Katniss With a Thousand Faces

Let the 74th Annual Backlash Begin!

Before a single ticket was purchased for the opening weekend of The Hunger Games, , the inevitable backlash had already been swelling, most notably criticisms that Hunger Games was a rip-off of other stories. The most obvious comparison has been made to the 2000 Japanese novel and movie Battle Royale. Certainly, the two stories share superficial similarities: Both take place in future dystopias; both pit teenage children against each other in a king-of-the-hillwinner-kill-all battle meele; and the protagonists in both are star-crossed lovers who thwart the system.

But to engage in this reactionary dismissal of calling The Hunger Games a blatant plagiarizing of Battle Royale ignores the debt that both franchises have to The Running Man and Lord of The Flies, and the debt both of those owe to The Most Dangerous Game and the debt that had to the ancient Grecian myth of Theseus and the Minotaur.

Heaping another helping of criticism, Mike Ryan of Moviefone.com has made a correlation between each of the characters in The Hunger Games with the characters in Star Wars. So is that it? Can we just dismiss the The Hunger Games as Suzanne Collins freebasing Star Wars and Battle Royale and American Idol?

It is easy to make these correlations because all of these works follow the same fundamental story structure, the monomyth.

The term monomyth, literally meaning one story, was coined by Joseph Campbell in his seminal work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and he explained it thusly:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

Campbell then dissects the structure into seventeen smaller steps, and those are lumped into three arcs: The Departure, Initiation, and the Return. These are not rigid steps mind you, but they outline a structure that all similar successful stories share. All of the rest of the elements of the story, kids killing each other in a high stakes survivor reality show in a decadent post apocalypse future, are all window dressing. Distilled to its basic form, The Hunger Games is a traditional Hero’s Journey. And Collins adept use of this structure is the reason for its mass success.

Much like Star Wars, the first movie in The Hunger Games trilogy concerns itself with the departure and the first five steps of the Hero’s Journey, which begins with the The Call to Adventure. The hero begins in a mundane situation and is summoned into the unknown. The key to having a dynamic and sympathetic character is that the hero must choose to heed the calling. Luke Skywalker chooses to go to Alderaan and safely deliver the droid. Frodo chooses to take the ring to Mordoor. Marty chooses to meet Doc Brown at Twin Pines mall. Katniss Everdeen makes the heroic sacrifice in place of her sister and chooses the quest.

The second step is the Refusal of the Call. I’m a bit stumped here, as she really never rejects the calling, or has the power to do so, but she is quite a dick to Haymitch, and he's the scoundrel character, so that's got to count for something, right?

Once she has accepted the calling, she moves onto the next level, Meeting the Mentor. In this stage, the hero’s guide and helper appears and gives the hero an Object of Great Importance. Katnis’ guide and mentor is of course Cinna, and she receives an artifact from him that helps her on her quest. Just as: Theseus receives a ball of string and a sword from Ariadne; Luke obtains a lightsaber from Obi Wan; Dorthy receives ruby slippers from Glenda; Frodo gets the ring from Gandolf; and Marty gets a Delorian from Doc Brown, Cinna gives Katniss her talisman in the form of the Mockingjay pin. Certainly the chronology is a bit wonky, but hey, this is writing, not algebra. 

The next step is The Crossing of the First Threshold. This is where the hero leaves the old world behind and ventures off into the adventures beyond. This recalls the moment when Frodo and Sam step out of the field and remark that they have never been this far out of the Shire before. For Katniss, this is obviously when she gets onto the train and is whisked away from District 12.

The rest of the movie is the largest part of this leg of the journey, The Belly of the Whale. This is the part where the hero undergoes a trial in which they metamorphose from the person that they were formerly to their new self. Katniss undergoes a physical change preparing for her entrance into the arena, undergoes the trials of the Games, wins a small victory and emerges a stronger, more self-assured hero. This sets her up for the following trials.

Now I haven’t read the two sequels to The Hunger Games, but I can predict with certainty that the following things will occur.

• She will lose her mentor Cinna just as Luke lost Obi Wan, Frodo lost Gandolf and Marty lost Doc Brown. It’s an integral part of the characters maturing and succeeding their mentors.
  
• The stakes need to be raised, so instead of the stage being a Game, she necessarily needs to fight the mega-threat, the empire and President Snow.
  
  
•  She will suffer a defeat. One of the Districts will probably be destroyed, (shades of Alderaan).
   
• She will have an Atonement with Her Father (or mother in this case) find out the true nature of her father’s death, and be forever changed by it. After that she can no longer be the innocent, naive young girl, but emerges from some temptation of the dark side to become a fully formed woman.
  
  
• One of her close allies will turn out to be a traitor.

How close am I?

So The Hunger Games isn’t as derivative as it is made out to be, but instead it is following a template that storytellers have been using since the first cavebuster was told over a campfire and a bucket of mammoth barbecue. Deriding Collins for following these archetypes in her story makes as much sense as criticizing Frank Lloyd Wright for being unoriginal because he designs buildings that have a roof supported by four walls.  It’s the way it works. It’s the basic structure of the story. This type of story follows the blueprint set out in Joseph Campbell’s writings. Or Star Wars, take your pick. The latter was so slavish to the Heroes’ Journey that the final episode was actually called The Return (of the Jedi), deliberately named after the third act in the monomyth.

So may the odds be ever in our favor, the Force be with us, and pray that the Ewoks don’t make an appearance in The Hunger Games.

They do? Shit.