Earlier this year there was a moment in time that might be regarded as quite possibly the lowest point that contemporary television has ever sunk in order to gain viewers. The exact moment took place during an episode of Fear Factor wherein contestants where challenged to dive deep into a vat of cow's blood to retrieve, with their mouths, a collection of cow's hearts that could then be passed to their partners' mouths and then spat into a smaller container. Yet, no matter how incredibly tasteless and disgusting this program was it unfortunately doesn't stand out amongst what has become a sea of appalling and culture-warping programming that appears on American television sets in an hourly fashion.
Gary Ross's film adaptation of Suzanne Collins's popular novel The Hunger Games features an even more disquieting world wherein children are selected by a totalitarian government, run by an aristocratic and distant capitol city, to fight each other to the death in a giant televised arena. Like any good science fiction story, The Hunger Games attempts to present a not-so-unfamiliar world that is just unbelievable enough to remove it from reality while still allowing its audience to utilize it as a cultural mirror back onto their own lives.
