May The Odds Be Ever in Your Favor

Whenever we talk about representation, we’re usually talking about… The good things. 

Greater diversity in fiction. types of relationships that we don’t usually see on TV. Family structures, hard conversations, even just who gets naked.

Those are all the types of representation we tend to talk about.

I love TV so much that I write about it weekly whether anyone wants me to or not, so you’re never going to hear me say that we shouldn’t have that kind of representation.

But there’s another kind of important representation.

The ways that fiction can show us our worst selves, confirm our worst suspicions, and yeah… make us feel shitty. In a way that can move us to change.

For example.

When I lived in Washington DC, I had a lot of psychological issues that I was not addressing.

Luckily, a lot of young professional people have psychological issues they’re not addressing, when they live in Washington DC, so no one really seemed to mind.

For a lot of my early 20s, I would go to parties, get really drunk, and start a conversation kind of like this:

Me: so what kind of TV and movies do you like?

Unsuspecting Stranger Doing Some Sort of Social Justice Work: Well, I just saw the Hunger Games, and I thought it was really fun. 

Me: That’s cool. You know you’re not Katniss, right?

Unsuspecting Stranger: ...Sorry, what?

Me: Like... we all literally live in the Capitol.

We’re not Katniss. If there’s a Revolution, or any change... like, we’re maybe Effie Trinket at best.

Unsuspecting Stranger: Uh, okay. Nice to meet you, gotta go. 

Me: I SAID we’re complicit in all of this do you hear me?!!!

So first of all, sorry to everyone I did this to over the course of 5 years.

I hope you enjoyed the rest of the party.

As you probably can guess, my weird obsession with others’ feelings on the Hunger Games had nothing to do with them. 

At this point in time, I was doing a lot of “movement PR” for people dealing with a lot of shit I never will have to deal with, not even if society turned into the hunger games like, tomorrow. Things like losing a child to police brutality, being incarcerated, having a parent detained at the border.* Painful hard things. 

And my job, at least the way I conceived of it, was to “help tell their story.” 

Except I had no idea how to tell their story.

It wasn’t just because I didn’t know how the media worked, what news anchors were looking for, or what the words “trauma informed,” meant at that time.

It was also because… every single day, every single time I talked to someone, no matter how many times we worked together on a press release or their “spokesperson story,” I was stunned.

Sometimes people would tell me something that happened to them, some thing horrible, and… I just wouldn’t say anything. I had nothing to say. So I would sort of smile, frozen, and say something like “OK, that’s great. But I don’t think we should put it in the talking points.“

Anyway, if you know anything about the hunger games, you’re probably starting to see why I got weirdly obsessed with Effie Trinket. 

(Also because dystopia loves to make gay people the face of the decadence of the empire.)

Effie Trinket, to summarize the hunger games in a nutshell, is the Capitol PR representative assigned to help resting bitch face trauma symptom queen Katniss Everdeen and her boyfriend navigate the world of capitol reality show PR. 

And damn — she really doesn’t get it, man.

She makes obnoxious comments about how ugly it is in District 12 (it’s a police state). She is fixated on appearances, saying the right thing, and playing the game. The Hunger Games ha ha duh yes, but also the game of: surviving in politics, saying the right things at the right time to get what you want.

She is obsessed with the narrative, and sort of oblivious to the actual experiences Katniss is describing.

You get the impression she might also kind of suck at her job, since she often mentions that doing PR for District 12 is a less than ideal placement. But that could also be because of nepotism in the Captiol. (It’s always so hard to tell.)

When the revolution DOES come? 

She ends up in prison. 

Her worldview is shaken up, so much so that Katniss feels bad for her, or so she tells Julianne Moore, the Science Fiction Lenin in this scenario. Julianne Moore is like OK, whatever, let’s bomb some supply lines.

I spent a long time not really dealing with the recognition I felt whenever Elizabeth Banks showed up in those stupid movies.

I was so consumed by not dealing with it, that I never really noticed who else is in that movie.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman! RIP.

He plays a character equally consumed by narrative, native to the Capitol and a power elite even by Capitol standards. 

The difference between him and Effie Trjnket? 

He knows he has power, and he shares what he knows. 

It wasn’t until one day, while sitting in an H&M in LA bearing witness to my friend coworker compulsively buying shoes that I realized this.

“So what do you think I should do about going on TV?”she asked me, holding up a three dollar pair of silver handwarmers to compare them to the ones she just put in her cart that were gold.

“Oh… I don’t know. It’s your story, “I said, shifting around nervously.

She took her attention off of the hand warmers for a second to look at me, irritated. 

“OK H. That’s fine. But… you do know. You do have a sense of what you think I should do. And not saying those things? It’s not helpful.”

My fixation, obsession, with being the bad guy, or at least, the clueless PR guy, was just as harmful as any other story of self.

In other words: there’s nothing like worrying about being an Effie Trinkett to make you act like one.

• H PS — If you can think of a joke that references Elizabeth Banks self-produced and self-funded Charlie’s Angels reboot… I beg you… send it to me.**As is so often is the case, many of the people I met at these parties had, I found out when I got to know them better, experienced many of these same things! You truly do not know anything about a person when you meet them, no matter what your expectations or projections tell you. Wild!