Dystopian Politics in the Hunger Games Series

Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games series takes readers to a fictional country known as Panem that hosts an annual nationwide celebration in which adolescents compete in a battle to the death. In this analysis, I approach this book series with a Marxist lens to argue that the capitalistic system in Panem satirizes American culture in the early 21st century. Every novel in the series, through this theory, can be read as what scholars identify as a “critical dystopia,” a defamiliarized version of our culture, upheld through institutions and social participation in a way that satirizes ours. I argue that the Hunger Games are a materialization of the competition that exists within capitalism and is used to uphold capitalist ideology. Moreover, the series critiques our culture’s response to the systemic issues presented in the series, proposing that our populist investment in political figures upholds a cycle of repressive subjection. In conclusion,The Hunger Games series holds a mirror to our culture’s hegemony so that we may see how we are complicit, and that the solution is not to create a new hegemony, but to create our individuality separate from our political investments.