Over at New York Magazine, Heather Havrilesky has a great piece that posits an answer to one of the things that gets me twitchiest about post-apocalypse stories: the lack of an explanation for how everything got so terrible in the first place. She argues that the point of shows like The Walking Dead or novels like Colson Whitehead’s Year Zero is to clear away some of the complications of modern society and to let us revel in the possibilities of stark choices or stark scenarios: the opportunity to wander around a city alone, unencumbered by security guards or a need to justify turning up someplace, the possibility of nobly sacrificing yourself for your baby, the opportunity to demonstrate your love and commitment to someone you love who is in danger in a visceral, even violent way. She writes:

The focus of these novels isn’t on the shape and form of the catastrophe; those details are often pretty vague. The apocalypse mostly serves as a way to turn up the contrast on a hero’s solitary battle to adapt and sally forth. Stripping away the complications and distractions of the modern world, what is our protagonist left with? The same melancholy and longing he or she always had, of course, but with far more of an excuse to feel these heavy emotions at every turn. Instead of injecting desperation, romance, solitude, and morbidity into a banal tale, these qualities are encoded in the apocalyptic novel’s DNA, minimizing the trivial clutter and heightening the stakes. Values and ideas about morality are stripped down to their essential nature: Kill or be killed? Conform and tolerate oppression or escape and risk death? Somehow, though, even in older works like Ballard’s The Drowned World, such disturbing questions are savored and relished. There’s an obvious delight taken in the awfulness of the transformed planet. In his survey of science fiction, A Billion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss refers to this tendency of authors to concoct enviable end times as “the cozy catastrophe.” As others suffer and die around him, our hero runs wild, enjoying the fruits of the worldwide holocaust.

This fascinates me in part because I think my reaction to post-apocalypse fiction, and really, all sorts of futuristic narratives, is to be more interested in how we got there than what we do when we’re there. I love the first two books in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy because they’re all about the choices the characters make to extend their lifespans, to terraform Mars, to embrace new religions, and ultimately, to declare independence from Earth, but I’m relatively bored by the third novel, which is about all the sex and drama a new generation has once the future’s finally arrived. Reading The Hunger Games, I always want to know how the Capitol seized enough power to bring the Districts to heel enough to set up the Games in the first place. I wonder about first contact and the Bugger Wars in Ender’s Game, though I think Orson Scott Card is smart enough to weave a lot of backstory about the way the world changed into his story about what it’s become now. I love Contagion so much because it’s the rare, beautifully optimistic movie about how we avert a post-apocalypse, rather than bowing down to the inevitability of disaster.

By Melissa Boteach and Katie Wright

These days it seems like everyone is talking about the latest book-to-movie sensation, The Hunger Games. Set in a dystopian future America, two teenagers are selected from each of the poor 12 districts surrounding a wealthy city known as the Capitol to fight to the death on reality television. One of the highest-grossing movies of 2012, millions have flocked to theaters and bookstores to see the movie and purchase the book.

In The Hunger Games, the wealthy people of the Capitol leverage their power to create a game only they can win. Unfortunately, this is a storyline similar to one that many Americans know all too well. Lionsgate, the studio behind The Hunger Games, seemed to recognize that—they partnered with a number of anti-hunger charities as part of the movie’s rollout, though they cracked down on other advocates who were riffing off the franchise’s themes.

And while The Hunger Games may have surrendered its place atop the box office to The Avengers, the fight against hunger remains a real and pressing issue in Washington. Time and time again, conservatives in our nation’s capital choose to preserve the “invisible benefits”— the tax breaks, loopholes, and subsidies that benefit the wealthy—at the expense of programs that create jobs and help low-income families feed their children and boost our economy.

This week the House of Representatives is expected to vote on a package that would cut more than a shocking $33 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Cuts of this magnitude will impact every household seeking nutrition assistance, the overwhelming majority of which have a member who is elderly, disabled, a child, or working poor. Two million people would lose all of their benefits, and 44 million others would see their benefits reduced; 280,000 schoolchildren would lose automatic access to their free school breakfasts and lunches.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program has helped millions of Americans such as Tara, a working mother who once went hungry for a whole weekend to feed her son, put food on the table. Without it more than 5 million Americans would have slipped into poverty in 2010.

It’s time to tell conservatives in Congress that we’re done playing these hunger games. We don’t need to cut food assistance for families struggling against hunger in order to finance more tax breaks for millionaires and to bolster our bloated military budget.

If Congress is hoping that you don’t know about these cuts or that you won’t contact their offices to push back, they’re going to be wrong. Help us spread the word about these cuts—share our Hunger Games trailer and weigh in with your members of Congress now.

Nearly 45 million Americans are counting on you. May the odds be ever in your favor!

Melissa Boteach is the Director of the Half in Ten Campaign and Katie Wright is a Research Associate with the Half in Ten campaign at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

The bridge is yours.

-TV’s best gingers.

-Reflections on Adam Yauch’s death.

-David Tennant might be in the next Fast and Furious movie.

-Having the guy behind Toy Story 3 and Little Miss Sunshine working on the Catching Fire script sounds exciting.

-Sandra Day O’Connor gets into the video game business.

The bridge is yours.

-Is the golden age of male full-frontal nudity past? Passing? Yet to come?

-These awesome kids tried and convicted The Hunger Games‘ President Snow of war crimes.

-Which Avenger are you? Someone better be something cool, because you’re pretty much out of luck if you’re a lady.

-The Winchester Mystery House is, in fact, an awesome subject for a movie.

-Oh dear Lord, The Newsroom is going to be unbearably pretentious, isn’t it?

The bridge is yours.

-A great examination of dystopian fashion.

-How TV networks fall apart.

-Some early pictures from the set of Django Unchained.

-Judge condescendingly declares that documentary filmmaking can’t be a for-profit activity, gets a lesson.

-Having better cameras doesn’t mean everything has to look the same, does it?

The bridge is yours.

-FX is restarting its efforts to make a Powers show from scratch, which hopefully will mean some better casting.

-The Dark Knight Rises is going to have “sensuality.”

-After they make Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, someone should adapt Nothing Ever Happens on My Street.

-Is the Katniss Everdeen Barbie skinny enough for Manohla Dargis?

-This diss track doesn’t exactly elevate the conversation around Odd Future, though I do like the Hunger Games reference. Some other rapper should run with that:

The Hunger Games has been a massive smash, but director Gary Ross is apparently out of the running to helm the next sequel, Catching Fire. And to be honest, Ross’s huge reliance on shaky cam both blunted the impact of some of the killings and was awfully hard to watch after a while. Here are five directors I’d love to see considered for the role, pending their availability, and what I think they’d bring to the tale of a critically important female action hero.

1. Patty Jenkins: Jenkins was supposed to be directing Thor 2, but ended up exiting the project. She might actually be better suited for Catching Fire. The Hunger Games trilogy is fundamentally a story about post-traumatic stress disorder and the trama of committing violence, themes that Jenkins explored in her serial killer biopic Monster. That’s also a great movie about love and the authenticity of affection under enormous stress, a key component of the franchise.

2. Steven Soderbergh: He’s done a delightful job with action sequences in Las Vegas, which is the closest we get to the Capitol in contemporary America. And his work on Haywire suggests an interest in building out new brands of action heroines. But he might actually be better for the sequences in the third movie in the series, Mockingjay.

3. Edgar Wright: I think Wright, the force behind Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and the adaptation of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is one of the most outrageously talented and creative action choreographers working today. One thing the movie adaptation of The Hunger Games didn’t entirely make clear is how weird the arenas for the Games can be, and the arena in Catching Fire is a doozy. I’d love to see what Wright does with it. And given the weirdness of the one fight between women in Scott Pilgrim, I’d say Wright owes us a better one.

4. Karyn Kusama: I know a lot of people didn’t like the movie adaptation of Aeon Flux, which is a totally valid position to take. But between that and Girlfight, I’d like to see Kusama take another crack at a dystopian action movie with a female heroine, particularly one where the heroine and a man she (maybe?) loves are violently opposed.

5. Matthew Vaughn: Given his work on X-Men: First Class, we already know that Vaughn can get good work out of Jennifer Lawrence, especially in situations that involve performative sexuality. And Kick-Ass is brutal fun, with a tender, violent performance by Chloe Moretz. It’d be fun to see Vaughn tackle a movie where an alternately tender and tough girl is the main character.

I’m still annoyed at Manohla Dargis for thinking that Jennifer Lawrence isn’t starved-enough to play Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, but her conversation with A.O. Scott about where Katniss fits in both the American literary tradition and in the world of female action heroes is excellent. And I want to zero in on her observation here:

By suggesting that Katniss occupied feminine and masculine positions (and is therefore not locked into either), I was inching toward the idea that gender absolutes are less confusing than inapt. I mean, is killing masculine? Is nurturing feminine? Katniss nurtures and she kills, and she does both extremely well. Katniss is a fantasy figure, but partly what makes her powerful — and, I suspect, what makes her so important to a lot of girls and women — is that she’s one of the truest feeling, most complex female characters to hit American movies in a while. She isn’t passive, she isn’t weak, and she isn’t some random girl. She’s active, she’s strong and she’s the girl who motivates the story.

Katniss does evoke the American Adam, and she charts her own course. She’s a rugged individualist who picked herself up by her fashionable bootstraps, but at the same time she’s rooted to her home and to her friend Gale, who gives her companionship, and to her sister, Prim, who gives her love and a reason to live. And while the Hunger Games register as the ultimate social Darwinian nightmare, Katniss triumphs by changing the rules and by forming bonds with other tributes, specifically Rue and Peeta. Last, Rue (who’s played by a biracial actress in the film and is described in the book as having “satiny brown skin”) may narratively function somewhat like Leatherstocking’s Indian companions, yet she is far from the clichéd “noble savage” type.

I found the way the movie handled Rue’s death extremely striking. Rue is speared, Katniss shoots and kills Rue’s attacker, she puts Rue to rest in a striking act of political symbolism—and then she cries, hard, in a way that involves her entire body. The scene was striking because it’s so contrary to the way we’ve tended to frame female action heroines in recent years. They handle acts of violence calmly. The depictions balance out the theoretically masculine skill of competently executing violence is not to make female characters feel the cost of that violence, but by emphasizing that their sexual desirability isn’t compromised by that competence. Black Widow can wear a corset and be tied to a chair and still wreck a bunch of men. The ability to defend themselves or their country doesn’t render men obsolete for these heroines—in fact, it’s violence that heats up the dulled sex lives of the characters in Mr. & Mrs. Smith.

By contrast, the feminine attributes that Katniss is given in addition to her ability to kill, be it animals or people, belong to her. She may be a skilled hunter, but she feels the weight of her murders, which is what they are, no matter how justified. Like Hermione Granger, who does her hair for the Yule Ball and then goes back to her normal routine on the ground that it’s too much trouble afterwards, The Hunger Games is acutely aware of the work that goes into conventional female beauty. Katniss’s appearance is a construction, the work of a stylist and a a prep team, and one she has a complicated and ambivalent relationship with. Unlike many makeover narratives, which are actually about the moral improvement of men who realize they have overlooked women with physical and intellectual value, neither Peeta nor Gale is transformed by the revelation of a stylized Katniss.

And I wonder if that positioning is why, as A.O. Scott puts it, The Hunger Games has upended the accepted wisdom that: “It’s generally assumed that girls can aspire to be like Harry Potter or Spider-Man, or can at least embrace their adventures without undermining their own femininity. But at least within marketing divisions of the culture industry, it is an article of faith that boys won’t pretend to be princesses.” If a character is set up to specifically be not you, and if that character is offered up for your approval and consumption, for the reassurance of your fears and anxieties about what happens when women are empowered, it’s much harder to identify with them than it is to watch a character and wonder what you would do in their situation.

In our conversation about Two and a Half Men creator Lee Aronsohn’s recent complaint that, in terms of bodily female humor on television, “we’re approaching peak vagina on television,” one line of defense was that he was simply expressing a perfectly legitimate preference. His comments weren’t as horrifying as those of the racist fans of The Hunger Games who, in response to a character who is described as dark-skinned in the books being played by an African-American actress, tweeted things like “Kk call me racist but when I found out rue was black her death wasn’t as sad #ihatemyself.” But both strains of thinking get at something important: preferences in art aren’t neutral things unaffected by larger cultural forces that shield the people who hold them from any charges of racism, sexism, or homophobia.

Dan Savage wrote as much recently in response to a reader who wanted to know if his preference for masculine white men made him a jerk or biased: “You’re entitled to your preferences — but I hope your preferences are yours. I hope you’ve given your taste in men some thought and you can honestly say that these are your preferences, Masculine Man, and not just gay beauty ideals and/or masculinity standards that the culture stuffed down your throat and up your ass. And if they’re your preferences, well, you’re entitled to them. But you’re not entitled to be an asshole about them.”

It’s one thing to prefer stories about male characters, because that’s who you relate to most easily. It’s another to mistake that preference for some sort of proof that stories about men are inherently superior or more sophisticated. If you’d rather not watch gay people have relationships and build families, no one’s forcing you, but it’s worth interrogating why you feel that way. If you’re uncomfortable watching characters carry out their lives in a cramped, less-than-perfectly-maintained house but fine watching characters waltz through unrealistically enormous apartments, you might want to get to the root of that impulse. And if you bond more closely with a white child than with a black one, you should think about what that means on a deeper level than an #ihatemyself hashtag. There’s nothing wrong with treating entertainment as if it’s a source of fun rather than vitamins. But if being comfortable in your enjoyment means being comfortable in a narrow set of ideas, that’s not a neutral position, much less an admirable one.

Alan Sepinwall takes on a little-discussed kind of token casting: putting random, poorly-developed teenaged characters in shows in the hopes they’ll lure teenagers into watching:

Shawn Ryan was going on a Twitter run about all the ways “Smash” had gone awry, and suggested that at least some of the problems had to be coming from network notes. I asked whether we could blame networks for all the obnoxious teenage characters — not just Leo, but Tyler on “V,” Jack Linden on “The Killing” and Josh from “Terra Nova,” to name three recent examples — and he said yes, then tweeted, “Think a lot of writers/networks mistakingly think the mere presence of a teenager is show (however annoying) will lure teens into watching.”

And that’s not a new phenomenon, nor one that’s confined to adult programs. I remember when I was a kid, a lot of the cartoons I watched had kid characters — often, in the case of something like “Superfriends,” adding them to pre-existing source material where they didn’t exist — who were elevated to a position of prominence that never made sense to me at the time. With the benefit of hindsight, I have to agree with Shawn’s theory, and say they were there because an executive or producer assumed kids wouldn’t want to watch a bunch of grown-ups have adventures unless there was someone close to their own age to relate to. And it always seemed like a fundamental misunderstanding of the audience. Though some of the kids were non-terrible, I was tuning in to watch Superman or Batman or the guys from M.A.S.K. do something cool, not Wendy and Marvin, the Wonder Twins or Scott Trakker and his pet robot T-Bob. Or, to use a live-action example from when I was slightly older, think of Wesley Crusher, who was there as young audience bait, and yet is someone whom Wil Wheaton is still apologizing for 25 years later.

It’s particularly weird that television would continue to treat teenage characters as a way to pander, because not as if it’s impossible to tell specific stories about what it’s like to be a teenager, or to find quality metaphors for the pain of adolescence, be they Spider-Man‘s web-slinging, the revelation of wizarding abilities in the Harry Potter franchise, or The Hunger Games‘ vicious battles in the arena. And there seems to be ample proof that grown-ups will watch or read intelligent fiction about teenagers that comes with a larger message. Just saying.