The Hunger Games (Night Vision Glasses in Daylight) | Database of Machine Vision in Art, Games and Narratives

Brief description

After blowing up the food that the Careers had stashed, Katniss is too weak and deafened by the blast to run, and hides in bushes all night, wearing her night vision glasses. When she wakes, she is confused because she can't see properly. She realises this is because of the glasses.

Pull Quotes

When I open my eyes, the world looks slightly fractured, and it takes a minute to realize that the sun must be well up and the glasses fragmenting my vision. As I sit up and remove them, I hear a laugh somewhere near the lake and freeze. The laugh’s distorted, but the fact that it registered at all means I must be regaining my hearing. Yes, my right ear can hear again, although it’s still ringing. As for my left ear, well, at least the bleeding has stopped. Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games (Hunger Games Trilogy, Book 1) (p. 227). Scholastic Inc.. Kindle Edition.

Work that the situation appears in

Title	Publication Type	Year	Creator
The Hunger Games (series)	Narrative, Movie, Novel	2008	Suzanne Collins

Who does what?

This character

Is

This technology

Is

This entity

is/are

Aesthetic characteristics

Fragmented

Machine P.O.V

Not machine P.O.V.

Record Status

One person feels OK with this

Notes

Katniss is presented as having a very natural strength, with her bow and arrow, her connection to nature and hunting to eat. She rarely and somewhat reluctantly uses technology. I think the only technology she operates herself, apart from her bow and arrow, is the night vision glasses and in book 3, the holo. She goes along with the videos (provos) and plays to the cameras, but reluctantly. The Capitol is of course hugely technological, whereas District 12 seems mostly stuck in the 1930s in terms of technology and clothes and the black and white framed photo of her father, except for the television screens and (in the movie though not the book) the blood drawn from fingers before the reaping to check their identity. Oh, and the Storm Trooper-like Peacekeepers. (--Jill, 21.01.2020)

The final scene (in the fourth movie) is utterly bucolic, no barbed wire, not even dense woods, but rolling fields, children dressed in white. A big, old, non-technological manor house. Peeta planting primroses in a garden bed.

So when she uses night vision glasses to augment her senses, it is because she has lost one of her other senses, hearing, due to the blast. She's excited at how well they work when trying them on after Rue has explained what they are. But they "fragment her vision" in daylight, and she thinks of the Careers as "tromping around in the woods" (page 229) and having heavy bodies (page 248) when they wear the glasses. They lack her natural hunter's advantage and thus must use the prosthetics of the glasses, but it barely helps.

Authored by

Jill

UUID

9637a21e-9cff-48b6-a10e-196b5b532265