Film Analysis Isn't Just for Scholars: Catching Fire with Katniss

Catching Fire Edit.jpeg (Photo credit: 1:00 AM)

I still don't wanna work on my projects, but I got a few things done yesterday, which is good.  What's bad is that I keep coming across things that seem a lot more interesting, and they're distracting me (of course, if I were doing what needs to be done in the first place, I'd never know about them).  So, as part of my work-stalling routine, today I checked in at FlickeringMyth.com, and there was an article about The Hunger Games:  Catching Fire.  Not too surprising so far, but bear with me.  I was kind of stunned to realize that the author is doing the sort of thing I've spent the last ten weeks doing:  analyzing a film and arguing a point in a "scholarly" way.  He only quotes one outside source (Caroline Williams, who is presumably a feminist critic), so it's like a research paper without much secondary research, just the primary stuff, the film.  Dr. Toffee told us that people were writing this kind of thing and publishing it, but I don't think I believed her until now.  And it's really interesting. 

The point that the author, Paul Risker, is making is that the character of Katniss "is meticulously constructed to be an idealised role model," and he argues this with a lot of support from the text.  The "meticulous construction" is the thing that strikes me as the key to why The Hunger Games works as a whole, and here I've got to refer to the last big thing, the Twilight saga.  I never got into that, mainly because the heroine is so . . . well, boring doesn't begin to capture what she is.  She's self-absorbed and selfish, she uses people who care about her, and she's pretty much unlikeable, as far as I'm concerned.  My point here is that she is no kind of a role model for anybody who has anything resembling self-respect.  Now, I'm not looking for a role model myself, but I can see that Risker is right about what the films do with Katniss.  However, he also seems to feel that she's a bit too perfect, and I have to disagree on that score.  She's not flawless.

Anyway, I'm thankful (ahead of time) that he gave me something to write about so that I'm getting close to hitting my goal of 20 posts for the semester.  

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It's Finally Finished

English: A map of the fictional nation of Panem from Suzanne Collins' "The Hunger Games." (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The final revision of my critical analysis paper on The Hunger Games is done, or at least as done as it will ever be, and I turned it in.  I feel like I've been let out of prison!  I don't have to think about the movie anymore, and I can get on with the rest of my work.  I'm glad that the paper was due now; all the major projects for my other classes are due in the last two weeks of the semester, and having this one out of the way means a lot in terms of time.  All I have to do for English 101 is the application letter/résumé and a portfolio, which ought to be a breeze.  Oh, and there's still a test on the textbook readings and a final exam, but I'm not going to worry about them now.

One thing I have noticed is that what Dr. Toffee calls my "writing process" has changed.  I always thought of revising as being mostly correcting errors, but now I get it.  In fact, right now, I realize that I'm not following the prompt for this week.  I'm supposed to be writing about "The experience of developing and writing" the critical analysis essay, and I really should revise this post to fit that.  But I'm not gonna!

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Face to Face on my Horrible Draft

English: South facade of the Temple of Artemis seen from the South Theatre in Jerash, Jordan (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A couple of days after the peer review on my critical analysis draft, I read it again.  Suddenly, it was horrible.  I don't know how this happened.  So, I went to my conference with Dr. Toffee last week under a cloud of angst.  It wasn't too bad.  She suggested a few tweaks for my thesis statement, and -- for once -- I saw what was wasn't working in the way I had put it.  She liked my explanation of my critical model, especially the parts about Artemis and Atalanta; I was kind of nervous about that, so it was a relief for me.  The analysis has to be reorganized some.  I need to put in a few references to other scenes from The Hunger Games to show that it's not just in the scene I'm focusing on that Katniss is following the archetypes.

All in all, it went okay.  I guess the draft wasn't as horrible as I thought.

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Peer Reviews

Peer Review opening illo for UA/AU - Canada (Photo credit: albyantoniazzi)

Yesterday we had the peer review workshop for the critical analysis paper, and my reaction was mixed.  My reviewer (who said he had seen The Hunger Games) seemed to be in a big hurry to finish, and the comments he made weren't all that helpful, at least not from what I can see.  Along with answering the questions on the sheet we were given, we also had to answer three questions from the author of the paper.  My questions were 1.  do you understand the thesis?  2.  Is there enough stuff about the myth crit model or did I forget something?  3.  Does the analysis make sense?  I think that part of the problem is the way I wrote the questions.  He gave yes-and-no answers, and I don't think he gave them any thought.  Oh well.

On the other hand, the paper I reviewed taught me a lot.  It was not by the guy who was reviewing mine, which was a good thing, since if I had gotten his review after working so hard on mine, I'd be really pissed at him.  Anyway, I think I learned as much from the things in the paper that were bad as I did from the good stuff, mostly because I did some of the bad things, too, but I didn't notice them in my paper until I saw someone else do it. 

Next week is the conference about revising my paper.

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Politics, Power . . . and Harry Potter?

Harry Potter and the
Goblet of Fire
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My draft has hit a bad spot, so I thought I'd get a jump on this week's postings, especially since there's a checkpoint this Friday.  We're reading "literary analyses" this week, and I picked an essay by Philip Nel, called "Fantasy, Mystery, and Ambiguity."  Don't be put off by the title -- it's actually about Harry Potter, or at least the first four books. 

Nel makes a point that reminded me of a whole bunch of things at once.  He writes, "As the series develops, it grows increasingly interested in questions of power:  who has it, who has the right to exercise it over another, who has the moral authority to wield it, and how it should be exercised" (750).  He goes on to talk about the political aspects of the books, and that made me think of my project.  I'm not looking at politics in The Hunger Games, but it's a HUGE part of the book, if not the film.  All the characters are living in a fascist dictatorship, where the people in the Capitol are wealthy and privileged, while the majority of the population (the Districts) lives on the brink of starvation and is forced to abide by the ideology of their distant rulers because the Districts have been made the scapegoats for a civil war that happened over seventy years earlier.  Sounds kind of like Nazi Germany, doesn't it?  And Harry Potter's world is headed in that direction in the first four books, too, what with Voldemort's supporters attacking Muggle-born wizards (I was really amazed when I realized that there are a lot of points in common between the last Harry Potter book, The Hunger Games, and the Nazis).

Since the tv was on while I was reading, I heard probably four or five political commercials before I finished the article, and I saw a connection there, too.  Which was scary.

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Prewriting the Critical Analysis Paper

Rue pointing at the trackerjacker
nest.

I'm supposed to write about the prewriting for my paper on the scene from The Hunger Games.  As I understand it, I need to prewrite two sections:  the explanation of my critical approach (myth criticism), and the analysis of the scene (the one where Rue dies).  I started with the explanation, because I thought that would be the tougher part, and I was right.  When I got to the analysis, I had to keep going back to the explanation because I remembered something I left out.

When I prewrite, I usually just brainstorm, but sometimes I'll start writing a paragraph or two because I have an idea how to handle it, which means that it looks pretty strange.  This is what works for me, though, so I'm going to keep on doing it that way.  The things I came up with for the explanation were:  Road of Trials, death of the mentor (yes, Rue is a mentor, if only for a short time, and this is one of the things that came to me when I was working on the analysis), hero archetypes, the goddess Artemis, Atalanta, virgins in Greek mythology, tricks in mythology, monsters (I think Cato is a monster in a way, kind of like the Minotaur).  There was more that I got rid of.

With the analysis, I had the following, plus a couple paragraphs in the middle that I'm leaving out here:  explain plan to destroy food, Katniss as hero, Katniss as Artemis/Atalanta, Rue as mentor (signals with mockingjays), shooting the apples (Atalanta?), attack/instant retribution, Rue dies - last words, song, flowers, salute (I really want to mention the explanation of this from the book, but I guess I can't), grieving.

I'll bet a lot of that doesn't make sense to anybody but me, but that's what I've got for now, and I may have a thesis already.  On to the draft.

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Picking a Scene

Artemis statue in Louvre, Paris, France
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I left my Norton Field Guide in Reb's car, so I'm going to talk about my proposal this time instead of the reading (I'll get to it.  Really.).  Okay, so I'm proposing using a myth criticism approach to The Hunger Games, and I'm going to focus on determining what kind of hero (or heroine) Katniss is.  I've been having trouble picking a scene for the project, and I really wish I could analyze two scenes, because she has a lot of different qualities.  She's self-sacrificing, above everything else, angry, clever -- but not about people, and she's a survivor.  This may sound weird, but I think she really fits the pattern of the Greek goddess Artemis, who is known as the Huntress.  I'll talk more about this next week, but for now, I am stuck on finding a scene, and I think I'm going to have to watch the film again.

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Hit or Myth?

Atalanta and Maleagar
(Jacob Jordaens)

Dr. Toffee has The Hunger Games in the Women's Studies category, but I've decided to use a myth criticism approach.  The way I understand it, I can discuss the characters and setting as archetypes and the scene I select as to where it fits into the pattern of the hero's journey.  What's interesting to me about this has to do with there being few archetypes of female heroes, which means I'm going to have to figure out which one of the male archetypes she fits.  And, since I have to talk about that male to female transformation (for lack of a better word), I'll be generating material for the paper right there!  It's a win-win choice.

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Hunger

The Hunger Games (film)
 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I don't really want to talk about the essay I read for this week because I'm still thinking about the one I read last week.  This is because my sister Rebecca bought the DVD of The Hunger Games, and I finally managed to find the time to watch it.  I read the book a while back, and I was surprised at how little hunger was shown in the film.  It was almost as if they didn't want people to be thinking about an America where people are starving to death.  In the book, hunger is everywhere, even when they go to the capitol city (where Katniss forces herself to overeat to put on weight for when the games begin).  In the film, the people in District 12 look poor -- they're dirty, tired, and wearing old-fashioned clothes -- but they don't look underfed (if that's the right word for it).  The girl playing Katniss is pretty good in the part, but she looks really healthy, as if she never missed a meal in her life, and that was a problem for me when they flashed back to when she and her family are on the verge of starving to death and Peta throws a loaf of bread towards her.  Her face is just as rounded as it is in the rest of the film (just look at the poster above!).

And her clothing in the opening scenes of the film, where she's out hunting, doesn't look at all bad.  In fact, if you saw a clip of that scene and didn't know anything about the film it came from, you would not guess that she was even poor.  (A side note:  one of the articles below, with a picture of her in that scene, is about how Target is selling a line of clothing based on the film!)

The good thing for me about making this connection to the essay is that I've found the movie I want to use for my big project.  Now all I have to do is decide on which one of the critical approaches on the list would be the best one to use.

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