BLOGGING THE HUNGER GAMES pt. 16: Pyramid Scheme

Last time, Katniss and Rue formed an alliance. And obviously alliances are temporary when there can only be on Hungerlander, but Katniss points out that the odds are still not ever in their favor; reaching the point where they'd have to kill each other is still a remote possibility. Sure, but I wonder for how long that will be true? Previous entries can be found in the directory.

Chapter 16

Rue cuddles against Katniss and sleeps while our narrator plots against the Careers. They're going to pull off an Ocean's 11-style heist, and it's going to be badass. I'm excited. But first, she reiterates the implications of destroying the food stash: The Careers have been well-fed their whole lives, and being a black belt in punching or whatever doesn't help you figure out which mushrooms you can eat and which ones will kill you (and which ones will expand your mind, man). Katniss says that in previous Games poor districts have prevailed only when the rich kids have been robbed of their food. This is why I have repeatedly said that I'm cool with the recession, as well as the woes of the entertainment industry. The continuation of the status quo doesn't help us scrappy folk much, you know? Let it burn! Go Katniss go!

Of course the next morning when Rue asks Katniss what her plan is, Katniss says "No idea." Weren't you lying awake planning, girl? We hear that the Careers are employing a scrawny kid from District 3 to watch over their stash, and Katniss and Rue puzzle over why that could be. (Just a wild guess: he's made out of bees!) They make tentative plans as they make their way toward the base, and on the way there they Get To Know Each Other. Rue has a bunch of siblings and says she likes "music" more than anything in the world. Katniss finds this to be frivolous, but uh, she's the one who asked the "what's your most favorite thing" question. What the fuck is her answer? "A carbonite double-bonded fast-action bow with filter-tip arrows." Shut up, Katniss.

Rue rhapsodizes about mockingjays and the way she used to sing back and forth with them. Katniss tries to give her her pin, but Rue suggests she hang on to it. "It's probably a magical MacGuffin of some kind and you should hang on to it for later plot reasons," she says. Once they have a plan, they part ways with intentions to meet up later and Katniss walks down the stream wondering about (guess who) Peeta ("I don't know, something about the stream and being soaking wet make me think of him"-Katniss). She tries to remember the hallucinatory moment when Peeta saved her but says "the fact that he was sparkling" is making her doubt it. What's so hard to believe about that?
Katniss reaches a bush where Rue usually hides to observe the Career base camp (for some reason I'm trying to come up with a sentence that ends "...is worth Rue in the bush") and finds four of them lingering about, a huge "pyramid" of food nearby. Other supplies are spread around the pyramid, mimicking the pattern of the original Cornucopia. So it's definitely booby-trapped, and Katniss daydreams about all the bloody, Saw-like ways it might work. Katniss is kind of a creep sometimes.

So there's this dude Cato who is shaping up to be the major villain from the Career gang, and he's the kind of villain who talks about his plans all the time, apparently. So just from plopping down a few yards away Katniss finds out that Peeta is on the run and was wounded badly by Cato's hand ("wounded by Cato's hand" sounds like a line that was in thousand Victorian-era plays. Do you think those playwrights maybe did have like, a stock phrase they put into everything, like a Victorian version of the Wilhelm Scream?) and that Cato wants the pleasure of killing Katniss himself:

"When I find her, I kill her in my own way, and no one interferes."

PUT THE FUCKING LOTION IN THE BASKET, KATNISS! So this dude is sort of a psycho, but Suzanne Collins manages to split the difference between an adult sociopath and a kid throwing a tantrum. He's threatening in a pathetic way, in other words. That's especially true for when he snaps the pencil-neck of the kid from District 3, but that's later. Somewhere Rue is off setting decoy fires, and Cato sees one and leads his pack (including the still-living nebbish from D3) toward it. Katniss chills for a while observing, wondering what she could do to destroy the pyramid. Would a flaming arrow work? Some other item she's received? Maybe if she plays a certain song on her Ocarina? Then the Foxfaced chick turns up, does a weird hopscotch dance toward the pile and picks off a few rations and other items. Katniss concludes from her practiced, careful dance that the pyramid is surrounded by land-mines. My first thought was "Oh, you have to dance the whole time to avoid waking the dragon!" (See, what happened was I used Occam's Razor to open a bag of Doritos a few days ago and misplaced it.)

So for a few weeks when wifi was spotty in my office I became addicted to this iPod app called Bunny Shooter. It's a pretty simple Angry Birds knockoff, just swap out the birds for a variety of arrows. You aim your bow and kill bunnies and that's more or less the whole deal. And yet it's oddly transfixing, especially when you get to fuck around with exploding arrows and other IEDs. I don't know what vestige of agricultural society is lingering in my lizard brain that makes me enjoy blowing up a bunch of cartoon bunnies so much, but there it is, I do. And I was a little surprised when this chapter basically turned into an iPod app, but here it is, it does.

Katniss looks over the pile for a while longer and sees a sack of apples. With a few well-placed shots, the apples come tumbling down, the mines go off, and a series of explosions propel Katniss backward and onto the ground.

The Hunger Games is a pretty decent book that's going to probably make a better movie. There aren't many works in that category. Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go is one, and Stephen King's The Green Mile is another (though that dude basically writes screenplays in the form of novels half the time). The first Twilight film is another one, but after that I think they draw even(ly bad). I haven't read Mario Puzo's The Godfather, but I bet it fits here too. The criteria is essentially novels with a decent plot (Green Mile) or a clever world (Never Let Me Go) or both (The Hunger Games) that don't necessarily make much use of the tricks exclusive to literature* or that don't have particularly strong or distinctive prose. What makes David Foster Wallace's writing compelling is, mostly, the way he writes. Which is why there isn't going to be a movie of The Broom Of The System anytime soon.

(*Unreliable narrators, multiple narrators, stories where most of the plot action is internal--hell, the stuff S. Meyer does in Breaking Dawn where she plays around with narration, telepathy and dialogue can't be rendered as effectively in any other medium.)

But in reading this chapter and thinking over where we've been so far, I was struck my an even stranger thought. The Hunger Games is a decent book that will make a good movie that could potentially make for a GREAT videogame. The reason for that is that even though the characters and human interactions are compelling, they are not so nearly as compelling as the rules, problems, and solutions presented by the games. In this chapter Katniss gets to know Rue, but in a totally general and boring way. Then they part ways, and Katniss has to travel through the woods undetected, observe the enemy camp, consider how she'll destroy their food supply, and then carry out the objective. Meanwhile Rue is traveling through the trees, stopping to start fires in key locations. The tasks are more interesting than the people. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's not exactly a testament to the necessity of the novel, either.

Maybe something will happen sooner or later that will make me change my mind, but we're pretty firmly in videogame territory right now. Thoughts?

Stray Notes & Questions

• Friend of the blog Rosanne just pointed out on Twitter that Wilco's new record "The Whole Love," which is out today, is selling at Amazon for $5.99. I paid more for a pancake this morning! Go buy it!
• Over at The Hairpin they've got a ten-minute deleted scene from Bridesmaids. I haven't watched it yet but I WILL because Bridesmaids was very good!
• I'm still waiting for other people to tell me how right I was about Janet Montgomery.
• Here's a video I made about sex. Well, condoms mostly.