Redirecting Theseus: How the Existence of Cato Proves That President Snow Has Read the Story of Theseus and the Minotaur
I have made no secret amongst my acquaintance that I believe that The Hunger Games movie makes a few significant improvements on the book version. Most notably, we have the chance to step outside of Katniss’s head and see other character’s perspective and get a view of how the nation of Panem is responding to Rue’s death and the rest of the Games in something other than Katniss’s almost baseless speculations.
But they also included a few beautiful Easter Eggs.
My favorite added detail of the movie is simply a matter of having to fill in details that Suzanne Collins chose not to focus on. Then decided to use that opportunity to do something awesome. Many of these moments are visually fun or cheesy in the movie, but my favorite is far too powerful to be accidental.
It first appears during the Tribute Parade. The first glimpse goes by fast, but the framing is deliberate and powerful to a very specific segment of the audience.
That is Cato dressed as Theseus.
In case either of those names didn’t land with the weight that they do in my mind each and every time:
Theseus was arguably the most respected hero of Ancient Greece despite doing a lot of shady stuff like abandoning nice ladies to die on islands, provoking his father’s suicide by his own forgetfulness, forcing Amazonian queens to marry him at the point of a sword, attempting to kidnap Helen (of Troy) when she was a little girl, and attempting to steal Persephone out of the Underworld.
But that’s all later. When he started out, Theseus was an all around awesome guy. He turned away from his royal authority and “invented democracy.” On his way to Athens, he clears the country of sadistic bandits by visiting their own atrocities on them a la eye for an eye justice. Then he followed Ariadne’s dearly bought instructions to slay the Minotaur, escape from the labyrinth, and end the tribute that Athens sent to Crete of young men and women every nine years.
He was a brave, wise, and compassionate hero and leader in story after story. He made a lot of poor choices because of his pride but…there’s a reason he’s one of the greats.
And Cato, the guy dressed up as Theseus, is the closest that the series comes to a villain amongst the young tributes forced into the arena. It’ll be a whole book before Katniss realizes that “I know who the enemy is, and it is not Enobarbia” or, by extension, Cato. And I will never forget the chills that ran up my spine when the movie theatre audience cheered at the brutal death of Clove, Cato’s partner in the arena. So it’s awhile before the book series officially realizes that Cato is not the villain of the story.
But the costumers do.
It’s still a little hard to figure out what’s going on here though. It gets more and more complex the more I look at it. Because the Look that Cato gives Katniss in the above picture is so Theseus. That is exactly the face that a young Theseus would make at an upstart Atalanta or Hippolyta. A challenging glare for daring to upstage him.
His final speech is another excellent addition by the movie. It solidifies Cato’s status as Theseus in my mind.
I’m dead anyway. I always was, right? I didn’t know that ’til now…
I can still do this. One more kill. It’s the only thing I know how to do. Bringing pride to my district.
Not by any failure of his own strength or cunning does Cato lose the Hunger Games. He loses because it was never his story.
And, after all, Theseus died by being thrown off a cliff after he had lost his popularity in Athens. Just like Cato really died the instant Katniss and Peeta won the battle for the hearts and minds of the Capitol. The rest was just theatre.
His final speech shows that Cato has precisely the same quarrel with Katniss that Theseus would. That he is a supporting character in her Games. It’s heartbreaking to watch him realize the 74th Annual Hunger Games were never going to be his story. Even if he had won, it would be the story of how he killed the star-crossed lovers from District 12.
Which brings me to the next little Easter Egg about Cato from when the Career Pack catches Katniss in a tree. If you don’t see what I mean by then, well, really look.
That is Cato, curled around Glimmer in the seconds before she dies.
The previous shots makes a point of showing that Clove and Marvel are sleeping separately, so the Pack isn’t huddled together for warmth. And Cato and CLOVE are District pairs. Yet it is Cato and Glimmer who cuddle for warmth. In whose glances you can now see a very careful kind of flirting in earlier scenes of the movie.
They didn’t meet until they arrived in the Capitol. There’s precious little reason for them to cozy up together or feel safe around one another. Especially with Cato going for intimidation as his persona to survive.
Every time I watch this part of the movie, all I can think is that Katniss and Peeta usurped the “real” love story of that first Games. Don’t get me wrong, by the Quarter Quell, they are an underdog love story in fact as well as image. But in this first Games, Cato beat them to it.
Which might mean that he, like Theseus, found a charming Ariadne and abandoned her when things went south. Or that he had Peeta’s idea and the Baker Boy beat him to it. Katniss stole his hero story, as he would see it.
Why It Matters
The reason I’m finally writing this up is a series of long-awaited realizations. When I taught the lesson as part of my Theseus and the Minotaur unit at the ADVANCE Program for Young Scholars, I asked the class (as always) to help me find what it means. What were the filmmakers (very deliberately) doing?
Many of my classes have struggled with and hypothesized on this answer. The best one was last summer. In brief, that Cato is a parody of Theseus. That Cato stands for what happens when Theseus’s pride runs out of control, gets off mission, and goes too far.
The more I thought about it, I think the student was almost right. Yes, Cato is Theseus-style pride in bravery, strength of arm, and glory of home city run amok. But he’s also what the great hero Theseus would be if he never actually challenged the system.
That’s when I realized what Cato’s connection to Theseus really means.
One day, President Snow (or his mysterious predecessor?) sat down and read one version or another of the Theseus myth. He incorporated the muttations inspired by the Minotaur, commissioned an elaborate Labyrinth/Arena by his resident Daedalus*, and took children to steal the heart out of the people.
Then he started work on the real problem. Theseus.
*Represented by Plutarch Heavensbee before he switched sides like the real Daedalus did for Ariadne (Katniss/Peeta). This also makes Seneca Crane the equivalent of Icarus, who paid the price for Ariadne’s escape.
Because the appearance of a Theseus is not a rare, once in 75 year phenomenon. Every boy grows up thinking he’s Theseus to one degree or another. Young radicals are always finding ways to get themselves killed for higher principals, especially if it means wielding violence.
And President Snow wondered. He wondered if Theseus did what he did to save the children of Athens…or just to prove that he could.
So he made the Hunger Games a prize to be won. A gauntlet of strength to be rewarded with fame, fortune, and even wealth and honor shared generously with the home district. And he redirected all of the heroes from banding together to overthrow the system to competing to win its “chief” prize.
He tricked Theseus into scrambling after the scraps from his table. After all, the real Theseus left Minos alive. Never looked back. Not at Daedalus and Icarus wasting away in the Labyrinth because of Minos’s wrath or plummeting from the sky on waxen wings. Not at Ariadne who gave up everything to protect him, wasting away on the nearest island for her trouble. Not at his father, leaping to his death in despair because Theseus forgot to send the signal of his success.
No matter. Theseus won renown. All the people he saved were incidental to everything Theseus did, at least in the early days.
So I always cry whenever I watch Cato (who might have grown up to be as grand as Theseus) realize, in his final moments, that he has been tricked. Betrayed to his death by the very man who showed him every year what a Victor, a Hero, looked like. As I watch him realize only too late that he was not a grand hero challenging the horrific world to a duel of honor. He was suffering and struggling for nothing more than reality TV. Moreover, a show deliberately designed to keep him from becoming a true hero.
Cato could have started a revolution. He has the fire and the drive. He has the single-minded intensity of every radical, every revolutionary, every anarchist. He’s a better candidate for setting Panem on the path to revolution, stood side by side before the Games, than Katniss Everdeen.
But President Snow was ready for that kind of hero. The Theseus kind, who can be bought with personal honor and self-centered pride. The strong and angry, who can so easily be talked into doing all the stupid things that Cato and Theseus both do in their careers.
Our world doesn’t have “real” Greek Heroes anymore because the Powers That Be have found ways to redirect them into safe, benign displays of heroism and power. Kept them as far away from the heart of things as Theseus himself proved he wanted to be the day he stepped down from the throne of Athens and ceded control of the city to the very same senate of old men that recently decided to send 18 children to their gruesome death in order to save themselves.
UPDATE: Having read The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes…it’s more complicated that Dr. Gaul, Coriolanus Snow, or [spoiler] having read of Theseus. They had to actually learn the lesson of Minos. But seriously, go read it. Especially if you are a young woman who might need a serious look at how to identify a toxic relationship with someone who will never change. And my new favorite movie-added Easter egg is the sound track for the first ten minutes.
