Hunger Games Rhetorical Analysis

Catering to the Audience

Throughout the Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, the Capitol deprives many of the tributes of their spirit and authenticity. The tributes have to manipulate themselves physically and mentally to appease an audience anticipating their immanent death. They are put on display to fight and murder other tributes until a lone victor remains. A significant factor in the survival of the tributes is their holding of sponsors, who send them gifts in the arena that could mean the difference between life and death. Sponsors pick their tributes based off of how much the tributes appeal to them. The biggest opportunity for the tributes to demonstrate themselves as desirable is the interviews. From page 111 to page 112, Haymitch

is attempting to coach Katniss to find an angle of her personality that will be most alluring to potential sponsors, but he ends up critiquing pieces of her personality until she feels like she has none. Collins uses this section of the book to show the readers how catering to an audience dehumanizes some performers in modern venues of entertainment, such as the music industry.

Haymitch tells Katniss early on that her sole purpose in the interview is to please the audience.

He tells her that she has to “delight” him as if he is a potential sponsor. This implies how the role of the tributes is to please the audience. The specific denotation of the word delight implies that she has to charm or thrill them, because she is essentially a performer and serves the purpose of providing them entertainment. Of course, this enrages Katniss and she relates herself to a “trained dog trying to please people [she hates]”. This comparison further develops the metaphor that Collins is attempting to relate the tributes to entertainers. Having Katniss compare herself to an animal dehumanizes her, and makes it seem as though her sole purpose in existing at all is for entertainment. Many performers in different forms of entertainment throughout time have experienced this same dehumanization for the purpose of pleasuring an

audience.

As Katniss attempts to find a personality angle that will appease the Capitol, it becomes apparent that she does not have one, and she must quickly find another way to appeal to the capitol. Haymitch grows frustrated and yells at her to “Then lie! Make something up!” because he cannot have her disappointing her avenue for survival. This relates to the way performers sometimes have to feign a persona or act a certain way simply to be entertaining, and not because that’s actually their personality. Because modern performers do not rely on their audience for survival, they simply entertain their audience instead of pleasing them. This means the performers can cause them to feel any drastic emotion based off of who they are pretending to be. This can cause the audience to have a negative perception of the individual, which can affect their self-esteem and emotional stability. As an example, artists such as Ke$ha have been coached by music producers into a persona to be more memorable performer. Ke$ha’s producers persuaded her into pretending she is obsessed with partying and abusive substances as a way for her fan base to distinguish her from any other female performer. In reality, her personality is incredibly different from this character that she was trained to be. This has caused her audience to perceive her in a negative way, and has lead to her eating disorder.

Because Katniss cannot pull off any persona that her mentor believes will please the audience, she is completely dehumanized.

Her spirit has been broken down, and “By the end of the session, [she is] no one at all.” Because her personality cannot match what the audience wants, any of her other traits do not matter. As a matter of fact, neither does she. If she cannot pull off a pleasing persona, she is not important or significant to her audience. This demolition of her character causes her to lash out as if she is nothing more than an imprisoned animal. She expresses her anger at Haymitch and the Capitol by shouting and “smashing dishes around [her] room.” The pressure of contorting her personality to the whims of a group of people whom she can’t stand is too much for her to handle. The criticism of the Capitol causes a mental strain similar to that of Brittany Spears in 2007. During this year, she lashed out constantly, shaved her head and went digging through the trash., Many other entertainers in the music industry rebel in similar ways. This is one of the reasons so many performers become abusers of drugs and alcohol. It has become a method of coping with stress, and the stress of dehumanization and manipulation is usually more than one can endure without a method of

escape.

As much as Katniss has always despised the capitol for the way they dehumanize citizens of Panem, she is also beginning to realize she has always played into their games. She recalls a time when she was out in the woods, and did not help a girl who the Capitol made into an avox. She was “a coward, a monster, a puppet of the Capitol, both now and then.” She had not realized it at the time, but she was altering her personality subconsciously to appease the Capitol and to do as they wish. Even before she was in the games, she always knew that her survival depended on pleasing them, so she did as they wanted whether she meant to or not. Celebrities in the music industry alter their persona as well as their music styles subconsciously to appease their audience in a similar way. Artists who begin their career as children are a prime example of this. Entertainers such as Selena Gomez or Miley Cyrus have not only grown and matured with their audience, but they have also shifted their style to match their trends. Sometimes, in an attempt to break away from their old persona, they create a new one. Whatever they do, they cannot avoid behaving in ways that entertain the audience. They usually have to alter themselves in a way that will be significant to the audience, because subconsciously the happiness of the audience means more than their own.

The idea that individuals are dehumanized and manipulated for entertainment is not an abstract concept that only fictional characters face. Collins uses the exaggeration of this concept through the trials Katniss must deal with. In reality, many performers face similar difficulties. Because of the overwhelming pressure to please an audience, entertainers are usually deprived of their own individuality and character. The impact of this can have detrimental effects on their mental health, but no matter what they do, it’s difficult for artists to break the cycle of appeasing an audience. The purpose of Collins revealing this is so that her readers can abstain from making critical judgments on performers, to keep from causing detrimental effects on their mental health.