She appeared in Winter’s Bone, which my Missourah friend put
in the class of a Harriet Beecher Stowe example of fiction—a decent piece of
crap, unconnected to any reality, with solid punctuation and a nice font—that
ever present danger of localism fogging my mind. While reactionary
against Stowe as a contrarian, however, as a Yankee, I was inclined to take to
Winter’s Bone, book and film.
There has been much talk in the MSM, and in the counter-culture, the depiction of the elite…and anyway, the late
Jonathan Bowden’s review of the Passion of the Christ gives some interesting
suggestion:
Several scenes are especially striking: the ravens attacking the thieves who are exposed with Christ on the Cross and Simon being made to carry the Cross on behalf of the Savior. But most assuredly the depiction of the Devil or Satan as a shaven-headed and androgynous Supermodel has to go down as one of the most startling innovations in cinema history.
Needless to say, Bowden provides an insight so striking to
Gibson’s film, but also, one that saw life in the Hunger Games, books and film(s.)
Beyond Left and Right…albeit teen fiction, the Hunger Games
presents elite that look absurd and evil; push androgyny even into its ‘gladiator’ spectacle,
if comes up short with a predictable old, gray bearded man as Der Leader
(advantage, Gibson of course.)
The movie's climax, with the last two standing about to go all Romeo and Juliet--teen suicide, again--on the television screen (with the gal, Eve perhaps, saying 'I know what I am doing') calling the bluff of the tee-vee director who declares the final players joint-victors.
My wife read the book over three nights prior to watching
the film. A brief summary would suggest
the book was more about what ‘she’ was thinking, leading me to conclude the
movie was forced to go ‘populist’ (the movie includes riot scenes from the ‘Districts’
that are not in the book) in order to maximize its relevance and dollar
take. Anti-populists, Right and Left
will not care for this—hence the post-modern take.
A solid post-modern analysis might conclude that the subject
of the Hunger Games moved from the book to visual (the media is the message,
folks)—which is the emotionally involved “tee-vee” audience—will force the hand
of the coming sequels to play to the audience that hates the elite.
Stay tuned; the elite usually win this battle, even if it
costs a box office success…
