Hunger Games Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Hunger Games - Essay Example The plotting of the previous release covers the disparity in power between formerly thirteen districts but currently twelve and the capitol, which ideally represents power (Collins, 3-18). The capitol district capitol represents the source of power or influence and which is depicted to rule over the rest of the districts. Poverty, hunger and general misery is shown to dominate the twelve districts while great wealth and technological advancement is what characterizes the capitol district. As a way of executing the power, the capitol district invents a mechanism through which food and such other humanitarian aid would be advanced to the rest of the districts through the ‘hunger games’, which are conducted annually. Every district therefore selects young representatives who would participate in fighting contests and the winner defines the district, which will receive the food aid over the year. The capitol district is therefore shown to have the capacity and power to advan ce food aid to the rest of the districts at will though this is not the case. The program to involve the districts in the hunger games is shown through the literature to be informed by the selfish ambitions of the power district to rule through oppression. In the movie (catching the fire), Peeta as well as Katniss comes back home after they are crowned victors in hunger games for the year. However, winning the 74th games meant that the duo would leave family as well as friends as they embarked on a countrywide tour, which is called ‘victors tour’ and involves visiting all the districts in the country. On the day that the journey was to commence, the president ‘Snow’ visits the 12th district unexpectedly and had to express his disappointment with Katniss for having broken the game rules within the previous annual games in which the two won. Snow’s anger was triggered by the defiance of Katniss’s rebellion, which he blamed to have triggered rebe llion among natives in the country (Panem). Nevertheless, the tour commences and the two starts at district 11 where after addressing and congratulating the citizens for their participation in the previous games, horror strikes when one three men are executed after one whistled a familiar tune to many. Among other motives in their travel, tour around the districts was to curtail rebellion and make peace between president snow and Katniss, which never materializes. After winding up the tour and returning home, two district 8 runways reveal Katniss that unlike what was said of district 13, the inhabitants had not been wholly wiped off but that they rather adopted underground shelters where they lived. This leads to announcement of 75th annual games, which was to involve the victors of the previous 24 matches. The common name to such games was ‘Quarter Quell’ and the two victors (Peeta and Katniss) individually commit to protect each other within the games. The movie unfol ds and the fight happens within the jungle and despite many deaths, which claims the live of Peeta, Katniss succeeds to direct lightening towards the ‘force field’ having the arena and wholly destroys it. However, she is equally harmed by the force and she paralyzes temporarily only to wake in district 13. It is also revealed to her that district 12 had been destroyed through bombing but the reporting friend safely rescued her family. The main thematic expressions of the movie

Consciousness Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Consciousness - Essay Example This is disturbing only if we assume that states of consciousness are mutually exclusive. Insofar as the same subject can experience different forms of consciousness (dreams and waking reality) they need not be mutually exclusive; rather, the fear is that a totally different worldview, and therefore a totally different mode of operating in the world, may be appropriate. For example, it would be unsettling if someone managed to convince us that feudalism is the correct worldview and therefore the correct modus operandi. Our defence of the current worldview (industrial capitalism) would be motivated not only by apprehensions of the alteration in our individual condition (from factory-owner to serf) but perhaps even more by our belief in the props (e.g. belief in free speech and free enterprise) of the current worldview. Our values and beliefs are ultimately determined by our social existence; our knowledge of the world is based on our social relations and conditions. The thesis he posited in contradistinction to Rene Descartes' "Cogito ergo sum" and which is central to Karl Marx's body of work is that "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness" (Critique of Political Economy 2). Existence itself does not depend on consciousness, much less on meta- consciousness; neither does life or productivity depend on consciousness. Rather, given a certain social structure and an individual's relations to it, subjective consciousness arises from physical reality. Physical reality encompasses everyday material activity (Burke 3), which is determined by the configuration of the individual or socioeconomic class in the current relations of production. An early 21st century American farmer's consciousness arises from the sum of all the activities and relationships he enters as a farmer (planting with a seed-drill, selling his grain to a corporate miller, buying seeds from a transnational biotechnology giant); it is different from the consciousness of the miller or the biotech company, and also from that of a farmer in Soviet Russia. It is different and unique not only because of his position in a salient mode of production (industrial capitalism versus socialism), but also, and equally importantly, because of the non-economic institutions that reflect and propagate that mode of production. Thus the early 21st century American farmer's consciousness is determined also by the media, the church, the system of education, the family - in short, by all that can be summed up as 'culture.' Althusser calls these cultural institutions the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) - in contrast to the Repressive State Apparatuses (Althusser 3) which operate by direct force (law, police, army). The ISAs grow up on the base of the mode of production, reflect it, and reinforce it; they represent the ideology of the dominant mode of production. This is true of every human society under every mode or production: it can be understood, not as a conspiracy (Burke 4), but as reflections in ideology of the mode of production. By reflecting the mode of production, ideology also propagates it: every time the status quo is mirrored in culture (e.g. in advertisements or