Last August, outraged conservatives won a one-sided war with Universal Pictures, using social media to get the studio to cancel the autumn release of The Hunt. The action flick, which satirized a physical hunt of “deplorables” orchestrated by wealthy elites — a political version of The Most Dangerous Game — became national news after President Trump tweeted about it, though it was already getting attention online.
“Liberal Hollywood is Racist at the highest level, and with great Anger and Hate! They like to call themselves ‘Elite,’ but they are not Elite,” Trump tweeted. “In fact, it is often the people that they so strongly oppose that are actually the Elite. The movie coming out is made in order to inflame and cause chaos. They create their own violence, and then try to blame others. They are the true Racists, and are very bad for our Country!”
Top Trump flacks took credit when Universal finally shelved The Hunt, yet as reporting later revealed, it wasn’t the Right’s misunderstanding of it that killed the release, but rather an awkward reception from test-screening audiences. Viewers of all political stripes were reportedly baffled by the film’s political message, as well as its gruesome imagery, a reaction compounded by the problematic optics of releasing a violent film after the El Paso and Dayton mass shootings.
Whoever wanted to claim victory, it was a temporary one. The Hunt has risen from the dead for a March 13 (yes, a Friday the 13th) release. Advertising has repackaged the movie, but “not one frame was changed,” producer Jason Blum told the New York Times. And as is fitting for every source of outrage in our incredibly stupid times, The Hunt is a rather milquetoast stab at a political satire-cum-dystopian slasher flick.
The Hunt begins in medias res, with random “deplorables” dropped into a forest clearing in the middle of nowhere as a part of the eponymous game arranged by a set of wealthy friends. The film soon makes clear that the fabulously wealthy, and evidently liberal, organizers of the hunt have specifically chosen their prey as a political punishment. As the herd culls, Crystal (Betty Gilpin) becomes the central protagonist of the story, transforming from the hunted to the hunter of the “elites” and their sick game.
As a horror film, The Hunt is a flop. As a psychological thriller, it’s pure entertainment. As a political satire, it’s too heavy-handed to stick the landing.
But it’s also something unexpected. The Hunt is a refreshingly honest attempt to depict a growing divide that clearly, given the widespread uproar about the film’s release, our culture needs — though arguably in more sophisticated forms.
Much like its contemporary, Knives Out, The Hunt excels at demonstrating the dynamic of how illiberal “liberal elitists” communicate and conceptualize flyover country. The organizers of the hunt have the means to fly private jets and rent European manors yet lack the morals to believe slaughtering strangers for sport is wrong. And they can’t stop infighting about political correctness, debating whether certain aspects of their human-hunt are racially “problematic.” Their obsession with politically correct speech mimics an ethnic studies course, reflecting the leftist delusion that speech can become tantamount to violence. The Hunt takes this to its logical conclusion, with the elitists justifying doing deplorable things as fair retaliation against people who they interpret as saying deplorable things.
This reductive, but admittedly humorous, dynamic between the two sides is summed up during an exchange in which a deplorable tells an elite, “Go to hell,” to which the character responds, “I don’t believe in hell,” before adding, “Climate change is real!”
When asked to comment on the meaning of these two sides, screenwriter Damon Lindelof and Blum, the producer, told the Washington Examiner: “These are words that the ‘sides’ call each other, but they’re not accurate. They’re broad, derogatory generalizations that the movie leans into and, more importantly, condemns. All the characters in this movie who wag their fingers or make unfair judgments don’t last very long.”
The film can poke fun at polarization, but it fails to understand why this cultural divide exists. The elitists are simply stereotyped as rich sociopaths with generically left-wing values, such as opposition to gun rights and support for refugees. By design, the deplorables, for lack of a better term, are even more sparsely sketched out. Sure, some are Southern and plaid-clad, but that’s about it. Both sides include their own array of attractive and intelligent people. The film itself clearly isn’t making a strong judgment on optics or ability.
So what does mark that divide? The Hunt didn’t find the answer, but it broached the question in a way no other films do. Most movies pick one side to satirize. By putting both caricatures on the same screen, The Hunt asks audiences: Is our current political polarization really the result of “the other side” being so awful, or are we already primed to think the worst of each other?
“We were talking about all the crazy conspiracy theories on the internet and that it’s gotten to a point where both ‘sides’ would believe anything about each other no matter how ridiculous it was,” Lindelof and Blum explained.
In other words, even if cloddishly, the film tells Americans: This is what you look and sound like right now. Don’t you think it’s ridiculous?
A twist at the end reveals, for instance, that it can be difficult to tell how often people live into their stereotypes or whether they’re complicit in creating them.
“Ultimately,” Lindelof and Blum say, “the takeaway of the movie would be that we’ve gotten to a point where we believe the worst in each other, and that is a very dangerous place to be as a country.”
As a piece of political satire, The Hunt occupies a unique space. From the idealism of The West Wing to the depravity of House of Cards, on-screen politics is usually examined from the top, focusing on those who make the decisions that incite your average citizen merely to post on Facebook in an indignant rage. The Hunt, in an outrageous way, focuses on ordinary people who have imbibed the political tone of those in Congress and the White House. But it’s not about Trump.
The president doesn’t get a single mention in the film, though he is alluded to a few times. Lindelof and Blum say this was intentional: “The movie speaks more to the divisiveness of our times than any one president … We honestly believe this movie could have been just as timely if there was a different result in 2016.”
If it isn’t about 2016, though, it still has plenty of Trumpian flavor. Remember that the name “deplorables” was coined by Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail, and it has since been adopted by Trump supporters as a badge of honor (you can buy “deplorable” T-shirts for just $24.50).
Besides issue movies, films that touch police violence or abortion, such as Queen & Slim or Unplanned, cinema seems afraid to touch polarization directly. In this sense, The Hunt is the first film about our culture wars themselves, rather than being about a specific contested issue of the culture wars.
“The plot is that both sides are dumb,” the movie’s director, Craig Zobel, told Playboy.
It’s too bad conservatives spent so much time misjudging the trailer when it first made the rounds. The Hunt is one of the few films out in the past few years that attempts to treat them fairly. Despite its gratuitous violence and its caricatures of “elites” and “deplorables,” The Hunt is oddly realistic about the fun-house effect of looking at the “other side’s” worldview through the prism of partisan politics.
No, “elites” don’t literally fantasize about “slaughtering a dozen deplorables,” and not all “deplorables” fuss over the “globalist cucks who run the deep state.” But too often, both sides of the political spectrum have something in common with the characters in The Hunt: They’re absolutely convinced that they have a monopoly on the truth, and that the other side’s intentions are so sinister that the logical endpoint is some kind of civil strife.
When the villainess, played by Hilary Swank, defends her actions near the end of the film, she insists she’s not crazy. But she is, like any good feminist these days, “really, really mad.” And she knows that other people care about the truth, too. “The only difference,” she insists, “is I’m right.”
This conversation leads our heroine, Crystal, and Swank’s villainess to a central metaphor in the film, which centers on George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The question is: Which side of the spectrum best represents Snowball? In Orwell’s political allegory, the pig Snowball parallels Leon Trotsky, the Soviet revolutionary who opposed Joseph Stalin. Snowball is obsessively idealist, an ostensibly good quality that leads, ironically, to his eventual failure. The Hunt may not be able to say much about our political divide, but it can offer this: Ideologues aren’t likely to have much political, or relational, success.
The presentation of this message is a bit ham-handed, but maybe over-the-top comedy is the only way to get the point across. When each side becomes ridiculous, it’s difficult for a viewer to embrace or reject either fully. If the polarized reaction to The Hunt is any indication, this just might be the “deplorable” film we need.
With a serious approach, it could have been more difficult to make a philosophical point that both liberals and conservatives would agree with. Perhaps what we need right now is a wild, uproarious send-up of both sides. And then a couple more.
Madeline Fry and Tiana Lowe are commentary writers for the Washington Examiner.
