Snow lands on top
Five years after the farewell of Katniss Everdeen and the quiet demise of the YA dystopia genre, Suzanne Collins returned readers to Panem with the Hunger Games prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.
The unexpected release in May 2020 follows an equally unlikely protagonist, President Coriolanus “Coryo” Snow, through his inaugural experience with the Hunger Games, as the mentor to the first-ever victor from District 12. With the film adaptation winning this box-office weekend, I read the novel and attended a screening back-to-back to find out which version of Snow lands on top.
Frankly, the merits of the novel are few and far between. As a reader, I was dumbfounded by the structure and pace of the book; the 528 pages miraculously leave an impression of being too long, yet 200 pages too short. Collins leaves the reader in a third-person limited view of the world with Snow’s mind cycling between three traits: narcissistic, pompous, and callous.
By the last few chapters, there is very little the reader knows about Coriolanus Snow, which wasn’t evident from the first three. In between, Collins throws in a couple of incongruent moments of humanity to imply Coryo isn’t all bad deep down, but it’s to no effect. His narrative voice is continuously corrupt such that there is no gradual descent into evil. There is barely a character arc at all.
I found myself, on multiple occasions, bewildered by Snow’s actions and statements that simply did not fit with the information provided. The novel fails as a villain origin story; Snow ends the novel as the same self-serving, disturbed teenage boy he was introduced as.
The motion picture skillfully revises the major flaws of the novel. There are several clever cuts to the written plot which allow the film to focus on its key characters. Despite its omission of Snow’s inner monologue, the film showcases a more nuanced and coherent Coriolanus, largely due to Tom Blyth’s stellar performance. The film’s protagonist is self-assured, calculating, and obscure as Donald Sutherland’s President Snow, with his goals never out of sight.
The third act is awkwardly rushed, as it is in the novel, but the direction of every scene contributes to excellent character progression for Snow. Away from the Capitol, he grows restless, revealing more and more of his true loves in life: power and control. There is a clear line between the Snow at the end of this film, and the Snow who meets Katniss 64 years later.
On the note of characterization, the novel’s Lucy Gray Baird is an unequivocal manic-pixie dream girl for her entire duration in the Capitol. While it was clear this charm was a survival tactic, I was relieved to see Rachel Zegler’s portrayal shaded with true fear, grief, and anger regarding her position as a tribute in the Games.
A standout of the story both in text and film, is the Games themselves. In the 74th and 75th Hunger Games, we sit in fear as Katniss and her companions outsmart their way to the end. For the 10th, in which Lucy competes, we know much less about the tributes because of Snow’s primary perspective.
Instead, the audience is made privy to the hateful sentiments of the Capitol through Coriolanus. The students, professors, and elders of Panem’s elite dehumanize the Districts to no end. The Capitol’s victory against the District uprising sees them parroting the same rhetoric that every oppressive regime in history has exercised against their opposition. The residents of the Districts are deemed incapable of self-governance because they are inferior beings.
Yet, the Hunger Games bleed with humanity. Tributes treat one another with dignity in death and protect each other to their graves. The only citizens of Panem who relish the violence are those protected in the Capitol. This commentary is the most emotionally affecting feature of the text and its adaptation. But in the battle of Songbirds and Snakes, the film is the clear victor. It is a satisfying story for all fans of the original trilogy, with the depth to match its length.
