“Mockingjay: Part II” and the Danger of Negative Causes
I actually didn’t even like Mockingjay, part I or part II. In fact my husband and I only just recently finally watched it because we figured we might as well finish out the series as not.
But as little as I enjoyed it, I thought it portrayed (if rather clumsily, in my humble opinion) a truth that we can learn from in this unique moment in which we’ve found ourselves in our American story.
Throughout the “Hunger Games” series, the reader is invited to participate in a very appropriate loathing of the series’ villain, President Snow. He’s easy to hate: he’s a master manipulator, a cold-blooded dictator who will stop at nothing to maintain control.
The series begins by showing us a dystopian future where thirteen “districts” live in poverty and hunger, each working to produce different goods that they won’t consume, so that the fabulously wealthy Capitol can glut themselves and live in ease (actually it’s exactly the same as the beginning of “Bug’s Life”, come to think of it). In the cruelest tribute of all, the Capitol city chooses two children from each district by lottery to participate in a gladiator-like competition called “The Hunger Games” to commemorate a failed revolution.
Katniss Everdeen, a contestant in the Hunger Games and the series’ protagonist, experiences her first epiphany when she realizes that Snow is pitting the districts against each other on purpose so that instead of uniting against him, they will always be divided by their grudges against one another as their children kill each other for survival in the Hunger Games. It’s Snow who is the real enemy.
United by their hatred of Snow, the districts begin to come together under the leadership district thirteen’s leader, President Alma Coin. Coin’s district manufactures weaponry, which puts them in a unique position to actually defeat Snow, if they have the cooperation of the other districts. Katniss, valued by Coin as a propaganda tool, becomes a reluctant ally even though she is inwardly disturbed by some of Coin’s methods. She finds herself at odds with her childhood friend, Gale, who is willing to go along with just about any means to achieve the all-important end of getting rid of Snow.
When Snow and the Capitol forces are finally defeated, Coin, who has engaged in unethical practices all along, shows her true colors by suggesting one final Hunger Games —only this time, drawing from the Capitol’s children. Coin, who the districts have cooperated with precisely so that they could get rid of a murderous dictator, turns out to be, in fact, a murderous dictator.
Not surprisingly, there are those who find Coin’s idea appealing. After years of sending their own children to their deaths while the Capitol applauded every bloody moment, they understandably want to “get back some of their own”. But of course the reader can see where this is going: when you want to “get back some of your own” against someone who has hurt you, you never get quite enough. If some little voice inside starts to say that perhaps they’ve had enough, you can always drown it out with memories of “what they did to me”. It’s human nature, when we’re hit, to want to hit back harder.
Katniss’s solution to this problem by assassinating President Coin is an ethical problem for another day (short version: not cool, Katniss), but Coin is certainly a realistic archetype that has shown up in history many times. In “Revolutionary Russia: 1891-1991”, historian Orlando Figes notes that in the early days of the Russian Revolution, propaganda focused less on how the new regime was improving the lives of the everyday Russian, and more on depicting how the formerly wealthy nobles and landowners were being brought down to their level, sweeping streets and doing other such degrading work. For a time, the image of their former oppressors being humiliated and made to suffer as they had suffered charmed the public so well that they overlooked the worsening conditions in their economy and everyday life.
This kind of cause usually goes one of two way: either the “other side” regroups and retaliates, spurred on by their own resentfulness of new grievances, and the fight goes on and on, with each side thinking it is the most injured party, or, the oppressed eventually become the oppressor.
It’s much easier to fight against something than it is to fight for something. It’s much easier to nurse grievances than to try to find a better way. But that’s not enough. Change is easy. Change for the better is hard, risky, and demands patience and perseverance.
We cannot be reckless of the intended and unintended consequences of choices that we make in a reactionary passion of justifiable anger. It’s easy to ally ourselves with something monstrous in order to take down a monster. But when we do, we shouldn’t be surprised when we wake up one day to find our monster all grown up.
