[COLUMN] The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes Makes the Audience Complicit in The Hunger Games | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes asks its audience to sympathize with the devil, and in doing so grapple with their own complicity.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes offers an origin story for President Coriolanus Snow (Donald Sutherland), the monstrous ruler of Panam in the dystopian Hunger Games franchise. Snow serves as the primary antagonist of the young adult franchise, a despotic foil to the heroic Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence). Snow does truly horrendous things over the course of the four films in the series. As such, it’s an interesting choice to build the franchise’s first prequel around Snow.

Of course, recent years have seen plenty of villain origin stories. In 2014, Maleficent reinvented the villain of Sleeping Beauty as an antiheroine played by Angelina Jolie. Joaquin Phoenix earned an Oscar for playing the Clown Prince of Crime in Joker, released in 2018. In 2021, Emma Stone took the eponymous role in Cruella, an origin story about the iconic villain from 101 Dalmatians. This is to say nothing of original films like Megamind or Despicable Me. Sometimes, being bad feels good.

However, there is something fundamentally different about The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. For all that the world of the Hunger Games has a cartoonish aesthetic, Snow is a more mundane and generic sort of evil than these supervillains and wicked witches. While many of these modern villain origin stories like Maleficent or Cruella soften their leads so the audience can comfortably root for them, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes has a much more complicated relationship to its subject.

The Hunger Games film franchise was a product of the 2010s. It was a story about revolution, a theme that resonated through the pop culture of the era from films series like the Planet of the Apes reboot to television shows like Mr. Robot. Like most of these stories, the Hunger Games was largely told from the perspective of the revolutionaries, the victims of oppression rising up against those responsible for their suffering. Katniss Everdeen was the living embodiment of the heroic ideal. Snow is a much more nuanced figure.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is undoubtedly sympathetic to its lead. Snow (Dexter Sol Ansell) is introduced as a child scrambling through the war-torn ruins of the Capitol in search of food. The movie then jumps ahead thirteen years, revealing that Snow (Tom Blyth) and his family are now impoverished. His father’s old friend, Dean Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage), notes that “the Snows don’t have a pot to piss in.”

Snow attends the Academy, an exclusive school, where he conceals his poverty from his classmates. He performs well enough that he has a shot at “the Plinth Prize”, a scholarship that could help his family escape poverty. Given this set-up, it is easy to root for Snow. He is an underdog, surrounded by privileged idiots. Inevitably, the Plinth Prize is snatched away from him, made dependent on his performance as a mentor at the annual Hunger Games.

Snow is tasked with mentoring Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler), a tribute from District 12 who will compete in a fight to the death against 23 other children. In any other Hunger Games movie, Baird would be the protagonist. She is clearly intended to remind the audience of Katniss. However, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes keeps its distance from Baird, introducing her with her back to the camera. Although Snow claims to love her, she is fundamentally unknowable to him. She is an abstraction to Snow, more of an idea than a person.

Snow supports Baird. He raises her profile to earn public donations. He sneaks her food. He advises her on strategy. The film understands this is not entirely selfless. “What do you want from that girl?” Highbottom asks. When Snow answers that he wants her to live, Highbottom replies, “And the Plinth Prize would be a happy coincidence, I suppose.” Later, Baird demands, “The guards say you get money if you get more people to watch and you say you wanna help me. Which is it?” He answers, “Both.” As Highbottom notes, this is “convenient.”

For the first time in the franchise, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes tells the story of the Hunger Games from the perspective of the audience, not the contestants. Much of the film is heavily mediated, with Snow watching the Reaping Ceremony through a live video feed at the Academy and most of the Hunger Games from inside the studio with host Lucretius “Lucky” Flickerman (Jason Schwartzman). As a prequel, a lot of the scale and spectacle of the earlier Hunger Games movies is stripped away. Even the arena looks dirty and dull.

This allows The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes to sidestep an issue with the earlier Hunger Games films. Those films asked the audience to root for Katniss as a contestant. Because the audience’s (and the film’s) perspective aligned so neatly with that of a competitor, there was an inherent paradox at play. It might be terrible to see children murder each other as spectacle, but it was also satisfying to watch Katniss defeat her enemies like Cato (Alexander Ludwig) and Marvel (Jack Quaid).

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes acknowledges this. With the Hunger Games dwindling in popularity, Snow insists that audience identification broadens the appeal. “If we need people to watch, we should be letting them get closer to the tributes before the Games,” he explains. “To make the stakes personal.” He clarifies, “People need someone to root for and someone to root against. We need them to invest.” In this way, the violence becomes more exciting than uneasy. It’s easier to put aside misgivings.

This is a challenge facing any adaptation of The Hunger Games. Coming out of an early screening of the first film in the series, critic David Edelstein lamented that the audience was ecstatic about the violence on screen, “They’ve just seen a movie in which twenty-plus kids are murdered. Why aren’t they devastated?” It recalls François Truffaut’s famous truism about the impossibility of making an antiwar film; depictions of violence tend to glorify it.

It doesn’t help that the Hunger Games could never truly depict the violence inflicted on children. Each of Francis Lawrence’s three Hunger Games movies had an R-rated first cut that was trimmed to get a PG-13 rating. The original had to undergo specific edits to get a comparable rating in the United Kingdom. These movies were never going to be able to depict child-on-child violence in the same way that something like Battle Royale might.

“Suzanne [Collins] wrote these books for young people to be able to read them and discuss them and engage with them,” explained producer Nina Jacobson, “and we would never make a version of the movies where they couldn't participate in.” Of course, Lionsgate was never going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on adapting a popular series of young adult novels that teenagers couldn’t go see alone. So the deaths of children, like that of Rue (Amandla Stenberg), become sanitized and bloodless. They aren’t shocking or upsetting.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes gets around this by focusing on the production of the contest. At one point, Juno Phipps (Serena Oexle) vomits inside the studio in response to a burst of violence on screen. The editors cut away. “Do you think they’re done?” Flickerman asks his cameraman. Earnestly, Flickerman addresses the audience. “To the children watching, that was violent, horrific, and disgusting,” he solemnly states. “Ms. Phipps, please, if you’re going to vomit, do it off camera.” This is a family-friendly broadcast, after all.

While this is a smart way of dealing with the franchise’s core themes within a four-quadrant blockbuster, the choice to focus The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes on the audience rather than the contestants also gets at something more profound. Famously, author Suzanne Collins was inspired to create the series by her experience “flipping through the channels one night between reality television programs and actual footage of the Iraq War.”

This framing suggests the genius of The Hunger Games lay in combining reality television and war footage. However, much of the footage of the Iraq War was already filtered through the lens of reality television. Critic Frank Rich wryly described the Iraq War as “the ultimate reality show.” The Pentagon teamed up with reality television producer Bertram Van Munster, responsible for The Amazing Race, to document the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad.

Though the war played out on television, the coverage was sanitized. “The defining moments of this war are not occurring on screen,” mused Anthony Swofford. “You can watch days of tanks traveling across the desert, but that's not war. Embeds serve up burly-chested kids full of charisma and grit; television reports soften war and allow it to penetrate even deeper into the living rooms and minds of America. War can't be that bad if they let us watch it.”

The earlier Hunger Games movies flattered the viewer by placing them in the shoes of the subjects of this war footage, the innocent victims fighting back against imperialism and interventionism. This was similar to how the blockbusters of the 1970s and 1970s reclaimed the Vietnam War by asking audiences to imagine themselves as the plucky guerilla underdogs in movies like Star Wars, Rambo, and Predator. It’s easy – and comforting – for the viewer to imagine themselves as Katniss.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes suggests the average audience member is closer to Snow, watching atrocities through a television set, living their own lives with their own worries, complicit in those systems of oppression. The average viewer has never been a soldier in Baghdad or even a contestant on reality television. If the audience watching the Hunger Games franchise has any experience of this sort of violence, it is as a spectator behind a monitor.

This is a bold and unsettling idea, but it resonates with other major movies this year, such as Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer grapples with similar questions. Martin Scorsese contends that Killers of the Flower Moon is “a story of complicity, silent complicity in certain cases, sin by omission.” Snow drifts through most of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes convinced that he won’t have to choose between the right thing and his own advancement.

However, characters constantly remind Snow that he has to choose. He doesn’t have to go along to get along. “People can be good,” his sister (Hunter Schafer) urges. “You can be good. You are good. Just believe in that.” Later, Baird tells him, “I think there’s a natural goodness born into us all. No, really. You can either cross that line into evil or not.  And it’s our life’s work to stay on the right side of that line.” The tragedy of Coriolanus Snow is that he can’t – or won’t – do that work. When it comes down to it, Snow doesn’t choose to do the right thing; he chooses himself.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is a bold and provocative piece of work, one that asks its audience to sit uncomfortably in their own complicity. Watching sanitized television footage of atrocities broadcast from around the world, everybody likes to think that they would be Katniss Everdeen. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes suggests that it’s much easier to be Coriolanus Snow.