The Politics of 'Hunger Games'

Terrific piece from Paul Bond at THR:

With 26 million books in “The Hunger Games” trilogy sold thus far, one hardly needs to look further for reasons why the first film installment is bound to open huge Friday (on Thursday, Fandango was selling 10 tickets per second). Nevertheless, here’s another one: politics.

In an extremely partisan atmosphere seven months before a presidential election, “Hunger Games” has the great advantage of being a movie with subtle political overtones that appeal to conservatives, and others that appeal to liberals. Evidence that both ends of the political spectrum have embraced the story of a dystopian future where reality TV pits children against each other in a competition to the death is, in fact, all over the Internet.

Occupy-Wall-Street liberals are loving the way the film portrays an extraordinary gap between the rich and poor as simply an innate evil. It’s a black-and-white view in which there’s no allowance that the rich might have earned their wealth — they’re portrayed simply as lazy and overly indulged oppressors. The poor are shown as the industrious ones.

The left is also gravitating to a global-warming theme that technically isn’t even in the film. They’re just assuming that destructive activity by humans created a catastrophic change in climate that destroyed North America and gave rise to Panem, the fictional country where “Hunger Games” is set.