The Game with One Winner
A movie concept that just cannot die
It was on sale. That’s my excuse. I watched the latest round of The Hunger Games and felt as bad when watching that one as I did when watching the first several episodes.
If you don’t know it, it is about a bunch of children being convicted on behalf of their societies to fight for their lives in a game — where only one will survive. And then we see through each movie various inventive ways for children to kill each other.
Pretty disgusting, I would say. But apparently very popular. It does belong to this article to explain that The Hunger Games series of movies is for adolescents and based on a book series that may contain some more details to broaden the picture of what is happening — who knows, maybe even with clear indications of it all being symbolic.
I haven’t read the books, though, and I don’t think that I will — the movies have scared me away. Besides, it was some time since I was an adolescent. But not having read them means that they could potentially be extremely good and less violent. I prefer to keep that potential open.
The Hunger Games is not unique in the movie world — I remember very many movies with that same idea, including some good ones, like Gladiator, having much more to say than just the cliché of a game with only one winner. There was also Rollerball, a hit when I was young, but honestly, one of the worst movies ever made. And how about Highlander: “There can be only one!” — and then, nevertheless, they continued making more or them — about some immortals who have the only goal in life to kill all other immortals and become the only one left.
Another movie was The Cube — where some arbitrary people wake up in a nightmare, being trapped in a world that consists of many connected rooms, and in each room there is another bizarre type of trap that will kill someone. I don’t think The Cube had as a purpose of killing all but one, but there surely weren’t many people left when finally the movie ended. And The Running Man was similar, with the runner killing many of the game managers and helpers as well.
The idea of the one survivor seems to be connected with the idea of being the best. And yet, many of these movies are really just about being lucky. The hero is always depicted as somehow more intelligent and sympathetic, and we feel relief when seeing how one child, our hero, manages to kill another child in the most morbid way, simply because that other child appears to be less sympathetic than the hero. But as we don’t want to watch millions of murders by the hands of our hero, the filmmakers seem to think, we will see several kids be killed by pure coincidence or as the result of someone outside the game interfering.
So, the one who is left isn’t really the best. Often, it is actually the only one we know more than the most rudimentary about, making the other participants in the game just that — anonymous game figures. Like anonymous soldiers in a war.
And this is what puzzles me. Are these movies trying to show how ordinary people can somehow become war heroes? Is that the dream that the spectators of the films should leave the spectacle with?
Why then not put the characters into a real war scenery — why that idea of the morbid game?
Is it all really an attempt to bring the gaming enthusiasm to the edge, after someone asked “what if it was real?” when playing a computer game?
Well, all I can conclude is that obviously, millions of people want to watch children kill each other, no matter the reason.
When the adolescents, for whom The Hunger Games is meant, and the many others who also watch it — older or younger — move out into the real society, they see all the same happening but in an abstracted way.
They see how companies are killing each other, because “it’s no fun to be number two in the market”, as their CEOs always tell. They see how individuals in the workplace attack each other, maybe (most often) not to kill, but to win over them in some other way.
They see how sports are about winning, and often by all means — doping and other ways of cheating are visible to even a young adult who just came from the dystopian world-view of The Hunger Games and the almost-still-a-kid immediately understands that people “of course” do everything to survive, even if it hurts others unreasonably, being equivalent of killing them.
The see how politics and democratic or non-democratic elections alike are about pushing the competitors out of the game by discrediting them and optimally killing their political careers.
There are no doubt people who feel that watching The Hunger Games is good for the young ones, as these then learn how life works. But I just ask, then, in a world with 8 billion people — what good does it do to play a game with only one survivor?
Wouldn’t it be better to teach the young ones how the world could become better by having people helping each other rather than killing each other? To teach the young ones something about empathy and a constructive attitude to problem-solving — to teach them that winning isn’t the only goal in life, and that we can all be “the only survivors” together.
While I am open to many different artistic expressions, I can’t help feeling that there is something seriously wrong with the movie industry, as it keeps producing such things. The books behind, as I said, may be more nuanced. I have seen that with many other books that have become violence-focused movies. Maybe the violence in the book wasn’t at all as explicit as in the movie, and the reader would understand how it was perhaps a thought, not real, or a potential, not a fact.
That game with only one winner… when pinned out on the screen, becomes a game with no winners.