Idle Movie Thoughts

Casting news for Catching Fire has begun in earnest, but I'm wondering if it's weird that I'm more curious to see who'll end up playing some of the older tributes than Johanna and Finnick. It's not surprising that most of the attention has been focused on the youngest of the potential new characters, the two whose facades are the most dynamic, but they're only two of the twenty-two representing what I think is one of the most compelling questions Suzanne Collins poses in the trilogy - when you win the Hunger Games, what does that really mean for the rest of your life? Only six of those twenty-two go unnamed or don't factor into the progression of the plot of Catching Fire, an inversion of the general namelessness of most of the kids who die in Katniss and Peeta's Games. They range in age from early-twenties to eighties. Some are addicts, some are emotionally unbalanced, some embrace their reputation as vicious killers, some acquiesce to whatever role the Capitol demands they play to stay under the radar and keep whatever they still hold dear safe. All have been forced to either shepherd a number of children to their deaths or to induct them into their fraternity of damaged ex-killers. Mockingjay delves more directly into the function of post-traumatic stress in the characters' lives, but Catching Fire offers a more interesting range of potential paths to adulthood as a former "winner."

In the casting of the Victors, part of me is really hoping for a quality similar to Montgomery Clift and Judy Garland's performances in 1961's Judgment at Nuremberg. Their casting as two witnesses in the trial is perhaps my favorite use of star persona of all time. As the movie recalls the past, so does it prompt the audience to recall Clift and Garland in their younger days and reconcile those images with the impact of age, substance abuse, Clift's car accident and the general effects of years spent in the Hollywood meat grinder. Later in the film, Spencer Tracy's character reviews the witnesses' files, and in looking at a photograph of Garland's character, observes wistfully, "She really was sixteen once, wasn't she?" Stanley Kramer doesn't show the photograph in a close up, but I don't think it's a stretch to think that the audience could readily supply an image at a time when television broadcasts of The Wizard of Oz were already in their early years of becoming an annual tradition.





There's so much potential in casting Catching Fire, not to create a false equivalency or one-to-one correlation between Hollywood and the Capitol, but to draw upon the similarities between two enterprises that unquestionably feed upon youth and take advantage of what film (popular culture?) offers as an adaptive medium. One of the things that I love about Woody Harrelson being cast as Haymitch is the fact that he really was in the public eye twenty-five years ago, an image of youth and guilelessness consumed by a large percentage of the nation's television viewers and syndicated around the world. How might the movie engage the audience on a different level by utilizing former child stars (while I know dream casting is mostly a fool's errand, I've decided that my dream casting for Beetee, who obviously would never, ever do it, is Ron Howard), or, for example, putting someone like Richard Roundtree or Fred Williamson in the role of Chaff?