From the newly released prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes to The Mockingjay, both the Hunger Games movies and books have captivated modern audiences who often recognize chilling parallels between Suzanne Collins’ dystopian world to real life events. Panem may be a fictional world, but it grants us devastating insights into the ways love, revolution, resistance, and war play out in real life. Here are some of the most crucial lessons viewers learn about how narcissists and psychopaths view power, love, and the state of humanity throughout the series.
Love Is Viewed As Ownership And A War Tactic – There Is No Good Deed Unless It’s for Image
In the book The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Coriolanus Snow is an orphan of war who has sadistic and psychopathic tendencies – a young man who will do anything for money and power. This is the villain “origin story” that many readers want to know. In matters of love as well as friendship, the book reveals how narcissists and psychopaths use the appearance of love as a means to an end, rather than as a powerful motive for deeper connection. In contrast to how the “rebels” throughout the Hunger Games series are motivated by love to survive (illustrated most powerfully in Katniss’ love for Peeta and Primrose, causing her to take on many risks and sacrifices) and wage a revolution against the Capitol to regain the integrity and freedom of their people, “love” in the hands of narcissists and psychopaths becomes just another war tactic in the rise to power, and any casualties, no matter how horrific, are considered insignificant and “necessary” to meet one’s goals.
Snow and Alma: Psychopaths in Power and Two Sides of the Same Coin
To better understand the significance of the Hunger Games and of revolution in the prequel, we first need to also remember how Snow’s burgeoning ideas advance into a tyrannical regime and the price that is paid when narcissists and psychopaths rise to power in the rest of the series. Fast-forwarding to the “future,” this is demonstrated palpably in President Snow’s terrifying tactics throughout the Hunger Games series to subdue rebellion and threaten the rebels with the loss of their loved ones. Civilians are starved as they are exploited, cutting off access to food and resources even as they perform labor to provide for the wealthy Capitol. Rebels are painted as “The Other,” and uprisings in the Capitol are met with cruel and unusual punishment. The Hunger Games forces the most innocent and vulnerable – young children between the ages of 12 and 18 – to fight to the death for survival, killing all but one as “victor.” Snow’s need to maintain power at all costs and the sadistic nature of the Hunger Games is nothing short of the violence psychopaths are capable of.
Yet such a sadistic nature is perhaps even more frighteningly exhibited when we also witness how President Alma Coin of District 13 uses the guise of spearheading “revolution” to rise to power in The Mockingjay and become interim president of Panem. Unlike Snow whose genuine agendas are less concealed in the series, President Coin of District 13 is more covert in concealing her true malice. Much like the way the Capitol scapegoats innocent children by reaping them into the Hunger Games as punishment and entertainment for the wealthy masses, Coin is not above killing children just to ensure Katniss stays out of power so she can reign. The long “PR campaign” she has Katniss undergo in fueling the fires of rebellion as The Mockingjay, while weaponizing her own tears, feigning remorse and integrity when Katniss is seemingly killed, just to elevate herself are astonishingly cruel but true to life when it comes to the way psychopaths use pity ploys and seemingly altruistic purposes to carry out their hidden agendas.
Coin presents herself as the empathic leader of a revolution to release the districts from tyranny, but while this revolution is needed, her true motive is power, and she is also the tyrant she warns the world about.
The ruthlessness and lack of empathy with which psychopaths and narcissists operate to get to the top, along with weaponizing tactics like gaslighting and smear campaigns which both Coin and Snow engage in, swaying the public to view each other as the enemy while dehumanizing the most innocent and vulnerable civilians, are accurate depictions of the ways powerful psychopathic leaders engage in not just literal war but also psychological warfare.
Katniss: A Symbol for Revolution and The Real Revolutionary
On the other hand, Katniss contrasts these psychopathic leaders as the true leader of the revolution with her genuine empathy and love for others. Katniss and Peeta represent the “good” of humanity, and the promise of revolution. Not only is she a potent symbol that carries and inspires the citizens of Panem through the devastation of war, she makes countless sacrifices to save the people she loves and even the people she does not know. Her love for her little sister Prim causes her to volunteer as tribute and take her place when Prim is chosen in the reaping for the Hunger Games. She risks her life to save Peeta during the games, as well as to try to keep one of the younger tributes, Rue, safe. She is ultimately the one who ends the tyranny of not only one psychopath in power, but two. In one of the most powerful movie moments in history, she appears to point her bow and arrow at President Snow, only to kill President Coin instead, as she realizes that some of the most dangerous people in power are the ones who mask themselves as saviors. Perhaps what tips her off is that President Coin isn’t above using the children of the Capitol to continue the Hunger Games – ultimately not deviating from Snow’s cruel legacy – as a display of power and revenge. Regardless, Katniss’ execution of Coin still leads to Snow’s demise as well as the crowd is free to launch themselves on him.
A Young Psychopath’s Rise to Power
As we delve back to the past, in the prequel to the rest of the Hunger Games series, we gain even more insight to the way psychopaths view power and love through the eyes of the man who significantly contributed to the current design of the Hunger Games – the head of the Capitol, Coriolanus Snow. As a result of the Rebellion leaving him without his family and without money, Coriolanus is met with the responsibility of rising to power as an adult – namely, by pursuing the Plinth Prize which will secure him the scholarship to pursue his education and bring respect back to his family name. In the 10th annual Hunger Games, he is assigned to mentor District 12 female tribute Lucy Gray Baird, whose spunk, rebelliousness, and talent mesmerizes him. He enjoys seeing Lucy plant a snake down the dress of the mayor’s daughter (who likely arranged for Lucy to be reaped into the Games), and rejoices in her singing: he recognizes that her musical talent will allow her to garner support during the games. Throughout both the book and film, we see both of them save each other’s lives as part of their “love story.” While the movie leaves it up to the viewer’s interpretation, the book features insight into what Coriolanus is really thinking about Lucy. Consider the following exchange:
“Well that’s it then, I saved you from the fire, and you saved me from the snakes. We’re responsible for each other’s lives now.”
“Are we?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said. “You’re mine and I am yours. It is written in the stars.” He leaned over and kissed her, flushed with happiness, because although he did not believe in celestial writings, she did, and that would be enough to guarantee her loyalty.
In the books, Snow’s love is not about genuine care or empathy – as for most narcissistic or psychopathic people, it is about loyalty, ownership, and possession. In this particular moment, Snow is enthusiastic about Lucy’s belief in being destined and fated lovers not because he himself believes in the inevitability of their love but because such a spiritual belief will secure her loyalty and devotion to him. Lucy also notes in the book that she believes there is an “inherent goodness” in human beings, a belief that will be weaponized against her by Coriolanus. Coriolanus, on the other hand, views his own acts of betrayal and evil (such as making the “tough decision” to get his friend Sejanus killed by recording his rebel plans with a jaberyjay and sending it to the Capitol) as justifiable. In the books, his contempt and jealousy of his wealthy friend Sejanus are more evident, and he only puts on the mask of friendship in order to gain access to his family’s resources. Even after Sejanus is executed, Coriolanus continues to benefit as he becomes heir to the Plynth family and conceals the true nature of Sejanus’ death. This is true to life when it comes to the mindset of narcissists and psychopaths: they view friendships and relationships as pathways to potential power, not connection. Everyone is an object to be strategically used to “win.”
In the movie adaptation of the prequel, Snow (played by Tom Blyth) seems visibly concerned and empathic toward Lucy Gray’s (played by Rachel Zegler) plight and fight for survival in the games, and this concern seems to go beyond just wanting to win the prize money for having the winning tribute or restoring his family’s prestige – he seems (at least to movie viewers) to be genuinely in love with Lucy as a person. The romance and chemistry between them on screen are sizzling, and this ensnares viewers into believing in their love story. As he goes out of his way to mentor her in unconventional ways – joining her at the Capitol zoo, bringing her a white rose when they first meet (a unique symbol that will be especially significant throughout his journey to becoming a dictator in the Hunger Games), and stroking her cheek while she cries, viewers see a “softer side” to Snow whose feelings for Lucy only strengthens when she goes out of her way to save his life. In the books, he is a less of a morally ambiguous character. His inner monologue reveals that he does not “love” Lucy the way he seems to love her in the movies – instead, it reveals that he objectifies her and wants to “possess” her, often obsessing over whether she is still interested in her former partner, Billy Taupe with a fixation that borders on pathological.
These tendencies are far more striking in the book through Snow’s inner monologue, as Snow often has a personal motive for everything he does: for example, in the movie, both he and his friend Sejanus plot together to give the tributes food. There is a seemingly altruistic element to their motivation in the movies, but in the books, Coriolanus only joins Sejanus in this generous act because he doesn’t want Sejanus to have the spotlight and thinks it will boost his image for reporters. In the movie adaptation of the prequel, Coriolanus Snow is depicted as more of a morally conflicted character who shows remorse and even has the capacity for love – the question of whether he is a budding psychopath or a man who descends into evil after life’s circumstances and seeming betrayals is still up in the air when we are unable to “see” or hear his inner monologue on screen.
Rather than portraying him as someone with outright blatantly malignant tendencies, the movie is far more subtle in tracking his trajectory to his reign of terror, emphasizing how his family circumstances of current struggle after Rebellion in the Capitol have left the once privileged Snow family without resources and caused him to use other means to gain power and control. This strife was deepened by Lucy’s “betrayal” of Coriolanus when she realizes that he played a hand in Sejanus’ death and may even kill her too out of fear of exposing him – thus, Lucy escapes before he can harm her, realizing theirs is not a fated love story but a twisted tale of her becoming the latest fixation of a psychopath – one that will do anything for the pursuit of power.
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