Earlier this year I missed seeing in the theater the huge
hit film The Hunger Games, based on Suzanne
Collins’ YA novels, but it turned up on satellite a few nights ago. It was more
enjoyable than I expected. The movie depicts a dystopian future in which a
ruling elite in the Capitol demands as tribute two young people from each of 12
formerly rebellious outer districts to compete in Hunger Games as
entertainment. (This harkens back to the mythic tribute of Athenian youths and
maidens demanded by King Minos of Crete to face the minotaur.) In a contest
called the Hunger Games, the tributes go out into the wild and hunt each other until
only one survives. The winner is celebrated and feted. The sport is followed by
everyone in the districts. The denizens of the 12 districts, by rooting for
their own local contestants, become invested and implicated in the games and in
the society.
Humans-hunting-humans is an entire genre of film, even if we
leave out war movies, detective movies, and fugitive movies (even scifi as Logan’s Run) in which the sporting
element in them is obscured. In all those cases the public interest is the
nominal motive (even if misguided) for the violence of the characters. As
Maxwell Smart says to Agent 99 in an old Get
Smart episode, “We have to shoot,
kill, and destroy: we represent all that’s wholesome and good in the world.” Just
the films in which the gamesmanship is overt are numerous enough. A few examples:
The Most Dangerous
Game (1932): This is the granddaddy of the genre. Joel McCrea and Fay Wray survive
a shipwreck only to be set loose in the jungle on the private island of the
immoralist big game hunter Count Zaroff who hunts them for sport. This film has
been aped and parodied many times – even on an episode of the The Simpsons. The original is still the
one to see.
The 10th Victim
(1965) is a Franco-Italian, based on the
short story by scifi author Robert Sheckley. Contestants – all volunteers – compete
in the Hunt for prizes, sponsorship deals, fame, and fortune. There are ten
rounds for each contestant, five as hunter and five as hunted (“victim”); the
victim doesn’t know who his or her assigned hunter is. You win by killing all
your opponents in all ten rounds. The Hunt is the most popularly followed sport
in the world, and has the advantage of eliminating from society its most
violent members. Despite undeniable campiness and some nice location shots
(including the Coliseum) in Rome, this is a silly movie. Stick with Sheckley,
whose writing is clever and funny.
Death Race 2000. What
can one say about this cult film from 1975? On a cross-country race, drivers
(David Carradine and a young Sylvester Stallone among them) in pimped-out
sports cars score points by killing pedestrians.
Running Man
(1987). In a movie made well before “reality TV” became a staple of
programming, Richard Dawson hosts a near-future game show in which convicted
criminals are released into a linear arena to run for their lives. They are
chased by “stalkers” who have themes and nicknames like those of wrestlers. One
called Fireball uses a flamethrower, another called Buzzkill uses a chain saw,
and so on. If a criminal survives, he or she wins release. The (wrongly)
convicted criminal this time is Arnold
Schwarzenegger. You know the rest: bad news for stalkers and bad puns for us.
Death Race (2008). In a reimagining of Death Race 2000, drivers battle each
other to the death in order to win pardons for their crimes. Once again, it is
a televised sport.
These are just a sampling. The persistent popularity of
books and movies with the theme suggests that they connect with something deep
in the human psyche. Humans are not alone in
this. The days are long gone when primatologists entertained the pleasant image
of chimpanzees, our close relatives, as peaceful vegetarians. Today we know
that meat is a significant part of their diet in the wild (monkeys are a
favorite), and that chimpanzees hunt chimps from neighboring tribes in a way
that looks a lot like sport. In the BBC film clip below, chimps raid a
neighboring territory where they catch, kill, and eat another chimp. They seem
to enjoy it.
Humans have the choice of rising above our natures.
Most of us get along well enough with our neighbors – we don’t usually cannibalize
them anyway. But we probably can succeed better at being a kinder gentler ape
if we acknowledge the part of ourselves that isn’t. Denying our nature just
makes it crop up surreptitiously, such as in ideologies that categorize
appalling violence as justice. It is better to indulge our chimp-like qualities
in a game of Halo or by watching violent movies such as The Hunger Games, while we enjoy tea with the neighbors.
Chimp hunger games
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