Sorry 'Catching Fire,' Kids Hunger for Real Rebellion

Competition does weird things to people. Generosity, sweetness and kindness go flailing out the window, and in their place comes a neo-Darwinian atavism, red in tooth-and-claw and willing to crawl over top of everyone and everything for money, fame and attention.

It's kind of strange how pervasive it is at the moment. On every television channel, singers, dancers, cooks, ninjas, gimlet-eyed tykes and star-spangled babes are all engaged in a battle to the death for the big prize in the sky. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is only the most nakedly evident example of the cutthroat ethos that threatens to subsume us all.

Humans have always been competitive little creatures, busily hitting each other with rocks to get the best bit of the wildebeest. But once civilization took hold, such raw contest was largely ritualized into sports, and there it stayed for a while. But at some point, the idea to make everything else we do into a competition seemed to take hold. The idea spread like wildfire and here we are today, fighting for the attention of a twat like Simon Cowell.

But for every breathy winner, there are many more losers. What is the eventual outcome of all this endless striving, this pushy kill-or-be-killed notion? According to the rules of the latest Hunger Games film, Catching Fire, it's to maintain the status quo of bread and circuses. But the games are rigged: the oligarchs not only get all the balls, they also make the rules. And who really wins? The folks who own CoverGirl and Subway.

Revolution and great hair!

In Catching Fire's good old Panem, things are pretty much where we left off the last time round. Katniss Everdeen and her two moony boyfriends are still figuring out the complexities of their romantic triangle. Meanwhile, revolution is in the air; the people are hungry for change and fancier hair-dos, and Ms. Everdeen showed them the way, with her lovely skin and her truculent manner. Onwards comrades! To poufy hair and eyelash extensions!

The first film in the series wasn't horrid, but the second outing takes a swan dive into dreck lake. Catching Fire is oddly enervating for a story of bloody revolution. What ought to be stirring just causes snickers, and a terminal dullness steals over the proceedings like poison gas -- one breath and your brain falls out of your nose. I feel sorry for kids looking for something to prompt any real feeling, but then again I'm not 12-years-old. When I was that age, I thought the Bee Gees were an all-girl group. And I still liked them. So who's to say what the kids should or shouldn't like these days?

While a few old critics grouse about the state of things, coughing and moaning about when films were actually decent, the kids are paying good money to see Katniss shoot first and dither later. Catching Fire is doing boffo box office at the moment all around the globe. Every kid I know trucked off on opening day and stood in line to buy tickets at the Cineplex to see the damn thing. This alone is indicative of something, since mostly they can't be budged from being in front of their computers. There is something here, some greater reason they're drawn to the story -- children fighting to the death for the delectation of adults.

'You're pre-fucked, kids'

It reminds me of something that one of the Yes Men said at the premiere of a film called Everyday Rebellion at the CPH: DOX Festival in Copenhagen. "You're pre-fucked, kids," he said, before inciting every red-blooded university and college student to fight for change. But college and universities are not the hotbed of radicalism that they once were, when the May 1968 student revolts changed everything. Kids are much too busy competing for grades, and the few jobs that come with them, to get really radical. They have been trained well, perhaps too well. In China, a rash of student suicides prompted universities to make new students sign waivers absolving the school of any responsibility should they die in the process of a getting a degree.

Perhaps the most curious thing about the screening of Everyday Rebellion in Copenhagen was the audience's reaction. The film examines the use of nonviolent resistance in revolutionary movements around the globe, everything from Occupy Wall Street, to the Iranian Green Revolution, to the increasingly terrible situation in Syria. (Forgive a brief aside for a moment: but just when I think things couldn't possibly get any worse in Syria, some new fresh horror arises. The targeted killing and torture of children and infants to break the will of parents pretty much destroys any illusions about humans I might ever have possessed.)

After the screening was over, the audience applauded politely and sat quietly in their seats. There were a few questions, but for the most part people seemed entirely unaffected. This was curious to me. Documentaries present reality, and here was one, raw and dripping, and no one seemed even slightly riled by the fact that regimes around the world have squashed their own people into red jam. Finally, an older man sitting in the front row asked, "Are you afraid that making a movie like this means that this story is now just entertainment?"

The filmmakers were silent for a moment, before launching into the usual and expected answer about needing to tell people's stories, etc. But the question begs a little more careful consideration. Whether it's Catching Fire or Everyday Rebellion, there is a danger of equivocating all films, no matter the subject, into a certain kind of gruel. The opium of the masses, as Marx once termed religion, has given way to an even larger and more encompassing church -- namely that of entertainment.

Engineered to compete

It's useful to look at the famous quote in somewhat longer form. Marx wrote: "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people... The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo."

Interesting, especially in light of the boundless supply of illusion currently on offer at the moment. We need illusions to distract us, to protect us from a reality that is too horrifying to countenance. The current hunger for reality-TV competition, with its endless supply of contestants and ritualized struggle, is a few yards off from kids killing each other for sport, but they're in the same ballpark. The most depressing bit is that we've been here before. The end of empire requires spectacle, whether you're on Easter Island or in ancient Rome. Behind it all is rocks and wildebeest, the fight for resources, food, water, shelter.

This competitive ethos is installed early in children and reinforced through to university and beyond. Ken Robinson gave one of the most widely-watched TED Talks about how formalized education destroys divergent thinking. Robinson is featured prominently in a new documentary from Erwin Wagenhofer called Alphabet that argues that "the modern educational system squelches children's capacity for imagination, turning them into little capitalist robots engineered to compete." At least according to the review in Variety.

The film travels the globe looking at different systems of education that promote competition above all else. The analogy to battle is made throughout, from Math Olympiads in China, to competitions to find the next CEO of the future. Those who lack the instinct for the kill are left behind, their bodies littering the field of society. For every Math Olympian or Master of the Universe, there are many more losers.

The argument that the education system has failed a generation is taken on by Jeff Madrick in the most recent issue of Harper's magazine. Madrick maintains that the young and the jobless will soon become one of the more pressing social ills in the good old USA, and makes his case on the basis of what is currently happening in New Orleans.

"The problem affects every major U.S. city -- American teens and young adults have never, since record-keeping began, done worse in the job market than in the past decade -- but it is worse in New Orleans than almost anywhere else... In New Orleans, 23 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds are out of school and unemployed; the national number -- 17 per cent -- isn't much better. Researchers estimate that there are 6.7 million young people nationwide who fit the bill," he writes.

The dichotomous world in which we live is becoming more dramatic everyday, so naturally it gets dramatized in the form of film and television. The subterranean pressure that moves culture and people isn't all that easy to see, except for when it comes popping up in movies and TV shows. Like some malignant and massive mycelium that stretches around the globe, it makes both toadstools and movies. It might seem like it just magically sprouted overnight, but there is a vast network of lines of control just beneath the surface of things.

Joy and anarchy

Against this network, like the controlled arena in Catching Fire, or maybe The Matrix before it, what weapons are most useful? Catching Fire itself offers a few answers. The work of Gene Sharp in both real and imagined revolutions shows up again and again, in colour, signs and gestures. It is in the scene where Katniss incites a mass uprising in a single silent gesture. It is there in the defiant and perverse will to fight in the face of overwhelming odds.

If only Catching Fire was even a slightly better film. There are few moments: the slicing whisper of arrows in flight, or the hardening of Katniss's young face into a mask of wrath. There are fleeting glimpses of something real, but they flicker away like wings in the forest.

I hope that real defiance will eventually win out, somehow and in some way. It is one of the characteristics that I hold most dear about humans, especially children. The stubborn, mulish need to say "No!" when everything is demanding that they say "Yes" -- this quality might be our saving grace one of these days. We do our best to train it out of them, but some ribbon of the stuff endures, a molten core of sweetness and strength, a caramel centre of joy and anarchy that won't be co-opted. Out of it springs genuine revolt, in the form of Syrian kids writing revolutionary graffiti in the streets, or Soweto kids refusing to learn the language of their oppressors.

A film like Catching Fire might look like it is using the language of revolution to forestall and co-opt that very thing, but the enthusiasm with which the younger set has embraced the series (books and films) gives me pause. There is hunger in their hearts for some kind of change. Or maybe a desire to quit the game entirely, to stop playing and leave the field, freedom and joy running hand in hand.