may the rose be ever in your favor
This Week in Reading
The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins
I’ve been rereading The Hunger Games in the weeks leading up to the election. It would seem an obvious allegory for the political toxins seeping from every crevice of America, but what the series reminded me of was not fascism and partisan divisions, but a similarly ancient, morally corrupt institution: The Bachelorette franchise.
In The Bachelorette, like The Hunger Games, dozens of contestants (or should we call them Tributes) enter the mansion/arena, and only one victor makes it to the end. Alliances are formed, bromances bloom, but there is an unspoken understanding that one friend’s success hinges on the elimination of the other. (Another essay for another day: for a show ostensibly promoting romantic monogamy, it is perhaps one of the most widely distributed depictions of polyamory in mainstream media, but I digress). In The Hunger Games, roses are synonymous with the wicked President Snow, who uses their scent to mask the blood on his breath. On The Bachelorette, they are symbols of destiny itself— men finding themselves without a blossom at the end of the night are escorted from the premises, their journey cut short.
Each season of the games is a contained story arc, complete with their own star: the victorious tribute or couple. But the institutions that perpetuate the games are bigger and stronger than any individual stars that may rise to fame through them. This is proven by the way these stars’ relevance is inextricably, eternally, tied to the franchise, no matter how many Instagram followers they accrue. In the same way that Elizabeth’s name is preceded by “Queen” more frequently than it is followed by “Windsor”, Colton is known as From-the-Bachelor more than he is by his legal surname. In Panem, it is no different. Katniss leaves the games a star, but she has no career beyond being the victor of the 74th Hunger Games. Her role as a public figure is not dissimilar to the lives of many former-Bachelor-contestants-turned-influencers, complete with a tabloid friendly fake-romance.
Tributes are bound by a series of rules, but ultimately, there are no rules. The structure of The Bachelorette insists that each week will conclude with a rose ceremony, but in reality, even this sacred ritual seems to be totally at the whims of the production staff— ceremonies are cancelled, eliminated contestants brought back to the mansion in a stretch limo a week after they had been sent home, additional roses procured when the lead just can’t bear to make a choice. In the Hunger Games arena the rules are mutable in the hands of the Gamemakers. Even the most steadfast of laws: there can only be one winner—is changed halfway through the Games to allow a pair of tributes from the same district to share the title—only to be reversed at the last minute, ensuring a brutal finale.
The stated goals of The Hunger Games and The Bachelorette are purportedly very different: the former aims to maintain the Capitol’s control by forcing district children to murder one another, the latter hopes to marry off a beautiful young woman. But in truth, these two series share the same goal: to entertain and transfix an outside audience in order to preserve these institutions into perpetuity. Everything, even the victors of the games themselves, are expendable in the face of that mission.
The façade crumbles under the opposition of a rebel star. In The Hunger Games this takes the form of Katniss Everdeen and in the case of The Bachelorette, manifests as the blonde, 39-year-old hottie, Clare Crawley. [Disclaimer: I have an absolutely gigantic crush on Clare and her generically hot MILF-y energy and this absolutely will influence my extremely non-objective analysis moving forward.]
When she threatens a double suicide in the final moments of the game, Katniss realizes that her opponent is not the other teens locked in the arena, but the arena itself. Death is not only expected, it is the goal of the Hunger Games—but intentionally eating poisonous berries is not an approved avenue for achieving death. The Gamemakers must halt the game before achieving the alleged goal of the games (killing a tribute) in order to preserve the true goal of the games (perpetuating the institution of the games themselves).
Similarly, the purported aim of The Bachelorette is for the season’s lead to Find True Love, culminating with a proposal and an enormous diamond ring from Neil Lane. But when our intrepid lead, Clare, dares to find true love TOO SOON, all hell breaks loose. Thirty seconds after Dale exits the limo she turns to the camera and literally swoons. It’s love at first sight! She cancels rose ceremonies and refuses to hand out group-date roses on group-dates that Dale is not on. In finding love—again, the literal goal of the show— she has broken all of the other rules of the franchise— diverged from the production approved pacing and plot devices. Some viewers, like me, love Clare’s rebellion, but much of Bachelor Nation lambasts her on Twitter, claiming she is the worst Bachelorette of all time. And with that the gig is up. The goal of the show was never for our generically beautiful tributes to find love; it is to protect the institution of the show itself. By falling in love in a matter of weeks (Days? Hours? Time at La Quinta Resort and Spa is a frozen hourglass), Clare has inadvertently proven that she does not need “the process” to select a husband, does not need months of rose ceremonies and hometown dates and helicopter rides over Portuguese farm lands to find the One. This simply will not do. The Gamemakers swoop in to save face, sending a PA to nasal swab Tayshia post haste.
Congratulations, Chris Harrison tells Clare sternly, you’ve just blow up the Bachelorette. The rebellion must be squelched, but squelched so seamlessly that the divergence is erased from the audience’s memory. Chris Harrison, embodying a police detective on a crime show if the police detective was a total pussy, interrogates the blissful couple about if they had been in contact before the show started. Have they lied to Bachelor Nation? Broken the sacred Rules of the Process? It is eerily reminiscent of Katniss and Peeta’s pseudo-romance that they must peddle during their post-game public appearances—only the purity of lovestruck teens could excuse the way they had undermined of the system. Yes, the Bachelorette gives her a sympathetic edit, paints it as unprecedented ardor that shuts Clare’s season down after a mere four episodes—as if production didn’t put a ring into a hapless Dale’s hand and command him to propose two weeks after meeting her. There is no purpose in rushing them into a premature betrothal, except to salvage the institution, to open an emergency exit and shoo Clare and her disobedience off of primetime television, and usher Tayshia, utterly charming, perfectly compliant Tayshia, on to replace her. Chris Harrison’s questioning of the couple’s honor is even more hypocritical when you realize that one season earlier, production knowingly cast a woman that had hooked up with the Bachelor in a hotel before the season began. But, I guess, the rules don’t matter if the institution breaks them.
Stars rise and fade but the institution is forever.
Further Reading:
I found the characters slightly more aggravating a decade later, but thought the books were as engrossing as ever. I followed them up by trying to read the new prequel that just came out this year and it was……so bad. Like, unreadably bad. Self indulgent and boring and ridiculously long, I gave up halfway through. Hard pass.
If you are looking for some other dystopian fiction, I found both Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel and Severance by Ling Ma to be very absorbing, though they are both about…global pandemics…so not exactly “escapist literature”.
P.S.
Thank you so so much for the outpouring of romance novel recommendations you all sent me! My library hold list is well stocked for the rest of the year.