PRECARIOUS DYSTOPIAS: THE HUNGER GAMES, IN TIME, AND NEVER LET ME GO MARK FISHER DISCUSSES THE POLITICS OF THREE DARK FUTURISTIC THRILLERS a in three recent films—most Dystopia has retumed to cin spectacularly in the blockbuster The Hunger Games b in to lowerprofile fins, Never Let Me Go, adap Kazuo Ishiguto's novel and directed by Mark Romanek, ad In Time, wtitten and dected by Andrew Nicol. in films, class and precariousness are forced into the foreground. ‘To be in the dominant class is, in each film, to achieve a cer- tain liberation from precariousness forthe poor, meanwhile, life is harried, fugitive, a perpetual state of anxiety. Yet precari- cousness here is nota natural state which the rich ate fortunate od from hese three ‘enough to rise above; on the contrary, precariousness is delib- ‘rately imposed on the poor as a means of controlling and he pretext ed class: of time, their subduing them, Pre-existing shortages provide for deliberately depriving the subj organs, ther lives, In an inversion of Hobbes, the against all emerges as an attficial condition, Strategie impov- cerishment and enforced competition are intended to make ar ofall solidarity impossible so that each must face death alone. Based on the bestsell Games is aimed ine Collins, The Hunger the young adult market, and, it can be seen as the suecessor of the Harty Pott: ‘Twilight series. The phenomenal success of Collins’s work (two other novels have followed The Hunger Games) tosome bookshops now featuring a “Young Adult Dystopian section, and it is tempting to see the shift from wizards and lovelom vampires to teenagers fighting for their lives in a state-organized spectacle as indicative of general change im the cultural temperature. The Hunger Games was pub- lished in 2008, fin was pitching the world i nd confusion. The label “Young Adult Dystop demographic The Hunger Games is sled tthe very moment that al crisis n” tells us much more than whieh mned at. ‘The film and tomy) Sa de NS Ona dine tigre or aStneer nro eptngoa arn ese tetheman nin orcncenmn erage AR the novel have no doubt resonated so powerfully with its young audience because it has engaged feelings of betrayal ng ina generation asked to accept that its quality oflife wll be worse than that ofits parents What is certain is that The Hunger Games is irreducibly political in a way that the Harry Potter and the Twilight films could never be. The filtn’s political charge depends upon the surprising intensity of its brutality. This brutality is affective rather than explicit; the amount of gore is aetually quite low, cit is the prospect of pubes git of What makes The Hunger Games more than a workaday thuiler is its disclosing of a world—a world that, a with al Aystopias that conneet, is. distorting mireor of ou own. The setting is Pan the mame for North strophic civil war. Panem is divided into twelve districts, all of which are presided over by the Capitol, As a symbolic act of penance for their past sts murder not the i doing it, which shocks. rica after a catae bellions, each dist is required to send a young “tribute” to the annual Hunger tele vised town 1 whieh the e required to npetitor Fight to the death. Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) comes from District 12, whose main function is coal-mining. At District 12 “reaping” festival, where the names of the tributes are selected bya lottery, Katiss Shields), is picked to enter the arena, Katniss volunteers in oungersister, Primrose (Willow her place, and she is joined by the male tribute, Peeta (Josh Hutcherson). The two of t tol, where mitch (Woody ade over by professional stylists, they Harrelson), and inter- viewed on television before they are rated by the organizers, the Gamer ince for the television eventually team up, acting out a ron . tis worthwhile to do this because “Sponsors” in to their favoriteethene and sympathy. (The estent to which the two characters can accurately second-guess the way in which their narrative will which such be edited is a canny commentary on the way manipulations are taken for granted by a generation that has grown up on reality TV.) The G: up on the romance by announcing that the rules: this year, there can be two winners, provided that the last two surviving tributes come from the same district Katniss and Pel just as they think they have won ive the other tributes, but ther announcement is " only ue: the rule change is suspended, ane now there ca be one winner. In defiance, Katniss and Peta decide that they will each eat a handful of deadly berries. As they are about to do so, however, a further announcement is made: this year, afterall, there can be two winners. Pethaps because of Collins’ close involvemen lf, thou it was tf ef difference between novel and film is the film—she weote the initial seript I revised by sereenwriter Billy Ray—thhe adaptation is to its source. The eh that the former has a frst person narrative, This leads to there 28 summer 2012 2 tatation being greater suspense in the film: inthe novel n iss tostuvive—butalso a reduction in claustrophobia, Shifting to third person allows usa few glimpses into the world beyond the arena: we see, for dent Snow instance, increasingly tense meetings between Pre (Donald Sutherland) and the chief Gamemaker, Seneca Crane (Wes Bentley), concluding, ultimately, with Crane’: death; Haymitch’s maneuverings on behalf of his charges; tl ‘operations center where the decisions about what happens in the aren ented are imp ind, most significantly, the upris: ings in some of the districts, But, these flee ides apaut, ‘our perspective is restricted to Katniss’ The Hunger Games is about the frst stirrings of revo- lutionary consciousness, but its relationship to capitalism is Does the Capitol double for capital, or is the form of exploitation in The less clear th: Jat initially appea Hunger Games of a eruder type? Although the Capitol looks al fist sight like a metropolitan capitalist society, the mode ‘of power at work in Panem is better described as eyber- feudal. The name “tribute” clues us in to the fact that theS N NY N N ~ ~ Capitol extracts wealth via ditect expropriation rather than through the market, Market signifiers are feral, strangely absent from the Capitol. Commodities are ubiquitous, but there are no corporate logos, shops, or bran! names in the city. So far as we can see, the state, under the beady gaze of President Snow, seems to own everything, It exert its power digectly, via an authoritarian police force of white-uniformed Peacekeepers which inflicts punishment summarily, and symbolically, through the Hunger Games and othe ritu- als in which the districts are requited to demonstrate theit ick market, but little indication of legitimate commercial activ- subordination. In District 12, meanwhile, there is a ity: We know that Peeta works in his parents” bakery, but the impression of District 12 is of a society bent double by manual labor, in which shopping is by no means a leisure activity The anachronism reflects the mistute of influences that Pa most frequently quoted remarks, the led Collins to create Panem. According to one of the author's al source for the novel was contemporary television, “I was channel surfing between reality TV programming and aetual war covers when Katnis’s story came to me, One night I'm sitting there flipping around and on one channel there's group of young for, I don’t know, money maybe? And on people compet n actual war. And [was tied, anid the lines began to blr in this very the next, there’ a group of young people fi unsettling way, and I thought of this story” (www scholastic ccon/thehungs ‘The Hunger Games owes much of its impact to the way in which it combines the results of this hypnagog) rgamesimedia/stizanne_collins_q and_apal, with classical influences, “The world of Panem, particu: larly the Capito, is loaded with Roman references,” Collins explained in the same interview, “Panem itself comes from the expression ‘Panem et Gircenses’ which translates into Bread and Circuses.” Besides gladiatorial combat, Sollins says she was also inspired by the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, Ath cens to Crete, where they were thrown in the Labyrinth and devoured by the monstrous Minotaur. The myth tells how in punishment for past deeds, 1s periodically had to send seven youths and seven maid“The world of The Hunger Games is rigidly stratified. One of the points of the Games is to underscore the impossibil- ity of any upward movement for most, even as it hols up ing) chance ofa limited escape for live as ich celebrities, a fiom the rest oftheir districts. They are required to mentor future tributes—a miserable, purgatorial fate, which mote than accounts for Haymitch’s alcoholism, ‘The feudal overtones means that Panem sometimes feels ‘more like a caste th districts have preferred status, their tributes usually all the arena to form a pathetic elite of tke downtrodde na clas, society: The lower (mostly) doomed. (One notable addition to the novel is the c ofthese of the film, he belatedly becomes status as someone born to kill, and to die.) The hierarchy between the Capitol and the distrits—and among, _more or less prosperous districts—is further compounded by class divisions within District 12, between the miners and a speech given to 01 just before merchant class. “The hierarchies in Panem are also organized geographi- the difference between C tol and the sued as analogons to that between cen- world, The districts are responsible for the extraction of raw materials and the manufacture of commodities, leaving the citizens of the Capitol to engage im various kinds of service industry —food preparation, styl- ing, and entertainment—not to mention consumption. This fades into the closely related division between urban d rural, where we are invited to contrast the metropolis’: almost entirely artificialized world with the woodlands of District 12. Yet we apparently unlimited consumption and foppish, infantilized spectatorialism can be set against the conspicuous authen- ticity of older forms of labor, with their dtt-poor privations and honest work ethic, When Katniss, the daughter of a dead who survives by h the Capitol by hi century is brought face to futureshacked face fist-century media culture, a disjunction that is pointed up by the gatish appearance ofthe Capitols citizens, with their grotesque cosmetics, lurid hair dye, and ornate clothes. But the urban-moderverus-urabarchaic opposition makes for the appearance of ity in whiely everyone knows eversbod els, the Capitl is immensely poptilow in Pa the rich vastly outnumber the working poor, as if th District 12 isa local- may. W ‘giving the impression th crated 1% work for the benefit of the privileged 99% rather than the reverse. (In the novels its explained that District 12 isan exceptionally small district.) Uli haps most obviously read in terms of colonial domination. In the Games, the colonized are forced to celebrate their ow defeat and toacknowledge the unassailablity of their colonizers power, But whether we read the film in generational, col geographical, historical, or class terms—or, as seems best, asa combination or condensation of all these modes —it is clear ately, the Capitol’ oppression of the disriets is pe that Panem is world in which there is Empire but no Multitude (to use the terms of N sel Hardt and Antonio Negri). Or, into existence fitful, in the uprisings which play only a small part in The Hunger Games but which take on a greater significance as Collins’ tilogy develops, where what initially seem tobe sporadic, tile els of defiance ultimately play apart in an organized resistance “Suicide isthe decisive politcal act of ou times,” claimed Franco Berardi in Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitaism and the Pathologies of the Postalpha Generation (London: Minor Compositions, 2009, 35). In a world where domination is total, where power has unquestioned dom death, then the k ‘own terms touse theit deaths as—symbolieas well as literal — weapons. Thus, in The Hunger Games, itis Katniss and Peta’ threat of suicide which checkmates the Capitol. In choosing to die, they not only deny the Capitol the captured life of a ctor, they also ceny it their deaths. Death inthe arena ceases to be a reconfirmation of the Capitols power, and becomes instead an ac of refusal. Up until this limactie moment, The yn over life and course forthe oppressed isto die on their Hunger Games is striking for the fatalism of its lead cl Kable something that is all he more rem iven the personal courage They think like slaves, taking it for granted that the Capitol’s power cannot be broken, Katniss and Peeta have at this stage no ambitions to head a revolution. Katniss aequiesces because she believes that confionting the Capitol is hopeless; any challenge to its power could only result in her family being tortured and seltsactifice th: killed. Foignantly, the only altemative to servitude she can imagine at the start of the film is escape into the woods. (It could be a of escape into the woods is «bya vision ofa retum tothe organi and 10 a space outside the purview of Empire, amounts tolitle more than a version ofthis same hope.) The threat of suicide isthe fist step ina proces of converting fatalism into insurecton, The fantasy of escape is given up, no a because itl's power as fe but to confront it ee ee a2 There is no stich conversion of fatalism into resistance in Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go. The peculiar horror of the film, in fact, resides in the untelieved quality of its fatalism. Never Let Me Go focuses on an “ideological state apparatus,” an English boarding school, Hailsham, in-an alternative twentieth century. ‘The film is about the sue- cess of such ideological apparatuses in destroying even the thought of rebellion. The truth of the school is known to all but, in the typical English way, it eannot be said out loud (one teacher is sacked for explicitly stating what the pupils already know): Hailsham is a training academy for clones, whose role will be to be provide organs for the wider human population. Unlike in The Hunger Games, the lead char acters in Never Let Me Go are not kept in line by a police force or an army. Here, heartbreakingly, and surprisingly, fe no dreams of escape into the woods (as the thresh- outside world coded as threatening, the woods at the perimeter of Hailsham ate precisely not understood as a ized is only a tertible compliance, and a slave’ desperate ca place of freedom, but mthol asite of terror); there ity for self-delusion, By contrast with The Hunger Games, in of id which brute force is always visible through the ven ology, Never Let Me Go is about a form of power that does not nee Let Me ‘comparison is inevitable. Bay’s film works from a premise to exhibit foree. It is instructive to compare Never Go with Michael Bay’ The Island; indeed, such a that is practically identical—clones whose body parts will be harvested —but its treatment of the concept could not be more different. The Island is a story of escape, full of spec- tacular Hollywood action sequences. In Never Let Me Go, however, there is nowhere to escape to. Once they leave the uw ouanreny 30school, the clones are not confined in some earceral space; they share the same world as these to whom, in a chilling yet appa ding euphemism, they must ‘donate” their organs, Nothing could be further from The Islands adrenal bustle than Never Let Me Go'satmosphere of. gly convineing.so lassitude, anguor, and longing, The fact thatthe clones’ tim is short lends their thwarted love affairs, their lazy afternoons spent reading in meadows, and their day tips to the coast a nearly unbeatable inte If there is nowhere to escape to—the clones are already in the world; the world is their prison—then nor is there any attempt to escape, The hopes and fantasies of lead clone characters, Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Knightley Andrew Garfield) rely shaped by the bureaucratic organization of the the thre Ruth and Tommy dlonation program, For reasons that ate never fully clear but which we can surmise ate down to the success of the Hailsham ideology, fleeing the program is unthinkable for them, Their hopes rest instead on the kind of collective fantasy that seems to spontaneously grow in institutions Tike Hails institution could not do its work, The fantasy is the unof- ., and without which, in a cruel twist, the nt which the official ideological program xl may even eultivate—without explicitly sanetioning, The fantasy is of a reprieve in the form of a “deferral” (Ishiguro’s language here echoes the “indefinite postpon in Kafka’s The Trial), available to couples that can prove the Without this fantasy, the clones would have ne hop me which is supposedly are really in love thus no reason not to rebel, or to destroy themselves. Buas Tommy and Kathy discover—and we sense that Kathy except asa kind of supers tion for the condemned to console themselves with—there al. Th never really believed it any love, like their bodies, will not survive whether clone or not—except that there is nothing natural about the clones’ fate. They’ die—or, in another wonderfully chilling euphemism, they “complete” —because they belong to an exploited elas, and what a harrowingly incisive image of exploitation “organ donation” is. While the fatalism of the cond ns the mood ‘of Never Let Me Go, in Time is driver by the desperate p of those strangling to fend death off. The ce death clones in Never Let Me Go—most will “complete” after ther third donation. in In Time, death isnot an imminent certainty buta constant threat—for the poor, a any rate, The eurrency in this future US. is time. At the age of twenty-five, people cease appearing to age. Unfortunately, however, they are only given one more year to live, If they want to survive beyond the age of twentysi, they must eam c. Social classes are defined by how mich time they ned gov have, and, asin The Hunger Games, stratification i organized geographically, w Zones.” “The poor live in temporal ghettos, while the rich dissoutely partyin the enclave of New Greenwieh, In Time captures the ambient cread of precatity in a world stripped of (job and social) security, in which the poor ate trapped in a perpetual present tense, unable to plan or tal and physical resources devoted to the he society divided into “Tis abble for bate survival. The lead charac- ter is Will (an improbably cast Justin Timberlake), a factory worker living in the ghetto of Dayton. He is gifted a cen of time by a hyperjaded plutoctat who has grown tired of living, Will heads to New Greenwich, but he is unable to adjust to the serene pace of the city. He is habituated to act- ing quickly, to squeezing as much into every moment as he ik of vulgar waitress discreetly tells Will when she sees (class ali New Greenwiel can, but ste is the very n ity. Asa rest him wolfin ‘ew Greenwich, i food, he is ily identifiable because he does thin too quickly. In isto be conspicuously squandered —ruch as space is sua dered by the rich in our worl. In Time is not only an attack on the rich; its target isthe class system as such, The rich are immiserated in their own way, their lives deprived of direction or significance. Like The ‘Hunger Garnes, In Time isin part a commentary on the empty allure of the mecls-leisure elite, As Sylvia (Amanda Seyfried) pits it, “the poor die, and 1 dont live.” Anoth ‘of putting ths is thatthe poor are exhausted, while the rich are world-veary. A banker's daughter, Sylvia is tited of the sterile hedonistic rituals of New Greenwich, and sily drawn, into insurrection wh She thus He fugitive Wal ass traitor, plotting the destruction But when Sylvia and Will start to rob banks” and flood the ghettos with time, they find that the rich respond by simply increasing the eost of living. The film ends equivocally—Will and Sylvia continue to rob time is futile or a presxevolutionary act banks, but whether th This hesitation is perhaps what is most cha of the current moment, in wh rented | of neolib a moment of ie. If the bleak from its not even broaching the possibil escape or insurrection, then the margin of hope in The ‘Hunger Games and In Time consists in the young exploited characters groping toward new kinds of collective action, ‘The Hunger Games’ arena, in which teen compete with each other for the entertainment of a bored is as horribly compelling to the dystop radical chi s of Never Let Me Go aises of collective zers are forced to ige of the privation of solidarity in our world a in the a you could wish for, Any allan the ordi- a is necessarily prosisional — nary course of things) there ean only be one winner, every member of an alliance knows that they may well face the prospect of eventually having to kill those with whom they are now temporarily allied. ‘The struggle to break out of the arena entails the throwing off ofthis imposed slogeatog Hobbesianisn, the reinvention of solidarity. Could it be that Collins’ novels are not only in tune with our actually exis ing but disintegrating neolib world that will repkace it? ral dystopia, but also with t CER oc ope Ti et Ce bs, ABSTRACT Soy he et novi nthe Hg Goes, ine, Ht rants Neen pt operons spo ciliates nd tse op. ETWORDS he goes, Ti, No ot He, pe, coos HEI Hing Gans Data Gay ss: i ai, i ‘Writers: Gory Ress, Suzanne Coins, Billy Ray (fem the novel by Suzonne Coins) Gage on Su En: Cog. Spe i, hts Wag es ons Nevin How. eatin caps: a Fo Log Tank Pecos ing, Lie Pion US dota ong VDDAA a Tine Deo: kien Wl. © 2011 Rosny xtra (SA) In bbe: 0 Cry Fox, $7898, 1, Nov Lt Me Go Diet: Na Rana. © 200 Toth Cnty Fx Fim Cpe aie ond De Exterior: 20 Canty Fx. $2998, 1 uw ouaereny 32