[...] The only alternative is death.

But what if you choose death? This is the crux of the first film, and I turned to Bifo when I tried to write about it. “Suicide is the decisive political act of our times”, Bifo wrote in Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-alpha Generation. (London: Minor Compositions, 2009, p55) Katniss and Peeta’s threat of suicide is the only possible act of insubordination in the Hunger Games. And this is insubordination, NOT resistance. As the two most acute analysts of Control society, Burroughs and Foucault, both recognised, resistance is not a challenge to power; it is, on the contrary, that which power needs. No power without something to resist it. No power without a living being as its subject. When they kill us, they can no longer see us subjugated. A being reduced to whimpering – this is the limits of power. Beyond that lies death. So only if you act as if you are dead can you be free. This is Katniss’s decisive step into becoming a revolutionary, and in choosing death, she wins back her life – or the possibility of a life no longer lived as a slave-subordinate, but as a free individual.