A few weeks back, our local paper, The Hampshire Gazette, ran a guest editorial by a mother wondering if she should let her child read The Hunger Games. Great question, but the author hadn’t read the book herself, or even a summary, and made several mistaken assumptions that would feed unreasonable fears about the book.
So I –ahem- wrote to the paper correcting those mistakes and urging parents to actually, you know, read the book, or one of the many online summaries, before deciding. The Gazette kindly published my letter with a big box around it and a picture from the film.
Done? No. This week, another guest editorial appeared. This one, from a teacher claiming to have read the book, goes on to decry the violence as a “mind-numbing experience.”
Is the book the right choice for any young reader? No, but near as I can tell, readers actually paying attention will find The Hunger Games if anything, anti-violence.
So… I wrote another response. Unless we’re on the verge of creating some sort of Hunger Games Editorial sub-genre, I don’t know if they’ll publish it, so I’m reproducing it here. Trusting the gist of the earlier pieces will become clear in context, without further ado, here we go:
The Gazette has now published two editorials on The Hunger Games – the first by Amy Pybus, who hadn’t read the book, and now the melodramatically titled “Hunger Games Starves Soul” by Tom Weiner, who chose to “skim pages at a time” when reading the violent passages his piece is supposedly about.
I’m not sure how much he actually read, since his description bears little resemblance to the book. In The Hunger Games, (SPOILER ALERT) after selflessly volunteering for the games to spare her sister, the main character does all she can to avoid killing. In the end, she threatens suicide rather than kill.
Readers do not “numbly” cheer her survival as a “killing machine” as Weiner suggests. Instead they cheer the survival of her compassion and the growth of her morality. Serious researchers into the subject take context into account. Here, the deaths are clearly depicted as tragic, leaving readers with a sense of revulsion and sadness at the violence.
That violence is itself meager compared with, say, Indiana Jones, Star Wars, or the 1950s EC horror comics widely read by 10 year olds, all of which do glorify violence yet have somehow failed to destroy Western Civilization.
The argument that virtual violence inherently renders us callous is also highly suspect. Since the advent of violent video games, played by hundreds of millions, violence within our society has not increased, but dropped dramatically.
Clearly, virtual violence is not violence. Reading about violence does not make us violent any more than reading about homosexuality makes us homosexual or reading Harry Potter makes us Satanists. Art reflects reality, and while, yes, it influences us, that influence is drop in the bucket compared to the real world.
Why are so many intrigued by tales and games of violence? Whatever else we are, humanity is a predatory species. It’s in our bones. Only by understanding our nature can we can rise above our darker side. Fiction is an insanely useful tool to accomplish that.
That said, how and when our youth learn about horrors like the Holocaust or the real-life Hunger Games of Joseph Kony’s child-army, is, and should be, up to parents and schools. To ignore violence completely, however, is to ignore reality.
Since Mr. Weiner mentions his book in his editorial, I’d feel remiss not mentioning my newest book, Ripper. It is about the son of Jack the Ripper and intended for ages twelve and up.
