What Our World Really Looks Like to a Teenager

Rating: 8/10 (27 September 2014)

As an older viewer and a schoolteacher, I was fascinated enough in my students' reactions to "The Hunger Games" that I decided to roll it out of the Netflix one night and give it a view. I must confess I found it an odd movie--a strange mix of Rollerball and Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, where teenagers from different parts of a futuristic fascist society win a lottery for the privilege of killing each other in a spectacle designed to maintain the social order.
This might sound ridiculous, at least put this way, except that in my mind the movie works. It does not work for the reasons that everybody says it does--the awesome action, the "brilliant" dystopian premise (this is actually a cliché!), or the great marketing. I think it works because, if you have ever spent a fair amount of time with the modern teenager, you know that this movie really reveals something about the way that they perceive the world. Our society is dysfunctional (is it not?) in ways that especially hurt them, many kids have parents lacking in resources (yes?) or no parents at all to speak of, the privileged kids are sharpening their knives for the battle of winner take all, cliques form for the purpose of destroying you, etc. Furthermore, this perception is not just teenage angst--it is unique, truthful, often unseen by adults and revealed in this movie in a way that adults can digest it, if they take the trouble to take it seriously.
The world of the Hunger Games movie is not realistic, it is not great literature, it probably does not measure up to its source novel or Battle Royale, the Japanese movie that everyone says it copies, but it is spot-on in depicting the modern world as viewed through the eyes of a teenager. In this movie, our teenagers get their revenge on us, showing us through the eyes of their mature- beyond-her-years hero Jennifer Lawrence exactly what our sick society is made of.