Playing with Fire: “Compulsory Heterosexuality” in ‘The Hunger Games’

This guest post by Colleen Clemens appears as part of our theme week on Reality TV.

I taught Suzanne Collins’s novel The Hunger Games as the culminating text for my Women and Violence in Literature course this semester.  Almost all of us had read the book already, but to look at Katniss through the lens of the female protagonists that had come before her in the semester—The Bride, Firdaus, Aileen Wuornos, Legs, Lisbeth Salander, Malli, Phoolan, Sihem—meant we could consider the work Katniss is doing in popular culture.  So while we had read the book before, we hadn’t read it the way that we read it together.

Much conversation focused on subverting gender norms, yet we talked little about the focus of the love interests until our final discussion.  While my conversations with my friends’ 12-year-old daughters about the trilogy always began with “Team Peeta!” or “Team Gale!” our conversations in the classroom focused on the scholarship of female collectives and violent resistance; we didn’t need Gale and Peeta as fodder for conversation.  But on the last day of class, I introduced Adrienne Rich’s idea of compulsory heterosexuality to complicate the larger conversation in which readers—and viewers—find themselves forced to choose a camp, just as Katniss is forced to do.

Of course, the filmic versions of the novels rely on the love triangle between Katniss, Peeta, and Gale as a way to include the most viewers, including the 16 or so people who saw the films without having read the trilogy.  In a perhaps unintended meta-moment, Caeser smiles to the adoring crowd and calls a surviving Peeta and Katniss “the star-crossed lovers from District 12” from a set that looks uncannily like one from American Idol or The Voice.

Within the context of the Hunger Games and the arena, The Capitol, just like Hollywood, gives the audience what it wants:  a forced—or let’s borrow Rich’s term “compulsory”—heterosexual relationship that Katniss barely tolerates in the novels.  However, Katniss co-opts the Capitol’s compulsion, her only opportunity to ensure the survival of both herself and Peeta, and uses it to resist the Capitol and disrupt their narrative of what the Hunger Games should accomplish—passivity—and instead incites the fire of revolution.

After Katniss becomes District 12’s first volunteer in an attempt to spare her sister Prim, whose odds were clearly not in her favor, the former is whisked to the Capitol where she must become what the audience wants:  the picture of femininity as a clean, waxed, young lady, a female object that must win the affection of the wealthy sponsors who hold her life in their hands.  In the clinical setting of the Remake Center, her team—after a required second round of cleaning–transforms her body from that of a ragged, hard coal-mining daughter to that of a smooth, soft Capitol woman where femininity means manipulation of one’s body, often to the point of disfigurement (as happens to Tigris in Mockingjay).  Haymitch reminds Katniss that she needs to be “nicer” to win the attention of the viewers.

Once the tributes are in the arena—the Capitol’s entrancement with the Hunger Games relying on bloodlust, the Districts’ on fear—Katniss and Peeta separate.  After many, many deaths of children in a PG-13 film, the Gamemaker announces a change of rule after his menacing conversation with President Snow: two winners can emerge from the same District.  As Gale watches the Games, his jealous sidelong glance casting toward the television, the rest of the Capitol can now root for love in the reality death match.

The Capitol viewers—and the Hollywood viewers—are then treated to the scene they have been waiting for.  All of us feel relieved there is a chance for the heterosexual love to live; the edict seems to good to be true!  We get the love scene that confirms their relationship, and Katniss’s performance makes it easy for all of us to forget that this relationship is forced, that Katniss and Peeta have both come to realize that their best chance of surviving is by feigning heterosexual desire.  They press together in the cave.  Haymitch sends medicine with a note reminding Katniss what she must do:  “You call that a kiss?”

In talking about Kathleen Barry’s work, Rich reminds readers in her 1980 essay  “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” that “[t]he ideology of heterosexual romance, beamed at her from childhood out of fairy tales, television, films, advertising, popular songs, wedding pageantry, is a tool ready to the procurer’s hand and one which he does not hesitate to use.”  The viewer requires a fairy tale—Katniss and Peeta’s lives depend on this fairy tale.  In an infection-induced fog, Peeta dreamily recounts watching Katniss go home, “Every day.  Every day.”  We are led to believe she has been the object of his love without her awareness.  We can hear the viewers in the Capitol swooning—and lining up to help.  And we see Gale leering at the screen as his love goes to another man.

This feigned relationship is in fact their only option for survival, one that they will play up later in this film as they dress like Prince Charming and Cinderella…

and (spoiler alert) in Catching Fire with their acceptance of the sad fact that the Capitol’s desire for their heterosexual relationship to carry on means that they must marry in order to survive…

and (super spoiler alert) by Katniss’s resignation in the epilogue of Mockingjay in which she succumbs to Peeta’s desire to have children with him.

In the final scene of the Games, Katniss is mocked by another girl for trying to save her “lover boy.”  We see the Capitol watching the love story.  The command center grows quiet while the men and a few women controlling the couple’s environment watch during a rare moment of stillness; even they are captivated by the story they have created.  Katniss and Peeta are the finale. The audience must know:  Will their (heterosexual) love survive?

Panem holds its breath.  The desire for compulsory heterosexuality is the pair’s shield—though it puts them at risk, it is the only way for the two of them to survive.   They are in a bind of expectations others put on them in order to endure in this system of oppression called Panem and its games.  And instead of choosing herself–“We both go down and you win”—she sends Cato to the dogs, saving her life and Peeta’s (and in a moment of gender essentialism, fires a mercy shot to spare Cato an even more horrible death).

They hug.  Everyone relaxes.  A crescendo of anxiety is released for a moment when we think they will both live:  Heterosexual normativity can persist.

And then the previous provision is revoked.  Peeta and Katniss stand at the cornucopia, the ultimate symbol of hearth and home reflecting the audience’s desires for heterosexual normativity, and recognize that their attempt at playing into the Capitol’s desires for a heterosexual relationship to flourish even in the face of terrible odds did not work.  One of them must kill the other.

Katniss takes control of the situation.  We see the districts watch them hold the poisoned berries to each other.  The thought of losing both lovers becomes unbearable, and the games are called to an end.  They are the “winners,” a moniker few of the surviving tributes accept. Katniss and Peeta hug again.

Rich argues that “[h]eterosexuality has been both forcibly and subliminally imposed on women, yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty.”  The Capitol has done just this:  imposed the narrative of heterosexuality onto the lovers, and then used it to attempt to kill them.  However, when Katniss takes the Capitol’s desire and pushes it to its limit—to the star crossed lover, the Romeo and Juliet, the Pyramus and Thisbe, the dangerous hyper-heterosexual narrative of “if my partner is dead, I can no longer bear to live” story—and thereby breaks the games.  By encouraging co-suicide, she makes the story so much more than the viewers can bear (whilst they have no problem bearing the awfulness of watching children die) that she takes the Capitol’s desire and exploits it to save their own lives—though it relegates her to a life of living a lie to maintain the ruse that saves her life.

In their final interview, the fairy tale couple, “the star crossed lovers from District 12,” sits onstage as the audience swoons.  Caesar feeds them the story they are to parrot: “You were so in love with this boy that the thought of not being with him was unthinkable.”

Katniss plays into the audience’s desire, though we know she is not in love with Peeta:  “I felt like the happiest person in the the world. I couldn’t imagine life without him.”

And finally, “We saved each other.”  The audience practically faints with joy.

But forcing herself into the ruse of heterosexuality puts her at more risk, not less. Katniss is trapped:  she cannot “win.” Playing into the deception draws the attention of the Capitol’s leaders, while not playing into the narrative means she may have been dead in the arena.

The last shot of the film focuses on Snow watching the “lovers” hold hands overhead.  Menacing music plays as he walks off.  The image of their heterosexual coupling is not enough for him.  Katniss will be at risk for the rest of the trilogy because of her subversion.  Rich ends her essay with a call to the reader to consider the damage that occurs to women within the framework of compulsory heterosexuality:

“Within the institution exist, of course, qualitative differences of experience; but the absence of choice remains the great unacknowledged reality, and in the absence of choice, women will remain dependent upon the chance or luck of particular relationships and will have no collective power to determine the meaning and place of sexuality in their lives. As we address the institution itself, moreover, we begin to perceive a history of female resistance which has never fully understood itself because it has been so fragmented, miscalled, erased. It will require a courageous grasp of the politics and economics, as well as the cultural propaganda, of heterosexuality to carry us beyond individual cases or diversified group situations into the complex kind of overview needed to undo the power men everywhere wield over women, power which has become a model for every other form of exploitation and illegitimate control.”

Katniss spends the rest of the trilogy grappling with the material consequences of her decision to co-opt heterosexuality to save her life in the arena.   Her experience echoes in Rich’s words:  “absence of choice,” “cultural propaganda,” “the power men everywhere wield over women.”  Catching Fire and Mockingjay find their roots in her struggle to come to terms with her need to feign a heterosexual relationship with Peeta.  We will have to wait to see how the filmmakers decide to construct the rest of their “love story.”  Because Katniss and Peeta never really have a choice.

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Colleen Lutz Clemens is assistant professor of non-Western literatures at Kutztown University. She blogs about gender issues and postcolonial theory and literature at http://kupoco.wordpress.com/. When she isn’t reading, writing, or grading, she is wrangling her two-year old daughter, two dogs, and on occasion her partner.