The Girl Who Was on Fire (10 page)

The Watchers of Panem respond strongly to the star-crossed romance of Peeta and Katniss. They latch on to it and show their support. And what happens?
The rules of the game change
. The Gamemakers milk the romance and the drama for all it’s worth—the viewers get to see Katniss nurse Peeta back to health. In everyone’s eyes, the two are desperately in love and wholly focused on surviving and protecting each other. But then the rules change again, and the balance of power swings back to the Engineers. Suddenly Peeta and Katniss are enemies once
more, the Capitol determined to create the most dramatic season finale ever. But it backfires. Katniss holds up those blue berries, and changes the rules herself. It’s one thing to present the drama-hungry Watchers with the tragic death of one of the lovers, but it’s another thing altogether to have
two
deaths. Two deaths would mean no victor. No Victory Tour. The Engineers are forced to back down, and allow Katniss and Peeta to claim their shared victory.

The thing about Panem is that for the most part, its citizens don’t know they’re being oppressed. They think the Capitol is there to look out for them, to protect them. They are told that having their children taken away each year and slaughtered on television is a warning, wrapped up in an easily digestible prime-time viewing experience. And because each district is closed off, surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers, nobody really knows what’s going on. Nobody sees the starvation and poverty in District 12, or the decadence and waste in the Capitol.

Except Katniss. She realizes the truth when she goes on her Victory Tour and sees how bad it is in the districts. But can she do anything about it? No. Because she can’t escape the cameras. Even outside the arena, Katniss is still being filmed, everywhere she goes. The Hunger Games may have finished, but the Katniss Everdeen Show is still going. The Engineers are still using her to control the Watched. President Snow is unhappy with the swing of power toward the Watched and the Watchers, so he threatens Katniss and her family. He tells her that she must convince the citizens of Panem that the stunt with the berries
was an act of love, not an act of defiance or rebellion. Snow knows that just as Katniss can be the spark that could destroy Panem, she can also be used to calm the Watchers down—to be a loyal and obedient citizen. To swing the balance of power back to the Engineers.

It doesn’t take Katniss long to realize that her return to District 12 after the first Hunger Games isn’t a return to anonymity. She’s still one of the Watched:

In
Mockingjay
, the whole of Panem is turned into a kind of giant arena—broadcast every night in full color, complete with titles and a stirring soundtrack. The war seems to be less about fighting over physical territory, and more about fighting over control of the airwaves—whose propo (short for propaganda) will dominate? Who can spin the war to the best advantage?

When Katniss watches the propo from District 8, she doesn’t try to imagine herself back in the thick of combat. She tries to pretend she’s watching her television back in District 12. Instead of thinking that something was happening
in Panem
that has never happened before, she thinks that there’s ���never been anything like it
on television
.” It’s like the whole war is an elaborate promotional tool for the rebellion to broadcast its agenda. Katniss joins a specially trained elite squad of soldiers—soldiers not trained in combat skills, but in media skills—to be the “on-screen faces of the invasion.” They’re followed by a camera team wherever they go, and all of the death, destruction, violence, and suffering is neatly
packaged up every night and delivered to living rooms everywhere. Suddenly the people behind the cameras have
all
the power, and both Watcher and Watched become tools to promote and spread propaganda.

In
Catching Fire
, President Snow uses Katniss’ family and loved ones as a bargaining chip—if she behaves and puts on a good show, they get to live. Katniss realizes quickly that she can’t run away from the cameras or the crowds—they’ll always find her. And even when she does escape the power of Snow and joins the rebellion in
Mockingjay
, she finds herself doing exactly the same thing. She’s still got her prep team, she’s still surrounded by cameras insisting she put on a good show, and she’s still working for someone who has the power to destroy her loved ones. A group of Watchers—the people of Panem who so passively consumed the Games in the past—have taken control of cameras and screens. The rebel Watchers are now Engineers.

In
Mockingjay
, the delicate balance of power swings toward the Engineers, and Katniss becomes a pawn in a new game, a dangerous struggle between the Capitol Engineers and the rebel Engineers.

When Katniss is captured by the rebels and pressured to become the face of the rebellion, she thinks she understands the power that she holds as the Mockingjay:

But Katniss’ power is slipping away, slowly being eradicated by the rebel Watchers-turned-Engineers from the moment she is rescued from her second Hunger Games. In District 2, Haymitch dictates Katniss’ speech to her through her headset. Her prep team control the way she looks and what she wears. Her actions and words are carefully edited into bite-sized, easily digestible pieces of propaganda. Her participation in the rebellion is just as choreographed and controlled as her participation in the Hunger Games. In fact, Katniss had
more
power and control
within
the Games—playing up to the cameras, winning over the Watchers, threatening to eat the berries and shooting down the forcefield—than she does when she’s part of the rebellion. The only time she comes close to this kind of independence and agency outside the arena is in
Mockingjay
when she’s declared dead—because the cameras can’t see her any more (and aren’t looking for her), she can finally make her own decisions.

Through her trials in the Arena and her participation in the war, Katniss comes to learn that surveillance isn’t a one-way street. When she threatens to eat the blue berries, she forces the Capitol to change the rules of the Games. This saves her life and Peeta’s, but it marks her as a Rebel, and an enemy of the Capitol. The balance of power swings her way—for a moment. But in
Catching Fire
, President Snow takes it back. He amps up his
surveillance, watching Katniss wherever she goes, ready to pounce if she steps out of line. Rebellion is brewing, and to threaten and control Katniss even further, he sends her back into the Games. But that turns out to be his greatest mistake. Like that poor girl who stole a loaf of bread, the Watchers at home don’t feel threatened, or bloodthirsty. They love Katniss, and they are sick of the Engineers taking away their riches and their children. Katniss very quickly realizes that for every act of cruelty and terror that the Capitol punishes her with in the Games, she is provided with an opportunity. To spread dissent and rebellion throughout Panem, and to unify the Watchers and the Watched into an unstoppable force.

When Katniss wins over the hearts of the Watchers and earns the hatred of the Engineers, she becomes a spark, a spark which, in the words of President Snow, grows to “an inferno that destroys Panem.” But starting a fire doesn’t mean you can control it. Katniss starts the rebellion, but events quickly move beyond her control. Her power is fleeting, and largely symbolic. Before long, the rebel Engineers take over, and the old balance between Watcher, Watched, and Engineer is restored.

Mockingjay
finishes with Katniss living in uneasy, troubled peace. She’s no longer Watched, but she isn’t a Watcher or an Engineer either. She’s retired. Plutarch understands Katniss’ anxiety—he knows that it’s only a matter of time before things disintegrate once more. But he’s ready, ever the Engineer, to point his cameras and repackage real-world drama and suffering into popular entertainment. He allows himself a cheerful moment of optimism: “Maybe we are witnessing the evolution of the human race.” And then he tells Katniss all about the new
Idol
-style program he’s about to launch. Evolution indeed.

Katniss turned around and looked back into the camera that was always watching her—and she changed the world. But she
is uneasy because she knows that this new balance between the Watchers, the Watched, and the Engineers won’t last forever. Sooner or later, the balance will swing too far in one direction, and the Games will begin all over again.

LILI WILKINSON
is the award-winning author of
Scatter heart and Angel Fish
. She lives in Australia where she can usually be found reading, writing, sewing, or consuming quality TV (along with quality chocolate). Her latest book,
Pink
, will be published by HarperCollins in February 2011.

 

 

If there’s one quality people look for in their reality television show contestants, it’s their ability to be “real”—to appear genuine, in spite of the cameras that follow them around. Should be easy, right? All you have to do is, as Cinna tells Katniss in
The Hunger Games
, “be yourself.” But being real is harder than it looks. It’s not Katniss herself that the viewers fall for, after all. It’s Katniss the star-crossed lover, Katniss the girl on fire, Katniss the Mockingjay. Being real is as much about artifice as it is about reality. Ned Vizzini looks at media training, the challenge of authenticity, and what it really takes to become a media hero, both in Katniss’ world and in ours.

 

 

W
hen I was nineteen, slightly older than Katniss Everdeen in
The Hunger Games
(and worse at archery), I was invited to leave my home and journey to a faraway land to prepare for a new chapter in my life. The faraway land was not the Capitol but Minneapolis, Minnesota. The new chapter was not a pubescent deathmatch—I had just been through that in high school—but a professional arena where every day contestants young and old are ground up and forgotten, driven to alcoholism, and sent back to graduate school. I was going to be a published author. My publisher had decided that I needed “media training.”

I arrived at MSP Airport with scant television experience. In grade school I had been on a Nickelodeon “Big Help” public service ad raking leaves and was given 0.2 seconds of screen time; as an infant I had failed out of auditions for a diaper commercial. (I could still end up in an adult diaper commercial.) The publisher was betting that this track record would change, because I was young enough and likable enough to do talk shows. I had to be ready. Being on television talk shows is a coup for any author. Most of the time if you see an author on TV, you are watching BookTV on CSPAN, and the only other person watching is my father.

An editor met me at the airport. She brought me to a restaurant where I saw “Beer Cheese Soup” on the menu. I learned it was a Minnesota specialty and ordered it. Like the lamb stew that Katniss gushes over in
The Hunger Games,
it blew my mind; I still cannot find anything like it. The editor told me how excited everyone was for my book to be published and how
much fun this was going to be. I knew from past experience that this meant
run
.

 

 

In
The Hunger Games
,
Katniss Everdeen is suspicious of her media training. When she arrives in the Capitol, she notes the strange accents and adornments of her prep team (no comment here on the Minnesota accent, which I found delightful). Not only do members of her team have tinted skin and high-pitched voices, they have a job that is alien to Katniss: to make her look good on television. This expertise in abstraction runs counter to her experience as a hunter and provider in District 12. A world like the Capitol, where food can appear at the touch of a button and image is everything, does not seem real to Katniss, and
realness
—real emotion, real resolve, real fire—is at the heart of
The Hunger Games
.

Katniss becomes famous because of her realness. When Caesar Flickerman asks her in her first televised interview what has impressed her most about the Capitol and she mentions the lamb stew, the laugh she elicits cements a love affair with her public that she contends with for the rest of the trilogy. Why is this answer so important? It is
honest.
It shows a lack of concern for what the “right” answer might be (“the architecture,” “the fashion”) and, in a world of tightly controlled propaganda, this is revolutionary. It is the first signal to the people of Panem that Katniss is an uncorrupted firebrand—one who has conveniently been on actual fire—and implies that she has no hidden motivations or agendas, unlike the rest of the contestants on the reality program they love so much.