The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A girl in a rainbow ruffled dress, singing. The film keeps coming back to it — Rachel Zegler's Lucy Gray Baird wearing the one bright object in a grey country, using a song where a weapon would be more use. Jo Willems shoots the Covey's outdoor performances warm and grainy and shoots the Capitol cold, so the dress arrives as a small riot of colour inside an institutional palette. It's a costume. She knows it's a costume. She wears it anyway, and it works.

Hold onto the dress. It's the part of this film that Deleuze can actually open up.

Start underneath. Deleuze has a category for movies where the social surface turns out to be a lid over something older and hungrier: the impulse-image, whose home genre he calls naturalism. Naturalist films (his examples are Stroheim, Buñuel, Losey) always run two milieus at once. There is the derived milieu, the furnished, historically specific place — here the brutalist Capitol a decade after the war, an academy and government halls that transmit institutional cruelty through their architecture, aristocrats keeping up appearances in faded finery. And showing through it, the originary world: not a setting but a pit, where conduct is nothing but drives.

Songbirds & Snakes stages that relation with unusual literalness. The tenth Hunger Games happen in a cracked open-air amphitheatre, a bombed-out civic ruin rather than the manicured simulated wilderness of the later films. That's a derived milieu — an arena, a public building, a place where a society once gathered to watch things together — caving into an originary world while you watch. The decision to make this arena look primitive next to the franchise's later spectacle is doing philosophical work, not just period-costume work. The tenth games are not a cruder draft of the seventy-fourth. They are the truth the seventy-fourth will dress up.

Viola Davis's Dr. Gaul is naturalism's spokesperson; Peter Dinklage's wrecked Dean Highbottom is the argument against her. Between them sits the question Coriolanus has to answer. Is a person a set of appetites with manners painted on? Gaul says yes and builds an arena to prove it. The film's cruelty is that it lets her be persuasive.

Naturalist films have a characteristic shape, and Deleuze names it: the line of slope, an irreversible gradient down toward exhaustion or death. Not a decision. A descent. Tom Blyth's performance is engineered for exactly this — his achievement is to make Snow's corrosion legible as a continuous arc rather than a switch. That is the difference between a villain-origin story and a tragedy. A switch is a plot point. A slope is physics.

The family reinforces it. The Snows are a fallen aristocratic house maintaining appearances, their status tracked in costume: the faded finery of people who can no longer afford the class they perform. Writing about Visconti, Deleuze calls this crystal-decomposition — an ordered, aristocratic world rotting from within while it goes on performing its own order, always arriving too late to save itself. Coriolanus is not corrupted by the Capitol. He is already standing inside something that is rotting, holding it up.

Now the song, and why it isn't decoration.

Lucy Gray performs, and her ballads are narrative events rather than scoring. When she performs for a Capitol audience she is doing what Deleuze, taking the term from Brecht, calls a gest: a posture that exposes a social relation instead of expressing an inner feeling. Dress plus voice plus stage makes the relation visible. There is an audience. There is a body expected to die entertainingly. There is a mentor whose fortunes ride on how she dies. She survives by making the arrangement legible and then charming it, which is more or less what an actor does, and the film knows it.

The songs do something larger too. Deleuze's late idea of fabulation — legending, story-telling — describes people caught in the act of inventing themselves through stories, because no official history is going to hold them. The Covey are travelling musicians with a repertoire, and the repertoire is their archive; it is the only place their existence is written down. One song in it is "The Hanging Tree."

Anyone who saw Mockingjay – Part 1 knows that song. There it is a diegetic protest ballad, scored by James Newton Howard, and it becomes the sound of a rebellion. This film reaches back sixty-four years and puts it in a girl's mouth in District 12, where there is no rebellion for it to belong to yet. Deleuze has an exact phrase for that condition: the people are missing. Modern political cinema, he argues, can't address a people that already exists and knows itself; it can only invent one, address work to a collectivity that hasn't arrived. Lucy Gray sings to listeners who won't exist for six decades. That isn't sentiment, it's the structural fact of what the song does across the series.

Which brings up the prequel form itself. The film runs on foreknowledge. You know what Snow becomes, so the suspense is never what, only when, and how much of it he'll enjoy. Deleuze calls the register where meaning gets assembled out of relations the viewer supplies — nothing on screen states them — the relation-image, Thirdness, the audience as the knowing third party. A prequel is a machine built out of nothing else. And "The Hanging Tree" is a textbook mark, an object that means through its customary chain, except the chain is delivered backwards. You hear a strange love song about a hanging, and you hear the revolution it will become, in the same breath.

The craft debts are open ones. From Joker, the sympathetic-descent template that walks a pitiable figure into a monster you already know. From The Godfather Part II, prequel-as-tragic-origin, foreknowledge squeezing irony out of every compromise. From Polanski's Macbeth, the classical grind of ambition through staged acts. Lawrence and Willems inherit their own grammar from Catching Fire — the anamorphic arena, the glass-and-marble Capitol — and deliberately coarsen it into an earlier era. But here is what none of the ancestors have. Neither Michael Corleone nor Arthur Fleck leaves behind an artifact that outlives him and turns against his world. Lucy Gray leaves a song, and the song comes back sixty-four years later to help burn down the house her mentor built.

One more thing this film sees clearly, and it is a real historical claim. Deleuze's attraction-image names the moment action stops being acted and starts being staged — violence transposed into spectacle, arranged to be looked at. The tenth games are barely watched. Under-produced, improvised, embarrassing. The film's actual subject is the retrofit of an atrocity into entertainment, and its argument is that somebody had to think of that: the show has authors, a grotesque architect and the ambitious students she recruits, and their careers depend on making death watchable. That isn't backstory. It's a thesis about how spectacle gets built, told from inside a piece of spectacle.

So watch it again and count who Lucy Gray is actually singing to. Not the Capitol. Not Coriolanus. Someone further out, not born yet.