The Hunger Games · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A girl runs through a forest and a wall of fire rises to cut off her retreat. The flames are not an accident of dry brush. The film cuts to a bright, cool room where a man in a charcoal suit drags his fingers across a pane of light, and the fire appears exactly where he draws it. That edit — from the endangered body to the hand that authored the danger — is the whole movie in miniature, and it is the reason Deleuze is worth bringing to a 2012 blockbuster he never lived to see.

Start with what the film obviously is. Deleuze called the dominant cinema of action the movement-image: a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the cutting serves that chain. The Hunger Games is, on its surface, a pure action-image, and a large-form one — the kind where a vast situation presses on a hero until a single decisive act transforms it. The encompassing milieu Deleuze calls the synsign is the arena, and behind it the whole Capitol order: a world of coal-dust scarcity and televised surveillance that calls an act out of Katniss. "I volunteer as tribute" is that engine firing. The situation (the reaping) demands; she acts; the gesture is clean, motor, complete. Jennifer Lawrence's stillness and physical competence — the archery, the hunting, the reading of terrain — keep the sensory-motor circuit taut and legible.

But the film will not let an action stay an action. Every time Katniss runs or shoots, it cuts away — to the control room, to Caesar Flickerman's blue-lit grin, to the watching crowd in the square. This is the move Deleuze names the reflection-image, and at its sharpest the attraction-image: action transposed into spectacle, staged to be looked at rather than simply done. Eisenstein's old "montage of attractions" returns here in literal form, because the Games are combat produced as television. The satire works precisely on this friction — Katniss is really running while the same run is re-edited, scored, and sold as content. The film is built from the gap between the body and its broadcast.

That gap has a body of its own, and Deleuze has a word for it: the gest, a posture or attitude that exposes a social or theatrical relation. Watch the makeover. Tributes are washed, costumed, paraded on chariots, set on a couch across from a talk-show host — bodies turned into figures, commodities on display before a ruling class. Cinna's flame dress, the "girl on fire," is the purest gest in the film: a person becoming a brand, the human reduced to an image that sells. The class allegory the production design carries — homespun grays against Baroque candy-colored excess — is finally a contrast of bodies, the ones that labor and the ones that watch.

Who engineers the watching? The control room. Deleuze, late in his cinema books, imagined a cinema-of-the-brain: the world rendered as an architecture of thought, a milieu conjured by an unseen, probabilistic intelligence. The Gamemakers never enter the arena. They author it from a glass-and-hologram brain — drawing fire, releasing muttations, changing the rules mid-game. The forest is not nature. It is a designed topology, a thought someone is having about how to make Katniss run.

Against that authored world, Katniss does something the Capitol did not script: she legends herself. Deleuze called this fabulation — subjects caught in the act of telling themselves into a story that does not yet exist. The "girl on fire" begins as a stylist's gimmick and becomes true: the berries that break the Game, the three-finger salute, the flowers laid over Rue's body. These gestures reach past the people in the frame toward a people who are missing — Deleuze's phrase for a political community that has to be invented before it can act. The score withdraws at Rue's death; the quiet lets the gesture land; District 11 rises. The rebellion is fabulated before it is fought. And note what the crowds become in these passages — not individuals but a single charged mass, what Deleuze calls the dividual, the collective rendered as one affective unit. The Capitol audience and the watching districts are two faces of the same crowd-image.

The craft debts are exact. The Most Dangerous Game supplies the enclosed hunt; Spartacus the groomed gladiators paraded before the elite; The Running Man the glib death-show host that Caesar echoes; Network the ratings logic that governs the control room; The Truman Show the surveilled, authored reality with its hidden director; and Ross's own Pleasantville the color grammar — saturated false world against a drabber real one. Tom Stern's 35mm grain and available-light handheld give District 12 and the arena a near-documentary, Bazinian realism, so that the real in this film is rough and shaking while the false is glossy and stable. The look is a moral argument.

Its significance is quieter than its grosses. When prestige cinema had drifted toward the time-image — watchers, drift, dead time — The Hunger Games re-armed the action-image for a female-led franchise, and then folded the attraction-image inside it so the action could indict its own spectacle. It made the sensory-motor circuit self-aware, and it made us the Capitol crowd: every cutaway to the watching audience is a mirror. Next time, follow those cuts to the control room and the square. Ask whether Katniss ever acts, or only ever performs — and whether, in her world or ours, the broadcast has left any difference between the two.