Before you dismiss this as yet another complaint about the intense nature of The Hunger Games, let me tell you that this is not the point of this article. Not at all.
(Spoilers)
To be honest, my first real exposure to The Hunger Games came last week, when I saw the movie. I was aware of the main topic and my curiosity even took me to flirt with the limits of spoilers, before going into the theater. I was a bit anxious for the first killing to occur… Scratch that, I was morbidly expecting for it to happen. Just waiting to see how it was handled and, to some extent, to see how insensitive I’d become to the whole topic. Turns out, once it happened, it wasn’t really that bad. I don’t know if it was because I knew it was coming, or because I felt like I was watching something novel, but once bodies started dropping, my mindset changed. I was forever transformed into someone who wouldn’t give a shit anymore if he saw a kid get murdered on film. But was I really?
Interestingly, there were plenty of children getting killed on TV this weekend. On Spartacus: Vengeance, we saw a woman jumping off a cliff with a newborn. On Game of Thrones, there was the whole bastard assassination at the end of the season 2 premiere. Was it shocking? Kind of. Especially, when the first baby was killed on Game of Thrones. But I couldn’t think of a reason why I should be mad at either of those shows for featuring those deaths. They were necessary in the context of the story they were telling, and it is the audience’s call to decide to stick with the shows or not.
However, things became interesting when my girlfriend came home today and made watch The Twilight Saga: Eclipse with her. As most guys would do, I bitched and moaned, before finally giving in. I was surprised when I saw that one of the “good” vampires had killed a fellow, clearly underage bloodsucker in a flashback. This movie is like 2 years old, and yet it already featured a kid dying. Later in the movie, a young girl is killed as well. I saw this movie when it came out, but for some reason, I completely forgot about those scenes. Why didn’t anybody make a big deal out of them?
I think the thing with The Hunger Games, and what makes it so shocking, is people’s morbidity. They went in knowing that kids would be killing the shit out of each other, and therefore that was their draw to see the film. However, it is more forgettable when a child dies contextually, and not as a gimmick.
Hell, I can even think of three other occasions where children are featured dying. One is on the movie The Devil’s Backbone. Then there’s Revenge of the Sith. Finally, on the US version of the TV show, Being Human, in the first season. Still, no one made a fuss about it.
And even though The Hunger Games has such a macabre plot, not many complaints were made about it. Have we been slowly desensitized that we just don’t care about it anymore? Perhaps. Or maybe there just weren’t writers ballsy enough to use this in their stories. Maybe we were being underestimated as an audience. They felt we couldn’t handle to see child murder on a screen. Guess what? We can. And it is very exciting to see what next step filmmakers will take to try and shock us.