Ghost of a flea

At first glance, there’s nothing original about The Hunger Games. Ed Morrissey, writing on the Hot Air blog, sums up the various influences: Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery,” films like The Running Man and Rollerball, “perhaps a dash of The Handmaid’s Tale and a bit of The Truman Show, and almost every post-apocalyptic dystopian fantasy ever filmed or even contemplated.” A glance at the rest of the trilogy would add Logan’s Run, that high water mark of Me Decade sci-fi, and I could go on, but the fact is that the young audience for the film and the books have heard of few if any of these precedents, and couldn’t care less. Dismissing youth culture for its lack of originality might be comforting to adults, but it merely irritates young people still unsold on the comforts of feeling jaded.

I didn't include Battle Royale because I loosely assumed - based on very little evidence, to be sure - that there might be some young people who'd have heard of it, if only because of the prevalence of manga/anime/Japanese pop culture among their demographic. Granted, it's a minority thing, but it's a bigger minority than anyone under 21 who'd have seen Logan's Run/read "The Lottery."

Still, I can't imagine them caring. Originality is overrated, especially in pop culture, and even more especially today.

For awhile, I was planning on sitting down with a bunch of kids at the tiny high school being run on the same premises as the private Catholic school where my kids go. They're bright kids, and apparently much in thrall to the Hunger Games thing. I wanted to get their take on it, and while there, planned to show them the final scene of If...., my favorite teen film. You know - the scene at the commencement with the machine guns on the roof.

I guess my point would have been "Hey, we're all acting shocked that you like this film/book, but frankly, some of us were a lot more nihilistic than you when we were young." Probably a good thing that it didn't happen, as some of their parents might not have thought it so salutary that I allowed them a glimpse of Malcolm McDowell in his full, pre-droog glory.