'The Hunger Games' and What It Fails to Say to Young Women

After being sucked into the Hunger Games trilogy, I took my daughter to see the movie. She had read the books as well, even the last one which is exceptionally brutal. I had high hopes for this movie to capture the complexity of Katniss Everdeen, the main character. Not very often do we receive complex female leads.  There were amazing nuances to her character in the book. From her reluctance to lead the uprising that is only beginning in Hunger Games to her mess of emotions regarding Peeta which she must capitalize on in hopes of assistance from the outside viewers, we see a young woman bravely facing her coming of age.

I’ll be honest, I think a great deal about young girls; I have young daughters. I want for them to grow up strong, self-assured and not full of the crap we fill our youngsters’ minds with. I thought finally we would have a strong female character that gives witness to the complexity of teen life and does so without watering it down. She is torn by her affection for Peeta, much of which seems to stem from her compassion and hating to see people suffer. And yet she seems appropriately annoyed at being told who and how she should love someone. That her love for another is fit for the consumption of on-lookers is also distressing. But here, I am getting caught up in talking about the love interest. To do so misses the bigger issues in the book regarding the female lead. She is compassionate, angry, scared and fierce. She feels the full gamut of emotions and in typical teenage form feels them intensely and in quick succession.

My fondness for Katniss likely lies in the fact that she has her own skills (she hunts) and does good things for others with her skills. She is not petty and superficial; she is an emotionally complicated young woman trying her best to figure it out. She struggles with retaining her own sense of self in a world that tries to make her into something else. Her struggle for her own identity resonates with me so strongly, full of all the hopes for my daughters, that I really had a difficult time with the movie.

Leaving the theatre, my eldest daughter and I talked about how they (Hollywood people) had "messed up" the movie and cut important parts from it. I agreed with her of course about scenes we would have liked to see on the screen but my mind was elsewhere. I was thinking of the world our daughters must navigate and how they receive so little to help them make sense of it because so much of what they see about their world is based on loving a boy and looking good. The Hunger Games is about so much more. Sure, the setting is a dystopian future that one readily sees similarities to our own world. But the Hunger Games is so much more in what it depicts for a young woman. This is how I felt in reading the book.

The movie portrayed Katniss as rather cold and shallow. She had moments of boldness and she is compassionate to others, but compared to the book, she was a flattened caricature of a young woman. Later in the day, I went to the supermarket and was dismayed to see the magazines trying to pique my interest in who is Katniss’s "real" love. Once again, we have missed the boat on giving girls real characters.

This thinking about girls lead me to another trilogy recently that also sparked far too little thought, in my humble opinion, about the portrayal of women. After reading the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, I was then struck by the complexity of the main character. I felt the Swedish films did a fair job at not diluting her but the American version wasn’t as good.

I hope that we may be moving closer towards seeing the full richness of experience, not just for girls (though that is where it is most sorely needed), but for all of us. There seems to be a trend now for having young tough women leads geared toward the teen audience. In my opinion they still seem to get it wrong.  We may be getting closer, but we still have a long way to go.