Book vs. Movie: Catching Fire
By Ben Gruchow
November 4, 2015
BoxOfficeProphets.com
In Book vs. Movie, we look at novels of any genre and compare them to their feature-film adaptation. This will usually happen when the film part of this equation is released. This will not be a review of the merits of either version of the story, but an essay on how each version of the story acquits itself within its medium. After analyzing both versions of the story, we’ll arrive at a verdict between which medium is more successful at telling its story, and whether any disparity between the two can be reconciled in a way that doesn’t impeach the winning version. There will be spoilers for both book and movie.
The Hunger Games trilogy
The Hunger Games trilogy is about the nation of Panem (which has grown out of the remains of North America following catastrophic events), its 12 “districts”, each specializing in the production of a valuable resource for the central autocratic Capitol, their creation of a grisly, televised fight to the death between children called the Hunger Games, and a growing rebellion against the Capitol’s tyranny. The first book introduces us to 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark, both of District 12. They are responsible for the first dual victory in Hunger Games history. Katniss is our protagonist and a central figure in a populist rebellion that grows over the course of the trilogy.
Catching Fire
In Catching Fire, Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark return home to District 12 in the wake of their dual victory in the 74th Hunger Games, with that story-ending narrative hook developing further. Katniss has become a hero to Capitol citizens and to the districts, but the Capitol government is furious with her for what they see as an act of defiance or subterfuge (she threatened suicide to prevent the Capitol from getting the type of victory they wanted). Retribution is a threat, and unrest in the other districts provides a motivation for her to lower the emotional temperature of Panem. This is set against the backdrop of the 75th Hunger Games, known as the third Quarter Quell - a special version of the Games held every 25 years.
The Book
If the purpose of a sequel is limited to raising the stakes of the first story and providing an expanded sense of conflict, then Catching Fire has to either win the reader over immediately or utilize enough goodwill from the preceding story to carry them through the opening. The amount of success it has with the reader on either of these is dependent on how long it’s been since reading the first book, and on how much of the reader’s enjoyment of it hinged on that book’s most notable asset: its headlong pace and seemingly endless supply of invention and suspense.
Put simply, Catching Fire doesn’t rocket out of the gate the way the first book does because it’s too busy picking up the pieces. Then those pieces are constructed into a funhouse-mirror repeat of the same crisis with superficially similar incident and much more personal implications. It’s a twist on the urge to re-create normalcy and youth after a trauma that’s on a level of nastiness equal to something like Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again, or (somewhat closer to home) the Scouring of the Shire in Tolkien’s Return of the King. The storytelling aspect that all three of these share is the experience of the central figure undergoing a sense of victorious closure, and returning home with an expectation or a hope of normalcy only to find that they, in Haymitch Abernathy’s words from this column’s movie iteration, never get off of this train.
Human nature does not, as a rule, agree readily with the concept of not being able to go home again. We are nostalgic, and we are also slow to adapt on a societal level. And so the first half of Catching Fire consists of a handful of individuals becoming aware of a sea change in the population, and attempting to subvert it and return things to their former version of stability. This is actually an even broader net than the story gives; most of what we see is a race between Katniss and Panem’s President Snow to see who can quash quicker and more completely the embryonic signs of revolution that are cropping up all over the country - him to maintain a sense of order and stability to what he sees as a fragile system, her under threat of death to her family, friends, and to her district.
It’s right about here that we’re also introduced to the concept of District 13, which plays a major role in the remainder of the trilogy. In the fabric of the story’s universe, District 13 was a region specializing in graphite mining, nuclear technology, and weapons manufacturing. District 13 was one of the major components of the “Dark Days” rebellion, which was a rather unspecified period of war and strife in the nation’s past.
The narrative is that the Capitol bombed it to the ground and killed all of its inhabitants as a show of force. Propaganda news reports are aired regularly showing uninhabitable ruins, as another reminder of what the Capitol is capable of. There are subtle indications that District 13’s true nature may be the subject of a cover-up; the best of these indications involves Katniss noticing a simple, barely-visible video editing mistake on one of the propaganda news reports.
The second half of Catching Fire depicts the result of a regressive reaction toward rebellion. Snow’s decision to quash rebellion through withholding necessities and outright violence - food supplies show up rotten, torture devices are installed in public areas - is intimidation by the playbook he’s been using that finally backfires. Capitol citizens have grown fond of past Hunger Games winners, viewing them less as the blood-sport components they were and more like the celebrities we believe we feel a kinship or connection with now.
One of the important aspects of Catching Fire is how it subtly provides plausibility for why Panem’s citizens - who are, even in the most well-off of districts, nothing more than destitute slaves - would allow this autocracy to propagate and even embrace it to a degree. That provision is that the Hunger Games are only the most visible component of a culture that’s bred and trained to fear its own companions and neighbors, and to move toward intimidation and warlike tactics to subdue those fears. Snow, in a final attempt to subdue an uprising, announces a special version of the Hunger Games that will pit Katniss and Peeta against other past winners - thereby almost certainly ensuring their death - and this is what turns the tide of Panem decisively against him.
The final third of the novel details an arena battle that’s shorter, bloodier, more efficient, and much more ambiguous as far as its effect on the public than the one we last saw (where weeks of footage of 20-odd violent killings are edited into a sappy love story for Capitol citizens to fawn over, in one of the grisliest satirical barbs thrown at both the viewer who buys into the artificiality of interpersonal connections on reality TV, as well as the reader who might have been expecting - or hoping for - a redux of Stephenie Meyer’s vapid Twilight quadrilogy). Internal monologue hypothesizes that this is because the Capitol knows this installment of the Games is unpopular with the citizens, and wishes it to be over as quickly as possible.
Since the entirety of Catching Fire is limited to Katniss’ point of view, we are reduced to hypothesizing about the tone and tension behind events. And as it turns out, the Games are a sham from both sides; Snow is using them to surreptitiously rid himself of the symbol of a burgeoning political revolution, while the revolution is using them to reveal itself to the country by saving, extracting, and taking possession of the same symbol (Katniss, in both cases). This theme of manipulation for political gain or progress culminates in Mockingjay, but the seeds were planted and begin to grow here. The first half of Catching Fire is possibly the most solid and structurally-sound writing in the series, and the second half contains most of the foundation upon which the trilogy constructs its final conflicts.
The Movie
As this column is being finalized, Lionsgate CEO Tim Palen has outlined a firm plan to contract out development of several Hunger Games-themed park attractions, ranging from recreations of District 12 to simulations of Capitol train travel to, of all things, Peeta Mellark’s bakery. Mind you, this is the CEO who has shepherded all of the adaptations to the screen. Certainly, the concept of a real-life Hunger Games theme park is astonishingly tone-deaf to what the trilogy concludes about commoditizing violence and death (especially for the sake of pitching a narrative to a mass audience), but it’s even more so coming from a studio that presumably has been aware of these themes for years.
Given that blind spot, it’s not surprising that The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, like its predecessor, leaves most of the satire and jabs at the audience to implication; instead, most of the story is re-contextualized and re-conceived as a straightforward political thriller, where the final maneuvers by both sides are equivalent to scorching the earth. The focus is on political aggression and velocity, not the somewhat slower one-card-at-a-time chess-game mentality of the book. While this is enough to make the film probably the canniest blockbuster of 2013, there’s no denying that it’s a simpler piece of work.
District 13 seems like an afterthought in the movie; we are given only one clue as to the protagonists’ level of knowledge, and judging by the minute facial tics from Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss when Donald Sutherland’s President Snow name-drops it, that level appears to be total ignorance. The biggest character change from the source novel is Effie Trinket, played by Elizabeth Banks. Her character is more elaborate here, likely to compensate for the absence of three Capitol beauticians from the novel. On the page, these three minor characters served as a gateway to the idea that Capitol citizens owe their manner to having been desensitized by so many years of violence as spectacle, as opposed to being innately uncaring or antagonistic. This manifests itself as simple, blunt emotion on the page, as the beauticians prepare Katniss for the Quarter Quell ceremonies and lose emotional control while doing so. The iteration offered by The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, with Effie giving a short and emotional apology directly to Katniss and Peeta, is arguably more eloquent and more touching.
The movie retains most of the book’s attitude toward violence and death; indeed, turning the satire into something mostly implied emphasizes the humanism on display, and the sequence with Effie is one of three passages in the film that are surprisingly moving. All three, in both book and movie, involve the affirmation of both empathy and grief - but the movie expresses them with more clarity and directness, and there are case studies in each of them of how slight changes in wording and incident from one medium to another can communicate very different levels of urgency.
The Verdict
About a half-hour into The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Katniss delivers a eulogy to the character Rue from the first installment. This eulogy is expressed in rather academic terms in the novel, and much more informally in the film. The depiction of Rue’s family during this sequence is done with a visual pragmatism that’s a little discomfiting, and commendable for it; Rue’s actual death in the first film was pretty sanitized, and the grisliness of it was redirected into a short, safer seed-of-rebellion sequence. And in the novel of Catching Fire, Katniss is moved to eulogize Rue at least partly by the perception that one of the deceased’s siblings is silently imploring her to do so. Here, she faces not Rue’s sister but a giant video image of Rue herself, with her survivors positioned beneath, and the blunt and straightforward way the family is clearly staged for the benefit of a narrative moment gives the setting a ghastliness and sick plausibility that is nearly all by itself more potent than anything thus far in the book (and, for that matter, anything in the first film).
What’s lost in this incarnation of the sequence is the sense, abundant in the early stretch of the novel, of the chess game; everyone’s aware that there are moves and counter-moves being made, and that the situation is on the verge of spinning out of control, but the more important move is keeping up an immediate appearance of normalcy and calm. There is a chilling moment in the book immediately following this eulogy where we hear the isolated pop of gunshots ill-muffled through a set of doors, and Katniss internally - almost detachedly - wonders who is on the receiving end of them. This is a far louder and more hectic chain of events in the film, which is more visceral and pointed (and arguably more emotionally sound) than the book, but it’s also comparatively shallow.
That last sentence does a fair job of encapsulating the big difference between the book and movie for this installment of the trilogy. That’s enough to make it superior to the first film - for that one was also comparatively shallow, and it was necessarily more cautious in what it was depicting - but it’s still at a disadvantage to its source material. I confess to a bias in favor of the chess-game pacing of the book, but it’s also more rewarding to see the layers of intrigue and escalation slowly build up around everyone. The director fills in the corners where he can; the nature of the Avox (the term for a political rebel or infidel of the Capitol who’s had their tongue removed, and been forced into silent servitude) wasn’t acknowledged in the first film, and it isn’t mentioned here either - but it’s shown, in what is really a fantastically creepy achievement of static composition and focus, during an unrelated dialogue scene.
The other side of this issue has to do with the larger storyline of Panem’s revolution, and it’s here that - for all of its strengths as a thriller - the film falters the most against the source material. There are hints and suggestions about where the characters and plot are headed in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, and they’re articulated as well as they can be by a good filmmaking team and a fantastic cast, but the final revelations do deserve more weight. The final minutes of the movie and book dump a lot of significant exposition and orientation into a very compressed timeframe, and the film compresses it much further, into roughly two lines of dialogue - three, if we’re being charitable. It’s functional, but unforgiving toward pacing and rhythm in the context of a film that’s so far been precise and steady with both. This is a good piece of work, closer to the essence of the material than the first film, but it doesn’t quite improve on the source novel enough to counteract its more significant assets.
Book vs. movie winner: Book.