Once upon a time, a young girl from an oppressed minority was
summoned to the capital. The nation watched as she competed against her
peers, and won. She could have done the thing that was expected of her
and lived happily ever after. But instead she risked everything—not just
her newly won riches and standing, but her life—to stand up for her
people. And these people, with her as their heroine and figurehead, rose
up violently. We would like to say that then they all lived happily
ever after, but the text doesn’t quite permit us that luxury. Still, the
war was epic, and the story became beloved, the bitterness of the
ending often skipped over. Its legend is considered myth, fairy tale, or
fantasy, even though the supernatural is notably absent.
Sound familiar? This is the story of the Book of Esther—and of the
Hunger Games, a trilogy of young-adult novels by Suzanne Collins with an
eagerly anticipated
movie adaptation [1] coming out March 23.
The Hunger Games and its sequels
Catching Fire and
Mockingjay
are set in the future totalitarian nation of Panem, in what used to be
America, where America’s reality-television obsession and the growing
gap between rich and poor have been taken to their dystopian extreme.
Every year a boy and a girl from each of Panem’s 12 districts are sent
to compete in the Hunger Games, a broadcast reality TV show in which 24
children fight to the death until only one survives. The annual show is
both entertainment and commemoration of the crushing defeat by
the Capitol [2]—a
city for the nation’s rich and powerful—of an uprising of the
districts, decades before.
The trilogy’s heroine, Katniss Everdeen,
comes from District 12, a poor coal-mining district, and her
background—half-orphaned and impoverished—is both asset and defect in
the competition; on the one hand, she lacks the physical size and
training of children from the wealthier districts, and on the other, she
is tough and resourceful.
In the Book of Esther, the Jews of Persia are to be put to death, a
plan devised by the evil Haman, a minister to the king. But Queen Esther
foils Haman’s plan, revealing to the king that she is Jewish. The Jews
triumph, and the gallows, built by Haman to hang the Jews, are instead
used to hang Haman and his sons, among others. Every year on the 14th of
Adar, the holiday of Purim celebrates this victory. The Book of Esther
is read aloud twice, in a spoof of the king’s proclamations, on which
the story hinges, and of the reverence of the usual Torah and Haftorah
reading, and the story is reenacted with drunken celebration, masks,
costumes, and pageants. Purim isn’t the only holiday in which we
remember a story by reenacting—on Passover, we are taught that each of
us has been taken out of Egypt—but it is the only one in which costume
and disguise are central to the observance.
And at the heart of the story is Esther becoming Queen Esther. She is
introduced as a beautiful young woman, but her edge over the other
maidens seems to come after she enters the harem “… to the custody of
Hegai, keeper of the women. And the maiden pleased him, and she obtained
kindness of him; and he speedily gave her her ointments.” It’s no small
thing; the cosmetic regimen lasts “twelve months—for so were the days
of their anointing accomplished, to wit, six months with oil of myrrh,
and six months with sweet odors, and with other ointments of the women,”
before Esther is presented to the king. She wins the king’s favor with
her beauty, and she does not reveal that she and her family are Jewish.
I’ve found myself drawn to this part of the story for a while. For
the past several years, I’ve been part of making an elaborate annual
Purim show in New York, and part of what interests me is the glimpse of
spectacle and artifice in the story itself; that the Esther who is sent
before the king is a character whom Hegai has been working on for months
and months, just as I might work on a costume for the Esther in our
show.
But the Hunger Games trilogy has helped me think more about the place
of the makeover as a cultural archetype, and especially about the sort
of transformation Esther undergoes as part of a power play. The makeover
is a staple of entertainment, most obviously today in reality TV shows
like What Not To Wear, but with a long and broad history including everything from My Fair Lady to Cinderella.
Putting on an outfit and some makeup at home might be private, slow,
and subtle, but the makeover of TV and film is visually striking,
dramatic, and fun to watch. The showmanship is made visible, and we get
to see the power of costume and spectacle at work. The TV-driven world
of the Hunger Games features a series of makeovers for Katniss,
masterminded by a designer named Cinna—we might think of him as Panem’s
Hegai—and a “prep team” of stylists.[3]
The stylists are recurring characters in the televised Games, and the
opening ceremonies, which include a parade, televised training, and
finally beauty pageant-esque interviews with these children who are
about to have to kill each other, are part of the cruel entertainment.
So, our first instinct, shared with Katniss, about Cinna and the
makeover, is that it’s a vapid sugarcoating of the violence of the
Games. Yet Cinna quickly emerges as a rare character: a loving, caring,
respectful, competent adult in a dystopic
YA novel [4].
The costumes he devises are startling in their beauty and
innovation—they often feature fire in one form or another—and are
carefully designed to elicit certain strategic reactions from the
audience. In the second and third books, these costumes become overtly
political, but even in the first book, we are starting to see that these
costumes are not just a sort of disguise or passing, in which a poor
girl looks like a princess, but the seeds of opposition. At these
moments in which the Capitol seems to be in total control of the images
it broadcasts and the lives it cuts short, Cinna’s costumes actually
give Katniss a measure of power, turning her fear into confidence and
transforming her in the eyes of the nation into a dignified figure to be
reckoned with.
When fashion blogger Michael von Braithwaite
writes [5],
“You probably won’t want to dress like a dystopian hero every day, but
if you’re feeling down and out, slip on your Katniss look and stare down
every person you pass on the sidewalk,” he is being cheeky, but also at
some level recapitulating what seems to me to be Cinna’s lesson: that
clothes can work on us from the outside in, giving us confidence and
letting us feel what it is like to be the character we’re dressed up as.
And the series of extraordinary costumes in the Hunger Games trilogy
seems to me to give the lie to two assumptions about femininity and
power. The first is that the power of feminine beauty is predicated on
male attention and desirability. The second is that a girl’s political
power is as a symbol of vulnerability and innocence.
That is, when girls
lie down in front of tanks in the
West Bank [6], or when this country is galvanized watching the NYPD pepper-spray girls at
Occupy Wall Street [7],
we see the barbarism of the state in stark contrast. These assumptions
that the Hunger Games books upend are the very ones that underpin the
story of Esther: Esther
is powerful only insofar as she finds
favor in the king’s sight (“If I have found favor in thy sight, O king,”
she beseeches him, “let my life be given me at my petition”). And, to
make her plea to stop the massacre of Persia’s Jews, she
does
present herself as a personal, feminine symbol of her people’s
victimization (“we are sold, I and my people, to be destroyed”).
Thankfully, some 2,400 years later, and given an additional 1,100 pages
or so, a somewhat more nuanced heroine is possible. The Hunger Games
books suggest that beauty can, in itself, be a form of resistance and
self-possession, and, especially as the trilogy’s ideology becomes more
complex in the third book, Katniss is a heroic public figure not because
she is blameless, but because she is tough, brave, and well-dressed.
Regardless of the exact nature of the roles of their respective
heroines, though, what Purim and the Hunger Games share is an
understanding of the value of dressing up. If the Hunger Games trilogy
teaches us about the power of costume, Purim teaches us to push at the
lines between utopia, dystopia, and reality. When we listen to this
story of Esther becoming queen, of the fate of the Jews catapulting from
demise and triumph, and when we dress up as kings and queens, we are
tracing out the extremes of power in a society, mocking authority, and,
for a moment, feeling what it might be like to be the kings and queens
we’ll never be. Purim makes me want to believe that our fantasy lives
and our outfits matter, that inner transformation is both part of and
preparation for larger struggles, that political work can start with the
heart and the sewing machine.
Don’t break the rules just to help your kids get ahead. Teach them to be mensches by setting an example with your own behavior.
magazine online.A really interesting and current take on Purim. If you do not know the Hunger Games, you are not where 12-14 year-olds are. The books are a horribly bleak and nasty, but wonderfully written dystopian vision that involves children fighting to the death.Power Suits 