Book vs. Movie: Catching Fire
By Ben Gruchow
November 4, 2015
The Book
If the purpose of a sequel is limited to raising the stakes of the first story and providing an expanded sense of conflict, then Catching Fire has to either win the reader over immediately or utilize enough goodwill from the preceding story to carry them through the opening. The amount of success it has with the reader on either of these is dependent on how long it’s been since reading the first book, and on how much of the reader’s enjoyment of it hinged on that book’s most notable asset: its headlong pace and seemingly endless supply of invention and suspense.
Put simply, Catching Fire doesn’t rocket out of the gate the way the first book does because it’s too busy picking up the pieces. Then those pieces are constructed into a funhouse-mirror repeat of the same crisis with superficially similar incident and much more personal implications. It’s a twist on the urge to re-create normalcy and youth after a trauma that’s on a level of nastiness equal to something like Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again, or (somewhat closer to home) the Scouring of the Shire in Tolkien’s Return of the King. The storytelling aspect that all three of these share is the experience of the central figure undergoing a sense of victorious closure, and returning home with an expectation or a hope of normalcy only to find that they, in Haymitch Abernathy’s words from this column’s movie iteration, never get off of this train.
Human nature does not, as a rule, agree readily with the concept of not being able to go home again. We are nostalgic, and we are also slow to adapt on a societal level. And so the first half of Catching Fire consists of a handful of individuals becoming aware of a sea change in the population, and attempting to subvert it and return things to their former version of stability. This is actually an even broader net than the story gives; most of what we see is a race between Katniss and Panem’s President Snow to see who can quash quicker and more completely the embryonic signs of revolution that are cropping up all over the country - him to maintain a sense of order and stability to what he sees as a fragile system, her under threat of death to her family, friends, and to her district.
It’s right about here that we’re also introduced to the concept of District 13, which plays a major role in the remainder of the trilogy. In the fabric of the story’s universe, District 13 was a region specializing in graphite mining, nuclear technology, and weapons manufacturing. District 13 was one of the major components of the “Dark Days” rebellion, which was a rather unspecified period of war and strife in the nation’s past.
The narrative is that the Capitol bombed it to the ground and killed all of its inhabitants as a show of force. Propaganda news reports are aired regularly showing uninhabitable ruins, as another reminder of what the Capitol is capable of. There are subtle indications that District 13’s true nature may be the subject of a cover-up; the best of these indications involves Katniss noticing a simple, barely-visible video editing mistake on one of the propaganda news reports.
The second half of Catching Fire depicts the result of a regressive reaction toward rebellion. Snow’s decision to quash rebellion through withholding necessities and outright violence - food supplies show up rotten, torture devices are installed in public areas - is intimidation by the playbook he’s been using that finally backfires. Capitol citizens have grown fond of past Hunger Games winners, viewing them less as the blood-sport components they were and more like the celebrities we believe we feel a kinship or connection with now.
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