I presented this debate to my students and asked how The Hunger Games could help us make sense of it. Our consensus: “Two of the contenders for Best Picture are Selma and American Sniper. One is about nonviolent resistance, and the other is about violent resistance. It’s Peeta vs. Gale.” Although often annoyed by the fact that love triangles seem to have become part of the required formula for successful YA series, I think this particular Team Peeta vs. Team Gale situation is worth fleshing out.
Team Peeta: Peeta Mellark, like MLK Jr., understands that “returning violence for violence multiples violence.” While he acknowledges that he will likely kill to defend himself in the games (an overt metaphor for war), because he “can’t go down without a fight,” he also shows that he is engaging in the type of thinking Wong promotes: “I keep wishing I could think of a way to … show the Capitol that they don’t own me. That I’m more than a piece in their games.” At the end of the first novel, Peeta, rather than Katniss, inspires the berry scheme (i.e. they will both eat poisonous berries rather than kill each other). Peeta’s commitment to nonviolent resistance is so subtle that most readers, along with President Snow, miss his revolutionary role completely. Yet, when the dual winner rule is revoked, Katniss turns her bow on Peeta. He throws his knife into the lake. Only then, with Katniss’s “face burning in what can only be shame,” does she think of the berries. Remarkably Peeta is only directly credited with a body count of three in the entire games and subsequent revolution: the first is a mercy kill (ending a fatally wounded girl’s misery in Book 1); the second is in defense of another person (Haymitch’s friend, Chaff, in Book 2); and the third is when he’s mentally deranged after being tortured in Book 3. And, no, we’re not even counting Foxface, since that was indirect and completely accidental.
So where does this leave Gale Hawthorne and Chris Kyle? We can identify with their rage, certainly. When Katniss imagines what Gale saw, she “wants everyone in that mountain dead.” But then she replaces the images of burning children with the images of burning citizens and knows that this is horrible too; she says, “You don’t know how those District 2 people ended up in the Nut … They may have been coerced. They may be held against their will. Some are our own spies. Would you kill them too?” When Gale says he would, that he would similarly die for the cause (something that Chris Kyle also articulates in his autobiography), Katniss “know[s] he’s telling the truth.” But she also knows that this choice, admirably made by those willing to self-sacrifice, is “a coldhearted decision to make for other people and those who love them.” And, by the end of the novel, she realizes that despite Gale’s good intentions, his way brings about her sister’s death, the very thing she’s been so desperate to prevent. The series teaches us that we can understand Gale’s motivations; we can recognize his dedication to his family and all that is brave and heroic about him; we can even love him deeply. But we cannot love his way.
Only Peeta’s words in The Hunger Games (Book 1) are encouraging – “I don’t want them to change me in there. Turn me into some kind of monster that I’m not” – because he is able to articulate, from the very beginning, what will be the primary concern of the novels. The hope, the dandelion in the spring, is that there are people like Peeta and MLK Jr. (and Gene Sharp, if you’re looking for a contemporary) who see the world with moral clarity and push us to be better, stronger and braver. I don’t know which film will win Best Picture at the end of the month. Both Selma and American Sniper are contenders, and both are about creating a more safe, just society. The difference is that one of those two victories was achieved through nonviolent resistance, and (Oscar win or no) that will always be the better story.