Revisiting Dystopia: the Reality Show Biopolitics of "The Hunger Games"

Abstract

This paper explores the dystopian imaginaries of the recent popular novel trilogy The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and its film adaptations. Having put the narrative into a genealogy of dystopian fiction concerned with the historical nation-state totalitarianisms, I ask what is specifically contemporary about The Hunger Games. I explore this by focusing on the functioning of the reality show format in the narrative, which I link to G. Agamben’s understanding of the spectacle, as part of his wider biopolitical theories. I apply an Agambenian biopolitical reading to the narrative, seeing it as a production of bare life through the camp of the reality show arena. I suggest that The Hunger Games offer a critique of contemporary liberal democracies by calling attention to their production of underclassed and expendable life, which is imagined as an eruption of the nation-state right to kill, similarly as in Agamben’s theories.

Keywords

• The Hunger Games, dystopia, biopolitics, spectacle, bare life