New Catching Fire Trailer and Posters

[penfold_x]

Of all the books, Catching Fire is my favorite, so I'm almost vibrating with excitement over the release of a new trailer yesterday at San Diego Comic Con, and the chance to see our named victors in their arena costumes.

Some thoughts I had watching the new trailer:

* The Victor's Village is smaller than I expected, and the houses are much grander than I imagined. Kind of a McMansion development that didn't think hard enough about green space. So, from that perspective, it probably is the Village the Capitol would build.

* The scenes of the Hob burning are very dramatic! What's just an off-screen moment in the book is going to be a very dramatic sequence. I love that the film adaptation gives us the chance to see things outside of Katniss's perspective, and I'm really looking forward to more of these moments.

* That shot of the crowd surging forward during the tour (at 0:53)... is that District 3? Oh, please, let it be so! (Alternately, I'm guessing it's District 5, which I would also not mind seeing.)

* Is it just my imagination, or do the shots of the Capitol look bigger and broader than those used in The Hunger Games? I don't expect Catching Fire has a substantially bigger budget (I think Lionsgate expected THG to be a hit and funded accordingly), so I'm not sure why that would be.

* The look between Effie and Katniss at 1:16 is exquisite.

* OMG, the interview set! Am I the only one tortured by the fact that all the victors are there, but the screen size/resolution is too small to get real detail? (Why does District 6 look like they've escaped from the Matrix?)

* The actresses playing Enobaria and Johanna look fantastic. Not quite what I imagined (I pictured Enobaria with darker skin and a buzzcut), but true threats.

* Following Katniss's lift out of the stockyard into the arena could not be more breathtaking.

The victor posters were originally distributed separately to various websites, but Empire Online has posted all of them. The casting of District 3 is particularly important to me (headcanon, I haz it). I am really pleased with the choice of accomplished character actors Amanda Plummer and Jeffrey Wright as Wiress and Beetee. Plummer seems especially right to me, given the niche she's carved out for herself playing the tiny, soft-spoken women with the crazy eyes (if you have the opportunity, check out her Emmy-winning guest shot on The Outer Limits, "A Stitch in Time").

Comments

District Three Headcanon, Part the Second

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* District 3 has an intense set of exams that rank children, determine their educational opportunities, and eventually, career. I think D3 tries to manufacture genius as well as technology. Like D1, I think D3 is expected to not just manufacture what's requested, but to continue to innovate and develop new technologies to please the Capitol. To this end, it’s important for D3 to try to identify, cultivate, and expand the population at the top of the intelligence bell curve. Students should be motivated to do their best and seek as much education as possible based on the relative desirability of a career in research/engineering, but even so, D3 has limited resources and needs a way to figure out which of the students to put its greatest effort into developing. I can see D3 distributing benefits such as tutoring, technological aides, and higher education (which the Capitol would never ‘waste’ on factory laborers) on the basis of periodic examination of students. So, in my head, from a young age, D3 education uses ‘ability tracking’ system, teacher evaluations and examinations to sort students into a hierarchy of groups, which I have not-so-creatively named alpha, beta, gamma, delta and epsilon (belatedly, I realized this has certain parallels to Brave New World; I prefer to call these parallels an ‘homage’ rather than ‘rip-off’). This system can be a positive for the highly intelligent child of factory workers who might not have had the resources to succeed without a system in place to identify the child as gifted and to direct resources to him/her, but for most of the population, it’s limiting. There are few positions available in the top tier; fail to make a high enough group and you won’t even be considered for a non-factory job. The extreme high-stakes nature of this testing means D3 has a cramming culture that rivals Japan or China.

* District 3 is the anti-career district; they purposefully shield their most capable children from reaping. If D3 has a relatively large population and is directing additional resources toward developing the most gifted (to keep pace with the expectations of the Capitol), on cold calculation, it makes sense to attempt to prevent the most intellectually capable children from being reaped. There’s only a few extremely bright children in any given age group, and, while intelligence counts for something, their odds in the arena are still long: unlike D4 or D7, the main industry of D3 doesn’t provide children with quasi-fighting skills (or even a particular level of physical fitness), and given the urban nature of the district, provides no easy way to train them for the type of survival skills that could help them make it in the nature-based arenas (which I think comprise the vast majority of the arenas we’ve seen or the characters have described). In my head, D3 provides a ‘supplemental nutrition program’ to all alpha-ranked children. Ostensibly the program promotes intellectual development by ensuring the children have adequate nutrition, but it’s a thinly veiled effort to ensure the brightest children never sign up for tesserae. Although it serves the purposes of the Capitol for D3 to protect and develop the brightest children, D3 strongly suspects the Capitol has rigged drawings to punish the district after labor incidents or other failures, and to remind the intellectual elite that the privileges they enjoy at the top of D3’s hierarchy are gifts from the Capitol that can be removed at any time.

Re: District Three Headcanon, Part the Second

[lorata.livejournal.com]

So basically D3 is a weird sort of meritocracy, where you can only get so high because otherwise the Capitol comes swooping in with its giant hammer and smashes everyone back down. How secret is this, because I can see it kind of like the Career districts where it's vaguely hush-hush, people know about it and the Capitol has given support, but at the same time they're not open about how extensive it is -- and maybe even LESS so because intellect is power and the Capitol, as Gandalf says, does not share power.

I like the idea of class mobility being relegated to intellect/academic performance/innovation, which greater increases the kind of class/intellectual divide I mentioned in the other one. You're smarter than the others, you're rewarded for being smart, and they stay in the factories because they're not as smart as you etc. But meanwhile I assume with that kind of upward mobility the pressure to stay at the top and keep innovating would be kind of insane.

I TOTALLY agree that they would want to keep their children out of the Reaping, I mean, come on, what a darned waste, and I think the Capitol would allow that because, yeah, they want people to keep building them new shiny things. There will always be more miners and quarriers and lumberjacks, but not so many genius engineers. HOWEVER like you said, that doesn't mean that D3 has any level of security -- like any district with privilege it's a curse in its own way. At least D11 knows where they stand at all times.

Re: District Three Headcanon, Part the Second

[penfold-x.livejournal.com]

So basically D3 is a weird sort of meritocracy, where you can only get so high because otherwise the Capitol comes swooping in with its giant hammer and smashes everyone back down.

Yes, though I think there’s also just basically a ceiling of how well you’re going to be able to do in D3 (or any other district), because of how crazy-pants the organization of Panem is. Like other totalitarian states, Panem is sacrificing the economic growth (and the prosperity and human flourishing that accompany that growth) and engaging in debilitating levels of social control in order to maintain a power order. All the districts are much poorer than they need to be, and I imagine that life in D3 (like the other middle-range districts), even for those at the ‘top,’ reflects that unnecessary poverty. For example, I imagine that most factory workers can’t afford most of the technology that’s manufactured there, and even the scientists are limited in what they can afford.

Also, I imagine the Capitol exerts control over areas of research/study. For example, I imagine that the Capitol permits pretty much unlimited exploration of science and engineering, but has no interest in and significantly curtails study of the humanities (no sitting around contemplating the inalienable rights of man, or whatnot). I imagine a lot of directives from the Capitol, through state- or privately owned industry, for certain types of research projects, some of which are the bane of the scientist class (e.g., explaining the impossibility of perpetual motion machines to people who have never heard ‘no’ in their lives and have the power to ruin you). I also imagine that the Capitol maintains a rather tight control on ownership of the science and technology firms, through either nationalization of certain industries or prohibiting ownership of R/D or manufacturing firms by non-Capitol citizens, etc (which would, I think, be necessary in all the urban districts, to prevent any district from eventually becoming an economic rival).

Re: District Three Headcanon, Part the Second

[penfold-x.livejournal.com]

How secret is this, because I can see it kind of like the Career districts where it's vaguely hush-hush, people know about it and the Capitol has given support, but at the same time they're not open about how extensive it is -- and maybe even LESS so because intellect is power and the Capitol, as Gandalf says, does not share power.

Yes, I think they’re somewhat similar (especially the food aid, which has to be a kind of wink-and-a-nod program similar to the Athletic and Personal Growth Center), though I also imagined the academic stratas as a factor that dominated D3 childhood but became mostly irrelevant as individuals moved from study to work. In my headcanon, I pictured the labeling a pervasive and high stakes element of schooling, up to the teen years, where at around 16 or 18, you go to your final round of testing, and you’re either selected for higher education or placed into vocational training (both of which I picture as being funded and controlled by the Capitol). Theoretically only school officials, the education bureaucracy, parents and students know their precise label, but it’s probably relatively easy to sort out from a child’s advancement through the curriculum and other circumstances (for example, I imagine science fairs are all the rage in D3, and that there are a lot of other competitions, with public results).

Children tracked for vocational training end schooling by 19 and are placed in the factories, where, once you’re in, there’s basically no ladder out: organizations presume that the government tracked you correctly and so even if you want to move up, you likely won’t be considered because you don’t have the ‘right’ educational background. Due to space constraints, Panem’s district specialization system, restrictions on ownership and general poverty, there’s not a lot of options outside the factories (you could design the equivalent of the personal computer in your spare time, but Steve Jobs without a free market and stable democracy is, unfortunately, just a guy with a hobby).

Children tracked in the upper stratas begin to receive aid from the first round of testing that indicates their status, and receive the aid so long as they maintain the status. Most children are going to proceed through typical schooling alongside children in the lower stratas, but tracked into more advanced classes and moving forward based on ability level rather than age. Eventually, they’re selected for higher education, in the form of a technical school or university. The exceptions are the alpha-ranked children; from as young as 12, they move to the National Science Academy, a college within the University of Panem’s main D3 campus.

I think the Capitol is aware of the potential threat of cultivating a crop of geniuses, but also wants the technological goodies, and so tries to mitigate the threat by controlling areas of study, access to economic capital, and, as you suggested, food instability. As you noted, I think its part of a pattern of how the Capitol maintains control: tight control on food in the urban districts, lack of technology/education in the resource-rich districts, and of course, persistently playing the districts against each other through the Games.

But meanwhile I assume with that kind of upward mobility the pressure to stay at the top and keep innovating would be kind of insane.

For the students, especially those on the cusp between one tier and another, I think it’s absolutely manic, and results in the widespread abuse of ‘study aid’ drugs (which have caused some D3 tributes to crash in the arena). For the adults, I think it’s like a professorship with a never-ending tenure review: not nearly as bad as the acute pressure of zero-sum testing, but still, a continuous drive to research, improve, meet specific goals, etc. Certainly enough for the scientists and factory workers to share a common enmity for the Capitol.