Are we not in the real 'Hunger Games'?
Reality television and food insecurity in the U.S. alongside Sudan and Gaza
Contrary to popular belief, fat people get hungry. I can testify to that as, growing up, I had the pleasure of being both extremely poor and fatter than all of my classmates. Naturally, people thought this meant that I was just incompetent. My mother stressed to me that I had to show up at all times looking my absolute best to combat this, no matter what we actually had in the fridge. My small act of resistance was not to care. I let my hair look however. I wrestled the boys in the grass. I talked back to every teacher that tried to put me down. I laughed in the face of those who tried to bully me, knowing that they couldn't ever hurt me in the real way that poverty already had. Being this way made me extra sensitive, yes. But it also reminded me, as my family would say time and time again, that “I know where I've been.”
So when I went on to join some of Exeter's finest and the children of ambassadors at a women's college in western Massachusetts, I kept my head up and continued talking my shit. Few of those people would ever know what hunger felt like, and they might not ever, so their opinions meant shit all to me. Sometimes I'd feel a little embarrassed by people noticing the holes in my clothes, but it would quickly pass when I remembered that I was a descendant of slaves, and therefore was honoring their memory by simply being alive. It was easy to not care about their glares when there had been many nights that I went to sleep with no knowledge of where my next meal was coming from. What was a snide comment by an unkind fool to a survivor? Especially when we somehow ended up in the same place and are bound to end up in the same dirt.
Today, I'm hungry because I’m short on cash. I have to wait until I’m paid from (yet another) delayed article I’ve freelanced for. I left (yet another) job earlier this year and I start (yet another) one next month. In the meantime, I've been getting by thanks to the freelancing and other odd jobs. On social media, I’ve seen a lot of mutual aid groups supporting the targeted immigrant populations and fire victims of Los Angeles with free groceries and funds. I don’t feel like they apply to me as someone who simply hates working for racists so instead I just bide my time. During those windows, while my inbox is silent and my bank account is wheezing, I’ve been revisiting some classics from my childhood through a podcast from the actresses on Living Single, recaps of old Sims games, and The Hunger Games series.
I got curious about what happens to Haymitch in Sunrise on the Reaping so I restarted the books and read The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes for the first time. (It’s like a 2.5 out of 5, tbh, and the film — paused while I write this — is really missing the interiority of an elitist-turned-fascist main character for the sake of sex appeal.) Whether I chose to revisit unconsciously or not, it all feels eerily timely.
I originally read the book series too quickly when I was young, not fully taking in the significance of it all. What I did keep in mind all this time was a reminder that Suzanne Collins, the author, said that she had gotten the idea from myths, Roman gladiators, and flipping back and forth between reality television and war coverage.
In my teens, I used to be a Big Brother fan to make the summers go by faster but I stopped watching when I noticed how the editors made a big deal out of nothing. I realized I was being manipulated and got bored once I could see through it. I caught a glimpse of it this year, now in its 27th season, and not much has changed. As the show has continued alongside others like The Bachelor and Real Housewives, imitations have shown up with even more absurd editing and dramatic music. Last year, I watched a short documentary about terrible conditions on the set of Love Is Blind and yet it continues.
Like Collins, a few weeks ago, one post away from a recap of Love Island’s twists and turns, I saw folks condemning the starvation of both the Sudanese and of Gazans. I also saw critiques on how much coverage Gaza got compared to Sudan, and someone pointed out that it was anti-Blackness but also because they were simply online first, making videos about their plight. This rang true to me because as I’ve found myself in need of mutual aid on occasion, I’ve tried to come up with more and more ideas for getting my posts to stand out amongst a sea of marginalized people growing in need after each layoff or wave of new disabilities.
With unscripted shows filling in for an unwillingness to pay real writers for their creations, I’ve been thinking about what else they encourage us to do. Mock each other. Observe without engaging. Lose your empathy from one episode to another.
Knowing the strength of these shows, witnessing a growing misanthropy (read: antinatalism), and seeing the use of food as a weapon, I feel that if we don’t stop watching and start improving our daily conditions we’re in for worse than we think. After all, what is stopping us from throwing each other into an actually deadly arena for a laughable prize just to see who’ll do the dance? We’re practically there already, just without the shitty edits.
Just wanted to say I changed my mind about TBOSAS. It was much worse than I thought. https://boxd.it/auNSLN