Dear Editor:
If you have been anywhere within earshot of a teenager in the past month you've most likely heard about The Hunger Games, the latest fad since Harry Potter and Twilight. For those of you who don't know, The Hunger Games is a movie that originated from a thought-provoking book written by Suzanne Collins. It is a story set in the future after North America has been separated into 12 districts with one ruling Capitol. Every year one boy and one girl from every district are forced to participate in the Hunger Games - a fight to the death on live TV as both punishment for a previous rebellion of one of the districts and as entertainment for the people of the Capitol.
After reading the book back in high school I was completely unsettled by the realism Collins created and I spent many nights lying in bed thinking about
it. How close could this book be to reality anyway? Could people, with all the violence in the media, become so desensitized to it that we may someday be entertained by death and violence like the people of the Capitol? How close are we to having the same lack of compassion shown by the fictional Capitol people?
The day the movie was released I went to the theatre armed with a pack of tissues, knowing how sad some of the death scenes were, expecting to cry just as I had reading the books. What surprised me was, as I began to tear up during the sad scenes, people in the theatre began to laugh. Children as young as 12 were being brutally murdered onscreen and people were laughing, and continued to do so throughout various death scenes. I've never encountered such a thing during a movie. How could they find this funny?
That's when the irony of the situation hit me. The movie itself is meant to illustrate how disgusting the people of the Capitol are for finding entertainment in death and is meant to open our eyes to how desensitized humans could possibly become, but instead people watching the movie were finding the same entertainment in it as the people we were meant to find repulsive. It's shocking and scary to know that we may not be so far away from this dystopic world.
We are a lot like the people of the Capitol, and The Hunger Games, fictional or not, actually has a lot of truth to it, which makes it all the more scary.
If there ever is, by some chance, a real Hunger Games in the future, may the odds be ever in your favour.
Sofia Alev d'Erceville North Vancouver
