I Loved The Hunger Games, Except For One Absolutely Stupid Decision
Originally published at joshroby.com. Please leave any comments there.
There are 24 tributes from all over Panem.
Two of them are black. They come from the same district.
Of all the 22 tributes from other districts, only two interact with Katniss with anything other than unbridled antipathy.
And so the only two black tributes help the main character until the plot requires somebody to die, and so they die.
Bleeeeergh.
Update: I revised some numbers below; my night-of-watching eyeball estimate was off.
Now, when Collins wrote The Hunger Games novel, she wrote both Rue and Thresh as black (if you forgot, don't worry, so did I). She doesn't go out of her way to identify the ethnicity of anybody else, save for noting blond hair (which I totally missed when I read the book; the Peeta in my head was an Indian kid). So you can go either way on this, as far as Collins is concerned: either she imagined but did not stipulate* a rainbow of skin tones on the tributes, or she put exactly two black characters into her book to fill the exactly two sympathetic-but-expendible slots.
However, the casting of the movie gets no such handwave. When they cast the movie, they made two decisions, one good and one bad. First, they decided to actually make the black characters in the book black characters in the movie. Sadly, this often is not the case, and again sadly, it's a mark in their favor that they didn't whitewash everything within their reach (and on the other side, the available targets of the whitewashing they didn't do were already the comfortable sympathetic-but-expendible roles, so…).
However, when they then considered the twenty other kids they had to cast for the other tributes, they decided it was a good idea to make them all white. Absolutely stupid, tone-deaf, and again sadly, typical for Hollywood. The error here is in two parts: first, no hispanics, no asians, no middle-easterners, no native americans or first nations. Come on, these tributes are supposed to represent all of Panem… is all of Panem lilly-white, except for District 11 (which you may recall, if you've read Catching Fire, is the district with the endless plantations)? Stupid. But compounding this is the second problem: by making all the other kids white, it makes the District 11 kids the only black and non-white kids in the show. Which underscores their being cast in the sympathetic-but-expendible roles in which Hollywood so loves putting their black and non-white actors.
Update: the casting of the tributes as a whole is as follows: 17 whites (70%), 3 asians (12.5%), 2 hispanics (8%), 2 african-americans** (8%). So my characterization of the cast being "all-white" was off-base; these numbers, in fact, suggest somebody was casting with an eye to matching US census data, which is a breath of fresh air. Additionally, no other district besides 11 pairs two persons of color. Of course, all of the PoC besides Rue and Thresh fall in the initial bloodbath at the cornucopia, making their screen presence minimal - and giving rise to my impression that all the tributes outside of 11 were white.
Casting that ends up matching US census data tells me that somebody was paying attention, and that's a good thing. And if they were working to match census data, then the two characters described as black in the book means that their casting hands are tied. At which point, making Rue and Thresh the only blacks quickly becomes the least odious solution.
And the worst part is that this totally stupid Hollywood-standard casting decision mars an otherwise awesome movie. With the revised information on casting, I'll list its scrupulous decisions right along with the other bits that recommend the movie. The writing was tight and effective; the acting was fantastic and on point; the effects were flashy when they needed to be in the forefront and subtle when they need to fade into the background.
Go see it.
* I'm now waiting for somebody to quote me line and verse of the other tributes being non-white in the book. Hoping for it, in fact.
** Not sure if Dayo Okeniyi considers himself african-american or african; he was born in Nigeria but has spent most of his life in the States.