This article studies the hugely popular and critically acclaimed The Hunger Games film quadrilogy, starring Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen, who survives in a world in which fear is structural and mediated through visual technologies. The series establishes Katniss as its most important ethical and narrative agent, the locus of the spectators’ emotional engagement. However, the films also embody fear independently of the protagonist insofar as their thematic and aesthetic organization can be considered fear-ridden throughout the series. The quadrilogy consists of four science fiction/action films (The Hunger Games (2012), Catching Fire (2013), Mockingjay Part I (2014) and II (2015)) based on a dystopian trilogy of books by Suzanne Collins that depict the post-apocalyptic world of Panem. Panem is separated into twelve Districts, which are each subject to the authoritarian Capitol. The quadrilogy’s title refers to a compulsory, televised death match, for which twenty-four children from the Districts are selected each year as “tributes” to fight each other in a dangerous public arena for the entertainment of the Capitol. In The Hunger Games quadrilogy, the organization of the media follows a panoptic logic that is designed both to observe and to discipline, which can be seen as an allegory for governance that uses fear as the technology of its power. In his book Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault used this idea to illustrate the way in which disciplinary societies exercise control by subjugating their citizens to asymmetrical surveillance and by consequently provoking citizens to monitor and police themselves for fear of punishment.
The Hunger Games series suggests that counter-technologies can resist these disciplinary technologies of power but that these counter-technologies are equally subject to governing disciplines. This means that while one might resist technologies of power with counter-technologies, the resistance will never be outside of power relations. Even new media technologies, while providing individuals with the means of counter-hegemonic politics of communication, remain embedded “in the political economy, social relations, and political environment within which they are produced, circulated, and received” (Kellner 2). This is why Wendy Chun talks about digital technologies not only as “freedom frontiers” but also as “dark machines of [state] control” (2). In The Hunger Games quadrilogy, actual resistance becomes a matter of individual action only. The series’ emphasis on individual action at the expense of emergent technologies comes with a remarkably pessimistic view on media and media activism, suggesting in the spirit of Jean Baudrillard that all media is conformistic, and that the only places removed from power are areas beyond the media’s reach. In the age of digital surveillance, where algorithms have replaced the central observation tower, this view is increasingly relevant since digital surveillance is invisible, and individuals are no longer aware of being watched continually (Zuboff 323).