viz.

 Note: contains spoilers for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Inglorious Basterds 

Image credit: media.giphy.com

Hello viz. readers, it’s good to be back! In my last post (way back in 2013), I remarked upon the similarity between characters Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013) and Shoshanna Dreyfus in Inglorious Basterds (2009). Though Catching Fire runs through a gamut of stylistic epochs, Katniss’s home in District 12 has an intentionally Hooverville 1930’s aesthetic, placing it in roughly the same period as Tarantino’s Nazi revenge flick Inglorious Basterds. Similarly, both characters are separated from their families by totalitarian regimes. Finally, both heroines are placed in a position to be simultaneously savvy yet reluctant centers of those same totalitarian regimes’ entertainment spectacles – which is what I want to talk about in this post.

As I watched Katniss fling her last arrow towards the center of the coliseum, and the lights shut down as the building went up in flames, I couldn’t help but notice an affinity with the eloquent final scene of Inglorious Basterds. In destroying the entire spectacle, Katniss had made her marginalized existence central. The last thing viewers of the fictional “Hunger Games” TV show saw was her arrow (a similar image of Katniss aiming her bow was used when marketing the film). In Inglorious Basterds, Shoshanna also martyrs herself as entertainment spectacle, although her revenge scene is more protracted, more cathartic, and more gruesome – which is the sort of revelry in vigilante justice that viewers have come to expect from Tarantino films. Both Shoshanna and Katniss are ideal commentators on the connections between media and the powers that be because they are exalted by a system they’d rather destroy. Katniss as the unwitting darling of a noxious TMZ-esque elite, and Shoshanna as the equally ironical object of affection of the Nazi party – and just as Colonel Hans Landa hints that he remembers Shoshanna and her family whom he murdered, President Snow’s civility to Katniss carries a duplicitous maliciousness, that he could kill her family at any moment, as well. Rather than give in to threats of violence, both leads show a willingness to become martyrs in order to dismantle an entertainment spectacle, a spectacle which is understood as a major governing force behind their respective systems of oppression.

Like all great cultural zeitgeists, the symbol of the destroyed phantasmagoria is a popular one. A phantasmagoria is a kind of rudimentary projector which most historians say was invented in the 18^th century, while others claim some form of phantasmagoria existed even in Ancient Greece. I’m most interested in how philosophers of the Frankfurt school use the term to discuss a host of technologies and social spectacles which function via mystification. For them, the phantasmagoric is used to describe any spectacle which is sui generis in its capacity to present an immersive and persuasive illusion. Walter Benjamin (who died fleeing the Nazis) was understandably skeptical of the phantasmagoria. Though he believed in the power of film, writing that, film had “burst this prison world asunder by the dynamite of a tenth of a second,” he saw it as a potentially dangerous tool in the hands of totalitarian regimes, like the Nazi party, or any capitalist regime, as such capitalistic cinematic productions tried “hard to spur the interest of the masses through illusion promoting spectacles and dubious speculations.” In short, he saw it as having a brainwashing effect. As he quotes Duhamel, in the cinema “I no longer can think what I want to think.” Though the phantasmagoria seems to function similarly in Catching Fire and Inglorious Basterds, I wonder if it is entirely condemned in both films. Is the destruction of the phantasmagoric spectacle a total rejection of its mystifying power, or an effort to take back an otherwise powerful medium by marginalized people? I also wonder what we are to make of the fact that these films which seem to be critical of the entertainment industry are themselves highly successful. I’ll leave that for the reader to discuss or imagine.