Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Hunger Games
2012 · Gary Ross · The Hunger Games on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how close the handheld camera stays to Katniss's shoulder. (camera)
Stern shoots District 12 and the arena with a jittery, close, whip-panning camera. You rarely see more of a space than Katniss can. The Capitol, by contrast, is framed frontally and holds still.
Payoff: The camera keeps you inside her limits. The Capitol gets to stand still because it is never the one being hunted.
Look at the color drain from District 12 and flood the Capitol. (light)
Messina and Makovsky build the class argument in surfaces. Coal-country gray, homespun cloth, and available light in the districts. Powdered faces, candy colors, and Baroque ornament in the Capitol. Ross ran the same trick in Pleasantville.
Payoff: You can see who eats and who is eaten before anyone explains the arrangement. The palette does the politics.
Follow every cut away from Katniss to the people watching her. (cutting)
Mirrione and Welfling keep breaking the survival action to show the broadcast. The Gamemakers' control room, Caesar Flickerman's grin, crowds in district squares. The Games arrive as produced television, not just as danger.
Payoff: Each cutaway puts you in the crowd. You are watching the same show the Capitol is watching. In the reading: attraction-image. The reading calls this the attraction-image, an act staged to be looked at. Every cutaway turns Katniss's running into content.
Watch how little Lawrence's face gives away when people are looking. (performance)
Lawrence plays Katniss guarded and still. There is no voiceover, so her thinking shows up as withheld reaction. Around her, Tucci, Banks, and Sutherland play broad, mannered Capitol surfaces that make her flatness read as refusal.
Payoff: Stillness is her only privacy. When she does perform for the cameras, you can tell because the face finally moves.
Listen for the score dropping out and leaving plain quiet. (sound)
James Newton Howard scores District 12 with folk strings and woodwinds. In the arena he withdraws entirely at intervals, so you hear wind, breath, and leaves. The Capitol's sound is processed and broadcast-clean by contrast.
Payoff: Silence marks what the broadcast cannot package. When the music leaves, you are with Katniss rather than with the show.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Follow the cutaways to the people watching. The film keeps showing you the audience, and you are sitting in it.