Precarious Dystopias

Precarious Dystopias: The Hunger Games, in Time, and Never Let Me Go Author(s): Mark Fisher Source: Film Quarterly , Vol. 65, No. 4 (Summer 2012), pp. 27-33 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fq.2012.65.4.27 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Film Quarterly This content downloaded from 132.174.250.143 on Thu, 15 Sep 2022 21:45:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

PREC ARIOUS DYSTOPIA S: THE HUNGER GAMES, IN TIME, AND NEVER LET ME GO MARK FISHER DISCUSSES THE POLITICS OF THREE DARK FUTURISTIC THRILLERS 1 Dystopia has returned to cinema in three recent films—most spectacularly in the blockbuster The Hunger Games but also in two lower-profile films, Never Let Me Go, adapted from Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel and directed by Mark Romanek, and In Time, written and directed by Andrew Niccol. In these three films, class and precariousness are forced into the foreground. To be in the dominant class is, in each film, to achieve a certain liberation from precariousness; for the poor, meanwhile, life is harried, fugitive, a perpetual state of anxiety. Yet precariousness here is not a natural state which the rich are fortunate enough to rise above; on the contrary, precariousness is deliberately imposed on the poor as a means of controlling and subduing them. Pre-existing shortages provide the pretext for deliberately depriving the subjugated class: of time, their organs, their lives. In an inversion of Hobbes, the war of all against all emerges as an artificial condition. Strategic impoverishment and enforced competition are intended to make solidarity impossible so that each must face death alone. Based on the bestseller by Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games is aimed at the young adult market, and, as such, it can be seen as the successor of the Harry Potter and the Twilight series. The phenomenal success of Collins’s work (two other novels have followed The Hunger Games) has led to some bookshops now featuring a “Young Adult Dystopian” section, and it is tempting to see the shift from wizards and lovelorn vampires to teenagers fighting for their lives in a state-organized spectacle as indicative of general change in the cultural temperature. The Hunger Games was published in 2008, at the very moment that the financial crisis was pitching the world into panic and confusion. The label “Young Adult Dystopian” tells us much more than which demographic The Hunger Games is aimed at. The film and Film Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 4, pps 27–33, ISSN 0015-1386, electronic, ISSN 1533-8630. © 2012 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2012.65.4.27 the novel have no doubt resonated so powerfully with its young audience because it has engaged feelings of betrayal and resentment rising in a generation asked to accept that its quality of life will be worse than that of its parents. What is certain is that The Hunger Games is irreducibly political in a way that the Harry Potter and the Twilight films could never be. The film’s political charge depends upon the surprising intensity of its brutality. This brutality is affective rather than explicit; the amount of gore is actually quite low, and it is the prospect of pubescents murdering each other, not the sight of their doing it, which shocks. What makes The Hunger Games more than a workaday thriller is its disclosing of a world—a world that, as with all dystopias that connect, is a distorting mirror of our own. The setting is Panem, the name for North America after a catastrophic civil war. Panem is divided into twelve districts, all of which are presided over by the Capitol. As a symbolic act of penance for their past rebellions, each district is required to send a young “tribute” to the annual Hunger Games, a televised tournament in which the competitors are required to fight to the death. Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) comes from District 12, whose main function is coal-mining. At District 12’s “reaping” festival, where the names of the tributes are selected by a lottery, Katniss’s younger sister, Primrose (Willow Shields), is picked to enter the arena. Katniss volunteers in her place, and she is joined by the male tribute, Peeta (Josh Hutcherson). The two of them are sent to the Capitol, where they are advised by a reluctant mentor, Haymitch (Woody Harrelson), made over by professional stylists, and interviewed on television before they are rated by the organizers, the Gamemakers. When they are pitched into the arena, Katniss and Peeta eventually team up, acting out a romance for the television audience. It is worthwhile to do this because “sponsors” in the audience can pay for items to be sent to their favorite tributes, and the two District 12 tributes calculate that a star-crossed-lovers routine will capture viewers’ attention FI L M Q UARTERLY This content downloaded from 132.174.250.143 on Thu, 15 Sep 2022 21:45:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 27

District 12 The Hunger Games. Photos: Murray Close. © 2010 Lions Gate Entertainment. and sympathy. (The extent to which the two characters can accurately second-guess the way in which their narrative will be edited is a canny commentary on the way in which such manipulations are taken for granted by a generation that has grown up on reality TV.) The Gamemakers pick up on the romance by announcing that there will be a change in the rules: this year, there can be two winners, provided that the last two surviving tributes come from the same district. Katniss and Peta manage to outlive the other tributes, but just as they think they have won, another announcement is made: the rule change is suspended, and now there can only be one winner. In defiance, Katniss and Peta decide that they will each eat a handful of deadly berries. As they are about to do so, however, a further announcement is made: this year, after all, there can be two winners. Perhaps because of Collins’s close involvement with the film—she wrote the initial script herself, although it was revised by screenwriter Billy Ray—the adaptation is faithful to its source. The chief difference between novel and film is that the former has a first-person narrative. This leads to there 28 being greater suspense in the film—the first-person narration in the novel means that we expect Katniss to survive—but also a reduction in claustrophobia. Shifting to third person allows us a few glimpses into the world beyond the arena: we see, for instance, increasingly tense meetings between President Snow (Donald Sutherland) and the chief Gamemaker, Seneca Crane (Wes Bentley), concluding, ultimately, with Crane’s death; Haymitch’s maneuverings on behalf of his charges; the operations center where the decisions about what happens in the arena are implemented; and, most significantly, the uprisings in some of the districts. But, these fleeting asides apart, our perspective is restricted to Katniss’s. The Hunger Games is about the first stirrings of revolutionary consciousness, but its relationship to capitalism is less clear than it might initially appear. Does the Capitol double for capital, or is the form of exploitation in The Hunger Games of a cruder type? Although the Capitol looks at first sight like a metropolitan capitalist society, the mode of power at work in Panem is better described as cyberfeudal. The name “tribute” clues us in to the fact that the sum m er 2012 This content downloaded from 132.174.250.143 on Thu, 15 Sep 2022 21:45:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Gladiators The Hunger Games. Photos: Murray Close. © 2010 Lions Gate Entertainment. Capitol extracts wealth via direct expropriation rather than through the market. Market signifiers are, after all, strangely absent from the Capitol. Commodities are ubiquitous, but there are no corporate logos, shops, or brand names in the city. So far as we can see, the state, under the beady gaze of President Snow, seems to own everything. It exerts its power directly, via an authoritarian police force of white-uniformed Peacekeepers which inflicts punishment summarily, and symbolically, through the Hunger Games and other rituals in which the districts are required to demonstrate their subordination. In District 12, meanwhile, there is a black market, but little indication of legitimate commercial activity. We know that Peeta works in his parents’ bakery, but the overwhelming impression of District 12 is of a society bent double by manual labor, in which shopping is by no means a leisure activity. The anachronism reflects the mixture of influences that led Collins to create Panem. According to one of the author’s most frequently quoted remarks, the initial source for the novel was contemporary television. “I was channel surfing between reality TV programming and actual war coverage when Katniss’s story came to me. One night I’m sitting there flipping around and on one channel there’s a group of young people competing for, I don’t know, money maybe? And on the next, there’s a group of young people fighting an actual war. And I was tired, and the lines began to blur in this very unsettling way, and I thought of this story” (www.scholastic. com/thehungergames/media/suzanne_collins_q_and_a.pdf). The Hunger Games owes much of its impact to the way in which it combines the results of this hypnagogic conflation with classical influences. “The world of Panem, particularly the Capitol, is loaded with Roman references,” Collins explained in the same interview. “Panem itself comes from the expression ‘Panem et Circenses’ which translates into ‘Bread and Circuses.’” Besides gladiatorial combat, Collins says she was also inspired by the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. “The myth tells how in punishment for past deeds, Athens periodically had to send seven youths and seven maidens to Crete, where they were thrown in the Labyrinth and devoured by the monstrous Minotaur.” FI L M Q UARTERLY This content downloaded from 132.174.250.143 on Thu, 15 Sep 2022 21:45:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 29

The world of The Hunger Games is rigidly stratified. One of the points of the Games is to underscore the impossibility of any upward movement for most, even as it holds up the remote (and unappealing) chance of a limited escape for the competition’s victors. The winners live as rich celebrities, among but apart from the rest of their districts. They are also required to mentor future tributes—a miserable, purgatorial fate, which more than accounts for Haymitch’s alcoholism. The feudal overtones means that Panem sometimes feels more like a caste, than a class, society. The lower-numbered districts have preferred status, their tributes usually allying in the arena to form a pathetic elite of the downtrodden and the (mostly) doomed. (One notable addition to the novel is the speech given to one of these elite tributes, when, just before his death at the climax of the film, he belatedly becomes aware of his status as someone born to kill, and to die.) The hierarchy between the Capitol and the districts—and among more or less prosperous districts—is further compounded by class divisions within District 12, between the miners and a merchant class. The hierarchies in Panem are also organized geographically, and here the difference between Capitol and the districts can be construed as analogous to that between center and periphery in the world. The districts are responsible for the extraction of raw materials and the manufacture of commodities, leaving the citizens of the Capitol to engage in various kinds of service industry—food preparation, styling, and entertainment—not to mention consumption. This fades into the closely related division between urban and rural, where we are invited to contrast the metropolis’s almost entirely artificialized world with the coal mines and woodlands of District 12. Yet we can just as easily understand the differences between Capitol and the districts in historical terms, so that the Capitol’s decadent (post)modernity, its apparently unlimited consumption and foppish, infantilized spectatorialism can be set against the conspicuous authenticity of older forms of labor, with their dirt-poor privations and honest work ethic. When Katniss, the daughter of a dead miner who survives by hunting on the land, is conveyed to the Capitol by high-speed train, it is as if the nineteenth century is brought face to future-shocked face with twentyfirst-century media culture, a disjunction that is pointed up by the garish appearance of the Capitol’s citizens, with their grotesque cosmetics, lurid hair dye, and ornate clothes. But the urban-modern-versus-rural-archaic opposition makes for the appearance of anomaly. While District 12 is a locality in which everyone knows everybody else, the Capitol is immensely populous, giving the impression that, in Panem, the rich vastly outnumber the working poor, as if the immis30 erated 1% work for the benefit of the privileged 99% rather than the reverse. (In the novels it is explained that District 12 is an exceptionally small district.) Ultimately, the Capitol’s oppression of the districts is perhaps most obviously read in terms of colonial domination. In the Games, the colonized are forced to celebrate their own defeat and to acknowledge the unassailability of their colonizers’ power. But whether we read the film in generational, colonial, geographical, historical, or class terms—or, as seems best, as a combination or condensation of all these modes—it is clear that Panem is world in which there is Empire but no Multitude (to use the terms of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri). Or, rather, we see the Multitude flicker into existence fitfully, in the uprisings which play only a small part in The Hunger Games but which take on a greater significance as Collins’s trilogy develops, where what initially seem to be sporadic, futile acts of defiance ultimately play a part in an organized resistance. “Suicide is the decisive political act of our times,” claimed Franco Berardi in Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-alpha Generation (London: Minor Compositions, 2009, 55). In a world where domination is total, where power has unquestioned dominion over life and death, then the last recourse for the oppressed is to die on their own terms, to use their deaths as—symbolic as well as literal— weapons. Thus, in The Hunger Games, it is Katniss and Peta’s threat of suicide which checkmates the Capitol. In choosing to die, they not only deny the Capitol the captured life of a victor, they also deny it their deaths. Death in the arena ceases to be a reconfirmation of the Capitol’s power, and becomes instead an act of refusal. Up until this climactic moment, The Hunger Games is striking for the fatalism of its lead characters, something that is all the more remarkable given the personal courage and self-sacrifice that they show. They think like slaves, taking it for granted that the Capitol’s power cannot be broken. Katniss and Peeta have at this stage no ambitions to head a revolution. Katniss acquiesces because she believes that confronting the Capitol is hopeless; any challenge to its power could only result in her family being tortured and killed. Poignantly, the only alternative to servitude she can imagine at the start of the film is escape into the woods. (It could be argued that the fantasy of escape into the woods is by no means confined to Katniss; so much contemporary anticapitalism, motivated by a vision of a return to the organic and the local, to a space outside the purview of Empire, amounts to little more than a version of this same hope.) The threat of suicide is the first step in a process of converting fatalism into insurrection. The fantasy of escape is given up, not any more because Katniss sees the Capitol’s power as unbreakable, but because she now sees no alternative but to confront it. sum m er 2012 This content downloaded from 132.174.250.143 on Thu, 15 Sep 2022 21:45:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

2 There is no such conversion of fatalism into resistance in Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go. The peculiar horror of the film, in fact, resides in the unrelieved quality of its fatalism. Never Let Me Go focuses on an “ideological state apparatus,” an English boarding school, Hailsham, in an alternative twentieth century. The film is about the success of such ideological apparatuses in destroying even the thought of rebellion. The truth of the school is known to all, but, in the typical English way, it cannot be said out loud (one teacher is sacked for explicitly stating what the pupils already know): Hailsham is a training academy for clones, whose role will be to be provide organs for the wider human population. Unlike in The Hunger Games, the lead characters in Never Let Me Go are not kept in line by a police force or an army. Here, heartbreakingly, and surprisingly, there are no dreams of escape into the woods (as the threshold to an outside world coded as threatening, the woods at the perimeter of Hailsham are precisely not understood as a place of freedom, but mythologized as a site of terror); there is only a terrible compliance, and a slave’s desperate capacity for self-delusion. By contrast with The Hunger Games, in which brute force is always visible through the veneer of ideology, Never Let Me Go is about a form of power that does not need to exhibit force. It is instructive to compare Never Let Me Go with Michael Bay’s The Island; indeed, such a comparison is inevitable. Bay’s film works from a premise that is practically identical—clones whose body parts will be harvested—but its treatment of the concept could not be more different. The Island is a story of escape, full of spectacular Hollywood action sequences. In Never Let Me Go, however, there is nowhere to escape to. Once they leave the Giving up Never Let Me Go. © 2010 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation and Dune Entertainment III LLC. DVD: 20th Century Fox. FI L M Q UARTERLY This content downloaded from 132.174.250.143 on Thu, 15 Sep 2022 21:45:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 31

Clocking on In Time. © 2011 Regency Entertainment (USA) Inc. DVD: 20th Century Fox. school, the clones are not confined in some carceral space; they share the same world as those to whom, in a chilling yet appallingly convincing-sounding euphemism, they must “donate” their organs. Nothing could be further from The Island’s adrenal bustle than Never Let Me Go’s atmosphere of lassitude, languor, and longing. The fact that the clones’ time is short lends their thwarted love affairs, their lazy afternoons spent reading in meadows, and their day trips to the coast a nearly unbearable intensity. If there is nowhere to escape to—the clones are already in the world; the world is their prison—then nor is there any attempt to escape. The hopes and fantasies of the three lead clone characters, Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Ruth (Keira Knightley), and Tommy (Andrew Garfield), are entirely shaped by the bureaucratic organization of the 32 donation program. For reasons that are never fully clear but which we can surmise are down to the success of the Hailsham ideology, fleeing the program is unthinkable for them. Their hopes rest instead on the kind of collective fantasy that seems to spontaneously grow in institutions like Hailsham, and without which, in a cruel twist, the institution could not do its work. The fantasy is the unofficial supplement which the official ideological program relies upon—and may even cultivate—without explicitly sanctioning. The fantasy is of a reprieve in the form of a “deferral” (Ishiguro’s language here echoes the “indefinite postponement” in Kafka’s The Trial), which is supposedly available to couples that can prove they are really in love. Without this fantasy, the clones would have no hope, and thus no reason not to rebel, or to destroy themselves. But, sum m er 2012 This content downloaded from 132.174.250.143 on Thu, 15 Sep 2022 21:45:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

as Tommy and Kathy discover—and we sense that Kathy never really believed it anyway, except as a kind of superstition for the condemned to console themselves with—there is no deferral. Their love, like their bodies, will not survive much longer. Kathy’s concluding voiceover notes that this is the same for everyone, whether clone or not—except that there is nothing natural about the clones’ fate. They die—or, in another wonderfully chilling euphemism, they “complete”—because they belong to an exploited class, and what a harrowingly incisive image of exploitation “organ donation” is. While the fatalism of the condemned governs the mood of Never Let Me Go, In Time is driven by the desperate panic of those struggling to fend death off. The certainty of early death haunts the clones in Never Let Me Go—most will “complete” after their third donation. In In Time, death is not an imminent certainty but a constant threat—for the poor, at any rate. The currency in this future U.S. is time. At the age of twenty-five, people cease appearing to age. Unfortunately, however, they are only given one more year to live. If they want to survive beyond the age of twenty-six, they must earn more time. Social classes are defined by how much time they have, and, as in The Hunger Games, stratification is organized geographically, with the society divided into “Time Zones.” The poor live in temporal ghettos, while the rich dissolutely party in the enclave of New Greenwich. In Time captures the ambient dread of precarity in a world stripped of (job and social) security, in which the poor are trapped in a perpetual present tense, unable to plan or dream, all their mental and physical resources devoted to the exhausting hardscrabble for bare survival. The lead character is Will (an improbably cast Justin Timberlake), a factory worker living in the ghetto of Dayton. He is gifted a century of time by a hyper-jaded plutocrat who has grown tired of living. Will heads to New Greenwich, but he is unable to adjust to the serene pace of the city. He is habituated to acting quickly, to squeezing as much into every moment as he can, but in New Greenwich, haste is the very mark of vulgarity. As a restaurant waitress discreetly tells Will when she sees him wolfing his food, he is easily identifiable as a (class) alien because he does things too quickly. In New Greenwich, time is to be conspicuously squandered—much as space is squandered by the rich in our world. In Time is not only an attack on the rich; its target is the class system as such. The rich are immiserated in their own way, their lives deprived of direction or significance. Like The Hunger Games, In Time is in part a commentary on the empty allure of the media-leisure elite. As Sylvia (Amanda Seyfried) puts it, “the poor die, and the rich don’t live.” Another way of putting this is that the poor are exhausted, while the rich are world-weary. A banker’s daughter, Sylvia is tired of the sterile hedonistic rituals of New Greenwich, and easily drawn into insurrection when she meets the fugitive Will. She thus becomes a Patty Hearst class traitor, plotting the destruction of the class system. But when Sylvia and Will start to rob “time banks” and flood the ghettos with time, they find that the rich respond by simply increasing the cost of living. The film ends equivocally—Will and Sylvia continue to rob time banks, but whether this is futile or a pre-revolutionary act remains unclear. This hesitation is perhaps what is most characteristic of the current moment, in which fragmented challenges to the dystopia of neoliberalism may presage a moment of radical change. If the bleakness of Never Let Me Go arises from its not even broaching the possibility of collective escape or insurrection, then the margin of hope in The Hunger Games and In Time consists in the young exploited characters groping toward new kinds of collective action. The Hunger Games’ arena, in which teenagers are forced to compete with each other for the entertainment of a bored elite, is as horribly compelling an image of the privation of solidarity in our world as you could wish for. Any alliance in the arena is necessarily provisional—since (in the ordinary course of things) there can only be one winner, every member of an alliance knows that they may well face the prospect of eventually having to kill those with whom they are now temporarily allied. The struggle to break out of the arena entails the throwing off of this imposed dog-eat-dog Hobbesianism, the reinvention of solidarity. Could it be that Collins’s novels are not only in tune with our actually existing but disintegrating neoliberal dystopia, but also with the world that will replace it? MARK FISHER is the author of Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009). ABSTRACT Survey of three recent movie dystopias—The Hunger Games, In Time, Never Let Me Go—that explore the politics of precariousness, dramatizing the predicament of exploitation in both fatalistic and tentatively hopeful ways. KEYWORDS The Hunger Games, In Time, Never Let Me Go, dystopia, precariousness CREDITS The Hunger Games. Director: Gary Ross. Producers: Nina Jacobson, Jon Kilik. Writers: Gary Ross, Suzanne Collins, Billy Ray (from the novel by Suzanne Collins). Cinematography: Tom Stern. Editors: Christopher S. Capp, Stephen Mirrione, Juliette Welfling. Music: James Newton Howard. Production companies: Color Force, Larger Than Life Productions, Lionsgate, Ludas Productions. U.S. distributor: Lionsgate. DVD DATA In Time. Director: Andrew Niccol. © 2011 Regency Entertainment (USA) Inc. Publisher: 20th Century Fox. $29.98, 1 disc. Never Let Me Go. Director: Mark Romanek. © 2010 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation and Dune Entertainment III LLC. Publisher: 20th Century Fox. $29.98, 1 disc. FI L M Q UARTERLY This content downloaded from 132.174.250.143 on Thu, 15 Sep 2022 21:45:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 33