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March 26, 2012

The psychological truth behind the 'Hunger Games'

The Hunger Games, which now ranks as the most successful movie released during March—ever—adds to the toxic psychological forces it identifies, rather than reducing them.

In the movie, which takes place in a world given over to bloody entertainment, the government chooses young people to fight each other to the death on a reality television show. The writer of the film, Suzanne Collins, has stated she came up with the story while channel surfing first past news on the Iraq War, then past senseless, entertainment-driven reality TV shows. The mingling of those two messages, through one medium, seemed potentially harmful.

The trouble is that, rather than opposing the media forces that jam such disparate messages together, The Hunger Games embraces that toxic synergy. It is an entertainment product of complete fiction and great potency, given its intense level of fantasy and violence. As such, it only conveys young people closer to “expressing” in a virtual format their powerful and primitive instincts (potentially kindling their desire to truly express such instincts) while conveying them further from their daily realities and a little further still from their real selves.

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