The Girl Who Was on Fire (11 page)

Of course, in order to win the Hunger Games and lead the rebellion that follows, Katniss must betray that realness and
employ all sorts of calculated gambits, losing herself in a maze of self-constructed imagery. Once she becomes famous, she is forced to consider how much of her persona is real and how much is fashioned by her many handlers, from Cinna to Haymitch to President Coin—all of whom do not end up well. Thus the Hunger Games presents us with the kind of hero that not only Panem but America likes best: the reluctant one, unexpectedly brilliant when challenged and then, once famous, desirous of a simpler life.

In preparing
The Terminator
, James Cameron studied the narrative characteristics of the ten most successful films of all time. He found a common thread: ordinary people in extraordinary situations.
¹⁰
Implicit in “ordinariness” is realness, authenticity, and humility, traits that Katniss has in spades. No wonder the Hunger Games seemed like a good fit for the big screen.

 

 

I went to a
television studio to meet my media trainer. I will call her Jessica, which might have also been her real name.

Jessica wore a perfectly tailored dark suit. She shook my hand (down-up-down, crisp) while I stared at the ceiling, which was so high that it allowed for wind currents. Humongous lights—like chrome bombs—beamed down on a wide blank area with two chairs.

“That’s where we’re going to do the practice interview,” Jessica said. “But first, makeup!”

I was taken to a back room and plunked in a dental chair. A
woman my age poofed powder on my face with the clinical detachment of a doctor. I was not sure if I should speak to her. Perhaps this was like getting a haircut and it was better not to distract her. After a while it got too uncomfortable.

“How’s my ... ah, skin?”

“You don’t have many pimples, which is good.”

“I have them on my back.”

“Didn’t really need to know that!”

She stood me up. I glanced at myself in the mirror before leaving her chamber; I looked like something from
In the Night Kitchen.
I never realized that people on TV wore this much makeup. It had weight.

“Your shirt is going to be a problem,” Jessica said.

“Why?” The only thing I knew about being on television was that you weren’t supposed to wear white—it glows. So I had on a horizontal striped shirt, which in hindsight I had no reason to own.

“Stripes confuse the camera. You’ll appear to be shifting left and right.”

“Do you want me to take it off?”

“No! Just, next time, wear something solid.”

She led me to the chairs. A man stood behind a television camera a few feet from them. It struck me how
big
the camera was; it looked like a surface-mounted weapon from World War II. The editor waved at me from the sidelines. “You’re doing great, Ned!”

“We just want to get a little bit of test footage to find your strengths and weaknesses,” Jessica said. She sat in one chair and motioned for me to take the other. She crossed her legs. I crossed my legs, thought that must look weird, uncrossed them, felt exposed, crossed them again. I glanced at the camera. There it was: the red eye.

Like the Eye of Sauron in Middle Earth. Like the faces projected on the sky to recap the day’s casualties in the Hunger Games. Like the piercing pupil of God staring me down and daring me not to mess up. I knew my image was not being broadcast anywhere—this was all a test; it was going on a tape that no one would see!—but that was the same red eye that newscasters saw when they were piped into hundreds of millions of households. It was the same eye that Leonardo DiCaprio saw.

“So Ned, why don’t you tell us about your book?”

“Uh ... my ... uh ...”

I could not stop looking at the eye. I had a lot to learn.

 

 

Heroes and heroines were
not always like Katniss Everdeen. A quick trip through myth shows that, far from realness,
exceptionalism
was the prerequisite for humanity’s first heroic figures. From Gilgamesh to Hercules, stories of old centered around unreal warriors destined for fame, readily distinguishable from common folk by fantastic size and strength. As recently as the 1940s, Captain America captured popular imagination with a traditional (American) exceptionalism, blessed with superhuman abilities and divorced from ordinary concerns—and proud of it.

Early myths made up for their hard-to-relate-to subject matter by the tone and method of their delivery—they were told by priests and bards, infused with religious and patriotic didacticism. They were good for you; they were cultural glue meant to be experienced in particular contexts. As literacy and the availability of books spread, however, and made such stories accessible to everyone, the subjects of myth democratized. Heroes moved from high court (Geoffrey’s
History of the Kings of Britain
) to the middle class (Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe
) to the streets (Bukowski’s
Post Office
), spreading to meet their audiences, and exceptionalism
began to feel like a barrier to entry.
Authenticity
—the ability of a hero to convince an audience that
you could be me—
became paramount, and ordinary people in extraordinary situations became the go-to guys and gals for heroic tales.

In America, this went over particularly well, as it reflected the idea of the American Dream. If an ordinary person can thrive in tremendous peril, an ordinary reader can surely achieve greatness through life’s ups and downs. While the Hunger Games sets itself firmly in this tradition, it also addresses a more up-todate variant of the American Dream: the dream to be famous for no reason at all.

 

 

Ask a few kids
from Alabama to Wyoming what they want to be when they grow up, and these days you are likely to hear “famous.” Not famous for any particular thing, just “famous.” It seems unsavory to older ears, but this is a dream rooted in the original American Dream, the one about working hard and getting ahead. The only difference is that technology has removed the need for work.

By the 1920s, the red eye of the motion picture camera could do for human beings what the printing press did for words—make them reproducible at low cost for mass consumption. For the first time, it was possible to be famous for no reason other than an ability to be interesting in front of a camera, because there was such a thing as a camera, and it is a testament to the American work ethic that everyone did not immediately drop what they were doing to ambush one.

Some did, of course. Hopefuls streamed to Hollywood to get into the movie business. Viewers dreamed of television stardom and read magazines about it to be closer to their dream. But work still had a place in media success; the act of
performance
was
still a craft. You did not get to be a star just by being yourself—you got to be a star by being amazing. “To grasp the full significance of life is the actor’s duty,” said James Dean,
¹¹
which sounds like the same sort of duty a writer or musician should aspire to.

Then
The Real World
came along. Starting in 1992 and currently picked up by MTV for its twenty-sixth season, the show was so simple and instantly ubiquitous that it can be hard to step back and recognize its impact. It took Andy Warhol’s 1968 dictum about fifteen minutes of fame and put it to the test every week.
The Real World
stripped away any value for accomplishment; no one on the show was cool because they had a good job or created good art (remember the season where they were all supposed to get jobs?—a disaster!); they were cool because they were real, and the rise of
The Real World
dovetailed with the fetishization of the word “real” in hip-hop. Cultural currency no longer came from acts, it came from realness, as defined by an ability to be interesting in front of observers while not appearing to attempt to be interesting.
The Real World
was Zen: the only thing you had to do to get on it was be real, but if you tried to be real you would never make it.

By this time too the words “success” and “fame” had been conflated in American discourse. Kids who watched
The Real World
did not want to be successful; they wanted to be famous. They did not understand or care that there was a difference between the two. The tragic actors and actresses who achieved fame only to drown in it, from Marilyn Monroe to River Phoenix, were still famous. The housemates on
The Real World
were famous for being real and successful for being famous, and for almost a decade this was enough for the American public. Then
Survivor
came along, the brainchild of a British television producer, and reintroduced the Puritan work ethic to the reality media landscape. To be on
Survivor,
all you had to do was be real, but once you were on it, you had to be exceptional again—to compete in challenging competitions and outsmart your opponents. It was a microcosm of the old American Dream inside the new, and like
The Real World
it spawned a host of imitators.

American Idol
swung the pendulum back toward the old dream, unfolding season after season like a hyper-speed trip through Hollywood past, with clean, glitzy stages and an unfailing obedience to the will of the people. It rewarded performance in the most traditional way: a straight vote. Critics called
Idol
many things, but they never called it fake
.

While it ascended, the
Real World
model of fame for free was picked up by the internet. By 2006, when
Time
magazine’s Person of the Year was “You,” it was unnecessary—hokey—to appear on television to gain fame. The problem was that on the internet, being real was no longer enough; with 900,000 new blogs created per day,
¹²
dreamers had to dream bigger to get their message across. The absurd rose to the top—obese singers, dramatic chipmunks, focused light saber artistes. Being real was requisite, but now a certain amount of perversion and disregard for shame was also necessary.

Katniss Everdeen, then, is a post-American dreamer whose story pulls from each stage of the past hundred years of media history. Like the housemates on
The Real World
, she is not selected for the Hunger Games for any particular skill. Her family is struck by the hand of fate in the reaping and she does the best she can in response, selflessly taking the place of her
younger sister, which is what we would like to think we would do. As an ordinary girl in extraordinary circumstances, her reluctance makes her authentic.

Contrast this with the Careers that she fights against from District 2. Not only are they cunning and bloodthirsty, they
want to be there
. They train for the Hunger Games and look forward to achieving fame and glory on television. They are like the posers who do not make
The Real World
, the boys and girls who try too hard; they are also like Gilgamesh, brutally exceptional in the most unrelatable way. By being willing participants in the Games, they “swallowed the Capitol’s propaganda more easily than the rest of us,” says Katniss in
Mockingjay
, which makes them dupes, quaintly hokey, buying into a system that does not work. They are holdovers from a generation that believes in work rather than realness as the path to success, while Katniss learns it is authenticity that makes her a heroine in a media-saturated age.

But Katniss’ realness is only the beginning. Once her interview brings her to Panem’s attention, she delivers in combat, beating the Careers at their own game. Inside the arena, she takes on the traits that made Richard Hatch a hero on
Survivor—
ruthlessness—and Kelly Clarkson a heroine on
American Idol—
skill. The fact that she is drafted into a reality show she then excels at, despite not wanting to, lets her succeed in the old American dream while embracing the new. She is famous for being good and famous for being herself.

 

 

I was not good.
After my initial choke-up on camera, Jessica asked what the problem was.

“I just sort of ... started thinking about who might be watching.”

“But no one’s watching.”

“Hypothetically.”

“The way to approach a television interview isn’t to think about the people watching, Ned, but about the interviewer.” Jessica explained further: most people who watch television watch it alone, so if I acted the way I did when I was communicating with a friend, I would appear natural on the other side of the screen. Cinna tells Katniss the same thing to prepare her for her interview with Caesar: “‘Suppose, when you answer the questions, you think you’re addressing a friend back home’” (
The Hunger Games
).

“I don’t know if I’m really that natural when I communicate with my friends.”

“Do you look them in the eye?”

“No.”

“You should. And you should look your interviewer in the eye.”

“Shouldn’t I look at the camera?”

She smiled. “You should look at the camera but
not
look at the camera.” More Zen. It turns out that the proper way to treat a camera in an interview is to eye it at a three-fourths angle, as if you happen to be
sort of
looking at it while your main focus stays on the interviewer. Like being on
Survivor
, or in the Hunger Games, you need to be real in order for the audience to connect with you. Then you need to play the game in order to win.

Katniss gets put through the gamut during her media training. Prior to her interview, Haymitch attempts to have her act humble, cocky, witty, sexy, and mysterious, to both of their frustration. “‘[P]retend I’m the audience,’” he advises. “‘Delight me’” (
The Hunger Games
). Katniss does not, and soon enough Haymitch is throwing up his hands, drunk. As a veteran of the Hunger Games he should know better.

“Being aware of the audience leads to overeagerness,” Jessica explained, “which television cameras register as
fakeness.”