Seeing Social Movements through the Spectacle of the Hunger Games: Popular Culture as a Site of Contestation over Meaning in Political Struggles

The three-finger salute of the Hunger Games was used by protesters in social movements in Hong Kong and Thailand. Incidents of raising this gesture as a symbol of resistance were reported by both citizen journalism websites and mainstream media. Commercial Hollywood movies have no intention to provoke audiences to rebel, but we saw an adaptation of a fictional gesture into a real-life symbol of revolution. This paper is going to examine the role of popular culture in social movements in a network society. The case study is the Hunger Games and the Occupy Central Movement in Hong Kong. The paper argues that Williams's idea of culture as networks of shared and contested meanings has become more complex in a society where social activities are organized around both digital media and offline media which includes face-to-face communication. First is signification. The paper argues that the original material, i.e. the three-finger gesture, is from the spectacle of film. This material exists in a film world instead of our material world. The cinematic context of Hollywood movies becomes crucial to examine the symbol reconstructed as fighting for democracy in the Movement. Via the genre approach to analyze Hollywood blockbusters, the paper argues that 'the hero and villain' formula simplifies the authoritarian government in the Hunger Games as a villain and the revolution as a glorification of a hero. The cinematic context contends with the symbolic meaning reconstructed by the protesters of the Movement, which undermines the subversiveness of the symbol.Second is the sharing of meanings. The paper examined how the moments of raising this gesture in the Movement being captured and disseminated by citizen journalism websites and mainstream media, and further circulated by social media. Thanks to the appeal-to-all strategy of Hollywood blockbusters, the symbol being raised during the Movement has become a hot topic. However, the paper argues that with such a proliferation of images of the symbol associated with the Hunger Games, people can only see the Movement through a spectacle. References drawn from the movie are easier to be understood than the cause and development of the Movement. This displacement renders the meaning of the symbol empty and the purpose of the Movement ambiguous. The intended to be progressive symbols and movements are at the same time being contended by the spectacle provided by the media. Do people understand and share a collective purpose when they fight' Or eventually, their passion will be incorporated by Hollywood for producing a cycle of 'the hero and villain' movies like the Hunger Games'