With Women Of Action,Caroline Siede digs into the history of women-driven action movies to explore what these stories say about gender and how depictions of female action heroes have evolved over time.
There’s a perfect little silent-movie sequence about a third of the way through the first Hunger Games movie. Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen has been called to show off her bow-and-arrow skills to the Gamemakers who will decide her fate in the titular games. But she’s too nervous to hit the target. Confusion flashes across her face at the rare miss, then concern at the fact that the Gamemakers have already turned back to their small talk. She tries again, proudly hits a perfect bullseye, and looks up for praise. Only now the Gamemakers have turned their attention to their decadent lunch buffet. Katniss stares in frustrated disbelief before impulsively grabbing an arrow and shooting the apple out of the mouth of their roasted pig. All eyes now on her, she petulantly curtseys and then storms out of the room so flustered she almost forgets to put her bow back.Â
There are less than 10 words spoken in the whole sequence, but we’ve gone on an entire emotional journey with Katniss—an awakening of socio-political fury she didn’t have before she walked into that room. Sometime in the 2010s, “agency” became the buzzword for female characters, as if whether they had it was a pass/fail test for feminism. But what I actually crave from my female heroines is interiority—the sense of a rich, complex emotional life bubbling beneath the surface of whatever they do. That explains my enduring love for Katniss, a character given more interiority in that first movie than most action heroes (male or female) get in an entire franchise.Â
In fact, Katniss is defined as much by her lack of agency as by the rare moments she claims it, and that’s exactly what makes her story so compelling. Her cultural image is a girl with a bow and a braid, fighting to take down tyranny and find her dream boyfriend; an empowered young heroine for Zillennials at a time when female protagonists in action blockbusters were few and far between. But the nuances of her story, the messy contradictions of her motivation, and the potent metaphors of her dystopian world are deeper than they’re given credit for—even by the franchise’s casual fans.Â
Katniss arrived as the culmination of two separate trends in teen storytelling. The first is the young adult fiction boom that started with Harry Potter at the turn of the 21st century and then got a female POV with the Twilight books in the mid-aughts. Suzanne Collins’ 2008 Hunger Games novel kicked off a new wave of dystopian copycats like Divergentand The 5th Wave, but the love-triangle focus of its marketing explicitly stems from Twilight‘s DNA.Â
The Hunger Games also owes a lot to the “teen death” genre, which has roots in Lord Of The Flies in 1954, Stephen King’s The Long Walkin 1979, and the slasher films of the 1980s, but reached its pinnacle with Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale. The fact that the 2000 Japanese cult classic got its first proper U.S. release just as writer-director Gary Ross’ big-screen Hunger Games adaptation was hitting theaters in 2012 only made the comparisons that much more rabid. But while the premises of the two stories are undeniably similar, their aims are quite different.
At least in its film adaptation, Battle Royale‘s kill-or-be-killed game is a metaphorical exploration of the emotional rollercoaster of adolescence and the cruelty of adult authority figures—more in line with something like Buffy The Vampire Slayer and its simultaneous focus on teenage crushes and world-ending stakes. The Hunger Games, however, is much more literal in its exploration of war, class, propaganda, and tyranny. Its closest comparison is something like Andor, which uses the dressings of sci-fi to tell a pointed story about the human cost of political revolution.
Because of its Twilight lineage, however, there’s still a tendency to underestimate the intelligence of The Hunger Games. It’s a commercially successful, critically respected series, but there’s an unspoken asterisk that it’s good “for what it is”—for young adult fiction aimed at teenage girls. (Star Wars, Spider-Man, and Dune never seem to get stuck with the YA label, even though they center on young adult protagonists.) At the time of its release, cinephiles tended to ding the franchise for being less violent than Battle Royale, as if its PG-13 rating automatically made it more sanitized.But the true horror of The Hunger Games isn’t the violence its teen competitors inflict on one other, but the violence their government inflicts on all of them.
The most unsettling image in the first film isn’t a child being stabbed to death. It’s a teenager smiling and waving out of a train window because he knows the best way to ensure his survival is to ingratiate himself with the 1% who will be giddily watching his death match. Like so much of the series, it’s only a slight exaggeration of the world we actually live in. Think of the GoFundMes that turn brutal pain into palatable photos and captions more likely to go viral. Many of us are vying for sponsors just to survive.
What makes Katniss interesting is that she doesn’t care about any of that. Despite the bow, she’s no Robin Hood do-gooder fighting for the people of District 12. Nor is she Luke Skywalker, longing for grand adventures outside of the borders of her impoverished coal-mining community. Her best friend Gale (Liam Hemsworth) rails against the cruelty of an oppressive Capitol that forces the children of its once rebellious districts to fight to the death once a year. Her fellow competitor Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) wants to show his oppressors that they don’t own him. But as Katniss puts it, “I just can’t afford to think like that. I have my sister.”
A big reason Katniss’ story resonates so deeply with young women is because she’s action cinema’s ultimate eldest daughter—a teen thrust into a parental role after her dad died in a coal-mining explosion and her mom fell into an almost comatose state of depression. In the film’s opening scenes, Ross’ handheld camera captures the complicated dynamics of the Everdeen household. Mrs. Everdeen (Paula Malcomson) is now capable of laying out her daughters’ clothes and braiding their hair for the annual Reaping ceremony. But Katniss doesn’t trust her anymore. She swoops in wherever her 12-year-old sister Prim (Willow Shields) is involved, offering emotional reassurances and warm compliments like a parent would, even as she’s headed towards the same child death lottery.Â
When Prim’s name is called for the Hunger Games and Katniss volunteers to take her place, it’s technically a moment of agency. But, as Lawrence so perfectly plays it, it’s even more so a moment of instinct. There’s no world where there’s any option but this one for Katniss. No thought that she wouldn’t die in her sister’s place. While the action genre isn’t generally known for its stellar acting, the Hunger Games franchise pays close attention to the emotional realities of its characters. In her rushed goodbyes, Katniss only lets herself be vulnerable with Gale; she knows her mom and Prim need to see a brave face from her.Â
Not only did Katniss’ tyranny-fighting story arrive just as that cultural shift was happening, her own experience mirrors the slow-burn sociopolitical awakening that so many young people were experiencing at the time. In the daily grind of District 12, Katniss has no energy to focus on anything but feeding her family. She’s not afraid to bend the rules, like when she climbs a border fence to hunt, but always for personal pragmatism, rather than political rebellion. As she’s whisked away to the Capitol for a pre-Hunger Games media circus, however, she’s finally able to start seeing her society from a bird’s eye view.
From Princess Leia to Hermione Granger to Ellen Ripley, genre stories like to honor their strong female heroines by making them the smartest person in the room. But Katniss is the opposite. She may be the mature adult of her family, but she’s a dumb small-town jock in the Capitol—reactionary, naïve, and hotheaded. It’s hilarious to watch her shove Peeta into a wall because she’s too myopic to realize he’s trying to sell them as star-crossed lovers, not embarrass her by admitting his crush. That’s the sort of flaw that gives a female character depth.
In fact, there’s some meta satire at play as Katniss’ mentor Haymitch (Woody Harrelson) advises her to be more likable and her stylist Cinna (Lenny Kravitz) dresses her up like a fiery hero. The Hunger Games is as much about propaganda and media manipulation as it is gladiatorial battle. While Katniss is coarse and moody behind closed doors, her team are determined to sell her as the sort of empowering yet unchallenging female action hero Hollywood executives think audiences want—literally hosing her off, waxing her down, and dressing her up like a Strong Female Character Barbie doll.
Where a classic action heroine gets a training montage, Katniss’ biggest transformation is mental. Her skills are there from the beginning, what she needs is a crash course in the tools of state oppression and the power of symbolism. Once inside the arena, Katniss gets plenty of clever, John McClane action moments, like taking out a crew of murderous competitors with a tracker jacker nest or blowing up their food supply with a well-aimed arrow. But her greatest moments are when she refuses to play the game the way the Gamemakers want her to.Â
When her 12-year-old ally Rue (Amandla Stenberg) is killed, a grieving Katniss refuses to simply abandon her body and move on. Instead, she covers her young friend in flowers, finds the nearest TV camera, and gives the three-fingered salute of her district. As in the evaluation room, Katniss breaks the fourth wall of the Games. Only now she’s learned to do it on a grander scale; her innate big-sister instincts mixing with the media savvy the Capitol inadvertently taught her.
There’s an engaging tension to how aware Katniss is of her own impact, how accidental her role as a revolutionary actually is. Her act of cross-district solidarity inspires a rebellion in Rue’s district—one quickly squashed by violent state police. But she’s not thinking on that level yet. For every moment of defiance, there’s a moment of passivity, like when she gets swept up in a love story with Peeta that’s half-real, half for the cameras. There’s an ambiguity to Katniss’ feelings, even to herself—something Lawrence conveys through gestures and tone of voice. One of the great staging details of the final act comes when Katniss gambles that the threat of a double-suicide will be enough to push the Gamemakers to let both of them live: Peeta touches her braid like a lover saying goodbye, she turns to stare directly at the television cameras.Â
The Hunger Games trusts Lawrence to communicate that which would be lazily explained by exposition in a lesser film. One of Katniss’ greatest moments of interiority is actually observing the interiority of another character. In any other franchise, “career” tribute Cato (Alexander Ludwig) would have been a psychopathic final boss for Katniss and Peeta to defeat. But The Hunger Games humanizes him instead. Unlike the outlying districts, the Capitol-adjacent Districts 1 and 2 support the Hunger Games, actively training their children to fight in them. It’s only moments before his death that Cato realizes he was raised on a lie. There’s no point to this fight, no glory in this violence. He’s desperate and despondent, yet even then he can’t quite challenge the system—the only thing he knows how to do is kill.
As Katniss mercy-kills Cato, she realizes that even he is a victim. The districts all share the same enemy: the dictatorial President Show (Donald Sutherland). Only, this isn’t a world where one act can win a revolution; where one hit can blow up the Death Star. When it comes to fleshing out the mechanisms of state oppression, The Hunger Games is more nuanced than most action blockbusters of its ilk—something Sutherland himself was incredibly passionate about.
Instead of catharsis and celebration, there’s a hollowness to the end of the first Hunger Games. After her double-suicide stunt, Katniss has to jump back into the talk show circuit to pretend she was blinded by love rather than defiantly manipulating her government; an act of agency dressed up as the irrational whim of a lovestruck teenager. As she heads home to District 12, her only desire is to forget any of this ever happened.
Katniss is such an unconventional action heroine that she’s still refusing the call at the end of her first movie. That’s part of what makes her so compelling. Katniss didn’t connect with a generation because she’s a flawless revolutionary. She connected because, in a genre where women are often treated like iconography, her humanity burns bright.Â
