Lori Wheeler
21 June 2015

Neglected Commentary

          Reaching beyond a young adult (YA) audience, dystopian franchises written for young adults have become moneymakers for both the publishing and film industries.  As books are adapted into movies, these stories reach a wider audience and invite greater, often less academic, criticism.  As YA dystopian fiction transitions itself to reach a popular adult audience through film, the media assumes the primary role of critic and more often than not avoids any self-reflection brought on by parts of the story that provide a commentary on the roles of media and socialization in the dystopian world.  The media is happy to highlight any criticism of the government included in these stories, but it too often ignores the positions these dystopias take on the media because they conflict with the media’s bottom line of reality television and tabloid markets.  Because of the economic power popular entertainment carries, subversive messages about the media are buried, but they do exist.  And we need broader analysis of these stories to bring these media critiques to light.

           We have seen in Anthem a world that provides a direct reproach of the government as it exists in Equality 7-2521’s society.  The councils that govern society are controlling at best and corrupt at worst, and they make it easy for the reader to identify an obvious problem with the utopia that has turned dystopic.  Any reader can assume that the men who cry out at night in the Home of the Street Sweepers do so because of the oppressive government under which they live.  However, a deeper analysis of the society requires the reader to imagine what existed before Equality’s time.  What happened to convince anyone to give up advancement: technological, sociological, personal?  It leaves the reader to infer that society had gone terribly wrong.  It is even possible that the government of the past had been effective and trusted and was only given more power because of society’s failings.  Knowing that Ayn Rand wrote Anthem as a condemnation of communist government does not mean that one thinks in terms of government only.  It forces one to question what happened to facilitate the introduction of a communist regime.  How and why did the people give so much power to the government? Was it because they trusted the greater society so little?  And how did the government maintain its control? Rand’s brief exploration into these themes leaves much to the imagination, whereas the current YA dystopias take stronger positions on society and the media’s role in it.

          In Kiera Cass’s Selection series, America Singer vies for the affections of Prince Maxon, the royal prince of the new country formed after the US’s demise.  While much of the series deals with the romantic entanglements of Maxon and the girls competing to be the new princess, many readers and popular critics are quick to point out the biting criticism in the book of a government that centralizes its power as much as possible instead of sharing it with the people.  The commentary on the government is not the only aspect of the book that qualifies it as dystopian literature.  There is also a stunning social commentary in which the media is portrayed as nothing more than gossipmongers.  The girls who participate in the Selection do so through a well-documented process and find themselves on the weekly Illea Capital Report and in magazines distributed throughout the country.  The whole process is similar to ABC’s The Bachelor / Bachelorette.  Throughout the entire Selection, the girls are constantly in front of the public eye, their romance or lack thereof with the prince on display for the public to see.  As the series continues, readers discover that the Selection is as much a distraction from national security as it is an enactment of social and cultural ritual.  In this way, the media serves the government in its blatant attempts at setting each girl against the others and heightening the suspense of citizen-consumers and becomes complicit in the government’s corruption of power.  More importantly, though, as the reader connects with America, he begins to question the validity of making an honest personal romance a media product.  As readers look closer, they also question the morality of a society that makes something so intimate and personal an entertainment product.

          The same problems that occur with the discussion of The Selection series are found in the examination of The Hunger Games.  From the moment the film rights were sold, the media has hailed The Hunger Games as a criticism of centralized government and a warning to modern democracies.  Talk shows, news magazines, and even tabloids hail the criticism of government as the strongest theme of the series.  Perhaps this is true, but what few media reports mention is the commentary on the presence of reality television in the series.  Not only are the tributes who compete in the Hunger Games each year forced to do so for an audience, the majority of that audience is forced to watch as the dangers of the games become increasingly manipulated and bloody.  Those of the audience who watch for pleasure are also able to participate in the games by becoming sponsors to the tributes and sending the tributes helpful medical or survival supplies.  In a review in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Blasingame et al highlight the prominence that reality television takes in the novel.  In reviews of the film version of The Hunger Games both Rolling Stone and Roger Ebert highlight the social aspect of televising the games for citizens of Panem.  The Rolling Stone review briefly mentions the “sharp, satirical kick” the film gives to reality television, but Ebert’s criticism mentions how much of Collins’s commentary is lost in the film adaptation.  However, for many viewers and younger readers of the book, the most obvious criticism of the Panem society is of its government because the media, in its reviews of the film adaptation have also largely left the criticism of reality television ignored. 

While Laura Miller argues in The New Yorker that The Hunger Games is not about the effect of reality television on society and instead mirrors the adolescent experience of being forced into the dystopic world of high school, there is value in examining what YA dystopias have to say about media and how it is used in society.  YA dystopias as well as their film adaptations have drawn adolescent and adult audiences alike, and to discount the value of any messages in the texts ignores the complexity of such texts.  The fact that their films reach wider audiences should not mean that we should ignore the texts’ multiple reactions to and warnings for society.  One of those warnings is that we should beware of how far we are willing to distort our realities in pursuit of entertainment. 

The fact that certain aspects of YA dystopias are neglected as they are translated into film forces me to question the judgment of both authors and filmmakers.  If the entirety of a book’s message cannot be translated to the screen, does that mean everyone involved should be happy to settle for the parts that can? Should it be acceptable to trade message for money? I think not.  If they YA genre is to get the respect its proponents thinks it deserves, its authors and publishers must come to see it as art as much as they see it as commodity.  I am reminded of the displeasure with which Roald Dahl, J. D. Salinger, and Ernest Hemingway greeted the film adaptations of their work.  At some point, the decision to adapt a book for film comes down to the balance between the potential to bring a story to an ever-growing audience and maintaining the story’s integrity.  I admire the effort to bring YA books to greater audiences, but if we are going to do so, we must include a fair evaluation of their adaptation in the public criticism of them as well.  Once turned into movies, filmmakers and the media have the ability to limit and even censor what the narrative has to offer.

Works Cited

Blasingame, James, Jung, Michael, Stahn, Bridgette, Bard, Fran, Williams, Kyle, & Koebele, Elizabeth. “Review of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 52.8 (May 2009): 724-725. Print.

Cass, Kiera. The Selection. New York: Harper Collins, 2012.

Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games. New York: Scholastic, 2008.

http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/xcritsource/genre/YADystopFiction.htm

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-hunger-games-2012

http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/the-hunger-games-20120321