Episode 77 - The Hunger Games (Gary Ross, 2012) (with Tarja Laine)
The Hunger Games (Gary Ross, 2012).
The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!
The first instalment of The Hunger Games (2012) franchise, directed by Gary Ross, provides the focus of Episode 77 of the podcast, which looks at the film’s connections to ethics, rationality and affect, and what structures our emotional engagement with its narrative of totalitarian systems and panoptic visions. Joining Chris and Alex to examine the immersive world of Panem is Dr Tarja Laine, Assistant Professor in Film Studies at the University of Amsterdam and author of the new monograph Emotional Ethics of The Hunger Games (2021), as well as the books Bodies in Pain: Emotion and the Cinema of Darren Aronofsky (2015), Feeling Cinema: Emotional Dynamics in Film Studies (2011) and Shame and Desire: Emotion, Intersubjectivity, Cinema (2007). Listen as they discuss the politics of spectacle, and what it means for Young Adult Fiction to ‘do’ philosophical and ethical enquiry; narrative focalisation and the difference between subjectivity (style), allegiance (narrative) and alignment (ethics); how The Hunger Games invites an ethical engagement through fear, shame and hope; the economy of worldbuilding, structures of myth and how this relates to the fluctuations of character knowledge; how notions of ‘looking’ ultimately prevent access into interiority; and what the mediatised nature of The Hunger Games has to say the contemporary era of social media, where individuals must forge their being and identity in a world in which they are constantly seen and scrutinised.
Suggested Readings
Bordwell, David. 1985. Narration in the Fiction Film. London: Routledge.
Elsaesser, Thomas. 2009. “The Mind-Game Film.” In Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, ed. Warren Buckland, 13-41. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Krzywinska, Tanya. 2006. “Blood Scythes, Festivals, Quests, and Backstories: World Creation and Rhetorics of Myth in World of Warcraft.” Games and Culture 1, no. 4: 383-396.
Laine, Tarja. 2021. Emotional Ethics of The Hunger Games. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Mendlesohn, Farah. 2008. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
Perkins, V.F. 2005. “Where is the world? The horizon of events in movie fiction.” In Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film, eds. John Gibbs and Douglas Pye, 16-41. Manchester: Manchester University Press.