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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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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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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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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