Thirteen years ago Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris opened fire on their classmates, killing thirteen people and injuring two dozen more. It wasn’t long before the finger pointing started: the musician Marilyn Manson, the video game Doom, the film ‘The Basketball Diaries,’ and Goth Culture all were blasted in the media as contributing factors.
Yesterday a seventeen year old kid walked into a high school in Ohio and shot five other kids.
Today, three of those five, Demetrius Hewlin, Russell King Jr., and Daniel Parmertor, are now dead.
Senseless, unfathomable violence at the heart of another American tragedy as a community and a nation again ask the same question: why?
Undoubtedly there will be much discussion of the motivation behind the crime in the coming weeks, and some of it will probably circle back to the topic of popular media and whether violent movies, music, and video games lead to violent behavior.
And in this cloud of mourning and questions, The Hunger Games, a book-turned-movie about the horror of kids killing kids, will premiere.
Fans of The Hunger Games already understand that the violence in the series is not glorified, that the message of the series is that such violence is wrong, and that even ‘necessary’ violence is still tragic. It’s always ugly, painful, and destructive.
Jennifer Lawrence said it best in her audition for Katniss Everdeen: when she kills, she’s not badass. She’s broken.
Unfortunately, there will be people out there, media pundits, politicians, parental groups, that will not take the time to understand The Hunger Games, and will instead latch onto it as another contributor to the American ‘culture of violence.’
As a country mourns the loss of three young people, we must take extreme care to be good ambassadors of a series that many may be questioning in the next weeks. Most Hunger Games fans already do this exceptionally well by engaging each other in dialogues about the political, social, and ethical messages in the books, by exploring these themes in fan fiction and fan art, and by taking the messages of anti-violence and equity to heart and working to better the world around them.
However, little of that will matter if there is even a (small) minority of fans misrepresenting and/or glorifying the violence. This includes everything from lamenting that a PG-13 rating won’t be explicit enough (no one should need to see the violence to feel the emotional impact of its aftermath) to off-handed comments about how ‘cool’ or ‘awesome’ it would be to a Tribute in the Games (it’s neither- that’s the whole point of the series, that there is no glory in violence).
Moving forward from this tragedy, please take the time to think about what you’re saying—what you’re wishing for—because today in Ohio there are three kids who will never speak or dream again and families and friends who are mourning their very real loss.
Emphasis mine.
