The Hunger Games, banned books, and Bully

The Hunger Games, banned books, and the documentary Bully: what ties these three things together? Quite a bit more than you might think at first. To begin, for those not up on the latest book and movie news, here’s a quick tutorial.

Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games is a young adult novel centering around a girl named Katniss Everdeen and the post-apocalyptic world she lives in. At the center of this world is a totalitarian government that exerts complete control over its 12 Districts. Each year, as a method of keeping the Districts in line, the Hunger Games are held. 2 children from each District are randomly selected to compete in these “games”, wherein the 24 ‘tributes’ are placed into an arena from which only 1 may emerge alive – and only after all the other tributes have been killed. In this year’s Games, Katniss’ younger sister is selected, and Katniss volunteers to enter the Games to save her sister from almost certain death. The book has been challenged or banned many times since its publication for various reasons, including supposedly overt sexuality, violence and unsuitability for the age group it is aimed at. For the past few years, it has appeared on top-ten banned books lists across the country.

Bully is a documentary, produced by the Weinstein company, that’s about exactly what you think it is: bullying in schools and the very real and devastating effects it has on American youth. The movie might have been just another small documentary film – until the MPAA (movie ratings board) hit the film with an R rating for language, which many correctly argue would prohibit the age group that the film is about from seeing it. Harvey Weinstein, head of The Weinstein Company, distributor for the film, argued vocally and very publically for the rating to be overturned. Mr. Weinstein is no stranger to spats with the MPAA. He has publically challenged them in the past regarding ratings on some of his studio’s other projects, such as Blue Valentine and The King’s Speech. Consequently, some have attacked Weinstein’s efforts as being nothing more than a publicity campaign for another one of his films. But Weinstein says, ““I am not being Harvey Weinstein, showman…I am not using the ratings system for publicity. Yes, I’ve done it in the past. Mea culpa for that.” But, in the unique case of Bully, “this is completely out of passion.”

What brings these two projects and issues together is simple. The controversy each faces is symptomatic of different sides of the misdirected efforts to ‘protect our children’, while policing literature and other forms of entertainment, that is so popular in today’s culture. The Hunger Games and Bully are two sides of the same wrongly rejected coin. Hunger Games is a book that some argue can do harm to the children and young adults who read it. Those who make such claims may be well-intentioned, but they are wrong.

Yes, Hunger Games is a dark, dystopian novel. Yes, there is violence in its pages, and some elements that aren’t appropriate for younger kids. That does not make it a dangerous book. Nor does it make it a book that should be removed from library shelves. Should parents consider talking to their kids about the content of The Hunger Games and books like it? Absolutely. Should they, like the Goffstown, NH, mother who said the book gave her 11 year old nightmares, try to have the book removed from libraries? Absolutely not.

Violence and the other controversial subject matters of The Hunger Games are not unfamiliar to teenagers. We, and they, live in a world where violence in particular is spectacularly prevalent, even among our youth. This last is something that Bully does its best to address. In showing the prevalence of violent bullying in schools and the victimization of innocents, the movie is trying very hard to do something good – and the fact that many in our country can’t reconcile this idea with their preconceived  notions of what it means to protect children is a real problem.

Bully received an R rating for language. Weinstein says that he was told by the MPAA that the rating would not change unless “a crucial scene in which obscenities are hurled at a young victim on a school bus was changed – something he and Mr. Hirsh [the director] were unwilling to do.” I applaud that decision. Just because violence or profanity isn’t used onscreen does not mean it isn’t real, and trying to pretend otherwise is just foolish. Let’s be honest, in our world, most kids hear (and some see) worse things in and out of school on a daily basis than they’ll ever see on the movie screen while watching something like Bully.

            This whole debate hits close to home for me on a few different levels. I was never bullied as a kid, and I’m very thankful for that. But I was that kid who hung out reading a book at recess because I didn’t quite fit in with most of the other kids – and because I was too shy to talk to them even if I had somehow fit in. I wasn’t the only one, either. There were a few of us who just didn’t quite fit the mold, and that’s no different today. There are, and will always be, kids for whom books are a sanctuary, that place to go when there’s nowhere else you’d rather be. Books are an escape unlike any other, and for some kids, they are the only escape from tough situations. Books made my middle school years (and beyond) great, and I don’t want to think about what it might have done to have them taken away from me based on someone else’s erroneous judgment.

I think it is safe to say that the kind of kids who read books like the Hunger Games often do it to escape a world in which they’re attacked or judged for being themselves, which the film ‘Bully’ documents. Now is the time for parents to take a moment and think about what the best way to protect their children and others like them is. Is it to fight to keep books out of their hands, or is it to advocate for something good instead – like the documentary Bully, the message it imparts, and the challenge it leaves us with?