The Hunger Games By Suzanne Collins

The Hunger Games , released in March 2012, is the film adaptation of the first book of Suzanne Collins's best-selling young adult trilogy ( 2008 ) about a post-apocalyptic world and its 16-year old white hero, Katniss Everdeen. The film earned $408 million domestically, making it the third highest grossing film of 2012. Comparatively, Breaking Dawn , the final Twilight film, also featuring a teenage female hero, ranked sixth with $291 million (Smith, 2013 ). Our focus is The Hunger Games film, but we note changes made to translate the book to the screen. The film is set in the fictional “Panem” located in what was once North America, where the government forces its citizens to participate in “The Hunger Games,” a televised competition where

Films such as The Truman Show (1998), Wag the Dog (1997), and EDtv (1999) have similarly used tropes of RTV to explore the impact of media in our lives, particularly a fascination with fame (Bishop, 2000 ). Importantly, these films were released prior to the RTV explosion brought on by the success of Survivor in 2000. We extend arguments about these types of films, asking how the role of surveillance as an authenticating mechanism in contemporary RTV has become an ingrained dimension of the construction of the “deserving hero.” Much of the action of The Hunger Games occurs in a fictional context of surveillance, where surveillance produces notions of the “natural” and “authentic” as non-performative—spontaneous, instinctive, unrehearsed—central to the racialized and gendered way Katniss is positioned as the film's

If unexamined, notions of authenticity have the potential to “foreclose possibilities” (Johnson, 2003 , p. 3) by privileging certain racialized and gendered behaviors over others. To access how authenticity functions in The Hunger Games , we develop the idea of performing not-performing, central to Katniss's racialized and gendered construction: an idea not examined by critical scholars. Taking a page from Andrejevic's ( 2004 ) argument that RTV constructs an authentic-seeming transformation of self and Dubrofsky's ( 2011 ) retheorization that in reality shows featuring romance the transformation of self is a ruse (stars affirm they are transformed by being the same person across disparate spaces), we argue that Katniss's performance of not-performing is what situates her as authentic and true (not willful or guileful) and, therefore, heroic. The value of not-performing and behaving in a natural-seeming manner is transposed onto the body in the film: altered bodies—bodies marked as surgically transformed or adorned with makeup and ornate clothing—are constructed as deviant, in opposition to Katniss's natural, unaltered white femininity, dangerously entrenching notions of naturalized embodied feminine whiteness. The film is troubling in its seamless privileging of an unconscious production of observable trustworthiness and earnestness of