Both Shoshanna and Katniss are ideal commentators on the connections between media and the powers that be because they are exalted by a system they’d rather destroy. In Inglorious Basterds, Shoshanna also martyrs herself as entertainment spectacle, although her revenge scene is more protracted, more cathartic, and more gruesome – which is the sort of revelry in vigilante justice that viewers have come to expect from Tarantino films.
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The last thing viewers of the fictional “Hunger Games” TV show saw was her arrow (a similar image of Katniss aiming her bow was used when marketing the film). In destroying the entire spectacle, Katniss had made her marginalized existence central. Finally, both heroines are placed in a position to be simultaneously savvy yet reluctant centers of those same totalitarian regimes’ entertainment spectacles – which is what I want to talk about in this post.Īs I watched Katniss fling her last arrow towards the center of the coliseum, and the lights shut down as the building went up in flames, I couldn’t help but notice an affinity with the eloquent final scene of Inglorious Basterds. Similarly, both characters are separated from their families by totalitarian regimes. Though Catching Fire runs through a gamut of stylistic epochs, Katniss’s home in District 12 has an intentionally Hooverville 1930’s aesthetic, placing it in roughly the same period as Tarantino’s Nazi revenge flick Inglorious Basterds. readers, it’s good to be back! In my last post (way back in 2013), I remarked upon the similarity between characters Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013) and Shoshanna Dreyfus in Inglorious Basterds (2009). Note: contains spoilers for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Inglorious Basterds