BLOGGING THE HUNGER GAMES, pt. 7: The District Sleeps Alone Tonight

Science fiction writers who fear the political advance of religion write about a future in which religious lunatics have taken over (see The Handmaid's Tale). The Hunger Games seems to be warning us more about the effects of a violent culture of excess (it's somewhat conservative that way). Now, this has got to be the easiest way to write a novel about the future, right? Think about the things you hate the most and imagine they controlled you. Nobody writes about a horrible future in which everything they DO believe in comes to fruition, except the Left Behind guys. And fuck those dudes.

Chapter 7

I started to wonder for a while there if YA just didn't lend itself to close examination. When I was doing Twilight it felt like many of these posts were writing themselves; S. Meyer fell into the same traps so many times that creating a narrative about her narrative failures was almost too easy. And I felt like the same thing was starting to happen here. Katniss cycles from hardship-hardened tough woman to sweet and almost naïve girl back to suspicious and tough so many times in chapters 2-7 it was getting ridiculous. In this chapter, though, S. Collins turns her liability into an advantage, showing the cycle happen a few times in rapid succession during a kind of montage of Katniss and Peeta's training sessions. Our heroes trade witty banter and learn battle skills and all the while Kat lifts her guard up and pulls it back down like a wet t-shirt. It becomes endearing, in a weird way. That said, if this relationship were drawn out any more this would be a graphic novel. HEYOOO.

Katniss wakes up and has an uncomfortable shower because she's too lazy to bother trying to figure out the fucking nozzles and buttons. MONDAYS AM I RIGHT? She steps on the cat and tells it to fuck itself (or maybe that was me) and puts on a burgundy tunic (gentlemen start your engines) and heads down to breakfast. Eventually Haymitch and Peeta turn up and Katniss tells us that they're about to start three days of training, after which they will individually audition for the “gamemakers,” whoever the fuck they are (I'm guessing the descendants of Milton and Bradley). Haymitch asks what special skills they have and what follows is a weirdly flirty scene in which Katniss and Peeta sing each other's praises and then act annoyed at each other for doing so. Peeta talks about our narrator's accuracy with a bow, and how his father always pointed out that Katniss hit the squirrel in the eye every time out. Gross, Katniss. Also:

I never thought about Peeta eating the squirrels I shot. Somehow I always pictured the baker quietly going off and frying them up for himself.

What a creepy image! What's WRONG WITH YOU, Katniss? (“Oh, I just assumed your dad was having sex with those squirrel corpses.”) Anyway, Katniss tells Haymitch about how strong and muscle-y Peeta is and then they both look at each other like “Oh, have we maybe been obsessed with each other since childhood?”

[A]pparently, I have not been as oblivious to him as I imagined, either...I have kept track of the boy with the bread.

Peeta gets more and more exasperated as Katniss refuses to acknowledge how awesome she is, and he tells Haymitch, “She has no idea. The effect she can have.” It's hard to know if he means because people pity her or because she's sexy, but Katniss assumes the former so it's probably the latter. But it's ambiguous, and in a good way! This is the moment where I stopped being annoyed at Katniss's suspicions and the tensions between our heroes and started being interested. Until now it seemed like everything was a product of Katniss's insecurities, that Peeta was in love with her and she was just too self-deprecating to figure it out (has anyone ever read "The Frog Prince" as an allegory for self-esteem issues? If not I JUST DID BOOM). Now the picture seems more complex. Of course, it could still just be that Peeta luvs Katniss like krazy, that he has a notebook at home with “Peeta Everdeen” and “Katniss Mellark” written in a bunch of different milky pens all through the pages, but it doesn't feel like we're inexorably marching there at the moment, at least.

Haymitch tells them not to show their real talents in front of the other tributes, to use the training days to learn some new skills. Good advice. You gotta know when to hold them (That's what she said (about balls)). And he also mandates that they stay together at all times in public. That makes Katniss real mad:

It's such a joke! Peeta and I going along pretending to be friends! Talking up each other's strengths, insisting the other take credit for their abilities...

Hey girl, nobody made you do that last thing (that's what he said (about balls)). She gets on the elevator, and tells us it takes “less than a minute” to get to the training center in the basement. Well, of course! You're only going down 12 floors! Whoa, is this elevator actually really shitty by our standards but nice for Panem standards? What I'm asking is: at what level of technology should we picture Panem, really? Just because it's the future doesn't mean shit is actually advanced, you know? Think about it: it's implied that District 13 was bombed, but the only other weapons we've heard about (and continue to hear about in this chapter) are shit like swords and maces. Why don't Hunger Games contestants use guns? Why didn't Katniss and Peeta travel to the Capitol by plane? We're getting Soviet again with all this technological mix and match.

Katniss and Peeta start training in various stations (the “go around to different stations” thing is something we used to do in gym class when our teacher was feeling particularly lazy. “Okay, you guys go play basketball! You kids throw shot-put or something. Whatever!” It's slightly over-explained here and then somewhat comically mirrored later when Katniss explains that lunch is handled in the same fashion. So you can go straight from the hog-tying booth to the pulled-pork quesadilla cart!) and Peeta turns out to be pretty gifted in the field of camouflage. While Katniss watches him paint his firm, toned body (maybe while drooling a little) he confesses to her that he decorates the cakes in his father's shop window. Katniss recalls the beautiful cakes and tries to reconcile them with her idea of Peeta. Damn, the last time I saw someone in so many different lights I was in a lamp store.

Some other stuff happens: Katniss struggles to find conversation topics with Peeta and forbids him from talking to her in private—the resulting silence is even more fraught with sexual tension (or not, I'm not sure). They get tailed during their training sessions by Rue, the small female tribute who reminds Katniss of Prim. So the big question for me is: Is Katniss going to kill anyone when the games begin? Or is she going to survive some other way?

I was kind of under the impression we'd be in the training center enduring various interpersonal dramas between tributes for a while, reality show-style. So it's a little crazy when Katniss skips the three training days in a single paragraph. Suddenly it's audition day, and Katniss has to go last. After running around and shooting arrows at all kinds of shit like a boss, she looks up and sees that the Gamemakers (who are like the Hunger Games board of directors, I guess) are bored and not paying attention to her, instead looking at a roast pig they're about to have for dinner. So Katniss shoots an arrow directly at their table, taking the apple out of the pig's mouth. Hey, it's no William Tell, but at least it wasn't a William Burroughs.

Stray Notes & Questions

• There's a dark moment when Peeta is trying to make Katniss see how talented she is and he reveals that after the reaping, his mother basically told him she thought Katniss had a chance at winning the Hunger Games. Implying that he, her son, did not. MOMS, HUH? Yikes.
• We've seen a lot of Katniss's self-deprecating side, so it's surprising and interesting when she looks around the room at her fellow tributes and concludes that she has “a healthier body than most.” A few of them, though, are “Careers”—kids from the wealthy districts who are trained from birth to win the games. Even odds says the careers are all going to cancel each other out once the fighting starts.
• Speaking of once the fighting starts, what's going to happen when that happens? Imagine The Hunger Games to be a heist story, because right now that's sort of what it is. There's a big event coming up and we've met our team and we've learned the rules of the big event, and soon they're going to go in and do the thing. Heist genre conventions dictate that everything doesn't go according to plan once the heist starts: there's an obstacle no one anticipated, someone turns out to have shifting allegiances, or maybe some combination of both. So look for that, is what I'm saying.
• How are you liking this book so far?

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