I saw the Hunger Games movie last weekend. The original. Only 14 years late. I’m not a movie critic and this isn’t a review. This is an appreciation for the questions it tries to dramatize. Also, Lenny Kravitz.

The entire premise revolves around ‘suicidal empathy’.  Ironically, for those who hold this view, Katniss is less a virtuous hero than a ‘sucker’. When Katniss volunteers to take her younger sister’s place as Tribute, she is literally putting her own life at risk to safeguard another’s.

But to call her sacrifice ‘suicidal’ isn’t accurate. It’s an overstatement, since she has a non-zero chance to survive the Games and become a Victor.

As Orwell would say, ‘suicidal’ is Newspeak, to reference another dystopian fantasy. It is deliberately misstated to produce a desired effect – to discourage empathy. My kids accuse me of pedantry when I raise these kinds of objections, but it matters. Language matters. ‘Suicidal empathy’ is not literally suicidal. It may be incredibly risky. Chances of survival may seem remote. It may actually result in one’s own death. But none of that makes it suicidal.

Suicide is an action deliberately taken for the purpose of ending one’s life. By contrast, an action deliberately taken for some other purpose but that also puts one’s life in danger or jeopardy, even when death is known to be a likely outcome, is not suicide. And the distinction matters.

Brute utilitarians will sometimes argue that it does not matter how or why a death occurs because all deaths are identical outcomes, like points on a scoreboard. I use the ‘scoreboard’ metaphor intentionally, because this view treats moral choice like a game of wins and losses, winners and losers. It is guided by visions of rationality literally called ‘Game Theory’. The Trolley Problem. Lifeboat ethics. Survival of the fittest. Hunger Games.

But it’s a fantasy. It misinterprets reality. And this is something the movie does well: it bludgeons us with the artificiality of the ‘competition’. In the story-world, the consequences are real: kids really kill each other and are killed. But the conditions under which the life-and-death stakes are manufactured are completely made-up and therefore freely manipulated and micro-managed solely to benefit those already in power.

If one believes that all human lives are worthy of equal dignity, as I believe they are, it seems like a point of consistency to treat all deaths as equal losses. And in the sense that a human life has been lost, they are equal. Most classic rule-utilitarian views treat deaths this way. No human life – as a human life – is more or less valuable than any other, and so all human deaths – as the ending of a human life – are equal losses in the utilitarian calculus. Of course, most utilitarians are not classic rule-utilitarians so I’m not sure how helpful this point is.

But from the perspective of how or why a person dies, even from the rule-utilitarian view, not all deaths are the same. Some deaths (like some lives) happen in ways and for reasons that are more (or less) valuable than others. Just consider how differently people talk about a ‘needless’ death or the death of a child ‘with their whole life ahead of them’ versus an elderly person ‘who lived a good long time.’ It’s all too easy to all too often let that kind of language trick us into mistakenly believing that some lives are more valuable than others, but I’m arguing that is a different claim.

To use a crass analogy, every human life is equally valuable, like a $100 bill. But what each individual human does with that $100 bill (or has done to them) is not equally valuable. Some make good investments. Some get swindled or robbed. Some use it to benefit others. Some spend it all on themselves. How and why a person lives or dies is an important part of that secondary value assessment, even when the primary value is essentially, fundamentally, and unalterably equal.

I give the filmmakers credit for the way the early scenes in the Districts are shot. The camera is all over the place. It is beyond shaky. Some of the camera movements and cutaways are so wildly erratic as to be almost unintelligible and unwatchable. I did not like it. But it visually alludes to a sense of being violently displaced and pushed around by others against your will. In that it was powerful and effective.

My biggest takeaway continues to be the question of game theoretical ‘winning’. As I understand it, game theoretical rationality is all about maximizing or optimizing possible choices within a range defined by the rules of the game in order to achieve the desired outcome. But how does that work if the rules of the game keep changing?

There is plenty to dislike about the Capitol City folks who run the Hunger Games. They are so obviously vapid and shallow and casually cruel, with funny costumes too, that there is no possibility of mistaking them for anything other than ‘the bad guys’. But it’s also so over-the-top and on-the-nose that it comes across as a bit comic and silly.

My strongest negative reaction to them, however, was when they start changing the rules of the game itself. That’s not fair! For example, when they directly interfere to get Katniss to relocate, they don’t just start a forest fire, but they shoot balls of fire right at her. I’m not sure why it seems to me there is a difference there, but in a game where survival is victory, deliberately trying to kill a player by shooting at them is in a different league than starting a fire for them to escape from. I should know. I’m a Dungeon Master.

But the more interesting question is: which is a greater victory – to win a game according to its rules, or win a game when the rules keep changing?

Game theory presupposes a stable set of rules from which to optimize outcomes. As far as I know, game theory can’t function in a system in which the rules change. Or, if it did, it would have to assume a more fundamental set of rules that account for the rule changes in rational ways. If the rule changes are purely random or irrational, you might be able to adopt a very general strategy to minimize loss but optimization to maximize gain would seem impossible. Or maybe my ignorance is showing.

Katniss is the heroine of course because she plays by her own set of rules – better rules than the ones imposed on her by her society. The Hunger Games themselves have very few restrictions and only one victory condition: outlive all other competitors. But Katniss imposes ‘rules’ on herself to stay true to her own sense of who she is. She does not initiate violence. She only kills in self-defense or in defense of others, the only exception being when she fulfills a Tribute’s request for a ‘mercy killing’ when a more painful death was imminent.

Initially, Katniss preserves the lives of cooperative Tributes, but undermines the lives of competitive Tributes. However, the latter leads to loss. The one time she clearly takes initiative to act as aggressor is to destroy the supplies of the dominant tribe of killer Tributes. But this aggression leaves her only ally at the time undefended and her ally is killed. The ‘lesson’ seems to be that any aggressive action is inherently risky, with the costs likely outweighing any supposed benefits. Assuming she learns that lesson, we could add another rule to her list: don’t risk offensive actions, play defense only.

But does she survive despite these self-imposed restrictions or because of them? And to what extent is survival her goal? If Katniss increases her odds of survival by imposing certain ‘moral’ limits on herself despite these not being required by the rules of the game, then those limits can be seen as adaptations for fitness within her (artificially) competitive environment. But if her self-imposed restriction decrease her odds of survival and she survives anyway, then either her survival is just a statistical fluke, a chance outlier (which undermines her role as heroine) or Katniss as an individual is so much more fit than all other competitors because she wins despite her self-imposed disadvantages (making her a more worthy victor?).

And how does this relate to the Hunger Games tagline – “May the odds be ever in your favor”? What kind of victory would we most aspire to achieve for ourselves or reward in others?

Katniss last ‘move’ in the Hunger Games is satisfying because it works strategically on a few different levels at once. Her motivations are mixed, as are her personal ‘victory conditions’. I’m probably overthinking it, but what does Katniss think it means to ‘win’? There are a few different possibilities.

Most straightforwardly, the ‘victory condition’ imposed on her by the Game is ‘outlive all others.’ Part of what makes this condition interesting is that it is assumed to align with our ‘natural’ human evolutionary motivation to survive. But Katniss also recognizes that, as a human, she can also choose a different (possibly non-evolutionary?) motivation, or at least place limits on the instinct to survive at any cost. So she pursues her own survival, but within self-imposed restrictions: 1) she will not kill (or take offensive measures) unless necessary for defense of self or others. And 2) she will help (at least some) cooperative others to also survive, even when it puts her own survival at risk.

If it turns out to be impossible to both honor 1) and 2), and also ‘win’ the Games, it seems Katniss would consider it a personal ‘victory’ to honor 1) and 2) and ‘lose’ the Games.

There is an additional factor, explicitly stated by Woody/Haymitch, the past Games victor: to ‘show up’ the Capitol City monsters who impose the Games by defying them or denying them what they want. Katniss’ final ‘move’ does this, too. So it is an over-determined strategy, which satisfies all 3 conditions at once. That’s good story-telling. It makes us as readers/viewers have to parse her motives ourselves to make sense of her as a character.

Ironically, it comes back to suicide. When she tells Peeta to ‘trust’ her, Katniss seems to know that the GameMasters won’t let them kill themselves and deny the Games its victor(s). But that doesn’t mean her motive is to win the Games. Her real victory is getting the GameMasters to directly intervene – telling them to “STOP!” – because of her actions. She forces their hand and thereby shows her power over them. That she does so in a way in which faithfulness to her won values just so happens to align with her own survival and victory is bonus.

I’ve already written too much about this, so I may as well add one more thing. The creative alignment between Katniss’ values and the arbitrary rewards of her corrupt society is the biggest fantasy of all. Not that it doesn’t ever happen, but we shouldn’t expect it to. In so far as we take away from Katniss’ example that if we stay true to our values we will somehow also ‘win’ by the standards of our corrupt society, we will forever be disappointed. That’s why – even if her values fully account for her ‘victory’ in the Games – the victory itself can’t be her highest good or goal. Otherwise, she would abandon her values to ‘win’ the victory.

It’s the same with my argument about the evolutionary benefits of following Jesus. If we only follow Jesus because of the benefits we think we will gain (whatever those may be – health, wealth, peace, happiness, joy, community, etc.) we will be tempted to abandon following Jesus when we either do not experience those benefits or become convinced that they can be better experienced some other way. Part of the radical nature of this evolutionary step is that it cannot be taken as an evolutionary step.

This is also why Jesus speaks in terms of ‘eternal life’ and an afterlife of rewards and punishments. Aside from any metaphysical commitments regarding the nature or reality of an ‘afterlife’ the concept alone functions as a counter-weight to the pull of all other ‘earthly rewards’.

There is something of this in Katniss’ final move to risk suicide – even if she dies and loses the Games, she will have stayed true to her values no matter the cost. But in her case, in the movie, she seems fairly certain that the GamesMasters won’t let her die. I do not have the same assurance. The best my dim reflections on the reality of the afterlife can manage is not certainty, but uncertainty and faith. And even when I lack faith, I’m comforted by the fact that love is greater than faith. If there is a God and an afterlife and my faith is too weak to believe it, I still trust that God’s love is too strong to let me miss it.