Katniss Everdeen to Anne Frank: “We would have been friends.”

I arrived on the scene atrociously early, due to my hardened distrust of OC Transpo.  I had cobbled together a route to the suburban cinema mega-plex using the syndicated Travel Planner, but I knew it for what it was: a well-documented shrug of indifference.   The wind must have been just right, though, because I got there with time to spare, shipwrecked in a sea of teenage girls.  They clustered together in airtight, conspiratorial groups, wearing midriffy handmade t-shirts blaring their loyalties to the Hunger Games heartthrobs (with “Team Gale” clearly in the lead).

At 7:30, the line-up for the nine o’clock show was already threading from one end of the colossal hallway to the other.  The place felt like an airport lounge: kids sprawled all over the floor, leaning on backpacks and walls and each other, playing cards and dissolving into giggles and sneaking jealous up-and-down glances at each other.  When my friend Tam arrived, towing her eleven-year-old daughter and her daughter’s friend, I could have crushed them under the weight of my relief.  I saw them before they saw me, and called out, which was the wrong thing to do – Tam didn’t hear, but the groups flanking either side of me did, and I was subject to the scrutiny of two-dozen Smashbox stares as I hauled my rear off the floor and went flouncing after her.

The outing was ostensibly for the sake of our underage charges, though Tam and I were the only ones who had read the book.  The kids were our foil: their zany hyperspeed talking and unselfconscious antics, revved by bags of candy folded inside their purses, both exposed our transplantation into that adolescent world, and eased it.  The four of us sat in our own little circle on the floor, amid the dozens and dozens of other social planets.  I looked over at Tam.  I recognized the look on her face; her smile was vintage Tammy, one of total classic contentment, one that said, “This is exactly where I want to be right now.”  It had a tonic effect on me, like Xanax administered at exactly the right moment.  I had forgotten why were even there, and now, suddenly, it returned to me: to see a movie I’d been looking forward to for ages.

Despite (or because of) my latent PTSD re. adolescence, I have a perverse and enduring love of any entertainment that features teenagers.  I sponge it up like a cactus in the desert.  I’m not sure if it’s because my own high school years were so fraught and underwhelming, or because there are so many balls-to-the-walls writers and producers making art about the Abercrombie generation, but I simply love all that is YA media and I don’t think a life without it would be much of a life at all.  Teenage angst is my lifeblood, and the only two things I need most in order to manufacture a 24hr pleasure coma are vintage Degrassi DVDs and an unstructured weekend.

So I was completely ready for this movie.  What’s great about the Hunger Games is that you get all of that delicious teenage angst PLUS a terrifying dystopia (as if being sixteen isn’t terrifying enough already).  It makes for good entertainment.  I think this will always be true: take an examination of timeless human behaviour and transpose it over a violent landscape of almost impossible odds and you’ve got a narrative people will love to the end of time.  Just think of Anne Frank.  We don’t keep reading her diary because we’re not sure what the Holocaust was like (as Kate Winslet’s Extras character famously said: “We get it.  It was grim.”).  We keep reading her because she is a teenager who has a crush on a boy, is fed up with her parents, and is desperate for a bit of independence.  The extraordinary circumstances in which she lives shock and appall us, but it’s her ordinariness that really sticks to our bones.  We recognize it.  And to recognize ourselves in such foreign and dangerous milieu is both thrilling and wildly unsettling.  It says, Reader Beware: This Could Have Been You.

In this way, the Hunger Games is a feast of unsettling familiarity.  The whole plot revolves around a teenage crush (or, at least, the ruse of one – and when you’re a teenager, what’s the difference?).  Hormones become as scary as the circumstances into which they are thrust.  Almost as entertaining as the movie, though, was the experience of watching it in a packed theatre on opening night.  When the cinema staff moved aside the gate and opened the theatre doors, there was a stampede.  I am not kidding.  Hundreds of teen girls (and the odd teen boyfriend), docile if a little testy until then, suddenly surged like a coastal tide towards the doors, sacrificing each other in their race to the goal.  Let’s just pause for a moment to draw the obvious parallel: in the Hunger Games, the ordeal of twenty-four teenage “tributes” chosen to fight in a public arena begins the moment that a barrier lifts and they must sprint for their lives.  Cut to Tam and I quickening our steps, surging with the rest of them, throwing ourselves like linebackers into side-by-side theatre seats while the crowd scatters around us.  Our charges sit several rows behind us, testing the limits of their independence.  When we turn around and stare up in the stadium vastness we can just make them out, and they wave to us like goofballs.  They send us text messages.  When two of the movie’s stars kiss for the first time, we wonder if we can hear their screeches amid the feverish, swooning noises that rise from the theatre all around us.  It is amazing: no one reacts audibly when characters are hacked to pieces and thrown to the wolves, but as soon as two pairs of lips hover threateningly close to each other, the din is deafening.

When the movie ends, we’re pointing out all the differences between it and the novel before we’ve even brushed the popcorn from our laps.  The overall effect was a good one, though; we can agree on that.  We wind our way through clots of teenagers, shoulders rounded in that skinny-girl way that sixteen-year-olds have, talking coolly about the movie and waiting for their parents to pick them up.  We find our own two munchkins hovering over an arcade game, talking a thousand words a minute.  When one pauses to breathe, the other takes over.  It’s hilarious.  They have such an infinite capacity for it.  We all take the same bus but Tam and the kids get off before it leaves the burbs; I still have a long ride to downtown Ottawa.  The bus feels cavernous and whisper-quiet compared to the cacophony of the last few hours.  In true Megan style, I already miss the heady close quarters of the theatre’s hallway where we’d lounged, waiting for the movie to start.  It’s always like that, where adolescence is concerned: what makes you feel a few degrees west of normal one minute makes you nostalgic and regretful the next.

Around the country, hundreds of thousands of people saw the Hunger Games that night.  There was something remarkable about knowing, thanks to Tam, that I was one of them.  Even if I didn’t screech at the sight of a kiss.