Susan McGarry
November 10, 2020
Professor Meyer-Lee
LDR 101
The Hunger Games
Lord of the Flies but add a little spice
We all remember the craze around the Hunger Games series, as it was filmed 20 mins from my hometown I’m sure I do. As the Hunger Games gained notoriety so did the themes and lessons conveyed in the book. However, popularity means that people will call your content into question especially when your content changes media (I.e book to movie). Questions will be raised such as why were there only this amount of this type of actors? Why did the character speak a certain way? Why was the scene shot this way? Etc. This essay will further analyze the book and film adaptation of the Hunger Games asking and answering questions such as these.
One issue regularly brought up revolving around the famous series in the books, Katniss is portrayed as a strong woman. She is the sole provider, she has starved, hunted and risked serious repercussions to support her mother and little sister. In the movie, the director chose to just gloss over it which takes away an important impact on the reader about her character. Not only that but many important scenes were lost during the book to film adaptation. A lot of the meaningful scenes that cause an impact on the reader, whether it be during that scene or how it affects a character later, were lost to the movie. Such as the governers daughter being the one to give Katniss the mockingjay pin after Katniss assumed the girl didn’t like her, or Peeta’s father coming to Katniss before she’s taken away and giving her cookies, or the more impactful scene where we find out that Peeta’s own father told him he thought Katniss would win, not his son. These scenes and more were robbed from viewers, if they had not read the book then they would never know or understand how sad or impactful this book truly is.
Another issue with the film is the representation, in the movie you would see maybe two black actors and certainly very very few of them in the capital. Of color actors were only shown in abundance in one scene which was added into the film and was not from the book. The riot scene, the riots are mostly made up of people of color, was the only scene where we viewers are shown a normal amount of POCs. I promise you in the future that white will not be the only race, Hitler is already dead so lets put that to rest.
To conclude, the book and movie were very different. The movie had a lot of issues, leaving out important scenes, representation, etc. The book did a very good job of causing an impact in its readers, there is a reason why this series caused such stirrings in the fantasy community. People were moved by this book, they could see themselves, their struggles, their issues with the system and society reflected within this book. The movie having stripped the majority of that away is extremely sad and I hope future adaptations are better.
Gupta, Harsh. (Lack Of) Representation of Non Western World in Process of Creation of Web Standards. 29 July 2016. World Wide Consortium (W3C) as an standard setting organization for the world wide web plays a very important role in shaping the web. We focus on the ongoing controversy related to Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) and found that there was a serious lack of participation from people from non western countries. We also found serious lack of gender diversity in the EME debate.
Essentially this article states the data and representation provided in internet sources around the world. Looking at the data charts it is fairly obvious that the non-western world barely gets any representation, which I touch on in a different way in my essay. In my essay I talk about the Hunger Games film being not a representative as it could, or should have been. This article links to my argument that there is barely any representation given to these countries or their peoples.