Rejecting The Narrative
In December of 2013, Dr. Jamil Khader, an academic who was at the time teaching at Birzeit University in the West Bank as part of the Fulbright Fellowship, found himself seated for a screening of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire in a Haifa movie theatre. Palestinian children would need permits from Israeli authorities to even be allowed out of the Occupied Territories, and considering the costs of movie-going, it would be too much trouble both logistically and financially for them to seek out these theaters. Expectedly, the cinema was full of young Israelis, some soldiers in uniform. In his recollection of this experience, Dr. Khader notes that “the structural realities [between Panem and Israel’s apartheid policies] are not that much different,” and yet when two rounds of applause interrupted the film, the louder one was for a kiss shared between Katniss and Peeta while the weaker was for Katniss destroying the arena’s force field.
Of course, The Hunger Games franchise was and continues to be a global young adult sensation so it is not surprising that its target audience would be swept up in the romantic subplot but there is no denying the film's revolutionary messaging. As an audience, we root for Katniss, we abhor the cruelty of President Snow and the Capitol, so we cling to our Mockingjay’s every word and we continue to use the three-finger salute and wear our mockingjay pins even years after the final film ends because this story is moving, inspiring and revelatory. In The Hunger Games, you’ll find “a coded commentary on inequality, power and hope,” according to Donald Sutherland, who plays the tyrannical President Snow. How could it possibly not be about inequality or injustice when the Capitol bombs “a hospital filled with unarmed men, women and children,” and our heroine is forced to not only live through this but broadcast a video to document the crime and reaffirm the resistance in the midst of all the death and destruction?
The scenes feel all too familiar in recent months, as multiple young Palestinian journalists have found platforms to share their experiences of the bombardment of Gaza and other atrocities across the Palestinian Territories committed by Israeli forces. How many videos and pictures have we seen so far of regular young people like Bisan Owda, Plestia Alaqad and Moataz Azaiza trudging through rubble and among the deceased and injured with Israeli drones as background noise? Some of the most damning footage came in October when the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital was bombed and doctors had to hold a press conference amidst corpses. That was October, and at the time of writing, it has been over three months of intense bombardment with seemingly no end in sight. It’s not the first hospital that has been targeted by Israeli forces and it doesn’t seem as though it will be the last as the Israeli Defence Forces’ stance has seemingly shifted from blaming misfired Hamas rockets to rationalizing the act as one for the greater good due to Hamas’ alleged use of hospitals and civilian areas as command bases.
Those who have watched The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 are likely able to recall that President Snow’s justification for the hospital bombing was that all its occupants were complicit in Katniss’ rebellion. He had it filmed to deter people from other districts from joining her cause. Even if you were somehow morally opposed to Katniss’ revolution, surely you can recognise that killing unarmed civilians is indefensible, right? Not quite. A major reason why there seems to be no end in sight for the armed conflict between Israeli forces and Hamas is American support for Israel. If you follow the news or any official White House communication, you’ve likely heard all about Israel’s “right to defend itself” and a preference for requesting “humanitarian pauses” rather than a ceasefire.
A UN Security Council resolution for immediate ceasefire was vetoed by the US, and that stance is unlikely to change due to the nature of the relationship between the Israeli and American governments. What vetoing every call for a ceasefire does is essentially sanction the continued slaughter of the Palestinian people because many of the casualties of the Israeli campaign are civilians. People like Antony Blinken and Karine Jean-Pierre, who are major players in the Biden administration in tandem with most mainstream media, have been attempting to cast doubt on the fatality numbers provided by the Gaza Health Ministry by emphasising that it is Hamas-run, however, the evidence is there. There are so many videos, images and accounts of people losing entire families in a single airstrike. We are expected to look at that, nod and go on about our day because that is indicative of “unshakable moral conviction … and support for the Jewish people.”
One of the people who shares this belief that Israel’s assault on Gaza and the US’s support of it is justified is none other than Francis Lawrence, who directed the sequels to The Hunger Games and the recently released prequel. Interestingly, when Mockingjay – Part 1, which features the hospital bombing scene, was released in 2014, it was a few months after the seven-week Gaza War between July and August in which Israeli forces targeted hospitals yet again. Almost a decade later and it’s still the same story: a hospital is targeted, Hamas misfired rockets are blamed initially, more hospitals are attacked, then the justification for this is that Hamas is using these hospitals as military bases, leaving the Israeli forces with no choice.
The cognitive dissonance here is not unique to Francis Lawrence. Many liberals who wear a nice progressive sheen seem to falter when directly confronted with issues and not separated from them by the wall of history. It is infinitely easier for people without actual convictions to say Nelson Mandela was a hero today than it would have been in the ’50s and ’60s. You can see it across Hollywood again with filmmakers such as James Cameron with his Avatar movies, which are inspired by the colonisation of the Native American peoples which he acknowledges as something undoubtedly bad but still manages to produce a white savior narrative out of Indigenous people’s pain. Another example is a film like WALL-E which is seemingly a great anti-capitalist film but never really spurs anyone into action after watching it because for one, it is a children’s movie, and when people think of socio-economic revolutions, they aren’t exactly expecting eight-year-olds to lead the line. It is not surprising in the slightest that a Disney/Pixar film did not herald the end of hyperconsumerism. What is more curious is how this kind of messaging, even at its mildest, made it into such a film at all. Was Andrew Stanton secretly trying to implore the parents of his young audience to realize the error of their ways? Was there a grand ulterior motive he intended to pull under the noses of the executives? Predictably, this was not the case. According to the director himself, the theme of consumerism was not included intentionally. While several critics and older audience members read the film in that way, Stanton’s goal was to simply make a film where “irrational love defeats life’s programming” but films do not exist in a vacuum, and however unintentional it was, WALL-E was, and continues to be seen by many as Disney at its most anti-capitalist.
In his seminal work, Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher suggests that films like WALL-E with ostensibly heavy anti-capitalist messaging permit us to “continue to consume with impunity.” I would like to think this applies to all films which have seemingly progressive narratives. We all want to be correct. We all want to be “one of the good ones,” and it’s very easy to attach yourself to the underdog tale, which means most of the major films of the year will center on overcoming the big bad oppressor. Everybody wants to be the empowered victim and that desire exploited in film leads to a great number of charming films about the human spirit and tenacity but in reality, it can end up in a situation like Jamie Lee Curtis, who posted a picture of Palestinian children in Gaza amidst the destruction wrought by the Israeli forces and claimed they were Israelis affected by Hamas because it’s much easier to project yourself onto the smallest person in a conflict.
Dr. Khader asserts that “neoliberal global capitalism turns revolutionary theory and practice into profitable commodities” and Hollywood is a prime example of this. Being intimately entwined with the American political sphere means that Hollywood and Zionism share a long history but very rarely do you see a film that is explicitly Zionist make waves because those films have been historically unprofitable. Profit will almost always come first over narrative. Gal Gadot can star in a film like Wonder Woman and never mention neither Israel nor the Middle East once in the entire franchise and still the Israeli government benefits from her donations and lobbying outside of her acting.
The state of Israel doesn’t need Hollywood’s fictional narratives — it needs Hollywood faces and personalities to propagate its legitimacy because no matter how you spin it, the narrative will be grim due to the Nakba. There’s a concerted effort to shift focus away from that and on to the Jewish suffering in Europe prior to the establishment of the state but Jewish suffering cannot justify Palestinian suffering and the Zionist colonial project is in no way representative of all Jewish people. So instead of a culture war, we have an information war. We’re told everything from Hamas baking babies to Palestinians faking videos of the destruction and it’s no longer a game of representation like it would be in a film; these claims are presented as facts by figures many people have become attached to because of their seemingly apolitical or even progressive leaning work in Hollywood.
As of December 2023, another addition to The Hunger Games franchise is in theaters, directed by a man who believes Palestinian resistance must be put down using any means possible. An actress who helped revitalise one of my favourite horror film franchises was fired for calling what is happening to the Palestinian people a genocide. Tom Cruise’s agent was forced to resign from her agency for the same reason. For a brief moment, I was cynical about my aspirations of working in the entertainment industry when new young talents and veterans alike are being discarded for acknowledging the humanity of Palestinian people. I now realise that this is a turning point. As young people, we don’t have to accept antiquated, violent systems. In these trying times, we must remember that the future is malleable. Using a collective imagination and creativity we are capable of making something better. ♦