The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes: Is YA Dystopia Relevant Again?
Charlotte considers the popularity and relevance of the new Hunger Games film to the current political climate.
Have you seen the new Hunger Games film yet? Do if you haven’t – it’s great. I didn’t expect to like it as much as I did. The last Hunger Games film came out 8 years ago, I thought that phase of my life was over. I mean, that would usually be the case. It’s like the new Fantastic Beasts films. Sure, I was a fiend for Harry Potter when I was 10 but the more recent projects in the wizarding world just haven’t had the same importance that the origin films hadfor me (this is even when we ignore the JK Rowling of it all). The Fantastic Beasts series feels like a desperate clinging onto the success of Harry Potter, the glory days of its popularity, and honestly it’s a bit sad to see.
The YA Dystopian film genre really popped off in the early to mid 2010s. Those books and films were EVERYWHERE and, honestly, I reveled it. But they died a big death too – the cinematic Divergent series literally remains unfinished because of lack of interest after 2016. With such a dramatic fall from grace, I’m beyond bewildered to see such a resurgence of public concern in this new Hunger Games film.
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes has, on its third weekend in cinemas, surpassed the $200 million threshold in the international box office. Sure, Mockingjay Part II ended up making $646.2 million (the lowest grossing of the series at that point), but rather than comparing this new film to its predecessors in the series, let’s compare it to the final Divergent movie, Allegiant. It was released at the tail end of the YA Dystopian era of cinema; young people were, I guess, no longer interested in authoritarian dictatorships and injustice that only a few special, good looking teenagers could take down. Allegiant ended up making $179.2 million, so The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, a prequel film quite detached from its original series released over 10 years after the first film, has already surpassed the third instalment of another popular film series. Does this mean YA Dystopias are back in vogue? And if so, why?
While watching this new Hunger Games film in the cinema, I was reminded of what I loved about the original story so much, and honestly felt even more strongly about it than I could have when I was only 11. Watching these elitist gamemakers despise the poor and send innocent children to their deaths as a means of entertainment but, more crucially, as a means of stamping out revolt, with a ‘get them before they get us’ mentality was painfully accurate to the world we see today anytime we put on the news.
It’s not just the news now, with social media like TikTok we are now given a direct, first hand view of the carpet bombing of Gaza. There is a whole genre of dystopias catered specifically towards young people for a reason; we can clearly see from polls and even just by looking at the marches taking place across the world how great the generational divide is between those who are pro-Israel and those who are pro-Palestine, the youth, of course, leaning more towards the latter. Palestinian journalists like Bisan Owda and Motaz Azaiza have been providing footage that is unmediated by the press, raw and real footage of the death and destruction all around them. The same young people who grew up watching teenager Katniss Everdeen being thrown into an arena to die are now watching children being killed because if Israel doesn’t bomb the hell out of Gaza, the evil Palestinians will obviously commit the Holocaust against them. It’s not difficult to draw these parallels.
Here are some quotes from the book The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is based on, many of which are also used on screen, that can easily applied to the situation we are seeing currently:
“When one of ours is hit, we hit back twice as hard.”
“Winning a war doesn’t give you the right [to kill innocent people]. Having more weapons doesn’t give you that right. Being from the Capitol doesn’t give you that right. Nothing does.”
“With the Peacekeepers occupying the districts, with strict laws, and with reminders of who’s in charge, like the Hunger Games. In any scenario, it’s preferable to have the upper hand, to be the victor rather than the defeated.”
This is not a coincidence. Suzanne Collins, author of the Hunger Games books, comes from a military family (her father was a US Air Force officer during the Korean and Vietnam wars). The insight this upbringing gave her to poverty, starvation and the effects of war, especially the Iraq War, inspired her writing heavily. As much as this series is a work of fiction, it really isn’t.
And it’s not just the genocide of the Palestinians that can be seen represented in this new film. The wealth disparity continues to grow during this cost-of-living crisis. Inflation rates are insane, everything is ridiculously more expensive, times are really tough right now. And so we are forced to look to our (unelected) Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, to save us. Sunak, the same man who famously said in an old interview, “I have friends who are upper class, I have friends who are, you know, working class, but – well, not working class”, and whose wife (daughter of billionaire co-founder of Infosys) was revealed to claim a non-domiciled status so she wouldn’t to pay around £20 million in taxes. We have the richest leader this country has ever seen who’d rather be dead than spend time with a povvo and then we watch those entitled brats from the Capitol who are repulsed by the district people in this new Hunger Games film. Again, does not take a genius to make these parallels.
I guess what I’m trying to say here is the world really seems to be quite terrible right now and The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes truly captures that. That’s what I took away from the film the most (other than how fit Tom Blyth is with a buzzcut) and that’s what makes this genre, which seemed to have reached its peak almost 10 years ago, so relevant today.
I’m fully aware that I am responsible for my own TikTok For You Page and what the algorithm wants me to see, but I also know that it’s not just me getting a tonne of Hunger Games TikToks currently, it is trending on the app. People like this new film but, more importantly, they are responding to the message of the series as a whole. They are awake, they know what the world we are living in now is like and how this series holds a mirror to that. That’s why a random prequel film with none of the original cast members is succeeding so long after the golden days of YA Dystopian fiction and cinema. It was important then and it’s important now.
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