+1 ThatOldGuy, you have stated it better than I could
This thread is full of people obsessed with the story of Hunger Games, and me talking about propaganda.
Thanks for the compliment, Clayton. I appreciate it.
@hashem: You don’t get it. Obama announced fairly significant budget cuts earlier this year. Why? Well, I believe it is indirectly due to the success of Ron Paul - Obama’s handlers are worried enough about the remote possibility that Ron Paul could really skyrocket in the polls that they felt compelled to start laying the groundwork for damage control - Ron Paul wants to cut the budget? Well so does Obama! Etc.
Are Obama’s budget cut promises in the slightest sincere? Of course not. But it doesn’t matter to me. The fact he had to even make a verbal concession to budget cuts tells me that Ron Paul matters.
The same is true of Hollywood. Does HG have subtle programming cues? Possibly. The likelihood of rape also popped into my mind in the underground scene with Cinna and Katniss and the pack of Tributes wandering around with the giggling girls also subtly suggested “the alpha male gets the girl”. But so what? Every movie has that crap in it.
But the plots of those movies are also propaganda, most movies out of Hollywood are either pure propaganda, pure trash or both. The point is that HG has a plot that clearly is not propagandist, in fact, quite the opposite. Just like Obama’s half-hearted concession to make budget cuts, motivated by his handlers’ concerns about damage control, HG is a concession and there are others like it. You keep laughing at A Bug’s Life - go watch it and then come back and laugh at the claim it’s anti-state. Seriously, it’s just Rothbard’s Anatomy of the State translated to an ant colony and animated.
Another one is The Matrix (only the first one, the other two are just standard Hollywood fare). The anti-State message of The Matrix is profound and not even very subtle.
Please explain to me how Morpheus saying that “paying taxes makes you feel the truth that you are a slave in a prison for your mind” is a subtle form of pro-state propaganda or programming. The fact is that there are some good guys out there and I’m fairly convinced that the Wachowski brothers are among them.
Clayton -
What?
Does it or doesn’t it?
Thank you for acknowledging this. Now to relate it to propaganda, I would say the role of such scenes, perhaps hundreds of thousands or millions of times on an individual mind, and on the meta mind of society, has a very real effect. That’s just basic common sense, propaganda isn’t really that complicated. My point is mostly that its controlled, and therefore we can make observations about what they are trying to program into the mind of society.
On a related note but off topic, I learned at a young age that the government (really just anyone intelligent, but the government is condensed population of intelligent sociopaths) never does anything for one purpose. This is similar to the principle that they never waste a crisis, in that they prefer to take advantage of as many possibilities as possible, and they will capitalize further on the problems they cause. So they don’t just control our water supply for profit, but also as a means of direct control, as a means of institutionalizing the state, as a means of poisoning us, as an excuse to appoint powerful people, as a means of disposing of industrial waste (flouride), etc etc. They don’t just regulate and control media outlets for profit and power, but they control them for propaganda as well. Everyone knows of the government’s old school (successful) plans to infiltrate and own all the news outlets. Well, there’s a reason you’ve never seen anarchist content out of Hollywood, and the vast majority of society will go out of their way to avoid talking about government or anything besides sex the weather and the local team.
Your mind = blown.
Lie. I keep ridiculing your use of a quote from a Princess (royalty) in a major Disney release targeted at kids as evidence that Hunger Games isn’t propaganda. I’ve seen that movie. Wasn’t the movie about reverence to the brilliant queen, and didn’t the main character snag the hot priness in the end? Wasn’t it about a victory “for the colony”? I remember seeing it when it was popular wondering why everyone thought that stuf was so great. I mean, the characters were interesting at times, but interesting is a dime a dozen. Why interest your mind with propaganda tuned for the masses?
No really, you don’t
Therefore, given that Hollywood strictly distributes propaganda, you would start to analyze what the propaganda was, and maybe what purpose(s!) it served.
hashem, the only way we can make the case for either side in this thread -whether the movie is pro-war or anti-war- is by referring to the story of the movie to make our respective arguments. You did the same for your argument in the OP.
Fair enough, the story isn’t entirely unimportant. I guess the function of propaganda has more to do with the cummulative effects of the things you don’t think about though. This was just a single movie—granted its part of a series. As long as they can saturate our minds with propaganda for years and years through hundreds of thousands if not millions of scenes that are generally socially accepted, then only a small fraction of the actual content needs to be effective. The best part is that the machine, the system, essentially determines what is socially acceptable.
If nothing else, it could be argued that a role of this movie was to keep people comfortable with Hollywood, that monstrous propaganda machine, because after all, they produce real content sometimes.
So we have a movie the perfect child of a propaganda machine, distributed by the most successful distributer of propaganda in world history, and everyone on an anarchist board jumps to its defense. That’s what I’m seeing.
@hashem: It appears to me that you’re generating a lot of heat but not a lot of light - rather than repeatedly asserting that HG is a “propaganda movie”, why not analyze the specific elements that you found to be propagandistic and place them in the wider context of State propaganda?
Propaganda is real, programming is also real (though programming in movies and television is, I believe, one of the lesser threats). So why not drop the unprovable totalistic assertions and talk about the nitty-gritty details?
Clayton -
To this end, I think it speaks volumes that the movie has been interpreted as representing a message sympathetic to most political perspectives: conservative, liberal, and libertarian; pro-war, anti-war, and a toss-up. I don’t know whether the movie had the intent of delivering any particular viewpoint or if the producers and writers had it in mind to propagandize a certain message. I haven’t read the books -although, after having seen it the other night, I’m planning on it- but others have said that there are poltical messages within the books as well.
From one of the critical blog posts That Old Guy posted:
I sense where the author is going with this - black vs. white, good vs. evil serve the militaristic narrative of xenophobia. However, I think he’s missing the point that all these characters are automatically morally exonerated by the audience that is following the Games from the perspective of only one character (Katniss). I think he’s over-interpreting the movie’s portrayal of the more adept killers as being “bad guys”. They are not “bad guys” so much as characters to whom we are not emotionally attached and whose deaths we will regret less than the sympathetic characters like Rue, Katniss and Peeta. Even the curly-haired blond boy is a sympathetic character and it takes a toll on the audience when he is killed. The audience can only sympathize with so many deaths without becoming demoralized.
And yes, someone needs to make a movie about the Christmas Truce.
Let’s go back to the points I made earlier. The country in which this is occurring is called Panem - short for panem et circenses, “bread and circuses”, as pointed out by another poster. So, the author is clearly identifying that this story is to be interpreted in light of Roman gladiatorial combat. Author Suzanne Collins says she got the idea from this story when flipping channels on the television and she saw a reality Survivor-style show on one channel and then on another channel news footage of the US wars.
The message could not be clearer - Hunger Games is a deconstruction of the media’s presentation of war as a game, reinforced by “reality” programming such as Survivor and its spawn. Like the Hunger Games, war and reality-TV (propaganda/programming-in-general) are a “no expenses spared” production. War is presented as a game and, to an extent, war is a game, that is, it is staged. The purpose of invading other countries may not have anything to do with natural resources or petrodollars or anything like that… if nothing else, it keeps us in line. It keeps the districts in line - not just people in the US, people in other countries are intimidated by the display of force, as well.
And the foremost “message” that anyone with a pulse will take away from the movie if they take away any message at all is “the draft is murder.” That’s a pretty noble message, particularly in a time when the Pentagon is saber-rattling against Syria and Iran, apparently itching to ignite WW3.
Clayton -
@hashem, the mods are MIA but I think you are a decent person, so I kindly request that you change the title of the thread to “Hunger Games: War Propaganda?” - I’m all for vigorous discussion but you must agree that the title you’ve chosen is very prejudicial.
Clayton -
I have a lot to say but I’m way tired and I’ll respond later, but a few things come to mind right away:
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It was an action movie. A lot of the subtle stuff just went completely over most people’s heads as scenes cut and more trauma happened. That’s what I felt at the time, watching it with a very young kid whom I have responsibility over, and so I was concerned with how the traumatic scenes would affect fragile naive minds, and with the fact that for such people there wasn’t enough time to process much of it rationally because scenes switched and stuff progressed so fast. I felt constantly compelled to explain things because the movie failed to…how can I put this…put anything in any sort of a realistic context. And of course I couldn’t explain everything (for example the likelyhood of rape and the causes and implications of that reality), and that’s how propaganda works.
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I talked about as much of the “nitty gritty” as I could remember immediately after the fact in the OP. If you want me to elaborate on a particular part maybe I can.
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Can we agree that the movie is de facto propaganda, and begin to analyze it from that perspective?
“And yes, someone needs to make a movie about the Christmas Truce.”
It’s been done
Havent seen the movie, havent read the books. My preliminary take is that, like all art, it is subject to interpretation. “Full Metal Jacket” was written as an anti-war movie, based on The Short-Timers, an anti-war book, yet it was probably the most successful recruiting commercial ever. Maybe second to “Top Gun.” but maybe not. Here is an interesting article on the movie, support for hashem although the position seems to be that there are no black swans because swans are by definition non-black. But heres the text for the link:
So, so, so off the point. This film/book is in no way “pure war propaganda”. However, among the several “themes” or ideas in the story: patriotism, war, hunger, family, propaganda plays a huge role. Everywhere in the book you read of propaganda being used via several different means: television, education, pomp and panolply in an effort to control the society. And most storngly, one comes across understanding the danger and “wrongness” of war, not with a craving for war.
I just watched the movie again and thought of something else while watching. I never really considered the team of people controlling the Games as they were played out. I feel like this could be related to various groups that supposedly control, if not have some influence, in worldly affairs (Corporations in general, Bilderberg Group, Illuminati, Free Masons et al). Perhaps someone who has knowledge of these groups can elaborate as all I am capable of doing stating my familiarity with their reputations.
Relevant scenes from the movie:
- When Katniss reaches the “limits” of the map and the controllers try to kill her with fireballs.
- When the controllers try to limit riots (from Rue’s death) in the Districts by allowing for two winners of the Games if they are from the same district (allowing Katniss and Peeta’s love story to play out).
- When the controllers change the pace of time when they get impatient with the game’s progress.
- When the controllers send huge monsters created to seek and kill players.
- When the controllers change the rules to only allow for one winner when Katniss and Peeta actually both survive.
- When the controllers end the Game once Katniss and Peeta resolve to commit suicide.
As I mentioned above, I have almost no knowledge of controlling groups like the above-mentioned and what parts they play in war. When Bin Laden was killed (if he was killed) it always felt so sudden; it was as if someone just pushed a “kill Osama” button. During the raid, OBL supposedly hid behind his wife (false), was armed (false), was killed rather than kept for interrogation and gaining information about terrorist networks and was buried at sea in accordance with Islamic tradition (false). IIRC, Obama wasn’t doing too well in the polls at the time and he received a nice bump when he announced the man’s death. Are we really meant to believe that this man has been hiding from the world in the capitol of a US ally, and was on dialysis (then again, was he?) since before the 9/11 attacks?
What a benefit it must be for a state to have a boogeyman to lean back on to justify its expansion of powers and plunder for a decade. Give the public a newly released video of (a younger?) Bin Laden once in a while and see how much one can do with a monopoly on aggression. Maybe officials did a cost/benefit analysis of keeping Bin Laden alive and decided that it wasn’t worth it to keep him alive. No, it would be much more exciting to the public if he were found and killed out of nowhere. For weeks after, a lot of people I knew, at least, openly stated how they believe that OBL’s death will surely grant Obama a second term because he killed OBL (even Obama says that that’s not the case; he probably had a teacher somewhere in life or had, at one point, driven on a public road).
In relation to The Hunger Games, the manipulation of The Games also has its benefits. As the President of Panem said in the movie:
In relation to OBL: give the people hope that Bin Laden is out there and “we” will find him and “bring him to justice.” Show the troops shooting and marching, release a video every so often and talk about him on prime time news. Keep him on the “public’s” mind to justify government growth in this “post 9/11 world.”
It’s stuff like this that leads to seek out the opinions of “conspiracy nuts.”
Disinfo, disinfo everywhere.
The DoD/CIA doubtless encourage UFO mania. Why? Well, if you’re in the business of flying concept craft (unidentified aircraft) it helps to marginalize real sightings of these craft by encouraging people to go over the cliff into the fantastical. “I saw a UFO!” is much less believable than “I saw a very oddly shaped aircraft flying in very strange patterns not too far from the Air Force’s secret aircraft testing base.” It serves other purposes as well, though I won’t go into those. This is just one example of zillions of disinfo/propaganda tricks.
The whole idea of “secret societies” is, to some extent, disinfo. It’s not that secret societies don’t exist - they do. It’s just that they’re not pulling the strings that people are encouraged to believe they are pulling. Anyone can join the Freemasons and promote within its ranks. Do you really think the Freemasons have more power than, say, this organization? Just read the membership list. Yet we are encouraged to believe that the former is a sinister, world-controlling organization conspiring for world domination and the latter is just, you know, basically a bridge club for Kings and Queens.
Doubtless, the Freemasons, Illuminati, etc. are networked in with real power but they are not root sources of power. Their power is derivative, it comes from somewhere else. Which brings me back to the central dogma of Power Elite analysis: all power is ultimately private. This means that all power is something that is owned by someone in particular and that the modern conception of power as this amorphous “thing” that’s just “out there” and not attached to any particular individual is an illusion, it’s disinfo. The entire structure of modern, “democratic” government is part of the facade. Even the structure of the corporate world is itself part of the facade. We have these supposedly disembodied legal entities owned by no one in particular supposedly going around “doing stuff”. Nonsense. The world of corporate structure is just a facade covering over the private wealth and power which resides behind it.
So, you need to take a step back and really see the Matrix for what it is… it is the legitimate world as you see it in broad daylight which is the control construct, the “limits” imposed by the game’s controllers, to use the Hunger Games metaphor. When you wrap your head around that, then you will truly have understood the Game.
Clayton -
Sorry if this is unrelated to the Hunger Games, but I felt this was interesting and wanted to respond.
“Disinfo, disinfo everywhere.”
Whats scarier is realizing that you were foolled/manipulated by the disinfo. When the disinfo starts to get high, it becomes very hard to seperate info from disinfo, which can be pretty scary for figuring out what to believe.
“The DoD/CIA doubtless encourage UFO mania. Why? Well, if you’re in the business of flying concept craft (unidentified aircraft) it helps to marginalize real sightings of these craft by encouraging people to go over the cliff into the fantastical. “I saw a UFO!” is much less believable than “I saw a very oddly shaped aircraft flying in very strange patterns not too far from the Air Force’s secret aircraft testing base.” It serves other purposes as well, though I won’t go into those. This is just one example of zillions of disinfo/propaganda tricks.”
I should admit that I am interested in the possibility of extraterrestrials. I reject the UFO stories as false, but I heard related stories about this. Of the U.S. government suddenly shutting down investigation of an air force crash site or the like. Could an aura of secrecy be (perhaps as a desirable side effect) fuel for disinfo campaigns, distracting people with the rampant speculation?
Now its starting to sound like an actual extraterrestrial contact (not those BS UFO stories) could spark a mountain of disinfo, especially if these aliens so much as dared to question the system. I mean, its happened with big events in the past.
Clayton, it always feels that there is a mountain of information that you only scratch the surface with in each post, and you are bringing back the surface to lead people to get further to this mountain.
“The whole idea of “secret societies” is, to some extent, disinfo.”
Is the idea of secret societies in real life related to masquarades in fiction? In fiction, some secret society of beings wielding supernatral powers keeps their identities and what they do secret, to avoid possible panic and such if the mask was removed. Harry Potter is a great example of this, as wizards hide themselves (and are forced to do so by a Ministry) from Muggles.
Keep this up Clayton!
I think we can divide the public into three major groups, from the point of view of the Elites. Actually, it’s two groups, but one can be futher divided naturally. The first group is those who obey the State out of love. These might be dupes or those on the dole but it makes no difference - they love the State either way. The second group is those who obey the State out of fear. This group can be further divided into two groups - those who fear the government ignorantly (supposing its powers to be much greater than they are) and those who fear it knowingly (likely having experienced the bottom-side of the jackboot or knowing someone who has).
e oderint dum metuant (“let them hate, so long as they fear”) - purportedly, a motto of Caligula
Of course, there are those who disobey the State. They are either criminals (in prison) or “pirates” (not yet caught). Aye matey!
I am beginning to explore some of Velikovsky’s and Walt Thornhill’s ideas and I’m wondering if, perhaps, the Solar System (including the Earth) is actually a designed system. But even if this is the case, I don’t think the Designers visit us. To beings powerful enough to control an entire Solar System, we are the equivalent of barnacles on the bottom side of a ship’s hull. This thought is inspired by the Kardashev Scale, though Michio Kaku has ruined it for me by espousing it. He’s a NWO blowhard pile of crap if ever there was one. Yuck.
Life evolved on this planet but no one knows where it came from. More importantly, though, there are massive, gaping holes in modern cosmology and astrophysics.
I’ve been wondering why they are suppressing plasma physics. I wish I had the time to write because I have some great fiction ideas based on this.
I wish I had more information. Unfortunately, the “secret” in “secret society” is the operative word. *sigh
It’s like that George Carlin quote, “It’s a big club and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the Big Club.”
I don’t believe the Elites have access to any technologies or powers that we don’t have access to - else why would they need to lie, steal and cheat all the time? Does the rancher “trick” the cows into doing what he wants? No, he ropes, prods and corrals them regardless of what they think about it. While it is true that the Elites do this to us in some allegorical sense, it’s a slight overstatement of the case to make it out like they are literally able to treat the public like cattle. They do so but only as part of a very delicately balanced equation that, when tipped against them, becomes very dangerous for them (cf Louis XVI’s head).
Yeah, I think that HP and related stories are subliminal programming along these lines. Basically, we are being informed that there are powerful people who exist in a world that is entirely separate from our own and, while some of them can move between their world and ours (some never leave their world), we (muggles) can never see their world, even when it affects in some way that we can’t understand. Very creepy, subversive stuff.
To reiterate, I don’t think this is because they actually have any advanced technologies or superphysical powers but things go much smoother for them if the public simply behaved as if they do. Of course, not everyone needs this programming, it’s only people who might be smart enough to perceive the mask/curtain and to wonder what’s behind it - HP appeals primarily to nerds/smart-people and it does so by constantly flattering their mental superiority (Hermione/Potter vs. Ron Weasly, all magicians/half-bloods vs. muggles, etc.) But in the end, a truly smart person knows that it’s all make-believe. See?
Clayton -