The Hunger Games
by Jason Stotts
The movie The Hunger Games has been doing exceptionally well in the box office and it’s no surprise. The Hunger Games are poignant, dramatic, and moving. It is the story of children caught up in the machine of an all powerful government who controls the very lives of its citizens and kills them for sport and to keep the others in line. It is the dramatization of what happens when the state gains absolute power. But, this post is not about how The Hunger Games is all too apropos to the direction our own government is heading. No, this post is about something entirely different.
In The Hunger Games, we see the viciciousness of a world in which children have to murder each other for sport, to appease their government, and to help keep the subjegated masses under control. We watch these children murder each other on screen, much as the ficitious residents of Panem do and we think about what a good shot Katniss is with her bow or how powerful Cato is. But, do we wonder about how we are so used to violence and death that the idea of even children killing each other as pets of their government doesn’t faze us? Do we not worry what has become of our humanity when children killing children is not absolutely shocking?
Moreover, do we not realize what is suspiciously absent from the film? In the book, Katniss remarks that the height of fashion for tributes is often nudity and she is relieved that her stylist Cinna doesn’t just make her go out naked or perhaps covered in just coal dust. There are scenes of her showering in the book, of being worked on naked by her prep team to look good for her death, and even of her bathing in the river during the games. These scenes are absent in the movie. Why? Because they contain nudity. Of children. And that is unacceptable in our culture. It’s fine to watch them murder each other, but god forbid we see their nude bodies, whether they are being sexual or not. And let me point out that I say “god forbid” very pointedly, becuase it is the christian preoccupation with the evil of the body, the sinful nature of the flesh, and the very evil of our “coroporeal prison” that has brought us to this day when to see children murder each other is fine, but to see their exposed bodies is not. And to think that the christians call us immoral.
If you haven’t considered why you think it’s okay for children to murder each other, but not to be naked on screen, please pause and ask yourself that now. There was no nudity in the movie because that would have moved their rating from PG-13 to R. Not the murder of children by other children. Simple nudity. Nudity in context of a story, nudity because it is part of life, nudity because it is natural. Not even sexuality, not even gratuitous nudity, just simple nudity can move the rating from PG-13 to R, whereas the murder of children cannot. What an interesting time we live in.
Our culture, corrupted with the taint of christianity, is so perverse that murder is more desirable to see than the natural state of our bodies. I can think of no more obvious sign that everything about christianity is set up as the opposite of what is good and fine in life. I can think of no more telling example than this that christianity is truly the great inversion of morality, the turning of morality from being an aid to achieve a good life to being nothing more than a path to perversion and death. That christianity is nothing more than the worship of death.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The day is not too late. We are still alive. We still have our minds. We are still free to act, to think, to write. We can reconsider our positions, reconsider why we believe the things we do. We can throw off the shackles of irrationality and look at things anew in the light of reason. We can regain our humanity one person at a time and retake our culture. And what a culture it was at one point, the American Dream: Freedom, Independence, Ingenuity, Mastery over Nature, Self-Reliance, a Government that is Servant and not Master. A dream that reasonable men and women would be able to live out their lives on their own terms, free to succeed or fail on their own merits. The dream began to fade because the philosophy on which is was based was not yet ready. And make no mistake, culture is only a reflection of philosophy, of ideas. Without the right ideas upon which to build, the structure slowly collapsed in on itself. But it is not gone yet and the philosophy is now ready.
We can start again in this noble land where the ideals are good and true, even if they are beginning to be corrupted. We can replace their poor foundations with strong ones made from good ideas and begin to build again. Through reason and human intelligence, we can reraise our flags of virtue and rebuild our society in the light of reason. We will have to throw off all scraps of faith, of desire to control the lives of others, of the desire to live off of others, of weakness and frailty, and replace these things with reason, productiveness, independence, and self-reliance. We can do it. The day is not too late. The sparks are lit. The only quesiton that remains is are we willing to commit ourselves fully to reason and fans the flames to immolate this culture corrupted by faith and religion and build anew through reason to the glory of man?
