Catching Fire is a film that I’ve
looked forward to for a long time. It’s by no means a perfect film, but it
definitely captures a fear in the American public in an interesting and dynamic
way. I believe it shows a similar fear to that which Adorno and Horkheimer
described.
“Each single manifestation of the
culture industry inescapably reproduces human beings as what the whole has made
them. And all its agents...are on the alert to ensure that the single
reproduction of mind does not lead on to the expansion of mind.” (Horkheimer,
Adorno 100)
Katniss and Peeta are threatened because they must act as
the Capital will have them act. They are an image of the culture industry. They
must smile and be in love. At one point Haymitch points out that this will be
their entire lives (being an image for the Capital) so they might as well
become the image instead of just acting like it. This is a terrifying thought.
They will be entertainment prostitutes for the rest of their lives. Is this
what famous actors and actresses are? Are they tricked into believing they are
free, when they are really being taken advantage of? It’s a scary line of
thought.
Before
society was unalterably connected by phones and the internet, social movements
often needed a head, a leader – Martin Luther King, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and
Mahatma Gandhi to list a few. Even scientists, like Galileo, had to die for
what they knew to be true. Nowadays this no longer happens, at least not nearly
as often. With digital technologies, leaderless movements occur based on the
zeitgeist of social opinion. “The horizontality of networks supports
cooperation and solidarity while undermining the need for formal leadership”
(Castells 225). In an earlier post I discussed Kony 2012 and that the biggest
weakness of their movement was their leader. I implied that the strongest
social movements are the ones that are leaderless. The more I think about it
the less sure that I am. I think that it depends on the movement and it depends
on the leader. Leaders, like the ones listed at the beginning of this
paragraph, can rally people in a way that cannot be done so easily with
movement based on zeitgeist. In Hunger Games, the rebellion wants Katniss to be
the image of the rebellion. This is similar to but not the same as leading the
rebellion, the movement.
People
often need something outside of themselves to push them to action, a call to
arms. Often in this modern age, call to arms are mistrusted or ignored. Society
has become as cynical as Adorno and Horkheimer. This is one of the reasons that
we don’t change things anymore; we’ve become cynical of the effectiveness of
action, of many small voices joining to be heard. In Hunger Games it is much
more obvious what the government is trying to do, how it subjugates its people
and forces them to watch the murderous hunger games. It is not so easy to spot
the biases and ulterior motives in our world. This makes change difficult. What
do we really want? It’s obvious that the people of Panem want to have more
freedoms and want to not have their children killed. What the people of the US
want? We are not so united. As we fight and bicker amongst ourselves. People in
power do what they want.
The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception by Max
Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno.
Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the
Internet Age by Manuel Castells.
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