A couple of thoughts on Mockingjay Part One and the nature of heroism

I’m conscious that this is a children’s literature blog and I don’t want to start segueing off into telling you about what I had for dinner or things like that, but I do want to tell you a little bit about Mockingjay Part One.

The film is an adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ novel Mockingjay (part of it – it’s been split into two films) and it is rather blindingly awfully brilliant. I saw it last night and can’t quite shake that dark pained truth that it has; that way that it situates stillness against rage and pain against love. Love, as President Snow knows, is destructive. Deathly.”it’s the things we love most that destroy us.”

Jennifer Lawrence is the raging anti-centre of these films. She is the Mockingjay; this figure isolated, this totemic individual that says a thousand things with just the look of her eyes and the shift of her body. Her stillness is immense.

Is Katniss likable? To me, yes. Immensely so.  She is a hero. She is heroic. She fights for what she believes in, even though she may not know what she’s fighting for. Freedom? Love? Hope? She is the after-effect of a former world, she is the impact of the Hunger Games, she is not the same person she once was. She is a teenage girl but she’s more than that and less than that, all at the same time.

She is a hero. A complex messed up individual who stands for something deep and strong and hopeful and shameful all at the same time. A dilemma of sorts encapsulated in a stubborn, bruised shell of a person.

Heroism. Dark blues, greys and blacks; a colour spectrum of heroism encapsulated in the muddy tones of a film bedding in to say big things and horrible things and necessary things and awful, timely, relevant things.

I think of heroism a lot with young adult literature. I think that that framing of a person in the centre of a dialogue, of a narrative, is in a way creating heroes. A centre of story, a breaker against the tide.

And I think that reading that narrative is heroic, I think that every time you pick up a book you’re creating a little intervention in the narrative of the everyday. You are sticking your hand up, marking your flag in the sand, stopping in your way down the road of your life to say – this matters. This moment matters, right here, this story I am engaging with, this moment of text and I.

And that story, right there, that involves a thousand moments of heroism. A redefinition of heroism, no – perhaps a wider interpretation of heroism is required. The heroic nature of the young adult protagonist; the mark of placing themselves against the world and fighting to hold onto it.

I love Katniss. I love what she is. I love that she is. Complex, brave, shattered women exist.

Heroes exist.

We should not ignore that.