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Bill Clinton, Blackness, Cinna, Ferguson, Katniss, movies, Rue, The Hanging Tree, The Hunger Games, Young Adult Fiction
Protestors facing off against the police in armored vehicles, fires burning amidst chaos, civil uprising. These scenes could be seen at theaters across the country in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 and on the streets of Ferguson, New York, Austin, Los Angeles.
Mockingjay is on its way to becoming the top-grossing film three weeks in row. The penultimate installment focuses on an impending revolution to overthrow an oppressive regime that sees a portion of its primarily poor population, many of whom are Black, as expendable and forces them to fight to the death in an annual public spectacle of obedience.
The parallels between the Ferguson protests and the film are notable, particularly when looking at the social uprisings of an oppressed and racialized underclass. Against a backdrop of largely class warfare, Katniss Everdeen, the series heroine, becomes the public face of a revolution. In doing so, she becomes America’s first Black YA heroine.
Toni Morrison once identified Bill Clinton as the first Black president, which is oft quoted and equally misapplied. Her intention was not to anoint him as an “honorary” African American; it was meant to explain how his criminality was presupposed, during the White Water investigations, and how he signified, through his personal life and upbringing, “every trope of blackness.”
Katniss’ profound poverty and vulnerability to the state is something she shares with other characters, Black and White, but are not enough to make her a Black heroine, nor are her relationships with pivotal revolutionary characters. It is the fact that primarily Black characters, namely Rue and Cinna but others as well, publicly defy the Panem Capitol and act as agents or catalysts for civil unrest. When Katniss begins to do the same, according the racial logic of the film, she becomes Black.
In the first film, after Rue is fatally injured, Katniss sings to her as she dies, arranges flowers around Rue’s body, and visibly mourns, signaling to the Capitol that Rue was a person and body that mattered. As the scene unfolds in Rue’s home district, the agricultural District 11, in which the members of the primarily Black population look like sharecroppers in the South, a Black man responds by charging a Peacekeeper, and other citizens quickly join in. The police use water hoses to quell the uprising, drawing distinct parallels between the scene in District 11 and civil rights activists in Birmingham, AL in the 1960s.
Capitol stylist Cinna equips Katniss’ would-be white wedding dress, in the second film, with the ability to transform into a sleek black mockingjay costume complete with wings and feathers. As she performs for the Panem audience, she metamorphoses from a pawn of the White President Snow, who ordered her to wear the wedding dress, to a black figure of resistance. Cinna is later beaten and eventually killed for his role in literally outfitting Katniss for the coming revolution.
In the most recent installment, Mockingjay, Katniss becomes synonymous with the effort to overthrow Panem. The rebels record Katniss candidly singing the folksong “The Hanging Tree,” which had been outlawed by the Capitol, for use in their propaganda films.
“Are you, are you
Coming to the tree
Wear a necklace of rope, side by side with me.
Strange things did happen here
No stranger would it be
If we met up at midnight in the hanging tree.”
Katniss’ voice is slowly joined and overpowered by the voices of the people rising up. The lyrics, written by Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins, call to mind the history of racial violence in the US. The racial politics of the film and Katniss’ open defiance of the state through her singing of “The Hanging Tree” directly align her with Blackness.
We need to see more than white actors taking up Black subject positions as heroes, revolutionaries, and cinematic saviors. We need actual Black, Latino, American Indian, and a host of others as diverse agents of change.
Given that Katniss, in the book, is described as “olive-skinned,” many of us had hoped that a Latina might be cast in the lead. But the odds were never in our favor, and Jennifer Lawrence in bronzer with her hair dyed dark was given the part.
The fan outrage about and blatant racism in response to African American actors being cast as Rue and Cinna suggest that regardless of how characters are written, white audiences read them as white. Some fans declared that they would not have cared as much about Rue or Cinna if they had known they were Black. While these sentiments are shocking, we are repeatedly shown how little Black lives matter, whether on the big screen or the streets of Ferguson.
How ironic that the number one movie in America mobilizes blackness to fuel a revolution given the current state of racial politics in the nation, particularly after Ferguson. How can we as a people consume revolution, while at the same time be completely oblivious to deeply entrenched race and class disparities? In our failure to recognize these injustices, we have become like citizens of the Capitol.