I arrived at MSP Airport with scant television experience. In grade school I had been on a Nickelodeon “Big Help” public service ad raking leaves and was given 0.2 seconds of screen time; as an infant I had failed out of auditions for a diaper commercial. (I could still end up in an adult diaper commercial.) The publisher was betting that this track record would change, because I was young enough and likable enough to do talk shows. I had to be ready. Being on television talk shows is a coup for any author. Most of the time if you see an author on TV, you are watching BookTV on CSPAN, and the only other person watching is my father.

An editor met me at the airport. She brought me to a restaurant where I saw “Beer Cheese Soup” on the menu. I learned it was a Minnesota specialty and ordered it. Like the lamb stew that Katniss gushes over in The Hunger Games, it blew my mind; I still cannot find anything like it. The editor told me how excited everyone was for my book to be published and how much fun this was going to be. I knew from past experience that this meant run.

Katniss becomes famous because of her realness. When Caesar Flickerman asks her in her first televised interview what has impressed her most about the Capitol and she mentions the lamb stew, the laugh she elicits cements a love affair with her public that she contends with for the rest of the trilogy. Why is this answer so important? It is honest. It shows a lack of concern for what the “right” answer might be (“the architecture,” “the fashion”) and, in a world of tightly controlled propaganda, this is revolutionary. It is the first signal to the people of Panem that Katniss is an uncorrupted firebrand—one who has conveniently been on actual fire—and implies that she has no hidden motivations or agendas, unlike the rest of the contestants on the reality program they love so much.

Of course, in order to win the Hunger Games and lead the rebellion that follows, Katniss must betray that realness and employ all sorts of calculated gambits, losing herself in a maze of self-constructed imagery. Once she becomes famous, she is forced to consider how much of her persona is real and how much is fashioned by her many handlers, from Cinna to Haymitch to President Coin—all of whom do not end up well. Thus the Hunger Games presents us with the kind of hero that not only Panem but America likes best: the reluctant one, unexpectedly brilliant when challenged and then, once famous, desirous of a simpler life.

In preparing The Terminator, James Cameron studied the narrative characteristics of the ten most successful films of all time. He found a common thread: ordinary people in extraordinary situations.¹⁰ Implicit in “ordinariness” is realness, authenticity, and humility, traits that Katniss has in spades. No wonder the Hunger Games seemed like a good fit for the big screen.

Jessica wore a perfectly tailored dark suit. She shook my hand (down-up-down, crisp) while I stared at the ceiling, which was so high that it allowed for wind currents. Humongous lights—like chrome bombs—beamed down on a wide blank area with two chairs.

“That’s where we’re going to do the practice interview,” Jessica said. “But first, makeup!”

I was taken to a back room and plunked in a dental chair. A woman my age poofed powder on my face with the clinical detachment of a doctor. I was not sure if I should speak to her. Perhaps this was like getting a haircut and it was better not to distract her. After a while it got too uncomfortable.

“How’s my ... ah, skin?”

“You don’t have many pimples, which is good.”

“I have them on my back.”

“Didn’t really need to know that!”

She stood me up. I glanced at myself in the mirror before leaving her chamber; I looked like something from In the Night Kitchen. I never realized that people on TV wore this much makeup. It had weight.

“Your shirt is going to be a problem,” Jessica said.

“Why?” The only thing I knew about being on television was that you weren’t supposed to wear white—it glows. So I had on a horizontal striped shirt, which in hindsight I had no reason to own.

“Stripes confuse the camera. You’ll appear to be shifting left and right.”

“Do you want me to take it off?”

“No! Just, next time, wear something solid.”

She led me to the chairs. A man stood behind a television camera a few feet from them. It struck me how big the camera was; it looked like a surface-mounted weapon from World War II. The editor waved at me from the sidelines. “You’re doing great, Ned!”

“We just want to get a little bit of test footage to find your strengths and weaknesses,” Jessica said. She sat in one chair and motioned for me to take the other. She crossed her legs. I crossed my legs, thought that must look weird, uncrossed them, felt exposed, crossed them again. I glanced at the camera. There it was: the red eye.

Like the Eye of Sauron in Middle Earth. Like the faces projected on the sky to recap the day’s casualties in the Hunger Games. Like the piercing pupil of God staring me down and daring me not to mess up. I knew my image was not being broadcast anywhere—this was all a test; it was going on a tape that no one would see!—but that was the same red eye that newscasters saw when they were piped into hundreds of millions of households. It was the same eye that Leonardo DiCaprio saw.

“So Ned, why don’t you tell us about your book?”

“Uh ... my ... uh ...”

I could not stop looking at the eye. I had a lot to learn.

Early myths made up for their hard-to-relate-to subject matter by the tone and method of their delivery—they were told by priests and bards, infused with religious and patriotic didacticism. They were good for you; they were cultural glue meant to be experienced in particular contexts. As literacy and the availability of books spread, however, and made such stories accessible to everyone, the subjects of myth democratized. Heroes moved from high court (Geoffrey’s History of the Kings of Britain) to the middle class (Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe) to the streets (Bukowski’s Post Office), spreading to meet their audiences, and exceptionalism began to feel like a barrier to entry. Authenticity—the ability of a hero to convince an audience that you could be me— became paramount, and ordinary people in extraordinary situations became the go-to guys and gals for heroic tales.

In America, this went over particularly well, as it reflected the idea of the American Dream. If an ordinary person can thrive in tremendous peril, an ordinary reader can surely achieve greatness through life’s ups and downs. While the Hunger Games sets itself firmly in this tradition, it also addresses a more up-todate variant of the American Dream: the dream to be famous for no reason at all.

By the 1920s, the red eye of the motion picture camera could do for human beings what the printing press did for words—make them reproducible at low cost for mass consumption. For the first time, it was possible to be famous for no reason other than an ability to be interesting in front of a camera, because there was such a thing as a camera, and it is a testament to the American work ethic that everyone did not immediately drop what they were doing to ambush one.

Some did, of course. Hopefuls streamed to Hollywood to get into the movie business. Viewers dreamed of television stardom and read magazines about it to be closer to their dream. But work still had a place in media success; the act of performance was still a craft. You did not get to be a star just by being yourself—you got to be a star by being amazing. “To grasp the full significance of life is the actor’s duty,” said James Dean,¹¹ which sounds like the same sort of duty a writer or musician should aspire to.

Then The Real World came along. Starting in 1992 and currently picked up by MTV for its twenty-sixth season, the show was so simple and instantly ubiquitous that it can be hard to step back and recognize its impact. It took Andy Warhol’s 1968 dictum about fifteen minutes of fame and put it to the test every week. The Real World stripped away any value for accomplishment; no one on the show was cool because they had a good job or created good art (remember the season where they were all supposed to get jobs?—a disaster!); they were cool because they were real, and the rise of The Real World dovetailed with the fetishization of the word “real” in hip-hop. Cultural currency no longer came from acts, it came from realness, as defined by an ability to be interesting in front of observers while not appearing to attempt to be interesting. The Real World was Zen: the only thing you had to do to get on it was be real, but if you tried to be real you would never make it.

By this time too the words “success” and “fame” had been conflated in American discourse. Kids who watched The Real World did not want to be successful; they wanted to be famous. They did not understand or care that there was a difference between the two. The tragic actors and actresses who achieved fame only to drown in it, from Marilyn Monroe to River Phoenix, were still famous. The housemates on The Real World were famous for being real and successful for being famous, and for almost a decade this was enough for the American public. Then Survivor came along, the brainchild of a British television producer, and reintroduced the Puritan work ethic to the reality media landscape. To be on Survivor, all you had to do was be real, but once you were on it, you had to be exceptional again—to compete in challenging competitions and outsmart your opponents. It was a microcosm of the old American Dream inside the new, and like The Real World it spawned a host of imitators.

American Idol swung the pendulum back toward the old dream, unfolding season after season like a hyper-speed trip through Hollywood past, with clean, glitzy stages and an unfailing obedience to the will of the people. It rewarded performance in the most traditional way: a straight vote. Critics called Idol many things, but they never called it fake.

While it ascended, the Real World model of fame for free was picked up by the internet. By 2006, when Time magazine’s Person of the Year was “You,” it was unnecessary—hokey—to appear on television to gain fame. The problem was that on the internet, being real was no longer enough; with 900,000 new blogs created per day,¹² dreamers had to dream bigger to get their message across. The absurd rose to the top—obese singers, dramatic chipmunks, focused light saber artistes. Being real was requisite, but now a certain amount of perversion and disregard for shame was also necessary.

Katniss Everdeen, then, is a post-American dreamer whose story pulls from each stage of the past hundred years of media history. Like the housemates on The Real World, she is not selected for the Hunger Games for any particular skill. Her family is struck by the hand of fate in the reaping and she does the best she can in response, selflessly taking the place of her younger sister, which is what we would like to think we would do. As an ordinary girl in extraordinary circumstances, her reluctance makes her authentic.

Contrast this with the Careers that she fights against from District 2. Not only are they cunning and bloodthirsty, they want to be there. They train for the Hunger Games and look forward to achieving fame and glory on television. They are like the posers who do not make The Real World, the boys and girls who try too hard; they are also like Gilgamesh, brutally exceptional in the most unrelatable way. By being willing participants in the Games, they “swallowed the Capitol’s propaganda more easily than the rest of us,” says Katniss in Mockingjay, which makes them dupes, quaintly hokey, buying into a system that does not work. They are holdovers from a generation that believes in work rather than realness as the path to success, while Katniss learns it is authenticity that makes her a heroine in a media-saturated age.

But Katniss’ realness is only the beginning. Once her interview brings her to Panem’s attention, she delivers in combat, beating the Careers at their own game. Inside the arena, she takes on the traits that made Richard Hatch a hero on Survivor— ruthlessness—and Kelly Clarkson a heroine on American Idol— skill. The fact that she is drafted into a reality show she then excels at, despite not wanting to, lets her succeed in the old American dream while embracing the new. She is famous for being good and famous for being herself.

“I just sort of ... started thinking about who might be watching.”

“But no one’s watching.”

“Hypothetically.”

“The way to approach a television interview isn’t to think about the people watching, Ned, but about the interviewer.” Jessica explained further: most people who watch television watch it alone, so if I acted the way I did when I was communicating with a friend, I would appear natural on the other side of the screen. Cinna tells Katniss the same thing to prepare her for her interview with Caesar: “‘Suppose, when you answer the questions, you think you’re addressing a friend back home’” (The Hunger Games).

“I don’t know if I’m really that natural when I communicate with my friends.”

“Do you look them in the eye?”

“No.”

“You should. And you should look your interviewer in the eye.”

“Shouldn’t I look at the camera?”

She smiled. “You should look at the camera but not look at the camera.” More Zen. It turns out that the proper way to treat a camera in an interview is to eye it at a three-fourths angle, as if you happen to be sort of looking at it while your main focus stays on the interviewer. Like being on Survivor, or in the Hunger Games, you need to be real in order for the audience to connect with you. Then you need to play the game in order to win.

Katniss gets put through the gamut during her media training. Prior to her interview, Haymitch attempts to have her act humble, cocky, witty, sexy, and mysterious, to both of their frustration. “‘[P]retend I’m the audience,’” he advises. “‘Delight me’” (The Hunger Games). Katniss does not, and soon enough Haymitch is throwing up his hands, drunk. As a veteran of the Hunger Games he should know better.

“Being aware of the audience leads to overeagerness,” Jessica explained, “which television cameras register as fakeness.”

“Is that why so many people seem fake on TV?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes they really are fake. Want to try again?”

I nodded. Jessica was my Cinna. Luckily for Katniss, it is Cinna, the unexpected voice of reason, who gets the final word before her interview. He contradicts Haymitch’s advice and asks her the question that spurs her to greatness: “‘Why don’t you just be yourself?’” (The Hunger Games).

It started with blogs; now, through social media, anyone who is active on the internet creates a digital projection of themselves for public consumption. We are all stars, all heroes in our own online productions. What does this do for our authenticity? It destroys it.

The problem is that anyone who checks into Facebook, Twitter, and the like is automatically shown how their profile is trending through wall posts, messages, and friend requests. Anyone who Googles him or herself engages in a form of selfregard that used to require highly paid analysts. A truly authentic hero would not care what others thought; he or she would be comfortable enough to ignore the chatter of digital friends and strangers in lieu of the strength of his or her convictions. But a person who uses social media does care what others think—demonstrably. Looking at ourselves on the internet, we are not ourselves, and no amount of rationalization makes us seem like anything other than egotists.

Katniss avoids this pitfall in the Hunger Games through the circumstances of the competition. Thrown into an arena without media access, she cannot tell how she is doing. (Luckily she is not as addicted to social media as the rest of us; for many Hunger Games readers, the lack of an internet connection might be the most difficult part of the Games.) She knows that she is on television but cannot watch it; she must rely on her hunches, which are unquestionably hers, to survive. She is not only genuine, not only skilled; she is incapable of cheapening herself by checking her own profile. The facade she creates is fully removed from her ego, cementing her heroic persona. Even as she becomes aware of the camera (“I am live on every screen in Panem,” she notes in The Hunger Games), she is real, both to the viewers of the Games and readers of the Games, since by not watching herself she cannot be seduced into being what people want her to be. She can only be herself.

This trick has been pulled before by young people playing with American imagery. Kurt Cobain, the apotheosis of the reluctant media hero who came to power in the age of The Real World, made himself famous by being real, by being good, and by convincing the public that he did not care about his appearance. MTV pushed authenticity in large part by splashing Cobain across its screens; there were times in 1992 when “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was on television as much as the Hunger Games are on in Panem. When asked about the situation, Cobain had consistently ego-demolishing responses. (To a friend who remarked that he was on TV all the time, he said, “I don’t have a TV in the car I live in.”¹³) Although contemporaries report that he was as crafty and controlling of his media image as Katniss is of hers (“I pause a second, giving the cameras time to lock on me,” she says as she slips out of a tree during the first Games), his suicide solidified his realness by erasing any chance of him slipping into a self-aware persona, and now he lives on as a saint of unadulterated artistry in a world that seems more artificial since his death.

Compare him to another rock star, Noel Gallagher of Oasis, who once said: “[B]eing famous is great. I love it, man. I think it’s the best when you get stopped walking down the street for an autograph, that’s the best feeling in the world.”¹⁴ A person who was truly busy being a heroic artist would not have time to be self-aware in such a manner. Whoops—Gallagher just checked his Facebook in front of everyone.

By the time Mockingjay begins, Katniss has gone from Cobain to Gallagher, fully aware of her image and struggling to maintain it. Asked to film propos—“propaganda spots;” wasn’t Katniss fighting propaganda?—to support the rebellion, her prep team now “has to make me pretty and then damage, burn, and scar me in a more attractive way.” Katniss’ scars used to come from actual combat, unquestionably earned by her greatness; now they have to be rendered. Asked to say canned lines to inspire her followers, she suffers from stage fright; only when she is dropped into battle does she deliver inspirational speeches that are worthy of broadcast across Panem. Plutarch, Gamemaker and rebel leader, commends her spontaneity (“the audience eats that up,”) even as he stages a wedding and dance in District 13, which normally holds neither, for the cameras.

Like many a hero and rock star before her, Katniss is trapped in her own persona. As early as the end of The Hunger Games, she has difficulty distinguishing between her real self—the girl who entered the arena—and the media powerhouse she has become: “I stare in the mirror as I try to remember who I am and who I am not.” By the time she is filming propos as the face of the rebellion, others have noticed her confusion. “‘I can’t tell what’s real anymore, and what’s made up,’” says her lover Peeta, describing his confusion at who Katniss really is (Mockingjay). How can she escape? More than once, she considers the ultimate way, but when she sees herself shot on television, she inoculates herself against the escape hatch that lured Cobain.

I showed up early, as I was told was an absolute must. I went into the green room, which is never green, and saw the most unappetizing spread of donuts and fruit that I have ever seen to this day. It looked plastic, as fake as Katniss’ propos. I sat in the room alone and watched the broadcast of the Today Show with the happy people on the street in New York behind the TV personalities waving signs. “Those are the people are you aren’t supposed to think about,” I reminded myself. I was nervous, sick to my stomach. Jessica told me that the key with stage fright was to embrace it and convert it into energy. I tried, furrowing my brow and scrunching my guts. Soon enough I was called into makeup and then I stepped out under the lights to do the interview.

Like Katniss’ talk with Caesar Flickerman, it was short. I sat up straight; I looked at the camera but did not look at the camera; I smiled. When I saw the tape later, I was dumbstruck.

How come no one ever told me that my mouth was so crooked? Why did I have my hair cut short so that I looked like a hedgehog? How was my head so skull-like? I seemed nervous, hyper, self-aware. I was self-aware. I could try and hide it through mental trickery and media training, but I had been self-aware the whole time I was getting ready for the interview and the whole time I was being interviewed. I am self-aware now, and barring a Buddha-like moment in middle or old age I will continue to be. I put the interview on YouTube, where it still resides,¹⁵ but stayed away from television in the years that followed. I prefer email and phone. I prefer the control. I do not have the heroic, authentic persona necessary for TV.

Reading Katniss’ interview in The Hunger Games, however, gave me hope that I was better than I thought. Before she goes on with Caesar, after she has been through her own media training, following the first question, when she is tongue-tied and about to ruin everything, Katniss thinks, “Be honest.” This mantra, given her by Cinna after Haymitch’s haywire advice, carries her through, and I, too was honest on the Today Show. I am honest now: I check my online persona regularly and am ashamed of it. I try to write and hope that people like it. I tried out for The Real World once and failed miserably. I was almost on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, but the people in my building would not allow the camera crew. I play the games necessary to achieve success in my field. I have moments, like Katniss at the end of The Hunger Games, where I try to remember who I am and who I am not. I do not want to be famous for no reason ... but I would take it. I can only hope the honesty of admitting these things outweighs the self-awareness of doing them.

At the end of Mockingjay, I was reminded of the Henry Hill monologue that closes Goodfellas: he says that after a lifetime of adventure, “I’m an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.” A schnook is not a hero. But Katniss is nothing if not a survivor. She does what she needs to to stay alive. And after she picks Peeta and retires from the public eye, into what spurious nest of lies does her other lover, Gale, go?

He goes back to District 2, to do television.