Emotional Ethics of The Hunger Games

‘’The Hunger Games movies have become iconic symbols for resistance across the globe. Tarja Laine proposes that this is not caused by their status as exciting cinematic spectacles, but by their engaging our emotions. Laine uses The Hunger Games as key texts for understanding our world, demonstrating that ethics do not originate from rational considerations, far removed from those mucky things called emotions. But rather that emotions are at the core of cinematic ethics.” —William Brown, Author of Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age ‘’In this elegantly written exploration of the relationship between aesthetics and emotion in The Hunger Games trilogy, Tarja Laine illuminates the power of film to embody ethical conflict. Deftly interweaving film-philosophy and close analysis, Laine traces how these films mobilise complex emotions, nuancing our thinking about cinema and the spectator. Laine’s book takesThe Hunger Games films seriously, demonstrating with verve why they matter.” —Catherine Wheatley, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies, King’s College London, UK Emotional Ethics of The Hunger Games expands the ‘ethical turn’ in Film Studies by analysing emotions as a source of ethical knowledge in The Hunger Games films. It argues that emotions, incorporated in the thematic and aesthetic organization of these films, reflect a crisis in moral standards. As such they cultivate ethical attitudes towards such phenomena as totalitarianism, the culture of reality television, and the society of spectacle. The focus of the argument is on cinematic aesthetics, which expresses emotions in a way that highlights their ethical significance, running the gamut from fear through guilt and shame, to love, anger and contempt. The central claim of the book is that these emotions are symptomatic of some moral conflict, which renders The Hunger Games franchise a meaningful commentary on the affective practice of cinematic ethics. Tarja Laine is Assistant Professor in Film Studies at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her previous books include Bodies in Pain: Emotion and the Cinema of Darren Aronofsky (2015) and Feeling Cinema: Emotional Dynamics in Film Studies (2011).