I’m going to step outside of my focus on District 3 for a moment to talk about the character of Drusilla.
This essay will:
-Deeply analyze and critique Drusilla's representation in SotR
-Contain spoilers for Sunrise on the Reaping
So you can decide if that’s something you’d like to experience under the cut:
Do you hate Drusilla? Does anyone not? There’s a reason for that: you’re supposed to. Why? Not because she’s the escort for a cruel tyrannical death match, but because the narrative forces a comically evil image that allows us to feel nothing but contempt for a character we’re supposed to understand is villainous. We’re told to hate her, so we do.
First is the name. Drusilla. Drusilla’s a real name, and it follows the same Roman naming convention as the rest of the Capitol names. It means “mighty” or “strong” which is decent enough as a name in itself if it weren’t being used in a comically villainous context. It sounds like Cruella, a name meant to evoke cartoonish wickedness and devilishness. A character who, by name, you’re primed to believe is awful. There’s just something about it. It easily conveys villainy, and we’re really not supposed to think hard about it.
We’re introduced to her as:
a plastic-faced woman who … has a line of what look like fancy thumbtacks encircling her face, pulling her skin back and pinning it in place.
It’s hard not to imagine this:
She’s garish and repulsive. Capitol fashion comes off that way to the Districts, sure. But even accounting for that, her description is monstrous and revolting. There’s little humanity in her to connect to, which is the point. And because of this, we the audience will not see Drusilla as fully human or contemplate the deeper meaning of her presence within a narrative about propaganda and social control. We simply find her nauseating. To emphasize this, Haymitch notes:
As they lift me, I notice Drusilla has a riding crop clipped to the side of one boot and wonder if it’s just decorative. Her dead-fish breath hits my face. “Play this right or I’ll shoot you myself.”
Don’t want the audience to like your despicable character? Give them halitosis!
It’s hard to imagine that someone whose sole personality traits are vanity and over-the-top cruelty would lapse in the department of hygiene, because how you smell creates an impact as much as the way you look. If you smell bad, people notice. It’s hard not to be aware of the way people react to you if you’re highly attuned to their validation and cognizant of social expectations. So I’m not buying that Drusilla goes overboard on body modifications but just doesn’t give a shit about her body odor. Perhaps because Drusilla is so unapproachable and is surrounded by obsequious sycophants, no one has told her she’s let her oral hygiene lapse. But surely someone must have let it slip as an insult (I can’t imagine she has many friends) and given her the opportunity to correct it. If she knows she smells bad, why isn’t she jumping to do something about it?
There are a couple of real-world explanations for this. Trimethylaminuria or TMAU is a condition wherein the body excretes a fish-like odor that is not a matter of hygiene but genetics. It would be cruel to use this condition to paint her character as wicked and unlovable, because people with the condition can’t help it and common hygiene practices do little to address the problem. This isn’t a matter of badness, it’s a biological circumstance that causes a lot of shame and difficulty for sufferers. Using it as a shortcut to make someone gross because they’re the “bad” character in your narrative is…well, gross. And cheap.
The other, and perhaps most likely possibility, is ill-fitting veneers. Veneers are a common practice in the celebrity/wealth world to enhance the appearance of teeth, but a poorly done job can create gaps between the veneers and the natural teeth where bacteria that cannot be reached by brushing proliferates and causes a bad odor. This, coupled with poor hygiene and other practices that might be common in the Capitol (excessive drinking, consumption of sweets, smoking, drug use) could explain why she likely looks the part but doesn’t smell it. We know she smokes, which doesn’t do great things for your breath or sense of smell, but still.
Maybe she genuinely just doesn’t realize she smells, because some people are not smell conscious.
“Well, what are they staring at? Filthy beasts. Go home! All of you!” She addresses a Peacekeeper. “Get them out of here before their smell gets in my hair.” She sniffs a lock of her hair and grimaces. “Too late.”
Oh, wait, yep. She’s aware.
The problem is when bad hygiene is equated with bad personhood. That’s a lazy, offensive, and unfair trope that’s often used to effortlessly paint an unpleasant portrait of a character we’re supposed to despise. Attempting to strip them of humanity by humiliating them with unbecoming physical attributes is cheap. It’s childish and something you’re more likely to see in a kid’s book where characters are reduced to funny, one-dimensional archetypes. It has no place in a mature series that takes its subject and themes seriously. Her description is something that makes me feel like I’m reading a caricature of a "good versus bad" tale rather than whatever super serious and meaningfully important message SotR is trying to impart.
And then there’s her behavior:
“Shut up!” Drusilla yells at the crowd as a makeup person puffs some powder on her sweaty face. “Shut up or we’ll kill every last one of you!” As if to emphasize this, a Peacekeeper next to her fires a spray of bullets into the air, and a hovercraft passes right over the square.
Are we to believe the Capitolites are so comically cruel because they come from The Bad Place and hate all the innocent poor district folk? That they don’t have even an ounce of integrity or decency? (Well, of course the good characters we’re supposed to cheer for, Plutarch and Effie, have this.) Talk about propaganda! This just in everyone: the Capitol is bad, they're the bad guys, and we are supposed to loathe them!
Take the beat down scene:
“Nasty, disgusting creature,” Drusilla pants. “I will destroy you before you even make it to the arena.”
SotR heavily makes use of “beat the cat” (so to speak) scenes that emphasize a character’s wickedness. Drusilla with Maysilee. Silka with the horse. Another example of short-circuiting readers’ interpretation of the characters and making them easy to hate. Why do such characters need to literally beat an innocent in order for us to see that they play an antagonistic role in the story? Perhaps because the narrative fears we won’t know we’re supposed to hate them otherwise. Then, we might go too far into seeing them as complex human beings living in a complex system of lies, propaganda, and government control, which would drive home the message that anyone can fall prey to it, and we must always be vigilant, because in real life we are not all good or all bad all the time. But people hated being given a chance to look at Snow’s perspective for fear of him being too sympathetic, apparently, so I think Collins felt the need to play it extra safe here.
And last but not least, this scene:
Drusilla clatters down the steps in platform boots and a skintight jumpsuit emblazoned with the flag of Panem. Her hat, a two-foot pillar of red fur, jauntily tilts over one eye. A smear of yellow frosting trails out of the side of her mouth. Someone had no problem celebrating my birthday.
“Enjoy the cake?” asks Maysilee. The girl has not backed down an inch.
Drusilla looks confused until Plutarch taps his face. “A little something right here.” For lack of a mirror, Drusilla checks her reflection in the train window and cleans off the frosting with her tongue. Her cheek, where Maysilee struck her, looks slightly bruised under her thick layer of makeup.
This scene exists as nothing more than an easy win for Maysilee, and the reader, because there is no way such an image conscious woman is going to step back into the world of the Capitol and all its cameras with frosting on her damn face. I’m sorry, no. I feel like I’m in middle school reading this, where the Big Bad Bully just got their comeuppance and it’s so satisfying and so utterly ridiculous. Why is this coming off like a cartoon? Because we’re supposed to hate Drusilla, hee hee, ha ha!
“Word got out. Magno was fired for negligence and Drusilla broke her hip falling down an escalator,” Plutarch tells me in confidence. “It seems Maysilee was right about those heels."
Aww, haha, yay! A happy and fitting ending for a character we all loved to hate!
Drusilla is one of many examples of how Sunrise on the Reaping is written in such a way that the thinking and feeling are done for you. You don’t have to think about why you hate Drusilla, or even acknowledge it, because you just do. Effie as a character was off-putting when we first met her but grew into more as the series (and film interpretation) progressed, but we would never see that kind of growth from Drusilla because she wasn’t written to be anything other than simple to hate. In fact, she functions as a piece of propaganda herself, representing the reprehensible Capitol versus the devastated Districts, the Entitled versus the Innocent. In a series that has worked to show the complexities of war and humanize those on either side, it’s strange to see this backward step into one-dimensional characters where the good guys are flawless and heroic while the bad guys are garishly awful. See also: the Careers.
"Jesus, it's not that deep. She's just a simple background character. And she's fun! We love to hate her!"
Sure, because she's a hate sink. The problem with this type of character in a narrative specifically critiquing propaganda, a narrative which implores us to “remember who the real enemy is,” is that it kneecaps its own message by portraying anyone as so one-dimensionally despicable, loathsome, and cruel. Everything the Capitol is supposed to “represent.” And yet, didn’t the original series and TBoSaS show us how much the Capitol is also subject to propaganda and is victim to the mentality of absolute control? Wasn’t the point of the rebellion to free everyone from its grip, including the hapless Capitol citizens who’d known no other world? Didn’t we get Cinna and Katniss’s prep team and the Capitol rebels and even Effie to show us these people are human, too?
So why undo that all for Drusilla? Because the story needed a cheap gimmick and someone to re-enforce the, dare I say, propagandized message that we are supposed to hate the Capitol and root for District 12. Haymitch's perfection is contrasted against the backdrop of the Capitol's wickedness. It’s childish, a cheap cop out for a storyteller who has gone to such depths to tell a nuanced story of the complications of war. This kind of characterization might be fun and easy to ignore in any other series, but in one that has set the precedent for examining morality with nuance, it shows the stark difference between SotR and the rest of the series.
Glenn Close will be Drusilla Sickle and Billy Porter will be Magno Stift in the upcoming "The Hunger Games: Sunrise On The Reaping'' 🌄
YOU GUYS THE BUDGET IS BUDGETING, THE CAST IS CASTING, THE MOVIE IS MOVING AND EVERYTHING IS SO ON POINT 😭❤️ (sorry for not posting before I have a terrible cold 🙂↕️)
Also, I think given the times we're living they just said: I don't care about the money, give me the most iconic people to play these characters and lowkey I think the majority of the cast also wants to be part of a production that's a complete masterpiece about themes so controversial in the political environment we found ourselves at (idk it could be my fever talking but I'm so fucking excited)
I know it's a shit-ass theory but I will continue to headcanon (not seriously) that Cinna is Magno and Drusilla's child for no other reason than it would be fucking hilarious
Drusilla's outfit, while ridiculous, is so like reminiscent of Effie in the first film but in the same time not? Like she's a warning and Effie is 'other'??? Someone smarter than me please I beg
Something about this scene, even as limited as the shot is, makes it feel as though Drusilla is almost evaluating him, like seeing if he's good enough? Maybe it's just vibes but anyways
