And even though he told his lover to flee, he keeps asking if she’s coming to meet him. You realize the singer of the song is the dead murderer. That’s weird obviously, the talking-corpse bit, but it’s not until the third verse that “The Hanging Tree” begins to get unnerving. The murderer’s lover must have had something to do with the killing, or maybe they were just going to punish her anyway, because his corpse called out for her to flee. But it’s an odd place for a tryst, a hanging tree, where a man was hung for murder. Here’s how she first interprets the song:Īt the beginning, it sounds like a guy is trying to get his girlfriend to secretly meet up with him at midnight. She even learns to twist the song’s meaning to find solace in its lyrics. Peeta was small, probably 6 or 7, but he remembered it because he was specially listening to see if the birds stopped singing … It’s the first connection to you that hasn’t triggered some mental meltdown.” Despite its creepy lyrics, the melody gives Katniss comfort and even helps cure Peeta of his Capitol-implanted hatred. Haymitch explains to Katniss: “ heard singing it one day when he came to trade at the bakery. And she’s not the only one: After Peeta returns from the Capitol with his brain all scrambled, the song is the first thing he connects to his old life in District 12. Katniss begins to directly associate the song with her father. I started to cry because my mother never yelled, and then Prim was wailing and I ran outside to hide.īut just as kids do, when someone tells you to forget something, it immediately turns into the only thing you can remember. Suddenly, my mother snatched the rope necklaces away and was yelling at my father. The tune was simple and easy to harmonize to, though, and back then I could memorize almost anything set to music after a round or two. Making us necklaces out of scraps of old rope like it said in the song, not knowing the real meaning of the words. The mournful song soundtracks a propaganda video Plutarch Heavensbee creates in an attempt to motivate Panem’s Districts.īut what is “The Hanging Tree,” and where does it come from? Hunger Games readers might remember a deeper, darker history to the song, which Katniss’s father originally taught his children before their mother found out and banned it completely from the Everdeen household: Lawrence’s singing voice sounds a lot like her speaking voice, pitched low with a slight crack. And as you also may have noticed in the lead-up to release, Jennifer Lawrence sounds lovely. The song was written by The Hunger Games’ author, Suzanne Collins, and the Lumineers (of “Ho Hey” fame) were called in to provide a haunting melody to match Collins’s lyrics. Wear a necklace of rope, side by side with me. Where I told you to run, so we’d both be free. Where the dead man called out for his love to flee. If we met up at midnight in the hanging tree. Where they strung up a man they say murdered three. Pollux, an Avox who cannot speak because the Capitol deemed him a rebel and had his tongue cut out, asks her to sing something to the Mockingjays. “I knew she didn’t love the idea of singing, but I didn’t realize how nervous she was until when we started the first take, and she was in tears, ” said director Francis Lawrence about his star, Jennifer Lawrence, who sings a song in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part I called “The Hanging Tree.” Katniss wants to show off the singing abilities of the Mockingjays, who could not only mimic Rue’s four-note birdcall but have “song voices are different from their whistles.” She sits alongside the film crew who escaped the Capitol to help the rebel efforts of District 13.
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