Propaganda, Spectacle, and Morality Theme Analysis

In the futuristic North American country of Panem, the 10th Annual Hunger Games—a televised sporting event designed to punish the 12 districts for rebelling against the Capitol, in which children from the districts (known as tributes) are placed in an old sporting arena to fight to the death—is shaping up to be the first of its kind. Despite Panem’s reliance on a state-sanctioned television channel that constantly plays on TVs all over the Capitol and in every resident’s home, few people actually want to watch underfed district children (whom the Capitol frames as subhuman) murder each other. But this year, the Gamemakers (designers of the Games) have decided to try to liven things up by having 24 promising graduating students from the prestigious Academy mentor the tributes and come up with new ideas to boost engagement. One of these mentors is the novel’s protagonist, 18-year-old Coriolanus Snow. Coriolanus and his tribute, District 12’s Lucy Gray, participate in events meant to humanize the tributes (such as television interviews), while at the same time, Coriolanus comes up with ideas that dehumanize the tributes (such as a betting system). Through Coriolanus’s efforts, the novel shows that propaganda and spectacle, at least in this context, can be disturbingly effective at obscuring questions of morality and making something as barbaric as the Hunger Games seem just and necessary.

Propaganda, broadly speaking, allows a government to show citizens how to think and feel about something. In the case of the Hunger Games, the Capitol uses propaganda to cast the districts and their tributes as subhuman and barely worthy of consideration. When it comes to the districts (whom the government blames for starting the devastating war that ended about 10 years before the novel begins), casting all the people who live there as subhuman is how Panem justifies the cruel and inhumane ways they treat the people who live in the districts—and not just with the Hunger Games. If the people who live in the districts aren’t as human as those in the Capitol and pose a threat to Capitol dwellers, the government reasons, it only makes sense that they should receive less food, subpar medical care, and little or no education. Panem uses a variety of tactics to show that the districts and the people who live there are subhuman. Most obvious is the fact that in the Capitol, most people use the derogatory term “district” to refer to the people who live there (so Lucy Gray isn’t a person from District 12, she’s a district). Rationing or cutting off the districts’ access to food, medical care, and education, meanwhile, ensures that the people from the districts are often extremely poor, malnourished, and uneducated. And Capitol folk are encouraged to see the districts’ plight as their own fault—it’s their fault for rebelling during the war that they’re poor, not Panem’s fault for denying them food.

However, the Head Gamemaker, Dr. Gaul, recognizes that the best way to increase the Games’ viewership is to turn it into a spectacle and let viewers feel like they have a stake in the outcome—something that also, conveniently for her and Panem, dehumanizes the tributes further. The tributes’ television interviews, for instance, mainly cast the tributes as curiosities by showcasing skills that seem disgusting or exotic to wealthy Capitol residents (such as Tanner’s intimate knowledge of butchering practices, or Bobbin being able to kill someone with a sewing needle). To the pampered, wealthy Capitol residents, this makes the tributes interesting but not necessarily sympathetic people. Betting mostly dehumanizes the tributes, but it encourages viewers to put money on the tribute who looks the biggest and strongest, much like a person would bet on the biggest, strongest horse to win a race. Indeed, Festus, the mentor who initially floats the idea of betting, brings betting up as it pertains to dog fights—in other words, the betting reduces the tributes to animals who are judged on their physical attributes. With the introduction of betting, viewers feel like they have a stake in who wins—and tune in to watch the Games, thereby also exposing themselves to more propaganda.

The propaganda and spectacle, the novel shows, allows Panem to shift the conversation away from questions of morality—and indeed, questions of why the Games exist at all. Specifically, the way Panem obscures moral questions is clearest in Coriolanus’s proposal to allow viewers to send tributes food and water. Viewers who send food and water to their favorite tribute feel like they have a stake in the Games—but this also discourages them from questioning why the Capitol isn’t feeding the tributes, and why food essentially becomes a tool for control. Though the novel never introduces any people who send food to tributes, the implication is that they send food because they want their preferred tribute to win, not because they believe the tributes need food and water because they’re people who need to survive. Broadly speaking, turning the Games into a spectacle does much the same thing, on a grander scale, as letting viewers send food and water does. If people have money invested in a tribute, see tributes as entertainers, and know it falls to them to keep their tribute fed and in contention, this successfully distracts people from questioning why the Games exist, whether they’re moral and appropriate, and how Gamemakers treat and care for the tributes. In turn, this dehumanizes the tributes even further—which continues to support Panem’s insistence that tributes, and all people who live in the districts, aren’t people. Instead, they’re curiosities, entertainment, and disposable. And ultimately, Panem insists, they deserve to be forced to fight to the death in the Hunger Games.