The Unofficial Hunger Games Companion (34 page)

Katniss initially thinks of her prep team—Flavius, Venia, Octavia, and Cinna the stylist—as “total idiots.” She later learns to like her crew, seeing them as real people who are caught in a society of weirdness; and when they’re killed, she’s devastated. This is true of a lot of people in our own world. Just because someone undergoes some of the plastic surgery procedures described above doesn’t make him or her less of a person. We are all caught in a society of weirdness.

Soon, it will become routine for people to alter our DNA as often as we now undergo plastic surgeries, wear tinted contact lenses, and take antidepressive drugs. Gene products will provide lovely, soft skin without blemishes; and will alter our personalities based on who we want to be rather than who we really are. According to Dr. Henry I. Miller, a Senior Research Fellow at Stanford University, we will routinely use genetic therapies to enhance our physical and mental capabilities. He points out that in the future genetic therapy for achieving favorable physical and mental attributes will be as ordinary as going to a counselor or psychiatrist, taking psychiatric medications or antidepressants, or getting drug treatments for baldness, obesity, and age spots.
²⁷

In addition to style and fashion, the tributes also learn how to walk as if they’re on a fashion show runway, how to smile and make eye contact, and much more. In reality, entire television programs center around people competing on the runway: Not only do we have
America’s Next Top Model,
we also have
RuPaul’s Drag Race
and many other shows devoted to models and runways.

Readers might be tuned into the Scott Westerfeld
Uglies
books, in which all teenagers get plastic surgery. Again, it’s style over substance: Everyone must conform to defined beauty standards. The heroine of the series, Tally, wants to become a Pretty, yet all the Pretties receive lobotomies during the plastic surgery. The Uglies series is faintly reminiscent of
The Stepford Wives,
in which husbands make their wives into robotic yet beautiful drones. Pretty is all that matters.

It’s only fitting that we close this chapter, which explores reality television programs, with a discussion of
Survivor
. In the United States, the program launched in 2000, and it was so popular that it spawned reality television as a staple of programming. The show has taken place all over the world: Nicaragua, Fiji, China, Borneo, Australia, Africa, Thailand, The Amazon, Samoa, Gabon, Brazil, etc.

The Hunger Games is an extreme version of Survivor. Suzanne Collins has pushed
Survivor
into the horror of dystopian post-apocalyptic fiction, where she pits competitors against each other for prizes worth a lot more than merchandise and cash.

Just as everyone in the Capitol can’t wait for the Games, apparently people in the real world are obsessed in the same way with
Survivor
. Rating have been through the roof, ranging from 10 million to
52 million viewers
.

In the real
Survivor
program, tribes of strangers are stranded in a game locale that varies from season to season. The competitors must find water, food, and shelter, just as in the Hunger Games. They pair off and compete against each other so they won’t be eliminated from the game. One person wins each
Survivor
game and is designated the Sole Survivor. He also gets a million dollars, just as the Sole Survivor of the Hunger Games get a free mansion and food for life. While the Gamemakers often change the rules of the Hunger Games, so do the gamemakers of
Survivor
. The point is to keep the program entertaining, because after all, if the competitors always used the same strategies to win, nobody would watch the show.

What about style versus substance? Is
Survivor
real or fake? According to MSNBC, it’s mostly real; however, the show does actively hire models and actors for programs. On
Survivor Fiji,
“everyone except one person . . . was recruited.”
²⁸

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1603–1800

I
n a famous interview with Scholastic, Suzanne Collins tells us that the ancient Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur served as a “significant influence” on The Hunger Games series. According to the author, she views Katniss as “a futuristic Theseus.”
¹

So who was Theseus, and how does Katniss resemble him?

According to mythology, Theseus was the son of King Aegeus of ancient Athens, and of Aethra, daughter of King Pittheus of Troezen. At first, Aegeus wasn’t aware that Theseus was his son because Pittheus and Aethra hid the fact from him. In fact, as the story goes, Aethra claimed that Poseidon was really Theseus’s father.

Aegeus’s wife, the sorceress Medea, bore the king a son named Medus. In the meantime, Aethra led her son, Theseus, to a rock, where Aegeus had hidden his sword and sandals.

When Theseus grew older, he traveled to Athens to meet his human father, Aegeus. Medea didn’t want any competition against her own son, Medus, for the throne, so she sent Theseus on what she hoped was a doomed quest to capture the savage Marathonian Bull. Expecting Theseus to die, Medea was shocked when Theseus captured the bull. She persuaded Aegeus to poison the boy with tainted wine. But in the nick of time, Aegeus recognized Theseus’s sword as the very one he hid near Aethra’s home. He realized that Theseus was of his own flesh and blood. So he knocked the goblet of poison wine from the boy’s lips, and he banished Medea and Medus from Athens.

Aegeus, in the meantime, was at war with his brother, King Minos of Crete. The people of Crete suffered from war and hunger, and as a result, Minos demanded every year for nine years, seven boys and seven girls be sacrificed to the Minotaur.

Fighting over the throne with his brothers, Minos had resorted to desperate measures. He had prayed to Poseidon for a white bull as a sign of Poseidon’s approval to rule Crete. He promised to then slay the bull in honor of the Greek gods. But when Minos saw the beautiful bull, he couldn’t bring himself to kill it. Bad idea. You don’t mess with the gods. Poseidon was furious with Minos, and worked his magic on Minos’s wife, Pasipha, who fell in love with the bull. Alas, as is the case in stories of the ancient gods, Pasipha had a child with the white bull. It wasn’t a boy. It wasn’t a girl. It was the Minotaur: a monster with a man’s body but the head and tail of a bull.

Minos ordered the architect Daedalus to create a huge labyrinth in which to imprison the Minotaur. And then, every year for nine years, he cast seven boys and seven girls from Athens into the labyrinth, where the monster would feast upon them.

Hoping to end the sacrifices, Theseus volunteered to be one of the young men who had to battle the monster for his life. Suzanne Collins points out that, in this regard—because Theseus volunteered to fight the Minotaur—Katniss is a “futuristic Theseus.” He sailed to Crete, where Minos’s daughter Ariadne helped him defeat the Minotaur.

In the meantime, Aegeus assumed that the Minotaur had killed Theseus, and he threw himself off the Acropolis into what later became known as the Aegean Sea.

Suzanne Collins describes in her Scholastic interview how struck she was, even as a young girl, by “the ruthlessness of this message. ‘Mess with us and we’ll do something worse than kill you. We’ll kill your children.’ ”
²

Let’s summarize: