As the conquered Athenians periodically had to send 14 young people to the palace in Crete to be devoured by the Minotaur, the impoverished “Districts” must offer up a boy and a girl each year to battle to the death with edged weapons on national television. This may strike you as an all-around terrible idea, but that’s Collins’s point. Katniss is in perpetual mourning over having to participate in such an appalling event.

Katniss isn’t a butt-kicking babe who out-grapples beefy lackeys in the tiresome modern mode beloved by nerds. Instead, Collins assigns her that ancient emblem of Artemis the huntress, the bow, with which she adds rabbit to the turnip greens back home in West Virginia. Admittedly, effective bowhunting requires upper-body strength, but the weapon at least looks elegantly feminine, which is more than you can say for the sword or flail.

Perhaps The Hunger Games works best as an allegorical critique of poor dumb Red State Americans volunteering to serve in the Capitol’s wars without even getting a cut of the Beltway’s black-budget contracts.

Thus the heroine is never tempted to side with the rich and powerful, although you can’t really credit her for that considering their taste in couture. The Capitol denizens are addicted to godawful conspicuous consumption rather than to the current status system in which you show off what esoterica you notice (how much carbon was emitted bringing your carrots to market, for instance) and all the massive facts you ostentatiously fail to notice.

Conversely, the movie’s portrayal of West Virginians is straight out of a Works Progress Administration writers’ project. The mountaineers are all hardworking coal miners. Nobody is on disability due to morbid obesity. The working class isn’t trapped in a web of invisible debt, they aren’t having their heavy industry jobs outsourced, nor are they having new populations insourced. In other words, there’s little to unsettle contemporary viewers in The Hunger Games.