The Girl Who Was on Fire by Diana Peterfreund, Carrie Ryan, Jennifer Lynn Barnes, Leah Wilson, Terri Clark, Blythe Woolston Page A
Authors: Diana Peterfreund, Carrie Ryan, Jennifer Lynn Barnes, Leah Wilson, Terri Clark, Blythe Woolston
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for humanity’s first heroic figures. From Gilgamesh to Hercules, stories of old centered around unreal warriors destined for fame, readily distinguishable from common folk by fantastic size and strength. As recently as the 1940s, Captain America captured popular imagination with a traditional (American) exceptionalism, blessed with superhuman abilities and divorced from ordinary concerns—and proud of it.
Early myths made up for their hard-to-relate-to subject matter by the tone and method of their delivery—they were told by priests and bards, infused with religious and patriotic didacticism. They were good for you; they were cultural glue meant to be experienced in particular contexts. As literacy and the availability of books spread, however, and made such stories accessible to everyone, the subjects of myth democratized. Heroes moved from high court (Geoffrey’s History of the Kings of Britain ) to the middle class (Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe ) to the streets (Bukowski’s Post Office ), spreading to meet their audiences, and exceptionalism
began to feel like a barrier to entry. Authenticity —the ability of a hero to convince an audience that you could be me— became paramount, and ordinary people in extraordinary situations became the go-to guys and gals for heroic tales.
In America, this went over particularly well, as it reflected the idea of the American Dream. If an ordinary person can thrive in tremendous peril, an ordinary reader can surely achieve greatness through life’s ups and downs. While the Hunger Games sets itself firmly in this tradition, it also addresses a more up-todate variant of the American Dream: the dream to be famous for no reason at all.
Ask a few kids from Alabama to Wyoming what they want to be when they grow up, and these days you are likely to hear “famous.” Not famous for any particular thing, just “famous.” It seems unsavory to older ears, but this is a dream rooted in the original American Dream, the one about working hard and getting ahead. The only difference is that technology has removed the need for work.
By the 1920s, the red eye of the motion picture camera could do for human beings what the printing press did for words—make them reproducible at low cost for mass consumption. For the first time, it was possible to be famous for no reason other than an ability to be interesting in front of a camera, because there was such a thing as a camera, and it is a testament to the American work ethic that everyone did not immediately drop what they were doing to ambush one.
Some did, of course. Hopefuls streamed to Hollywood to get into the movie business. Viewers dreamed of television stardom and read magazines about it to be closer to their dream. But work still had a place in media success; the act of performance was
still a craft. You did not get to be a star just by being yourself—you got to be a star by being amazing. “To grasp the full significance of life is the actor’s duty,” said James Dean, 11 which sounds like the same sort of duty a writer or musician should aspire to.
Then The Real World came along. Starting in 1992 and currently picked up by MTV for its twenty-sixth season, the show was so simple and instantly ubiquitous that it can be hard to step back and recognize its impact. It took Andy Warhol’s 1968 dictum about fifteen minutes of fame and put it to the test every week. The Real World stripped away any value for accomplishment; no one on the show was cool because they had a good job or created good art (remember the season where they were all supposed to get jobs?—a disaster!); they were cool because they were real, and the rise of The Real World dovetailed with the fetishization of the word “real” in hip-hop. Cultural currency no longer came from acts, it came from realness, as defined by an ability to be interesting in front of observers while not appearing to attempt to be interesting. The Real World was Zen: the only
Early myths made up for their hard-to-relate-to subject matter by the tone and method of their delivery—they were told by priests and bards, infused with religious and patriotic didacticism. They were good for you; they were cultural glue meant to be experienced in particular contexts. As literacy and the availability of books spread, however, and made such stories accessible to everyone, the subjects of myth democratized. Heroes moved from high court (Geoffrey’s History of the Kings of Britain ) to the middle class (Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe ) to the streets (Bukowski’s Post Office ), spreading to meet their audiences, and exceptionalism
began to feel like a barrier to entry. Authenticity —the ability of a hero to convince an audience that you could be me— became paramount, and ordinary people in extraordinary situations became the go-to guys and gals for heroic tales.
In America, this went over particularly well, as it reflected the idea of the American Dream. If an ordinary person can thrive in tremendous peril, an ordinary reader can surely achieve greatness through life’s ups and downs. While the Hunger Games sets itself firmly in this tradition, it also addresses a more up-todate variant of the American Dream: the dream to be famous for no reason at all.
Ask a few kids from Alabama to Wyoming what they want to be when they grow up, and these days you are likely to hear “famous.” Not famous for any particular thing, just “famous.” It seems unsavory to older ears, but this is a dream rooted in the original American Dream, the one about working hard and getting ahead. The only difference is that technology has removed the need for work.
By the 1920s, the red eye of the motion picture camera could do for human beings what the printing press did for words—make them reproducible at low cost for mass consumption. For the first time, it was possible to be famous for no reason other than an ability to be interesting in front of a camera, because there was such a thing as a camera, and it is a testament to the American work ethic that everyone did not immediately drop what they were doing to ambush one.
Some did, of course. Hopefuls streamed to Hollywood to get into the movie business. Viewers dreamed of television stardom and read magazines about it to be closer to their dream. But work still had a place in media success; the act of performance was
still a craft. You did not get to be a star just by being yourself—you got to be a star by being amazing. “To grasp the full significance of life is the actor’s duty,” said James Dean, 11 which sounds like the same sort of duty a writer or musician should aspire to.
Then The Real World came along. Starting in 1992 and currently picked up by MTV for its twenty-sixth season, the show was so simple and instantly ubiquitous that it can be hard to step back and recognize its impact. It took Andy Warhol’s 1968 dictum about fifteen minutes of fame and put it to the test every week. The Real World stripped away any value for accomplishment; no one on the show was cool because they had a good job or created good art (remember the season where they were all supposed to get jobs?—a disaster!); they were cool because they were real, and the rise of The Real World dovetailed with the fetishization of the word “real” in hip-hop. Cultural currency no longer came from acts, it came from realness, as defined by an ability to be interesting in front of observers while not appearing to attempt to be interesting. The Real World was Zen: the only
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