I Think What I Found Most Fascinating About Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes Is The Brilliant Exploration

I love how Snow's inevitable demise is constantly foreshadowed throughout the movie with Dr Gaul's "rainbow of destruction".

First we see it in Lucy's dress:

Then the snakes:

And finally, the very last scene:

It doesn't matter that "Snow lands on top" at the end of this movie because everyone knows how his story ends. Even though it will take a very long time...

That's what I call poetic cinema👏

rebog

Fuck man, this doomed underground city doesn’t have any good kebab joints

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023) + letterboxd reviews

shout out to suzanne collins for, in the middle of Everything Else she was doing in sotr, dropping a paragraph that’s just “btw fuck ai”

i dont think my mental state can handle "class of 2013" by mitski right now

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes was an excellent movie adaptation plot wise. It also solidified to me 2 reasons why Snow knew Katniss was such a threat beyond the basics and they were that

He recognized Haymitch as a mentor rewarding romantic behavior within the arena with sponsored gifts because a) it was his idea and b) before the drone system was perfected he saw how mentors themselves could technically follow rules while influencing the games and

He noticed how much sympathy and connection the Capitol citizens could form with the Tributes from all the nurses crying at Lucy Gray’s “last performance” to his entire class chanting to get her out of the arena which forced someone as influential as Dr. Gaul to listen

Snow’s not an idiot he knows Katniss herself held very little power at least at the beginning. But he instantly recognized how her story could be marketed and used to turn both District and Capitol citizens against him especially by people like Haymitch or Coin who knew what they were doing

i’m obsessed with the significance of the hunger games’ utilization of food as a metaphor for a character, their perspective, and their story. on that note, coriolanus and tigrid witnessing a starving man eating his maid’s leg.

understandably, a large amount of coryo’s food metaphors are centered around his distaste for food he considers undesirable. or, food that doesn’t live up to that which he is entitled to.

but i’m stuck on cannibalism. coriolanus knows what its like to be starving. he has never literally eaten another person, can barely wrap his head around eating “poor people food”. but coriolanus knew, from a young age, that desperation turned a man into an animal. he decided he would never succumb to that hunger, would never let desperation control him. yet he still deluded himself into believing he killed in self defense, that he killed to survive.

coriolanus says the hunger games are intended to reveal what humans become when they are desperate to survive. president snow somehow convinced himself that district-born were subhuman, yet he acknowledges their humanity as a definitive statement. the purpose of his greatest achievement; turning humans into animals.

humans, if starved for long enough, will become cannibals, or die trying to be anything else. the districts have eaten each other, and then their own tails.

coriolanus, with an infinitely widening margin of what is and is not starvation, kills whenever he is threatened with the possibility of hunger. somehow, he thinks this is different. that he is not terrified of starving just like every child he has locked into a cage to secure his own fullness.

eat his own words, eat his past, eat himself whole; both the starving man and the maid. maybe he died realizing, for the last time, that he’s always been an animal. his final exhale around a mouthful of blood.

🌈🌈🌈🌈