The Girl Who Was on Fire (12 page)

“Is that why so many people seem fake on TV?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes they really are fake. Want to try again?”

I nodded. Jessica was my Cinna. Luckily for Katniss, it is Cinna, the unexpected voice of reason, who gets the final word before her interview. He contradicts Haymitch’s advice and asks her the question that spurs her to greatness: “‘Why don’t you just be yourself?’” (
The Hunger Games
).

 

 

After her triumph in
the Hunger Games, Katniss finds it difficult to stay herself. Her heroism, which begins in authenticity and solidifies in skill, comes under fire as soon as she slips into a public persona, first as victor of the Games and then as the Mockingjay, face of the rebellion. Readers can likely relate to Katniss’ struggles to reconcile her personal and private lives, as they also have public profiles to maintain.

It started with blogs; now, through social media, anyone who is active on the internet creates a digital projection of themselves for public consumption. We are all stars, all heroes in our own online productions. What does this do for our authenticity? It destroys it.

The problem is that anyone who checks into Facebook, Twitter, and the like is automatically shown how their profile is trending through wall posts, messages, and friend requests. Anyone who Googles him or herself engages in a form of selfregard that used to require highly paid analysts. A truly authentic hero would not care what others thought; he or she would be comfortable enough to ignore the chatter of digital
friends and strangers in lieu of the strength of his or her convictions. But a person who uses social media
does
care what others think—demonstrably. Looking at ourselves on the internet, we are not ourselves, and no amount of rationalization makes us seem like anything other than egotists.

Katniss avoids this pitfall in the Hunger Games through the circumstances of the competition. Thrown into an arena without media access, she cannot tell how she is doing. (Luckily she is not as addicted to social media as the rest of us; for many Hunger Games readers, the lack of an internet connection might be the most difficult part of the Games.) She knows that she is on television but cannot watch it; she must rely on her hunches, which are unquestionably hers, to survive. She is not only genuine, not only skilled; she is incapable of cheapening herself by checking her own profile. The facade she creates is fully removed from her ego, cementing her heroic persona. Even as she becomes aware of the camera (“I am live on every screen in Panem,” she notes in
The Hunger Games
), she is real, both to the viewers of the Games and readers of the Games, since by not watching herself she cannot be seduced into being what people want her to be. She can only be herself.

This trick has been pulled before by young people playing with American imagery. Kurt Cobain, the apotheosis of the reluctant media hero who came to power in the age of
The Real World
, made himself famous by being real, by being good, and by convincing the public that he did not care about his appearance. MTV pushed authenticity in large part by splashing Cobain across its screens; there were times in 1992 when “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was on television as much as the Hunger Games are on in Panem. When asked about the situation, Cobain had consistently ego-demolishing responses. (To a friend
who remarked that he was on TV all the time, he said, “I don’t have a TV in the car I live in.”
¹³
) Although contemporaries report that he was as crafty and controlling of his media image as Katniss is of hers (“I pause a second, giving the cameras time to lock on me,” she says as she slips out of a tree during the first Games), his suicide solidified his realness by erasing any chance of him slipping into a self-aware persona, and now he lives on as a saint of unadulterated artistry in a world that seems more artificial since his death.

Compare him to another rock star, Noel Gallagher of Oasis, who once said: “[B]eing famous is great. I love it, man. I think it’s the best when you get stopped walking down the street for an autograph, that’s the best feeling in the world.”
¹⁴
A person who was truly busy being a heroic artist would not have time to be self-aware in such a manner. Whoops—Gallagher just checked his Facebook in front of everyone.

By the time
Mockingjay
begins, Katniss has gone from Cobain to Gallagher, fully aware of her image and struggling to maintain it. Asked to film propos—“propaganda spots;” wasn’t Katniss
fighting
propaganda?—to support the rebellion, her prep team now “has to make me pretty and
then
damage, burn, and scar me in a more attractive way.” Katniss’ scars used to come from actual combat, unquestionably earned by her greatness; now they have to be rendered. Asked to say canned lines to inspire her followers, she suffers from stage fright; only when she is dropped into battle does she deliver inspirational speeches that are worthy of broadcast across Panem. Plutarch, Gamemaker and rebel leader, commends her spontaneity (“the audience eats that up,”) even as
he stages a wedding and dance in District 13, which normally holds neither, for the cameras.

Like many a hero and rock star before her, Katniss is trapped in her own persona. As early as the end of
The Hunger Games,
she has difficulty distinguishing between her real self—the girl who entered the arena—and the media powerhouse she has become: “I stare in the mirror as I try to remember who I am and who I am not.” By the time she is filming propos as the face of the rebellion, others have noticed her confusion. “‘I can’t tell what’s real anymore, and what’s made up,’” says her lover Peeta, describing his confusion at who Katniss really is (
Mockingjay
). How can she escape? More than once, she considers the ultimate way, but when she sees herself shot on television, she inoculates herself against the escape hatch that lured Cobain.

 

 

Four years after my
media training, I was given the chance to put Jessica’s advice to the test on the
Today Show.
I was there to promote my second book, which had just been selected by the
Today Show
Book Club; it was the kind of pie-in-the-sky opportunity that authors get once if they are lucky.

I showed up early, as I was told was an absolute must. I went into the green room, which is never green, and saw the most unappetizing spread of donuts and fruit that I have ever seen to this day. It looked plastic, as fake as Katniss’ propos. I sat in the room alone and watched the broadcast of the
Today Show
with the happy people on the street in New York behind the TV personalities waving signs. “Those are the people are you aren’t supposed to think about,” I reminded myself. I was nervous, sick to my stomach. Jessica told me that the key with stage fright was to embrace it and convert it into energy. I tried, furrowing my brow and scrunching my guts. Soon enough I was
called into makeup and then I stepped out under the lights to do the interview.

Like Katniss’ talk with Caesar Flickerman, it was short. I sat up straight; I looked at the camera but did not look at the camera; I smiled. When I saw the tape later, I was dumbstruck.

How come no one ever told me that my mouth was so crooked? Why did I have my hair cut short so that I looked like a hedgehog? How was my head so skull-like? I seemed nervous, hyper,
self-aware
. I
was
self-aware. I could try and hide it through mental trickery and media training, but I had been self-aware the whole time I was getting ready for the interview and the whole time I was being interviewed. I am self-aware now, and barring a Buddha-like moment in middle or old age I will continue to be. I put the interview on YouTube, where it still resides,
¹⁵
but stayed away from television in the years that followed. I prefer email and phone. I prefer the control. I do not have the heroic, authentic persona necessary for TV.

Reading Katniss’ interview in
The Hunger Games
, however, gave me hope that I was better than I thought. Before she goes on with Caesar, after she has been through her own media training, following the first question, when she is tongue-tied and about to ruin everything, Katniss thinks, “
Be honest
.” This mantra, given her by Cinna after Haymitch’s haywire advice, carries her through, and I, too was honest on the
Today Show.
I am honest now: I check my online persona regularly and am ashamed of it. I try to write and hope that people like it. I tried out for
The Real World
once and failed miserably. I was almost on
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
, but the people in my building would not allow the camera crew
.
I play the games
necessary to achieve success in my field. I have moments, like Katniss at the end of
The Hunger Games
, where I try to remember who I am and who I am not. I do not want to be famous for no reason ... but I would take it. I can only hope the honesty of admitting these things outweighs the self-awareness of doing them.

 

 

Katniss ultimately reconciles her
public profile with her real life by eliminating the former, leaving the Hunger Games and the rebellion behind to raise a family with Peeta. This is an act of self-denial that is unheroic for her public, but necessary for herself. The unadulterated heroism that she shows in the Hunger Games could only come out of a shining moment in youth, a time when she was firing on all cylinders; success brings reflection and reflection erases the authenticity that makes a modern hero. Transitioning to motherhood is a brave decision, both on Katniss’ part and Suzanne Collins’.

At the end of
Mockingjay
, I was reminded of the Henry Hill monologue that closes
Goodfellas
: he says that after a lifetime of adventure, “I’m an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.” A schnook is not a hero. But Katniss is nothing if not a survivor. She does what she needs to to stay alive. And after she picks Peeta and retires from the public eye, into what spurious nest of lies does her other lover, Gale, go?

He goes back to District 2, to do television.

NED VIZZINI
is the author of three acclaimed young adult books:
It’s Kind of a Funny Story
(now a major motion picture),
Be More Chill,
and Teen Angst? Naaah ...
Ned has spoken at over 200 schools, universities, and libraries around the world about writing and mental health. He writes about books in the
New York Times Book Review
and the
L Magazine
. His work has been translated into seven languages.

 

 

We’ve tuned in to a lot of reality shows in the last decade or so, from the relatively harmless (
Dancing with the Stars
,
The Amazing Race
) to the somewhat more shameful (
Temptation Island
,
Jersey Shore
). We’ve watched, rapt, as contestants struggled to succeed and as relationships formed and fell apart. We’ve hung on every success, failure, and humiliation. But all of that is still a far cry from the Hunger Games ... right? Carrie Ryan makes some troubling connections between reality television and the Hunger Games, and highlights just how fine the line between reality and fiction really is.

 

 

I
n the Hunger Games trilogy, Suzanne Collins takes our obsession with Reality TV and extends it to the most horrifying ends: a society that views kids killing kids as entertainment. It’s easy to find this an uncomfortable premise—to turn our noses up and say that while we may enjoy
Survivor
or
Big Brother
every now and again, we’d never let society slip to such levels. However, there’s also a deeper, more difficult message in the Hunger Games series: the extent to which media can be manipulated as a means of controlling the populace and how we as viewers have abdicated any agency in the process.

This then leads to an even more troubling aspect of the trilogy: our complicity in said message. But for the viewers’ participation, the Hunger Games would not exist in the same way that, but for our tuning in, Reality TV wouldn’t exist. By watching, we increase the ratings, and as our interest wanes the shows must become “more” to recapture our attention—more compelling, more extreme, more dangerous. And the only difference between us and the viewers in the Capitol is that we have agency to turn off the television at any time; we just choose not to. As Suzanne Collins shows us, the obsession with ratings, which is driven by our desire for more and more compelling narratives, can turn ugly when such a lens is applied to news reporting—especially that of war—rather than so-called Reality TV.

With any television show, what matters are the ratings; getting enough people to tune in to make it economically
worthwhile for the sponsors to pay for advertisements, which in turn feeds the ability of the show to keep filming. Reality TV is no exception. After 51.69 million viewers tuned in to watch the finale of the first season of
Survivor
in August 2000, the television industry realized that Reality TV could bring in ratings and turn a profit for a fraction of the cost of a fully scripted television show filled with professional actors. This started a trend that turned into a landslide, making the first decade of the twenty-first century one dominated by Reality TV. By the 2009–2010 television season, nine of the top twenty shows among young viewers were Reality shows.