The Spectacle of Counting: Illuminating Exploitation in The Hunger Games

Abstract

This paper investigates various representations of civic exploitation in The Hunger Games trilogy and its film adaptations. Firstly, I hypothesise how and why quantitative language (i.e. language that expresses acts of quantification) may capture the attention of contemporary audiences. I engage with sections of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle to characterise the spectacle as it appears Panem’s violent, fictional world. In order to better delineate the term ‘violent’, I turn to Rob Nixon’s definition of ‘slow violence’ to differentiate between acts of immediate, explicit violence and unseen, systemic processes of exploitation. Through close readings of the texts, I posit that the diegetic world of Panem uses various attention-grabbing spectacles (numbers, the Games, televisual techniques) to conceal mechanisms of exploitation, and that the novels and films use these same attention-grabbing spectacles to reveal mechanisms of exploitation in a meta way. The question that emerges is whether the series’ employment of Capitol practices leads the extradiegetic audience to identify and problematize these mechanisms or become immersed in them.