“Trust Me”: Volatile Markets in Twilight and The Hunger Games

Abstract

When Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games was published in 2008 it was critically praised as the ‘antidote’ to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga, with Collins’s Katniss Everdeen heralded as the active feminist agent to counter Meyer’s passive Bella Swan. Meyer’s series drew to a close as Collins’s began, both in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis. Both series are compellingly connected to speculative finance. The Hunger Games caught the imagination of youth punished and excluded by a crash they did not cause, while facing uncertainty about the future; economist Noreena Hertz has dubbed today’s youth ‘Generation K’ after Katniss (2016). Meanwhile, critiques of Twilight’s Edward Cullen as “compensated psychopath” (Merskin 2011, 157) echo post-crash rhetoric on the role played by the finance sector’s “monstrous” hypermasculinity (Shaw 2015, 90). Indeed, when EL James rewrote Twilight as Fifty Shades of Gray, her original working title was ‘Master of the Universe’ (Domet 2013, 115), a phrase inseparable from depictions of the (male) speculator.