative.

And now! Off to get my Mockingjay.