Violence, love triangles, and the Hunger Games

Reader/movie watcher beware--slightly spoilerific.

Reading comments and thinking about many of the crap movies that come out these days has led me to the conclusion I wasn’t quite able to come to right after I saw the movie: I adored the movie version of the Hunger Games. Specifically, I adore the filmmakers and writers who made the film what it was supposed to be.

For making the violence exactly what it was. No spectacle, no violence for violence’s sake. It feels like a lone example of a movie that doesn’t glorify violence, in a story that would have been all too easy to do just that.

Not that I’m saying I’m against that kind of violence in movies. It serves its own purpose, and it can be entertaining in its own right. It just didn’t belong anywhere in the Hunger Games, and I’m so happy that the right people recognized that.

What I don’t adore, so much, is that some of the audience seemed to not quite understand what the movie--the story--was supposed to be. Which is the main reason why I couldn’t quite say I loved the movie right after I got out of it. I enjoyed it a lot, but there were many parts that couldn’t resonate with me because of the audience (I’m pretty sure I’m allergic to movie theaters, so don’t take my complaints too personally).

Movies are about enjoyment. I’m all for showing your excitement and getting hyped up for a great movie. Some of the most fun I’ve had is at midnight showings with friends, hearing the crowd cheer as the opening credits roll. But some reactions during the Hunger Games make me wonder if these people (mostly girls, in this high pitched squeal example) are paying attention at all, or if they’ve been programmed to not take movies seriously. If they even understand the gravity of a situation played out in front of them.

Again, I’m not advocating against violence in movies. But when so much of what we see is surrounded in violence, and we grow up seeing it portrayed in ever more grotesque and near-fetish ways, often for comedic effect, when this is the majority of what we encounter, it affects how we view the movies that aren’t meant to be a spectacle. The movies that meant to make us feel for the people, to realize the terror of a hopeless situation. To make us feel for every character that has to step into that arena, and in the end, to show that there is no real winner in the Hunger Games. You can cheer for Katniss or Peeta all you want, but if you can’t recognize that they’re killing real people forced into this situation (or coerced), people that are not inherently evil and at one time may not have been such bad people, then you’ve missed the whole point of this movie--or at least part. 

I thought the movies did that well, at least. I didn’t even find myself hating the careers that much. I didn’t particularly like them, but once their arrogance and easy dismissal of killing defense-less children--nothing that we should dismiss, mind you--is gone, they’re just people, who, instead of being picked for the games, were perhaps raised in a way that made them believe that there was actual honor in the games, who basically had their childhoods stolen from them. Kato barely realized that his volunteering was a death sentence, until Katniss’s arrow was pointed at his face. I’m not sure how to react to someone who cheers for his death. 

Aside from the violence, there’s an extreme separation between the content of the books, and the marketing surrounding them. The marketing wants to follow in the suit of Twilight, giving you “teams” to root for, for which guy you want Katniss to choose, as if it even matters that much to the story, like it does in Twilight. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with rooting for one of the guys. If you’re at all romantically inclined, like me, despite how cynical I might sound, you’re going to end up siding with one of them and wishing that Katniss would pick him. At the same time, by the end of the series, I no longer cared about who I had been rooting for, because far more had happened by then, overshadowing that little bit of love story. Collins has given us so much in exchange for that. And marketing that reduces the movie to “Team Peeta” or “Team Gale” does exactly that. It reduces the movie. Luckily, the filmmakers did no such thing. 

I’m very happy with this movie. I’m glad the books were teen books to begin with, to force the studio to stick to the PG13 rating. Without that, who knows what the movie might have looked like. I’m looking forward to a second viewing where I can let the movie affect me as it should, without the audience around me letting me know how they’re taking it. Because, once you’ve viewed it with all your friends, maybe this movie is one where we should all take a quiet viewing and really think about what it’s telling us. There is much to be learned from it and the entire series, as with any good dystopian fiction, and it’s ever more important that we pay attention.

Scrivener, where were you two years ago?

Oh, you were up and available for me to download. Damn. Ok, where was I two years ago? I was writing the first pages of the first draft of My So-Called Wormhole, oblivious that anything besides Pages (death to MSWord), a notebook, and the internet would be useful to the writing process.

Allow me to digress.

Happy second birthday, novel! (where does the time go?) You’re still just a baby, not ready to be published yet, but you’ve grown a lot over that time (I hope) and maybe you’ll be publishable once you meet a few more people and learn to stop blathering on about how great Buffy the Vampire Slayer is. I’m not asking you to stop completely. Just keep it to a minimum.

That’s what a lot of my time has been devoted to lately--keeping things to a minimum. Condensing passages and finding a better way to say things. That’s supposed to be a step near the end of the process, but you really never know with me.

And seeing as how I’m on full revision #4 (we’ll call it that for the sake of ease), I’m reflecting on how useful Scrivener could have been 2 years ago.

The reason it would have been so useful? It keeps everything organized and in ONE PLACE.

You know how many documents devoted to my novel I have sitting on my desktop? Eleven. Even that was higher than I thought it was going to be, because that’s just my desktop. Those are the high priority documents. There’s also a folder titled “novel” that contains 42 separate items in it, one of which is a folder titled “Thesis” that contains ANOTHER 22 items created for a different incarnation of the novel, half the pages and 4 drafts ago, submitted for graduate school. All having something to do with this novel. Granted, a few are pictures, and one is a spreadsheet of the agents I started sending to before I realized it (and I) was in no way ready for that step. But many of them are different drafts, different ideas, or different crap I’ve taken out thinking I might use that again...Someday?...no. 

Buried in those documents are ideas I forgot I’d even thought of. A Pages document created solely so I wouldn’t have to go searching for the idea, others simply added to the end of a list of other forgotten ideas. What good are breakthroughs if you’re going to forget where you wrote one, or if you wrote it on the laptop or in ink (there are notebooks, too. No, I don’t know how many, just that there is the possibility of many useful ideas written in several different places)(oh, and I have a filing cabinet with all my grad school papers--see, I’m trying to be organized!).

In comes Scrivener! (shill away!) There’s a place for pictures, for your research, “index cards” for each chapter or section you divide your work into, and the option to put notes on those sections, which could eliminate the need for entire documents. I could even scan in the notebook pages and throw them in someplace.

Will I ever do this? Therein lies the problem. How much time would it take me to organize all of this, and could I ever get myself to do all that when my fingers are compelling me to fix on the next page (and do something about the plot in the next hundred pages). Now I’m afraid it wouldn’t be worth the time to import everything when that idea I had five months ago could be irrelevant for this draft.

I know one thing. My next novel (whether it's my second born or it moves to the front after a tragic demise of the first) will be much more organized. And if Scrivener ever crashes, you will hear my scream.

Research for a completed novel

It never fails. Give me a method of doing something and I will find a different (and probably more round-about) way of doing it. I used to do it back in high school math classes for various equations and processes and now I’m doing it with writing:  I’m doing research for my *completed* novel. That’s right. That step you’re supposed to do around the beginning of the process? I’m doing it second to last (since I’ll have to now revise based on this research). It’s not to say I didn’t do any research when I first started writing this, but normally you’d have done the research that informs you about your main character’s obsession, which creates the bulk of her character, BEFORE you finished the freaking book. Let’s hope this method still gets me to a good end result.

The math equations are the only other example I can think of now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I could apply this to my life. Meeting a guy through WoW has got to be a more round-about way of doing things. Not that I am conscious of these processes while they are happening.

I’ve got some more blog posts brewing in my head, but as you can see, I have no time to write them because I’m busy writing my novel in reverse. 

The productivity/who is ever going to read this post

This is me starting that blog I was supposed to start a while ago so that people can find me when I finally do publish that book...whenever that will be. I’m not going to pretend that there are many people that really want to read my random thoughts. You know, other than my mom. 

But then, maybe I don’t really want my mom to read my blog, because I’ll probably just post something about how I wasn’t as productive today as I wanted to be, and she’ll call and ask why I wasn’t productive, and I won’t really have an answer for her. Sometimes it’s there and sometimes it isn’t, and sometimes you just have to stay online talking to people who make you laugh so hard you almost spit water all over the overpriced computer that you’ve come to depend on for your writing. I find that when you're 2000 miles away from most of your friends and family, and the ones that aren't that far are scattered throughout southern California (or England), you can't take laughter like that for granted.

Writing can help, of course, or I wouldn't be a writer. Sometimes it helps calm my mind, and sometimes I can’t calm my mind enough to write. Those are usually the times I seek out something more distracting, like the online game where most of my productivity goes to die. I actually have been in a pretty good state of mind lately for writing, but there are still essays to correct and reviews to be written and resumes to update so I can get that second job that will make it even harder to be productive.

They’re all excuses, of course. If a writer is dedicated enough, they’ll be punching away at their keyboard every chance they get. I still think of what the Todfather (the program director for my MFA) told me once, about how he wrote for infomercials and came home afterward and even though he didn’t feel like writing, he did anyway (he probably said more than that, all of it phrased better or at least sounding more intimidating, cause that’s what he does well). It’s enough to remind me that I should be writing when I’m not, that I should be able to be productive even when I really don’t feel like it. That’s what I’m trying to do, but life is still there, even if a lot of it is more virtual for me right now, and I’m still just trying to enjoy what I can of it. 

This is me trying to justify my lack of productivity, so you don’t need to remind of that.

Btw, can I count this post as being productive?