How does Katniss Everdeen proove that no one is human?

This weekend, I had the idea to hang out few hours to escape from my sad student condition:  reviewing my lessons for final exams. Thus, I decided to go to the cinema to watch the very last episode of Hunger Games.

(By the way, if you really love Hunger Games as I did, PLEASE DO NOT SEE THIS EPISODE. I’ve never seen an end so cliché. And I’ve never laughed so much at the view of someone dying. Disgusting.)

Anyway, Hunger Games tells the story of Katniss Everdeen, a young girl who lives in a country run by the Capitol. Capitol’s inhabitants are all healthy and way too rich and exhibitionist. They wear false rainbow eyelashes when the rest of the country is poor and tries to live hunting and farming. Each year, the Capitol organizes Hunger Games: two children of each district of the country are chosen (what a pleasure!) to struggle to death in an arena, under a dome plenty of cameras. Their struggle is broadcasted in the whole country, as a pointless TV serie like The Truman Show would be or like Secret Story. Nevertheless, as each year these children have to die until only one still alive, Katniss Everdeen, who was herself a survivor of the Games, decided to raise the whole country population against Capitol power.

Actually, this is only a basic story about politic and power. But as I was writing my final paper in this course this weekend, I could only watch this as a story of freedom. And be critical on this point.

Indeed, Katniss Everdeen was at first not free because the system of her country alienated her to the Capitol, which took away all of her assets while she was working. Then, she was not free because this same Capitol settled her under a dome. Hence, she decided to overthrow the power gathering the population of every district behind her. But even there, while struggling for freedom, she lost a part of her freedom. She had to play the role of the convener in front of the cameras. To arrange troops, she had to look pretty, to take her most compelling voice, and to literally act in fake war scenes. Consequently, where is her freedom? Moreover, I learnt (!!! THIS IS A SPOIL, sorry !!!) in this last episode that even her war peers and friends used her. She is only a tool, a being-in-itself as Sartre conceptualized it. She is an object for her army superiors and for the population, the rebels. Wanting to reach a being-for-itself, she felt into a being-for-others, without her agreement.

Furthermore, she wanted to escape from her condition at first because she thought that she was not free as a farmer. And that’s what the Capitol claims: “these people are not wise enough to think. They don’t deserve to be free, they don’t deserve an existence because they are not human, they are workers. Let’s use them to do our bad tasks and let’s enjoy our measureless treasures freely”. But the fact is that in the Capitol, people are not freer. They just follow the President voice and wear crazy clothes in crazy places. But if their first wish was to plant carrots all of their life, because they do love planting carrots, they forget this under the pressure of their society. Then they are no freer. They have everything they want but they are not free.

In other words, Hunger Games shows that every human condition offers less freedom that we could have if we spend our live struggling to obtain it. But even when we finally reach our goals, we remain unhappy, and we want to be freer.

“We are condemned to freedom” said Sartre. But we are also condemned to an infinite insatiability. This is a part of human characteristics to always want more.

Than, are we really condemned to be free? I would say yes. Because Sartre made this statement and that I’m far from being the next great philosopher of the century. So I harshly believe him. We have to be free to be a human. But if being a human means to be free, then we’ll just never be human. Because it is impossible to be free. Struggling for freedom may be a part of our human condition but the desire to always be better is another part. And both don’t match together.

Therefore, to be a human, I think that we should learn to live the absurdity, to love the absurdity, and do not expect anything from anyone, as Meursault did in The Stranger of Camus. Sartre suggested to face the bad faith and to understand that we could never escape from absurdity. Then let’s live this absurd life! We don’t need to be freer, but to accept everything that happens.

I tell myself that this is really weird to assume that, and neither Beauvoir, or Sartre, or even my consciousness would tolerate this statement. But it is a thought that get away from my brain when I saw people watching Katniss Everdeen struggling with no end and for nothing, like a fish in its bowl, soundless but delighting to the eye.