Faux liberals such as Solnit are so deeply embedded in the current corporate cultural system – from which, not surprisingly, she directly profits from – that they have lost touch with reality and, most importantly, with their own humanity. These are the morally corrupt American so-called liberals who choose to believe they are reading/watching an anti-corporate book/movie so that they can feel free to enjoy the ultimate necrophiliac pleasure of imagining/seeing children kill other children. Henry Giroux writes:
The film and its success are symptomatic of a society in which violence has become the new lingua franca. It portrays a society in which the privileged classes alleviate their boredom through satiating their lust for violent entertainment and, in this case, a brutalizing violence waged against children. While a generous reading might portray the film as a critique of class-based consumption and violence given its portrayal of a dystopian future society so willing to sacrifice its children, I think, in the end, the film more accurately should be read as depicting the terminal point of what I have called elsewhere the suicidal society (a suicide pact literally ends the narrative).
Given Hollywood's rush for ratings, the film gratuitously feeds enthralled audiences with voyeuristic images of children being killed for sport. In a very disturbing opening scene, the audience observes children killing each other within a visual framing that is as gratuitous as it is alarming. That such a film can be made for the purpose of attaining high ratings and big profits, while becoming overwhelming popular among young people and adults alike, says something profoundly disturbing about the cultural force of violence and the moral emptiness at work in American society. Of course, the meaning and relevance of "The Hunger Games" rest not simply with its production of violent imagery against children, but with the ways these images and the historical and contemporary meanings they carry are aligned and realigned with broader discourses, values and social relations. Within this network of alignments, risk and danger combine with myth and fantasy to stoke the seductions of sadomasochistic violence, echoing the fundamental values of the fascist state in which aesthetics dissolves into pathology and a carnival of cruelty.
Perhaps, this is the same type of hidden pleasure that Hillary Clinton and Obama (like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al) must feel as they rain drones over the heads of helpless children in the Arab world under the guise of humanitarian intervention – aptly renamed humanitarian imperialism by Jean Bricmont.
Sadly, Solnit and other supporters of the Obama imperial status-quo are the very product of the American corporate culture of violence, the subject of Chris Hedges's Death of the Liberal Class and Empire of Illusion and of many enlightening commentaries by Henry Giroux.
Another theme glorified in the movie is the role of the absent but for good reason father figure. This "sorry, but I got work to do" figure is exemplified in a scene where John Cusack tells his family that they will all sit together embracing each other until the plane they happen to be on lands safely. As he is uttering his last words, he gets summoned once more to the boys' room (the cockpit), and so he zaps away reneging on what he had just promised his wife and children a minute before. In a subsequent scene, Cusack talks to his son before embarking in a life or death mission. As he leaves, he tells his son that as long as he knows that his son is watching over his ex wife and daughter, he is confident they will be safe; in so many words, Cusack's character believes that his ex wife is not capable of taking care of herself, let alone their children.