The Bird & the Snake

“Remember who the enemy is,” Haymitch tells Katniss, moments before she is taken off to the Quarter Quell arena. Again, he reminds her as she attempts to talk down a man in District 2 holding a gun to her head; “Who is the enemy?”  

The enemy, she knows, is the Capitol, and the man who embodies the so-called “beating heart” of Panem: President Snow. Where she is the symbol of freedom, he is the symbol of an oppressive system. 

When Katniss first meets the President at the presentation of the victors, she understands instantly that he knows she is a threat, that she is the reason the Games and the Capitol were undermined. In the film, he seems to come across softer, commenting on her mockingjay pin and telling her that her district must be proud.

This softness and civility, we know, is a ruse. His eyes, she notes in the novel, are “as unforgiving as a snake’s” as he crowns her. What Katniss doesn’t realize at the time is how alike the two are, and just how much they will come to understand each other.