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Welcome to those new readers who are checking out this “bookish” site after reading about it in the LA Times this morning!

Taking a tally of those who love and those who loathe the film adaptation of the first novel in Suzanne Collins’ Panem Trilogy, the folks who are voting in the negative are a decided minority, and, frankly, rather apologetic to the Bolsheviks (Russian for “the majority”) who are as often as not enthusiastic, even evangelical, about their feelings. HogwartsProfessor, of course, is something of a contrarian site and much more about books than film. I know serious readers around the world check in here for the view-in-opposition to the critical mass and memes.

So I will oblige them today with two ideas I’m guessing they won’t read anywhere else ideas many of you probably won’t like, especially if you’re as enthusiastic about the film as a fictional Capitol stylist discussing the real Hunger Games.

First thought: Lionsgate director Gary Ross (with a heavy assist from actor Donald Sutherland) hijacked the satirical edge of Hunger Games to write movie makers into the story (1) as heroes martyred to the Capitol-ists they are beholden to in order to have the money they need to make films and (2) as victims of an oligarchic government who punishes them for telling a story ‘against the grain.’ The film means something quite different from the book; it’s ultimately a different story message than the original, and, as you’d expect, it’s one much more sympathetic to Hollywood and the filmmaker’s art.

Second thought: The almost uniform delight of readers, serious and not-so-serious, with this dumbed-down adaptation that is only the narrative shadow of the novel, is evidence that they have been “hijacked,” too, by the altered story Those readers who have read the finale of the Panem Saga know that “hijacking” here doesn’t mean stealing airplanes in transit but having your minds and memories re-shaped and altered via moving screened images. Hunger Games book-fans who believe that the movie is a great adaptation as true to the original as a medium jump like this allows, I’m afraid, are, ahem, Mutt-readers whose memories of their reading experience have been scrambled and re-oriented by the powerful Capitol tracker-jacker serum of film mixed with TinselTown hype.

Watching the movie, in other words, especially watching it repeatedly, all but obliterates many readers’ former understanding, which brain washing effect of movies and television, of course, is a major point or theme of the Katniss Everdeen Saga.

If I’m right on the second point, of course, the hijacked reality of most viewers’ minds at present makes it very unlikely that the readers among them will be receptive to whatever I have to say here. Think of the response of the shackled cave dwellers when they hear that the shadows on Plato’s allegorical cave wall are “Not Real.” I suspect it’s a real possibility that discussion of these two points will be greeted as Katniss was by Peeta on their first meeting in District 13 after his rescue.

But I’ll chance that kind of rejection to point out the “Not Real” quality of the film, the greater irony of it, in the hopes that some of those who entered into the books at some depth will wake up to how we’ve been played.

First Thought: The Star of this Show is Seneca Crane. Katniss who?

The first scene of the film is a Caesar Flickerman interview with Seneca Crane, the last is of President Snow who has just forced Crane to commit suicide. A story is largely about how it is framed — and this story is about the choices and fate of the Gamesmaker, Seneca Crane.

Look for the shiny edge of your memory of the first book and ask yourself: “Real or not real?”

Not real.

Seneca Crane is not a player in the book from which this film is an adaptation. He appears only in name in Catching Fire as the late Seneca Crane and his importance lies in how Katniss uses him in her ‘art attack’ on the Gamesmakers during her Quell mock execution of same. So why did this not present figure become at least as important as the Girl on Fire whose fate he holds in his hands?

Because the Gamesmakers of Hollywood — the establishment of Hollywood directors, writers, and studios — don’t see themselves as the willing agents of the Capitol but the great artists who suffer under the boot of their patrons, the Capitol-ists and government. So the movie meaning shifts to Seneca, the director, and the evil of President Snow, rather than the hijacking power of screened images.

Wasn’t that their only self-respecting and self-important choice? To make it about themselves, the Hollywood Gamesmakers, and their imprisonment as artists to government and big money? Seneca Crane is inserted here as the martyred artist who did the right thing per the Revolutionaries (Haymitch and the Districts) and who pays the ultimate price for his crime, namely, speaking truth to power or letting art become a threat rather than a sop to the people.

And lest you think I’m making this up, please review the comments made by Director Ross and his mentor, Donald Sutherland, about the great improvements they had made to the Hunger Games story by adding the Crane-Snow story line and scenes. We’ve discussed them already here and here.

If you don’t buy that the Gamesmakers of our Capitol have hijacked the movie’s anti-Hollywood theme, there is a test we’ll have in the their Catching Fire adaptation. I think it will be an if-and-only-if type demonstration, too. How do they write up Katniss and the Seneca Crane dummy?

I’m guessing that, if I’m right, they’ll spin Katniss’ assault in Catching Fire‘s training evaluation so it says almost exactly the opposite of what it does in the book. We read that scene as her attack on the Gamesmakers and her telling them all but point blank how she intends to work the Quell so that they all die (as they do, except Plutarch who is on the Rebels’ side and escapes). “You’re next!” in other words. My guess is Lionsgate will film that scene as a parallel iconography of shame in sync with Peeta’s painting of Rue, i.e., “Remember Seneca Crane!” here doesn’t mean “See your future, fellow pigs!” but “Stand by while we avenge the Rebellion martyr’s death!” I bet Katniss draws Crane’s Mephistopheles beard on the dummy, too, in a fairly sympathetic fashion.

Sutherland has recently opened up about his remarkable ambitions for the films here:

This script came and it seemed to me that it was a game changer. That it had the possibility, if it were properly done, to catalyze, motivate, mobilize a generation of young people who were, in my opinion, by and large dormant in the political process. You have Occupy Wall Street and all that, but it has a limited base or it seems to have a limited base. And I hoped and I felt that this could maybe spread out across the country. I don’t care what they do, just so long as they stand up and do something so that they identify the political situation that we’re in. I was thrilled at that possibility.

Plutarch Heavensbee, anyone? More on him in a minute.

You’ll note, if you read the rest of the interview that he had this epiphany after reading the first script, the one by Collins, in which President Snow’s “was at that time a very peripheral part.” You’ll see, too, that, though he is “loathe to use the word genius,” he breaks his own rule to use it for Ross and Lawrence, whose acting genius he likens to Laurence Olivier. Oh, and he hasn’t read the books, only the script, and Ross contacted him to play Snow. So much for Ross’ comments here that Sutherland read the books or book and contacted him about the part.

They are both eager to add that they haven’t altered the story as originally told in any significant way, that Ross wrote in these changes “and Suzanne Collins loved them” (Sutherland), and that “obviously the fact that Suzanne loved it instilled in me that I had been properly calibrated and my tonal sense of the material was coming through” (Ross). I don’t know Suzanne Collins, but allowing for the possibility that she did love and embrace all these changes to her material as “genius,” I think she was snookered. Played. (Or, Queen of Irony that she is, perhaps she just played along.)

It makes sense that there would be scenes from behind the scenes we didn’t get in The Hunger Games, the book, once the screenwriters decided they couldn’t work with the first person narration of the trilogy. But we lose something more than reader identification consequent to exclusive focus on the heroine; we lose the ‘wow’ of a slowly revealed consciousness of being a pawn in the game, just another person caught in the power holder’s metanarrative. We lose, in brief, the brutal ending of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery.

If you haven’t read The Lottery, you should, especially if you want the backdrop of the Reaping in Panem and why nobody raises their hand to take down such a murderous and pointless “reminder” of the Capitol’s worthiness and the Districts’ otherness or unworthiness. We know that Collins is a big Jackson fan. In this very short horror piece, Jackson’s best known work, villagers submit themselves willingly to an age-old superstition masquerading as tradition, in which each family head pulls a slip of paper from a Black Box. The family whose leader pulls the slip with a black dot them has every family member pull a slip. The one from that group that pulls the dotted slip is stoned to death.

Jackson doesn’t reveal this murderous madness and collective imprisonment to unthinking and unjust convention until the last paragraph.

By making the film be about Seneca and Snow, here not the President who is a serpentine symbol of Satan and everything evil (Collins repeatedly refers to him as a snake) but a Machiavellian “bureaucrat” (Sutherland’s word; “I don’t find him scary or terrible”), there is no gradual realization of how profoundly we are in the grip of our culture’s thinking, be it left, right, or off the chart. Without that gradual reveal or sudden reveal at the end — recall Katniss’ shock at Johanna’s openly defiant speech in the Quell — there is no experience of this cathartic difficulty.

What is Donald Sutherland’s metanarrative? That the capitalists are the “scary and terrible” folks and the hippies of the 60′s and 70′s had it right.

Q: Your character is the only one who seems to really understand that there is a world possible outside of the Hunger Games.

Sutherland: Yeah, sure there is. You know, you think when General Electric doesn’t pay tax on four billion dollars they don’t know that there is another world possible where they did pay the bloody tax? Sure they do.

Q: It’s interesting that you could really connect it to the Occupy moment. The underdog speech is something you might hear on conservative radio.

Sutherland: Exactly, yeah. Yeah. Except for Rush [Limbaugh] [laughs]. I bet Lionsgate doesn’t want us to dwell too much on Occupy Wall Street. But you’re right. I went there. I went to Occupy Vancouver. It felt so good. Somewhere around ’74, whatever we were doing was co-opted. It was commercialized. It became a brand and everybody lost heart. I have here [reaches for his briefcase], I have it here I don’t want to take it out, “The Port Huron Statement,” that the SDS made in 1962… Oh god, read it. Read it! Read it! It’s so — it’s just brilliant. It’s really brilliant. It’s brilliant today and I can’t read it because I can’t see properly, but it ends with something to the effect of, “You might think that what we are proposing is unattainable. But we’re proposing that because otherwise what is going to happen is unimaginable.” And that’s what happened.

Ah, the lost Paradise described by the Huronite visionairies! If you’ve read Hoffer’s The True Believer, you recognize in this the secular millenialism of 20th Century Communists and Socialists that they lifted in turn from 19th Century Pie In the Sky and Social Gospel Christians — and you see in in Sutherland just the sort of thinker that becomes the ideological firebrand forever married to the lost cause.

So what?

Roger Ebert in his review of the Hunger Games adaptation notes:

In interviews, Sutherland has equated the younger generation with leftists and Occupiers. The old folks in the Capitol are no doubt a right-wing oligarchy. My conservative friends, however, equate the young with the Tea Party and the old with decadent Elitists. “The Hunger Games,” like many parables, will show you exactly what you seek in it.

“The Hunger Games” is an effective entertainment, and Jennifer Lawrence is strong and convincing in the central role. But the film leapfrogs obvious questions in its path, and avoids the opportunities sci-fi provides for social criticism; compare its world with the dystopias in “Gattaca” or “The Truman Show.”  Director Gary Ross and his writers (including the series’ author, Suzanne Collins) obviously think their audience wants to see lots of hunting-and-survival scenes, and has no interest in people talking about how a cruel class system is using them. Well, maybe they’re right. But I found the movie too long and deliberate as it negotiated the outskirts of its moral issues.

He thinks the story is insufficiently political. Forgive me for wondering how they could have made the subjection of the Districts by the Capitol more the point of the film. But Ebert is right on about left and right claiming the story as their own. Another viewer-non-reader like Ebert and Sutherland wrote at National Review Online, the bastion of internet conservatism, that the Hunger Games is required viewing for Reaganauts looking for inspiration:

Returning home after the movie, I was surprised to read that some liberals were claiming the movie as their own on at least three grounds:

1) Class warfare. The rich 1 percent is living off the impoverished people, sort of an Occupy Wall Street argument. Ha! The rich 1 percent in this movie is in the nation’s capital, apparently with nothing to do except watch reality TV shows and live off the backs of the people. Doesn’t the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area have the highest median income in the country?

2) Eco-alarmism. The tyrannical state (the former U.S.?) arose from cataclysmic environmental abuses. Maybe that is in the book. It is not in the movie. There are some hints that all may not be right in the environment, but this film is no futuristic Inconvenient Truth. When hunting, Katniss sees her first deer in over a year — and promptly takes aim — but the forest nevertheless appears to provide sufficient game to keep Katniss’s family alive. (Evidently, it is the state’s rationing of food that causes widespread hunger outside the capital.) The forest in which the Hunger Game is fought is lush, almost primeval; though one cannot be sure to what extent it is manipulated by the state. What’s more, the heroine is from a coal-mining family, hardly the green movement’s favorite industry.

3) Feminism. The heroine is a feminist archetype, matching wits and strength with the best of them. Well, I am a feminist, too, and I like women who defend their families, fight for their freedom, maintain their compassion, oppose big government, can shoot an apple from a pig’s mouth yards away, and still look great. I am thinking more Sarah Palin than Nancy Pelosi. . . .

Too funny. Everything in literature and film has to be run through the competing narratives of our statist and individualist partisan filters. The difference between this NRO writer and Sutherland, though, is not their shared millenialism, but that he had a big part with Ross in re-shaping the story to be about his narrative. He tells us as much himself. Seneca Crane is a transparency for life in the film industry.

[Snow] thinks that Wes Bentley’s character would probably take over his position. He is 76 years old, He was two years old when the Hunger Games started. And he’s looking for a successor. And he tests Wes’ character. “You’ve allowed this girl. This underdog. Do you like underdogs? You’ve allowed her to take some kind of position of power.” …When you fail, you die. You’re not really of any use. You have your chances. It’s kind of the same in this business these days, you know? You have that one chance and you either succeed or fail.

It’s not just Sutherland that sees the film about an exposition of the oh-so-relevant plight of the artist under the capitalist thumb. Long-suffering Lenny Kravitz, born sucking on the proverbial silver spoon of access and privilege, also sees this as the “broccoli” being smuggled in with the food the kid likes:

[T]he cool thing about this project, The Hunger Games, is that it’s like sneaking in the broccoli to the kid.

LK: “Yeah, most definitely. I think so, and I think that’s why it’s going to be so appealing to not just kids, but I’m here in LA and I’m seeing friends who are like in their 40s, 50s, 60s—they’re like ‘we can’t wait for this movie!’ And I’m like ‘really? You can’t wait? You know about this?’ But everyone knows about it. And whether it started with kids and then the parents started reading the books, I don’t know how it worked, but adults find those messages, like you said, they find the broccoli within.”

Could you relate to this character in the sense that he’s an artist and you’re an artists who communicates through your medium? Because Cinna is a fascinating character in that he’s really telling a story with the costumes he creates.

LK: “Yeah. Of course, of course. And also people trying to control your artistry too. Because he’s an artist, and he’s a great designer, but he’s working under the government. Almost kind of like how musicians worked under the kings, whether you were Mozart or whoever, there were court composers and people that wrote for the king, and the king said ‘you know, you can’t put that note in because that’s an evil note or whatever.’ So yeah, although I have creative control in my music and always have. That was the first thing when I signed, I have to have creative control, and I got that. A lot of musicians don’t have that. But I know what it’s like for people to want to control it, it happens all the time, because for them, you’re all about money.”

You’re a commodity.

LK: “Yeah. It’s like you had that big hit, so they want you to do that again. Well, it’s too late, it’s already been done and now we have to move on to the next thing. Or, the fad right now is—you know—electronic gadgets. Well, I’m not into electronic gadgets. So, you know, people are always trying to control.”

MTV, the ultimate industry lap dog perhaps, loves the film; believe it or not, their reviewer, a self-described “fan of the book,” says the movie is a better telling of the story than the book. Now, I’m guessing that is so over the top even for MTV that it was written to generate traffic, which I’m guessing it did (as we’ll discuss, there is a limit to hijacking among readers). What reasons does he give, though, for the improved version the film is? Well, for one thing, the movie is “to the letter” faithful to the original:

The Capitol. The Cornucopia. Rue’s song. The cave scene. Heck, even the muttations, weird as they are. All of these things, written about vividly in the books, come to startling life in Ross’ hands. You get all the familiar beats and scenes and interactions from Collins’ fantastic tale, faithfully rendered to the letter. But the subtlety in the director’s adaptation, helped along greatly by the cool score from James Newton Howard and T-Bone Burnett, elevates what was great about the source material to brand-new heights. That’s what you want from an adaptation — elevation, enhancement — and to that end, “Hunger Games” succeeds fantastically, in ways “Twilight” and even “Harry Potter” never fully achieved.

Amazing. I don’t doubt Josh Wigler’s honesty in saying he’s read the book, but he hasn’t read it more than once. For reasons of economy with time, I’m guessing, and desire to slow the Peeta-Katniss relationship to “an evolving one of trust with Peeta” (Ross) almost every scene with Katniss and Peeta is turned upside-down and is anything but “rendered to the letter.” Not the scene on the rooftop. Not Rue’s death. Not the Bakery Save flashbacks or the Cave.  Not the train rides. What is he thinking? I won’t bore you with the changes made to the Cornucopia finale, Rue’s song, or the muttations; I’m pretty sure I don’t need to.

But this supposed fidelity is Mr. Wigler’s afterthought, and so off the mark that I have to wonder if it isn’t intentional hyperbole to raise controversy and fan ire about his “better than the book” idea (I prefer thinking of people as acting intentionally rather than from stupidity, alas, even when the former almost always involve some degree of the latter). The big improvements in the movie, he says, are its liberating us from the confining perspective of the narrator and, bigger, the inclusion of Seneca Crane.

Katniss aside, the real human star here just might be Seneca Crane. Wes Bentley delivers a great turn as the gamemaker, who has a smaller role in the “Hunger Games” novel, but a crucial, movie-opening part to play in Ross’ film. Without Katniss’ perspective, we’re allowed to spend time with Seneca not just in the control room — which is completely awesome and another point in the movie’s favor, by the by — but also opposite President Snow. Bentley and Donald Sutherland share several scenes that do not exist in Collins’ novel. Including these moments in the movie helps pave the way for what’s to come in subsequent “Hunger Games” movies like “Catching Fire” and the rumored two-part “Mockingjay.” In other words, Seneca’s increased screen time is a huge boost for the overall “Hunger Games” mythology. It also doesn’t hurt that he has the greatest beard in the history of the universe.

As I said above, I understand the inflated use of Crane and Snow (and Flickerman and Templesmith…) to compensate for the absence of the narrative voice in the books and the need for a much collapsed exposition. But Crane’s character is invented whole cloth and becomes a sympathetic, even admirable and enviable figure. He’s the guy in charge of the “completely awesome” tech control center where white frocked antiseptic technocrats coldly arrange children’s deaths inventively. He’s the one that buys into Haymitch’s star crossed lovers” idea that leads to the first rule change. And, in his death consequent to Katniss blowing the Games up in his face, we’re actually asked to sympathize with a Gamesmaker, the victim of Government “control” of artists, as Kravitz has it.

This is a great improvement, we’re told, because it will set us up for future movies. I think I see where this is going. The real hero of the not real future is… Plutarch Heavensbee, the artist that works so he gets to be the government official directing the art. How do we get there unless we see Crane as a martyr or victim to be avenged?

Let me play the incendiary part of the blogger fond of hyperbole here to sum up this first idea. Y’know, to build traffic to the site.

Sutherland and Ross don’t see themselves as part of the Capitol machinery Collins is savaging in her Everdeem Trilogy. The director and once-peripheal-now-near-lead actor believe they are the long-suffering rebel artists needing liberation from the Freak Show and Groveling of Hollywood to its capitalist masters. Hence Peeta’s diminution as artist speaking truth to power (sacrificial love, anyone?) and the invented story line of Seneca Crane and President Snow. JLawr is perfect for Katniss in the story retold from this Gamesmaker as hero point of view because the real focus needs to be diminished into just eye candy and a tease story to put viewers in the seats — to watch the real story of our heroic film makers!

Really, saying the movie is better than the book is to confess you are a complete vidiot unable to experience imaginative text. Not to mention a little hostility to the novels’ subtext and quite a bit of identification with the Hollywood elite who despise the proles in the Capitol their films are for (not to mention the Capitol-ists they are beholden to). This elite and their media/fandom hangers on imagine themselves as the real voice of the disenfranchised “underdog” proletariat Snow/Sutherland tells Crane he needs to hate as “other.”

The film has hijacked the story, so Peeta and Katniss are witless story elements and the heroes are Haymitch and Seneca, fighting against the real power holders. How about that “bitter cup” chalice that Crane had to drink from in the end? Nice little Garden. Not especially subtle.

The first point of disappointment in the film, then, why it and the over-the-top enthusiasm of Rotten Tomato and MTV reviewers, is the Sutherland-Ross insertion of the Capitol is OK message and themselves into The Hunger Games. They’ve worked themselves into the story, not as the exploitative Capitol-ites that they are, but as the heroes of the piece — hence all those film mavens married to the Cave Shadow Show industry have greeted it with hosannahs. It confirms all their beliefs but betrays Collins’ larger message, a message of Real/Not Real they’re going to miss entirely, being the vessel of ‘Not Real’ all the way.

Second thought: Watching Movies is a a Near Sure Means to Being Hijacked by Movie Makers

We all know how hard it is to keep a mental picture of a book character after watching film adaptation of that work. Does even the most fervent Gone with the Wind re-reader see Rhett Butler as anyone but Clark Gable? Ms. Rowling says she has a different person in her head for Harry Potter than Daniel Radcliffe, which gives her another entry in the Category “Only Person on Earth Who…”

This obliteration of even dearly held mental pictures by movies isn’t an accident; it’s a function on how the mind views screened images projected in sequence. As Jerry Mander, real mame, another television professional in recovery, explains in his important though inevitably neglected book, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television that screened images are hypnotic because they bypass conscious filtering in their speed. After detailing the several studies linking television viewing’s mental activity (or lack of it) and posture with hypnosis subjects, Mander writes:

I do not think of myself as hypnotized while watching television.

I prefer another frequently used phrase. “When I put on the television, after a while there’s the feeling that images are just pouring into me and there’s nothing I’m able to do about them.”

This liquid quality of television imagery derives from the simple fact that television sets its own visual pace. One image is always evolving into the next, arriving in a stream of light and proceeding inward to the brain at its own electronic speed. The viewer has no way to slow the flow, except to turn off the set altogether. If you decide to watch television, then there’s no choice but to accept the stream of electronic images as it comes.

The first effect of this is to create a passive mental attitude. Since there is no way to stop the images, one merely gives over to them. More than this, one has to clear all channels of reception to allow them in more cleanly. Thinking only gets in the way.

There is a second difficulty. Television information seems to be received more in the unconscious than the conscious regions of the mind where it would be possible to think about it. I first felt this was true based on my own television viewing. I noticed how difficult it was to keep mentally alert while watching television. Even so the images kept flowing into me. I have since received many similar descriptions from correspondents.

One friend, Jack Edelson, described his feeling that “the images seem to pass right through me, they go way inside, past my consciousness into a deeper level of my mind, as if they were dreams.”

As we study how the TV images are formed, it is possible to understand how Edelson’s description might be keenly accurate.

I have described the way the retina collects impressions emanating from dots. The picture is formed only after it is well inside our brain. The image doesn’t exist in the world, and so cannot be observed as you would observe another person, or a car, or a fight. The images pass through your eyes in a dematerialized form, invisible. They are reconstituted only after they are already inside your head.

Perhaps this quality of nonexistence, at least in concrete worldly form, disqualifies this image information from being subject to conscious processes: thinking, discernment, analysis. You may think about the sound but not the images.

Television viewing may then qualify as a kind of wakeful dreaming, except that it’s a stranger’s dream, from a faraway place, though it plays against the screen of your mind.

The stillness required of the eyes while watching the small television screen is surely an important contributor to this feeling of being bypassed by the images as they proceed merrily into our unconscious minds. There are hundreds of studies to show that eye movement and thinking are directly connected. The act of seeking information with the eyes requires and also causes the seeker/viewer to be alert, active, not passively accepting whatever comes. There are corollary studies which show that when the eyes are not moving, but instead are staring zombie-like, thinking is diminished.

Television images are not sought, they just arrive in a direct channel, all on their own, from cathode to brain. If indeed this means that television imagery does bypass thinking and discernment, then it would certainly be more difficult to make use of whatever information was delivered into your head that way. If you see a person standing in your living room, you can say, “There is a person; how do I feel about this?” If, however, the person is not perceived until she is constructed inside your unconscious mind, you’d have to bring the image up and out again, as it were, in order to think about it. The process is similar to the way we struggle to keep our dream images after waking.

If television images have any similarity to dream imagery then this would surely help explain a growing confusion between the concrete and the imaginary. Television is becoming real to many people while their lives take on the quality of a dream. It would also help explain recent studies, quoted by Marie Winn and many others, that children are showing a decline in recallable memory and in the ability to learn in such a way that articulation and the written word are usable forms of expression. We may have entered an era when information is fed directly into the mass subconscious. If so, then television is every bit Huxley’s hypnopaedic machine and Tausk’s influencing machine. (Arguments, pp 200-201)

The validity of each of Mander’s arguments, I have to think, are visible all around us except to those hijacked by the glowing screen. This one, though, is most important for understanding not only why movies wash out our imagination produced ideas of what a story looks like, but also why book lovers may whine a little (or a lot) about what was “done to their song” while they still go to the movie-plex to see the next book they love distorted and turned inside out. (Hat tip to the HogPro All-Pros Arabella and RevGeorge who opted out of this movie. Talk about non-conformists!)

But, you’re saying, “Movies and television are really different technologies and experiences, John, You’re using an ‘apples’ argument to slam ‘oranges’.” Movies and television are really different, but as Mander explains in his findings about hypnosis, watching films in theaters is more likely to bring you into a stupor-like state and prone to suggestion. The darkness, the feeling of expectation, the crowd confirmation with laughter and tears of your feelings, the size of the screen, etc.

And the technology? The relevant difference between teevee and cinema is neglible; frame rate or the number of frames turned over per second is 24-30 frames or images per second for both media. Those rates are both twice, almost triple the speed necessaryto dupe the mind into believing there is continuous action (the mind cannot process images with conscious distinction faster than 10 per second). Al the images are received, however, and enter the mind, making impressions on the subconscious.

This is what Collins, the self-described television writer in recovery, is describing in her depiction of the Capitol’s hijacking methods. Beetee talked to Katniss after Peeta attacked her to explain what had happened to her:

“I’m sure you remember how frightening it was [being stung by tracker-jackers]. Did you also suffer mental confusion in the aftermath?” asks Beetee.

“A sense of being unable to judge what was true and what was false? Most people who have been stung and lived to tell about it report something of the kind.”

Yes. That encounter with Peeta. Even after I was clearheaded, I wasn’t sure if he had saved my life by taking on Cato or if I’d imagined it.

“Recall is made more difficult because memories can be changed.” Beetee taps his forehead. “Brought to the forefront of your mind, altered, and saved again in the revised form. Now imagine that I ask you to remember something – either with a verbal suggestion or by making you watch a tape of the event – and while that experience is refreshed, I give you a dose of tracker jacker venom. Not enough to induce a three-day blackout. Just enough to infuse the memory with fear and doubt. And that’s what your brain puts in long-term storage.”

Now read this ‘Games Deserves a Second Viewing’ from a big Hunger Games fan, a giantess in the fandom, who was very disappointed in her first experience of the adaptation but loved it on her second trip:

There was no goodbye visit from Mr. Mellark with cookies. No lamb stew. No Cinna twirling his finger at Katniss in silent support or tapping of his chin to tell her to hold her head high. The Capitol electrical current hair dryer didn’t make it. The District 11 bread gift was eaten by the editors along with Haymitch’s goodie basket. The mutts were merely dogs. Katniss doesn’t run into Haymitch’s arms after recovery and receive a “Nice job, sweetheart.”. She never bangs on the glass in a desperate attempt to get to Peeta and she never accepts a handful of flowers from him before breaking his heart.

As Kimmy turned to me and said, “Wasn’t that amazing?!” I could only muster a nod because I was so conflicted and mad at myself and shocked that it was already over. How could I have let that happen to myself? Why did I go in with so many specific scenes cemented into my head? I guess I just couldn’t help myself.

I went to the midnight showing at my local theater here in Hawaii and found that with all the expectations, tension, and anticipation gone, I was finally able to just relax and watch the movie. It no longer felt like I was watching it on fast forward. After the Games is still a bit too rushed for me, but in general, my second viewing was so superior to the first that I’m pretty sure a lot of people are going to see ‘The Hunger Games’ twice. Plus, I picked up on quite a few things I’d missed the first time. I cried way more than I did the first time as well.

Yet I knew in my heart that the movie had still managed to stay astonishingly true to the book, the story of Katniss, and the larger message of the books so there was no denying that the movie was fantastic. It was just a different experience, something I thought I knew going in, but didn’t realize fully until Thursday night. All those changes were understandable and in the two weeks I had to think about it, almost all of them were in the grand scheme of things, necessary.

If you’re not planning on seeing it again because you’re just mad about everything that was different about it, believe me when I say that there’s a good chance you’ll change your mind if you go again. If you’re anything like me, you’ll need that first time just to “loosen up your corset” and the second time to experience it for real.

No, seeing it again doesn’t make it more “real.” I’ve seen the movie twice and I’m pretty sure my understanding of the books held up to the brain-wash, despite my tight corset. Because were doing Haymitch talk, “Repeated viewing, sweetheart, is a second dose,” or “stiffer drink” as the well sauced mentor might say, I’m guessing a stronger hypnotic hijacking of your recall about the story you love. A second sip of the Kool-Aid.

I wish this were unique to this Mockingjay.net reviewer. It isn’t. There are film ‘true believers’ all over the net who, if they don’t have the mind-as-mush or calculating motivation of an MTV “better than the movie!” reviewer, still suggest this story is a turning point for Hollywood and the first day of a Brave New World. I’ve just missed the subtlety and the anti-television scene as aside (that every movie viewer took as a “You’re not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy” moment).

Every one is entitled to their opinion and to some respect. Please overlook Mr. Crankypant’s disregard for others here. My opinion is this, in something of a palindrome-ish nutshell, though it promises to make my name radioactive in the Hunger Games fandom:

The Hunger Games story was hijacked by the Hijackers vilified in that story as Hijackers — and the Hijacker’s big screen story version has hijacked even the minds of those readers who understood the anti-hijacking message of the stories.

Which ironic and almost universal event of the last weekend only makes Suzanne Collins’ point about the power and danger of the Gamesmakers, doesn’t it?

Don’t loosen the strings keeping your mind together. Tighten that cranial corset, skip the second movie viewing or the first if you’ve put it off, shoot your television, and revisit the Collins’ wonderful Panem novels. They’re “genius,” right?

Jonathan Haight, author of several books on how our minds work, most recently of The Righteous Mind, has written about the relationship of our conscious and deliberate thinking with our a-rational, instinctive self in terms of an elephant and its rider:

The mind is divided in many ways, but the division that really matters is between conscious/reasoned processes and automatic/implicit processes. These two parts are like a rider on the back of an elephant. The rider’s inability to control the elephant by force explains many puzzles about our mental life, particularly why we have such trouble with weakness of will. Learning how to train the elephant is the secret of self-improvement.

As often as not, as Jim Geraughty puts it, the rider isn’t directing or even in charge of the elephant but left rationalizing and justifying the actions it doesn’t control.

One key conclusion from Haidt’s research is that most people think backward. In other words, they come to a conclusion based on a gut or “irrational” assessment, and then work backward to look for supporting evidence and reasoning.

If your loosened corset is in a twist right now because I’ve explained too baldly how this film adaptation is a re-telling of Hunger Games to make us love those the books tell us to hate and that the reason you were highjacked is because that’s what teevee and movie technology does to human minds (especially those who watch all the time), before you blast me for my arrogance, answer these questions with your self=reflection cap on.

1. Have you ever spent a conscious week, month, or year without television, movie, or YouTube video? Has it been a long time since you’ve taken even a day off from moving screened images?
2. Accepting Haight’s elephant analogy, do you think this viewing strengthens the thinking rider in his mastery of the behemoth beneath or trains the beast to want and do what the Gamesmaker wants it to want and to do?

I understand that my view is a reflection of my personal narrative, even snobbery, about the virtues of books and the dissipating, demeaning effects of watching screened images that move. Don’t blame me, though, for noting here at post’s end that the love of this hijacked adaptation by even serious readers is a function of their elephant having been very well trained by the Gamesmakers in Hollywood and Television land. I won’t be surprised if I’m stampeded by elephants without reins, hypnotized by Gamesmakers, whose riders are shouting out justifications for my demise.

As always, though, I do covet your comments and corrections to my contrarian posture. Fire away, defenders of hijacking! Stay tuned, everyone, for five more days of Hunger Games month here at HogwartsProfessor.com!

Hogwarts Professor

Two years ago, I read The Hunger Games for the first time and decided I would start using the novel as part of my Expository Writing courses at Mayland Community College. On March 23, I had the great pleasure of seeing the film adaptation of the novel on opening day in the company of my students and colleagues at a special showing at the great old Yancey Theater in Burnsville, NC, just up the road from where large portions of the movie were filmed. Though I took notes the whole time, much to the amusement of my students (who laughed at the dandelions in my braid, too), I won’t share all of my many thoughts on the movie, though there will be spoilers for non-readers (Not many of those here, anyway, I imagine!). Join me after the jump to see what aspects of the film I (and my fellow MCC readers) found most satisfactory, and what left us feeling unsatisfied.

Point of View
One of the greatest challenges in adapting a novel like The Hunger Games is in showing a story that is, in text, told from one character’s perspective, and often through her memories. Rather than sticking with Katniss’s perspective, the film, unlike the book, is free to travel to President Snow’s rose garden or back to District 12 for reaction shots. Sometimes, this works very well, as in allowing us to know a little more about Seneca Crane’s “sticky end” or in seeing how the events of Catching Fire are already being set in motion.

Most interesting was the use of Caesar Flickerman and Claudius Templesmith in the roles of sportscasters commenting on the events in the arena, adding information about the effects of Tracker Jacker venom, for example. This is a great touch, echoing the Games as the brutal next step in competitive sports. Especially effective is the rundown of the fallen tributes, with an anthem that sounds very close to the music used during sports broadcasts, and the promo shots of the tributes that look identical to the ones used of athletes. This point of view also takes us to the Gamemakers’ war room, where Seneca Crane conducts his masterpiece, using the fire not to drive the Tributes together so much as to keep Katniss from finding the edge of the arena as her mentor once did.

The drawback to the shifting perspective is that we lose what is one of the most compelling aspects of the book: Katniss’s voice. Since the film makers avoid Twilight-style internal monologue and our heroine is a perpetual introvert who admits she “no good at saying something,” we miss much of her charm, her history, and lines like “Thanks for the knife,” or “stupid people are dangerous,”which she only thinks and doesn’t say.

The film also misses the chance to fill in gaps that the book’s perspective leaves: how did Thresh die? how did Peeta cope with the death of the girl from 8 (he is not sent back to dispatch her in the film, but present when the careers do so, it seems)?

I Can See My House from Here!

One of the most wonderful aspects of the film is its use of the Appalachian mountains I know so well. The sights, the sounds of Appalachian summer are captured beautifully. The “laurel hells” (rhododendron patches) and rivers so common in this region are featured prominently and make a wonderful backdrop. District 12 looks appropriately bleak, though only readers will truly appreciate the struggles of its residents to survive. There are a few poignant glimpses of District 12 misery, from an old man picking at bones to a mother mournfully fussing over her son’s clothes before the Reaping, but not much explanation of the Everdeen and Hawthorne families’ trials and reliance on game.

As indicated in the trailers, Madge Undersee has been written out to streamline the plot, which makes me wonder about the possibility that Maysilee will also vanish when Catching Fire hits the big screen (an inevitability with the ticket sales yesterday). Yet, the tone of District 12 is perfect, from the worn-down look of the residents to their silent salute. The music also works well for the tone, though most of the songs on the recently released soundtrack don’t actually appear in the film (the best of them, the Civil Wars’s “Kingdom Come” appears with two others in the credits, but more on the music in a future post).

Very effective is the subtle depiction of the Everdeen family dynamic. Katniss is clearly the mother figure, and Jennifer Lawrence’s height means she is actually taller than the actress who plays her mother. Paula Malcomson does a wonderful, understated job of almost doing something, like tucking in Prim’s “duck tail,” but she hesitates just long enough for Katniss to swoop in and play momma. It’s wonderful, and very easy to miss, but one of my favorite aspects of the film.

Beauty Pageant

From the prologue which explains the development of the Games, to the speech of President Snow, the word “pageant ” is often used, a wonderful reminder of the way in which our pageants, from the meat markets of beauty contests to organized sports, are reflected in Suzanne Collins’s social commentary. Other nice touches along these lines are the great Tribute costumes, complete with commentary straight from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and outfits echoing each District.

Particularly nice are the Greco-Roman winged helmets on Cato and Clove (District 2 does house the Capitol’s hovercraft), Rue and Thresh’s overalls and wreaths, and the appalling gold cowboy outfits on the District 10 tributes, all perfect examples of the patronizing costumes Cinna deplores. Costumes in general work beautifully, from the candy-coated Elizabethan look of the Capitol to the worn and weary clothes worn in the Districts.

Character Study

Though the film format requires the removal or streamlining of numerous characters (Lavinia is only background with no backstory, the preps little more than featured extras), others are pleasant surprises. Jennifer Lawrence is fine as Katniss, though sometimes a bit whiny for our girl on fire, especially since many of her trials, including the lack of water, don’t happen in the film. She is fantastic every time she says “thank you,” a struggle for this character, and in her interactions with Cinna and Prim.
Lenny Kravitz is a lovely Cinna, and his performance is just one I wish we saw in more detail. Josh Hutcherson’s Peeta is quite effective, from his strength to his humor to his way with words and his very believable devotion to Katniss.

My greatest delight, however, came in the unlikely person of Woody Harrleson, whose Haymitch is fantastic. I had my doubts about him, but he does very well, capturing beautifully the terrible job of trying to keep two tributes alive when he has never succeeded in bringing back even one.

Surprisingly impressive is Alexander Ludwig as Cato, who gives a remarkably layered performance that indicates the Career’s instability early on and which demonstrates Cato’s awareness, at the end, that he’s just a gamepiece, too. I also loved the touch of his shoe soles, which are hobnailed like a Roman soldier’s and the implication that there is an attraction with Glimmer (whom he nonetheless abandons to the trackerjackers). All the Tribute actors do well, including our heart-wrenching Rue and a shockingly small Clove. Though “she be but little, she is fierce,” as Shakespeare might say, yet, in death, she is remarkably sympathetic, and when she falls still, we are reminded that she, too, is a damaged little girl.

The Fallen

Many parents are concerned about the violence, including those terrible Tribute deaths, but the film is carefully directed to avoid the worst of the gore. The trackerjacker attack leaves Glimmer disfigured but not the gory mess of the novel, and the most disturbing (for me and most of my students, anyway) element–the mutts’ being made to look like the Tributes–is not noticeable. They are just big, awful canines that look like a dog-lover’s vision of what should be set loose on Michael Vick.

Cato’s injuries (with make-up done by Conor McCullough, as is Peeta’s fantastic camouflage)also add to his pitiful condition, though he is not encased in the armor that make his long mauling so very horrible in the book.

Still, Rue’s death is terrible, though I loved the contrast between the way Katniss gently wraps the child’s fingers around a bouquet of Queen Anne’s Lace and the way she breaks Glimmer’s fingers to get the bow. Those limp children are shown enough to remind us of the seriousness of the situation. In contrast, one of my biggest complaints with the film is how little Katniss and Peeta really seem to be in danger of dying. His leg injury medicine is a topical cream, not a syringe for blood poisoning, and they both recover very quickly in the cave and seem fairly hale and healthy at their victory (no third near-death for Peeta in the hovercraft).

The Moral of the Story

And, of course, that’s not my only concern with the film. Though, on the whole, I was very impressed with the efforts to remain faithful to the book, sadly absent is the text’s allegorical resonance. Without Peeta’s near-deaths and resurrections, Katniss’s near dehydration followed by water and fire, or even the blackberries at the beginning (though Katniss does trade some kind of berry, blueberries I think, at the Hob), we lose some of the best allegorical and artistic elements of the novels. Some remain, though sometimes in subtle ways: the rose references, along with the fire, of course.

The cautionary tale elements work very well in the preaching against warfare: the propo that looks like it was made by the Third Reich, the emphasis on the military training of the Careers (which turns them into psychopaths), and Haymitch’s portrayal as damaged veteran. Two nice Civil War references come in Atala’s reminder to the Tributes that disease and exposure are just as likely to kill them as their opponents are and in the District 11 grain riot that includes elements of the civilian bread riots of the 1860s.

The dangers of entertaining ourselves to death are also clear, though the violence is criticized far more than the other soul-damaging effects of celebrity and entertainment saturation.

Overall, the film does what a film based on a book should do: it leaves us wanting more. There’s not enough time with Rue, not enough time in the cave (no lamb stew), not enough Cinna, not enough at the end. For those, we have to go to the book. Many viewers have not read the book yet, and, in that regard, the movie will inspire them to read, one of the best jobs a book-based film can do.

The hype surrounding the movie has also allowed me to engage in numerous conversations about the depth of the novel, encouraging deep-mining reading from those who have been only “surface-dwellers” in the story. Though nearly every single person at my showing had read the book (some of us repeatedly), most of us found the film satisfactory but not completely satisfying, just whetting our appetites for more reading and conversation on the books. For that, of course, this is the place.

Two of my students were extras in the movie

Hogwarts Professor

I can’t believe it but Harry Potter actor Jamie Waylett has been sentenced to two years in prison … and you know why … because he was a part of a violent mob which took to the streets during last summer’s riots in London.

Waylett is only 22 and he played Hogwarts bully Vincent Crabbe in six of the films. It was proved that Waylett joined a gang of at least four people trying to use a bomb.

Judge Simon Carr sentenced the actor to two years for violent disorder and 12 months for handling stolen goods.

The star completely accepts his guilt and further punishment.

I am so sad!

ReadingHarry

It has been 15 years this summer, believe it or not, since Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was published by Bloomsbury in Ireland and the United Kingdom, and Bloomsbury is  having a celebration! No surprise there, of course, but you may be disappointed to learn that you are not invited.

Here’s the thing… They want to discover the “biggest Harry Potter fan in the UK and Ireland,” which since the late 18th Century at least, has not included the United States. Scholastic will have to throw their own party next year for those of us on the left side of the pond.

The rules of this contest, if a preview of what Scholastic might attempt, are fascinating. They are not, I’m glad to report, looking for the biggest fan, i.e., one they could weigh or determine with a tape measure. No, they’re asking booksellers and librarians to nominate the readers they believe to be the most devoted and engaged members of fandom, however they choose to define that.

I’m guessing Bloomsbury is hoping the nominating adults will be choosing children as their nominees. That may be quite the trick for librarians who are at least as serious Potter-philes as any teen or young adult (as at left, librarians all, in Arizona). Let me know what you think of this UK party you cannot join in the comment boxes below.

Hogwarts Professor

Go ahead and walk on over to Amazon’s ‘Best Seller’s Page.’ At the time of this writing, the world’s biggest bookseller — with over six million titles available for your purchase if their marketing is to be believed (and why doubt it?) — the top three books are The Hunger Games trilogy. Number Five is the set package of the same books and number fifteen is the hardcover of the first book (I suspect it would be listed higher, even at *1, except for the publication of the trade paperback). The trilogy and set hold the same top five positions in Goliath’s list of Best Sellers of 2012.

There hasn’t been this kind of chart dominance since Harry Potter and Twilight, and, as Harry’s adventures were all published before the world went Kindle mad (hence PotterMore, etc.), The Hunger Games have set records there Harry won’t touch soon. Ms. Collins is officially Kindle’s Best Selling author. Ever. The Kindle editions of the trilogy are also numbers one, two, and three in the Kindle store.

Scholastic and other book sellers are paying attention and they’re doing everything possible to put out ancillary guides to the books for Hunger Games readers wanting more and some schlock for movie viewers to carry around and look out before the film gets out to the Districts Friday. Below the jump I list the first fourteen titles out of the gate in the order of their Amazon rank, from literary guides to cookbooks (two of those). Sadly, only the Scholastic ‘companion pieces’ are listed in the Amazon Hunger Games Store, so this list may be incomplete. Please share any others you have seen or found listed elsewhere!

Coming in first, of course, the movie tie-ins from the publisher of note…

The Hunger Games: Official Illustrated Movie Companion (Scholastic) #363

But the cookbook is right up there!

Hunger Games Cookbook: From Lamb Stew to “Groosling” – More than 150 Recipes Inspired by The Hunger Games Trilogy (Adams) #515

The Hunger Games Tribute Guide (Scholastic) *522

The World of the Hunger Games (Scholastic) #597

The Girl Who Was on Fire: Your Favorite Authors on Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games Trilogy (Smart Pop) *2507

And then a big drop in the sales numbers…

The Hunger Games Companion: The Unauthorized Guide to the Series (St. Martin’s Griffin) * 8228

Guide to the Hunger Games (Plexus) *15594

The Hunger Games Literature Guide: Common Core Standards-Based Teaching Guide (Secondary Solutions) *46467

How about these Gospel Tie-Ins?

The Hunger Games and the Gospel (Patheos) *12275 Kindle

— Author’s Blog Post on Gospel (Hat tip, Deborah!)

The Gospel According to The Hunger Games (Ann Duncan) *3581 Kindle

Study Guides I, II, III

The Hunger Games (Golgotha) *12297 Kindle

Catching Fire (Golgotha) *22177 Kindle

Mockingjay (Golgotha) *7001 Kindle

An Unofficial Hunger Games Cookbook and Survival Guide: How to dine, make wine, and hook a fish by line  (Amazon Digital) Kindle *81247

Please share your reviews if you’ve picked up or actually read any of these books, and, again, please let me know about any Hunger Games knock-off titles I’ve missed!

Hogwarts Professor

A very good friend from Marine Corps years in Okinawa, Dr. Arthur Remillard, now teaches Religious Studies at St. Francis University. In my regular correspondence with him, I shared my interest in The Hunger Games; he picked up the first novel in the series  as an impulse buy at an airport. He has since shared his thoughts on the lead-off book and I have his permission to share them here as a launchpad to my speculations about the religious faith implicit to the Everdeen Saga:

About the book… I can see why you are jumping on this.  In terms of style, the story moves swiftly and the author has a unique gift in her ability to use words to create vivid scenes, yet keep the story moving at the same time.  And it is thoughtful enough that I didn’t feel stupider (is that a word?) for having read it.  The Christian imagery pretty much hit me in the forehead like a hammer.  Easter and Pentecost symbolism in no short supply, with bread and fire images on every other page.  I wonder if the author is a Methodist, or wrote with Methodist influence.  The flame and the cross matched by the male and female lead… Wesley’s notion of “sanctifying grace” appearing in the slow awareness that winning the game was merely a prelude to a more complicated battle ahead.  Etc.

Then again, I suspect that like nearly every author of this genre, she watched or read Joseph Campbell and plugged and chugged with this rather unique, apocalyptic story line.  That is, ultimately, what I suspect is appealing here.  The American amygdala is on hyper alert, with the media deluge of gloom and doom.  Popular culture has seized on this evolutionary response to concentrate on threat, most notably with the proliferation of zombie books, movies, and television.  So the Hunger Games enters this door with a classic quest narrative, one that weaves together Old Testament liberation narratives, New Testament notions of sacrificial love, AND the story of America’s colonial rebellion.

There are about ten posts or the better part of a small book in unpacking just the ideas in my friend’s last sentence, but I’ll put that off for now to focus on his hypothesis that Mrs. Pryor, who, like Mrs. Murray, uses her maiden name as her nom de plume, is or was once a Methodist.

The note above gives two points of evidence that support this idea: the bread and fire imagery so predominant in the series’ lead characters, Katniss and Peeta, and the “sanctifying Grace” idea of salvation beginning an uphill adventure rather than a “once and done” born again experience. Let’s look at those first.

On bread and fire, “John Wesley often referred to himself as a ‘brand plucked out of the fire’ (Zecheriah 3:2; Amos 4:11)” because of his being rescued miraculously from a burning home as a child and Christ as Bread is an aspect of Methodist belief. Hymn 906, for example, in the Methodist Hymnal begins:

BREAD of the world, in mercy broken!
Wine of the soul, in mercy shed!
By whom the words of life were spoken,
And in whose death our sins are dead!

One of John Wesley’s signature lines, however, was one that might have been tattooed to Katniss by her Capitol Stylists if they’d been able to get past Haymitch’s protection: “Catch on fire and others will love to come watch you burn.” Wesley, of course, is referring to the Holy Spirit, who descends on the Disciples of Christ and the Theotokos at Pentecost in the form of “tongues of fire.” For a book series that features a “Girl on Fire” and which is a not very subtle story of her consequent total transformation as a Fire-Mutt or Piebald Phoenix at story’s end, the connection is a natural one.

On “sanctifying grace,” you’ll have to note that Methodist soteriology is a three step process of  prevenient and justifying graces leading to conversion, sanctifying grace cleansing us in our life of faith consequent to baptism (saved by faith in a life of mission and good works…), and our glorification hereafter.

The third and final step Wesley sees in salvation is glorification. This is the end result of our Christian life.  It includes the changing of our mortal state to become “like him” (1 John 3:2).  Wesley, however, sees glorification as changing not just the state of humankind but of all creation, that was corrupted by the fall of Adam.  In that day, not only our salvation, but the redemption of all the cosmos will be complete.

It is not a great stretch to see this progressive idea of salvation ending in a world redeeming glorification as the backdrop theology of Katniss Everdeen’s fictional transformation from Diana of the Seam, the pure natural woman in a fallen world, first into a Joan of Arc inspiring the downtrodden by her sacrificial love after her Reaping, and finally into something of a World Redemptrix in her heroic and life-risking acceptance of the Mockingjay-Phoenix role.

Why that isn’t a stretch — which I’m guessing not a few readers must think it is — C. S. Lewis explained in an essay published in Of Other Worlds. He wrote there,“to construct plausible and moving `other worlds’ you must draw upon the only real `other world’ we know, that of the spirit” (pp 35-36), i.e., a writer’s religious or spiritual understanding necessarily informs the worldview of their fictional sub-creation.

I have objections to both points, or perhaps ‘footnotes’ is better than ‘objections.’ I would not be very surprised if Suzanne Collins’ family faith, the one that shaped her understanding of the world, turned out to be Methodist, but I would be somewhat surprised.

My mother, for example, grew up in a strict Methodist clan that was W.C.T.U. and all. [She converted to my father's family's Episcopal faith at their wedding that had great confidence in the salutary powers of 'fire-water.'] John Wesley was an Anglican priest and believed in the sacraments of the church we would describe as Anglo-Catholic, which is to say, that baptism and frequent communion were essential to salvation.

Methodists, however, while affirming the “real presence” of Christ in the Eucharist, as near-Anglicans step well away from Orthodox and Catholic beliefs about the bread of Communion becoming Christ’s body except for the receiving believer. Methodism is a sacramental faith, consequently, but not in the fullness of tradition preceding Protestant individualism. They are, qua ‘reformed’ Christians, more theological nominalists than realists.

Peeta being ‘the Boy with the Bread’ strikes me as less hesitant Methodist than Catholic. Both the assonance of Peeta with ‘pita’ and ‘Peter,’ as well as the salvific power of his sacrificial bread offering to the starving Katniss, dying like the Prodigal by a pig sty, suggest strongly the beliefs of the Christian community that insists it is the Church of St. Peter, namely, Roman Catholicism. Catholics believe the bread is the Real Presence of Christ without qualification or reservation and the foundation of Peeta’s relationship with Katniss, the memory she can never forget, is her debt to him consequent to his saving her life with the Bread that “tasted of spring.”

The three step life of repentance, purification, and perfection or theosis is not exclusively a Methodist soteriology, either. If anything, it is common to all even nominally orthodox Christian sects and is most clearly expounded in the Maximian theology common to old school Catholicism and traditional Orthodox Christianity. Students of comparative religion argue that these three steps are evident in every one of the five great revealed traditions and readers here recognize them as the nigredo, albedo, and rubedo of literary alchemy. Collins’ trilogy is evidently in the same hermetic stream of Dante’s Commedia in this regard at least as much as she is to the world view of John and Charles Wesley.

The same point could be made about Katniss as Redemptrix. This is more a Catholic belief than a Methodist one, despite the Social Gospel of modern Wesleyans (sic), if only because of the devotional prayers to the Mother of God as co-Redemptrix that inform so much of Roman theology and worship life. My bet, my first thought really, is that Collins is a Roman Catholic of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker Movement; her hard-hitting and uncompromising view evident in the Games trilogyof social injustice consequent to capitalist excesses and the evils of war are both hallmarks of this Catholic niche school of thought.

But we don’t know! No one to my knowledge has asked Mrs. Pryor what she believes, what she grew up believing as a Collins child, and how this informs or does not have a place in her art as a writer. Which is a real shame! You cannot get at the heart of Rowling’s Potter books, Lewis’ Narniad, Meyer’s Twilight, or Grossman’s Magician books without a long hard look at these authors’ spiritual formation or lack/denial of same.

Hogwarts Professor

We noted here that Director Gary ‘the Boss’ Ross was enamored of actor Donald Sutherland’s understanding of “where the nature of power comes from and he understood how pernicious that power was and how President Snow used that power.”

He gave me a glimpse into that side of the world that was more vivid than anything that I had seen. In fact Donald wrote me such a compelling backstory to his character that I ended up incorporating some of those ideas into a couple of scenes that I added for him which are still in the movie and I think are very good.

The studio clearly feels this atextual addition is also “very good” because in addition to the stills from the Snow-Crane scene they’ve been sharing with media, today they released another film clip that is that scene.

Three quick notes:

(1) It’s a departure from the story telling of Suzanne Collins in two significant ways: first, it is a scene not in the story as written, and, second and more important, it is a departure from the novel’s narrative voice. Yes, I understand that we’re not listening to Katniss tell the story as in the books but, even if the movie-voice spoke in 3rd person limited omniscient with the restriction being ‘only scenes with Katniss’ rather than in 1st person narrative, the film-view would thereby narrow our experience and heighten our identification with the heroine.

Cutting off from her perspective to watch and hear President Snow explain his decision making is the story entry-and-katharsis breaking equivalent of, say, a scene with the Dark Lord discussing his plans for taking over Hogwarts with Bellatrix or a break-from-Harry moment in which Dumbledore shares with Snape in Chamber of Secrets his concerns that Harry is a Horcrux. Not only does it make a big plot give-away, the departure from the focus of a single character’s narrative perspective also dissipates to the point of shattering our concentration on and our consequent becoming the lead player in our imagination.

(2) It also means a major departure from the books’ portrayal of and the audience’s understanding of President Snow. As Katniss makes the implicit allegory explicit in Mockingjay after hearing Finnick’s revelations, Snow is a poisonous serpent, the serpent or Satanic figure in what is, as Tolkien said all stories are, largely a re-telling in apocalyptic frame of the Fall of Man in the Garden.

“Poison. The perfect weapon for a snake.” [Mockingjay (Scholastic), p.172]

Sutherland’s portrayal of the President as a rational, Machiavellian power holder may make him more sympathetic to the audience but this is a misunderstanding of the character’s place in the true myth that is the greater power of the story. The film makers seem to think that it is the Orwellian portrait of our times that makes people love these books, i.e., they do not see as Swift suggested they could not, their image in the satirical mirror. “This is about the evils of GOP capitalism and American exceptionalism (Snow) not Hollywood’s self-importance and role as shadow casters in the Platonic cave (Plutarch).” Sheesh…

Is it silly to note that we certainly don’t love the books because of the poke-in-the-eye they give us as Capitol voyeurs (mindless teevee addicts) and purveyors of global injustice? We love them despite the poke-in-the-eye and only suffer this satirical drubbing because of what we learn and experience imaginatively and spiritually about life, love, and death alongside Katniss in love of Peeta. See ‘Eliade Thesis’ for more.

(3) Why include it, then? I’m guessing that Donald Sutherland, forgive me for saying out loud the obvious, because he is the only ‘name actor’ in the film (even if his film career is or has been in decline for years), didn’t come cheap. I suspect he required significantly more screen time than Snow’s role in the first book allowed and called for a proportionately greater share in the publicity for the film (hence the clip release today).

Sutherland credits Ross for writing the ‘hope versus fear lines’ that are the substance of today’s clip:

Kevin McCarthy (NerdTears.com): My favorite line in the whole film is that you say, “Hope is the only thing stronger than fear.” It’s a wonderful line!

Donald Sutherland: “That’s not in the book! It’s Gary Ross. He’s a writer of such intelligence. He was able to get the very essence of the film, the book, everything, in a couple of words. He’s able to say, ‘Okay, we take 24 people. We could kill them all. Why not? I’ll tell you why not. We leave one alive, because hope is stronger than fear.” Hope is a spark, it gives people hope, a spark. You have to be careful that spark doesn’t become a flame, because that flame will burn you.”

Judging from this mutual admiration and crediting, though Director Ross (the Dickensian names would be ‘Boss’ or ‘Wroth,’ no?) makes no little noise about wanting to honor the books, he really wants to re-package them according to what he believes (along with Sutherland) is their “essence.” I’d suggest that means makeing a movie-message more palatable to his Hollywood peers than a dystopian morality play. He desires to go “3D” politically rather than cinematically, as he imagines the books are principally satire a la Orwell rather than alchemical drama echoing Dante and Shakespeare.

Whether it was a sop to a marquee player, then, or just secular sophism neglecting wisdom, the story told is less of a transformative experience and more of the next-in-line postmodern political fairy tale, this one heavy on the irony (violent story decrying violence in films as soul-and-spirit-deadening entertainment being presented in just that kind of movie to the huzzahs of the Capitol citizenry making the District 12 ‘farewell to those about to die’ three finger salute).

How about that Gummy Bear Room Service story? Again, can you say, “beyond satire”?

Please forgive me or just overlook that last. I covet your comments and corrections, instead, on the film clip and if the Sutherland-Ross addition-to/departure-from the Collins story and narrative perspective is a plus or minus in your view.

Hogwarts Professor

A letter I sent to a friend last year on the possible connection of Coleridge and J. R. R. Tolkien through Cardinal Newman:

Your prayers.

The Christianity Today article I forwarded last week on John Cardinal Newman’s literary imagination (‘Newman’s Unquiet Grave: A Biography that Stresses Newman’s Literary Imagination’) disappointed me in that the article didn’t mention Coleridge. It seemed to touch a nerve with you by asserting that “because of Newman’s particular blend of the literary and the theological, he may also be England’s greatest unread prose writer.” You wrote:

Confession time: I’ve never read any Newman. Not a line. I’m aware of him, naturally, but never read him. Really, he’s more a study for antiquarians of early Victorian Theology (I have a friend here in Divinity who’s looking at Newman, among others). I note, rather wryly, that the praise “master of sarcasm” predates–ah, Wilde, Bierce, Wodehouse, Shaw, Chesterton, Beckett, and so on. And seems to overlook Swift and Mencken. Among others. And, to be perfectly honest, I’m not at all surprised that students in a Swedish MA programme have never heard of Newman.

Again (I’m on deadline, so I’m thinking about this a lot), I fail to see any ‘smoking gun’ in the article that convinces me Newman is of anything more than marginal importance in literature. I’m reminded of the illustrious example of Robert Southey, hailed in his day as the greatest poet of the 19th century.  And now nobody reads him, and nobody cares. Newman, recently canonized I think, will probably fare better. But I’m not about to herald him as the second coming of Walter Scott.

(No idea what that last sentence means, to be honest, but it was a lot of fun to write.)

I would be interested in seeing more of the Newman/Coleridge connection though, as it’s possible they actually knew each other.

Given the hosannas to Newman from James Joyce, Auden, and George Eliot, I was led to disregard your dismissal of Newman as a brief fit of chronological snobbery and to follow up on our shared interest in the curious Coleridge connection possibilities. I read the Wikipedia articles on Newman, about whom I knew nothing (and, perhaps, post Wiki, I know less than nothing with any surety?), and found these hints of the Bard of Ottery St. Mary on the Cardinal’s literary imagination.

(1) Newman’s coat of arms as a Cardinal featured the Coleridgean motto ‘Cor ad cor loquitur’ and (2) he wrote a novel, Loss and Gain, as a vehicle for his philosophical and theological views as they evolved, something of a fictional Apologia. The best part of the Wiki explanation of this work’s merits was the concluding word:

Mrs. Humphrey Ward referred to Loss and Gain, along with Sartor Resartus, The Nemesis of Faith, Alton Locke, and Marius the Epicurean, as one of the works “to which the future student of the nineteenth century will have to look for what is deepest, most intimate, and most real in its personal experience.”^[15]

Read any of those?

Note that Newman used his motto as epitaph with one other epigraph:

The pall over the coffin bore the motto that Newman adopted for use as a cardinal, Cor ad cor loquitur (“Heart speaks to heart”),^[45] which William Barry, writing in the Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), traces to Francis de Sales^[3] and sees as revealing the secret of Newman’s “eloquence, unaffected, graceful, tender, and penetrating”. In accordance with his express wishes, Newman was buried in the grave of his lifelong friend, Ambrose St. John.^[3] Ambrose St. John had become a Roman Catholic at around the same time as Newman, and the two men have a joint memorial stone inscribed with the motto Newman had chosen, Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem (“Out of shadows and phantasms into the truth”),^[46] which Barry traces to Plato’s allegory of the cave.^[3]

^{I think Coleridge a more likely source than de Sales and “phantasms” a probable mistranslation of “imaginibus” Ah, Wiki!}

That there is a good sized book from Fordham University Press linking Newman and Coleridge on the subject of conscience makes me think there is a significant connection here. I was left, though, with your dismissive but sadly relevant question to a writer/speaker without much time: “So what?” Why should I care if Coleridge was a big influence on John Cardinal Newman if he is only of antiquarian interest to specialists in Victorian theology?

The answer, I think, for you the confessed Tolkien-admirer more than me, stranger to his shrine, is in Newman’s near direct influence on the formation of Tolkien’s imagination and understanding of same.

I was in a Barnes and Noble Sunday afternoon while my wife did her weekly grocery shopping at the Rochester Wegmans-opolis and, as is my wont, was shopping the discount bins. I found a copy of Frances Yates’ Theatre of the World for , Woodham’s White Magic and English Renaissance Drama for $.50, The Oxford Companion to English Literature for , and, next to it, Humphey Carpenter’s biography of Tolkien, also . I confess of the three finds I was probably least delighted by the last but I was happy to include it in my take. I started reading it on the long drive home from Rochester to Constantia and was startled to learn what I’m guessing is old news to true Tolkienites — he grew up, for the most part, under the care of Fr. Francis Morgan at the Birmingham Oratory, the community founded by Newman in 1848 and his home until his death in 1890.

If you are not familiar with this, as I was not, you can read about the influence of his Oratory experiences here and here and here, and, I assume, in books like Chestertonian Stratford Caldecott’s The Power of the Ring: The Spiritual Vision of J. R. R. Tolkien, an exploration of the implicit Catholicism of LOTR. Incredibly, Hilaire Belloc was also a veteran of the Birmingham Oratory.

I’m sure this influence can be over-stated and probably has been by those with a devotional regard for JRRT (his education, I’m obliged to note, was much more King Edward’s School than the Oratory). What interests me in it is that the Coleridge-Newman regard for conscience and imagination seems, if not explanation for Tolkien’s remarkable affinity for myth and languages in his youth, then what made his enthusiastic exploration of same not only possible but something that would have been encouraged and thought admirable rather than dangerously eccentric.

And, as you know, this interests me less as a Tolkien matter, about whom I maintain my studied indifference (lacking as I do the decades to catch up to speed with Tolkien literature), than with the Inklings and Tolkien’s relationship with Lewis, Barfield, and Williams, an Ulster Anglican, an Anthroposophist, and recovering occultist (?) respectively. Prof Wood notes:

Tolkien’s daughter Priscilla assured me, when I visited in her Oxford home during June of 1988, that this rigorously religious upbringing turned her father into a very spiky sort of Catholic, one who would not have thought very highly of a Baptist like me! He was a pre-Vatican II believer who scorned the vernacular liturgy (longing still for the Latin mass) and who had no desire for ecumenical unity. Like Chesterton, Tolkien regarded the Protestant Reformation as a terrible mistake, and he looked upon the great Anglican cathedrals as stolen Catholic property! In uncharacteristically harsh language, he called Anglicanism “a pathetic and shadowy medley of half-remembered traditions and mutilated beliefs.” Tolkien would thus deride his friend C. S. Lewis for being an unrepentant Ulster Protestant! (Yet Ms. Tolkien also said that, whenever her father explored his imaginative world, this short-fused defensiveness about his faith fell away, as he was free to plumb the inexhaustible depths of what Lewis called “mere” Christianity.)

The last point I suspect is critical to Tolkien’s affinity with the men his “spiky” Vatican 1 beliefs would otherwise have brought him to despise. The Coleridge-Newman connection and specifically the Coleridgean ideas of imagination are common and important to Barfield, Lewis, and Williams as well.

Despise Newman if you must as antiquarian reading, a judgment I think that is near consensus among academics and serious readers alike who are not Catholic, but as a Tolkienite and like me, someone curious about what makes the fiction of Williams, Lewis, and Tolkien so powerful, I think Newman’s Loss and Gain may deserve a visit (free online). Certainly Tolkien must have read it and, I suspect, with the atmosphere and priorities of the Neri-esque but Newman shaped Oratory, may have been the means of transmitting the Coleridgean ideas of imagination, conscience, and the power of story that shaped the young Tolkien’s ideas of same and made him a fellow in an otherwise uncongenial group. Perhaps, too, as a vehicle for philosophical and theological reflections it planted the seed of what became the signature fruit of Inkling literary trees.

Your comments and corrections, please! And I ask your forgiveness in advance if this is a very tired subject familiar to all Tolkien devotees. I worry that I am treading very near to the Personal Heresy here, especially when writing about an author that (a) I know little about and (b) who once said, “One of my strongest opinions is that investigation of an author’s biography is an entirely vain and false approach to his works.” My hope is that in revealing/exploring the Coleridge vein in the Inklings, to include Tolkien, we arrive at a much clearer understanding of the imaginative rather than devotional Gospel/theology they were smuggling contra the empiricists.

Which seems, a la Eliade’s thesis, the reason their books have the power they do and the Ancient Mariner effect on the human heart. I look forward to reading what you think.

Fraternally,

John

Hogwarts Professor

Pottermore. This site has tons of lovers and haters and I belong to the first category. I am addicted to this website and here are my reasons to love Pottermore.

Character development

J.K Rowling gives full and interesting backgrounds to each and every character. I adore reading about the professors, and other characters of the books.

Games

This site contains tons of catching little games and I must admit sometimes they really make my day. There are so many little games that you can play!

Wizard dueling

The wizard dueling belongs to my favorite options. To my mind, this category brings the most fun.

ReadingHarry

Or was this session with Caesar Flickerman and the Celebrity Careers required viewing in Panem?

Hogwarts Professor