The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes: The Hunger Games Unraveled
By Mia Ogle
Gen Z was raised on the dystopian story. We were utterly entranced by Divergent, The Maze Runner, and of course The Hunger Games, all of which straddled the line between cautionary tales and escapism. Inarguably the most influential dystopian story of our generation, The Hunger Games, was often lauded as a social commentary: this is how a capitalist society could go so terribly wrong. However, at least on the surface, it always veered more toward escapism.
Katniss Everdeen, the protagonist of The Hunger Games, was nothing short of a phenomenon. Everybody wanted to be Katniss, and, more importantly, thought that they could be — she was just a girl from District 12 who ended up taking down The Capitol. So, bow and arrow sales skyrocketed and “the Katniss braid” became more and more prevalent. Little girls were dressing up as the appealing, powerful woman that they strove to be. Indeed, for the most part, Katniss simply represented a heroic version of ourselves — we watched The Hunger Games to escape into the life of a hero, not watch our society unravel.
The spectacle of the initial films kept such distasteful thoughts just out of reach. The Hunger Games arenas are jaw dropping, filled with unimaginable dangers and superhuman characters. Katniss faces mutts with the eyes of dead tributes in the first film and poison fog and blood rain in the second. The second film also introduces Finnick, as flawlessly charismatic as he is skilled with a spear, and Joanna, who spends her first scene shamelessly undressing in an elevator. Joanna also has no issue verbally assaulting the capitol audience or ripping a tracker out of Katniss’s wrist. And then, of course, amongst all of this violence and grandiosity there is the Katniss and Peeta love story. The whole thing feels downright inconceivable, and thus more escapist than directly applicable.
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, the prequel to The Hunger Games franchise, has been successful in attracting old fans with similar drives while simultaneously finding its own, more unsettling niche. It has a nostalgic yet thoroughly fresh feel to it — the balance has shifted in favor of cautionary tale.
In The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, the “Katniss journey” from nothing to something morphs into a villain origin story — a teenage President Snow (Tom Blythe) ascends from poor Capitol boy to cruel dictator of Panem. It’s a Machiavellian ascent, ripe with brilliant menuevers, yet, complete with utter depravity, totally plausible. We are meant to see that the wrong person with the right tools could really do some damage.
Indeed, the setting of the film, the 10th Hunger Games, undercuts the spectacle of Katniss’s games. The arena is just a hollowed out building filled with rubbage from a rebel attack. The tributes, wandering aimlessly through tunnels and wielding shaky axes, feel like average, unremarkable kids. Here, we quite literally see how the games were conceived. And, all of a sudden, they feel a bit less…inconceivable.
Ultimately, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes sees spectacle become a weapon. Lucy Gray (Rachel Zegler), the film’s protagonist, is the anti-Katniss — as Rachel Zegler has said in several interviews, she is a performer at heart forced to fight. Snow, her mentor in the 10th Hunger Games, learns to harness her charisma to keep her alive. However, as the story devolves, he ultimately uses the power of performance to enhance the games. In other words, he turns the games into the violent and grandiose spectacles of the first films. So, in the end, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes breaks down the spectacle that kept the initial Hunger Games just out of reach. More than ever The Hunger Games feels real, and it’s just as unsettling as it is engrossing.
