Some weeks ago I first saw the trailer for the thriller The Hunt and I was unmoved and uninterested. If you are familiar with the classic story The Most Dangerous Game, a piece of literary fiction that has been adapted into film several time or the Ozploitation movie Turkey Shoot then you are aware of the basic set-up for The Hunt, a group of people are forced to the objects of a big game hunt and must fight and use their wits to survive. When I saw the trailer my thoughts went to Turkey Shoot and frankly seeing that again prompted more interest.
Last weekend a conservative friend of mine brought up the film because of controversy that was apparently bubbling over at conservative websites. The movie grand satire was that gun-toting liberal elites were the hunters and that they had selected ‘deplorables’ Trump supporters and the like as their game. Under fire for this set-up, with Trump taking part in condemning the movie, and the horrific tragedy of three mass shooting events, one certainly politically motivated, within seven days, Universal pulled the movie indefinitely from their release schedule.
Ruben Baron at the website CBR reports having read the script by Damon Lindelof and Nick Cuse and compares it to an episode of South Park where both the liberal hunters and conservative prey are presented in a bad light. In an attempt to be even handed apparently the script treats the liberal hunters as stereotypes and the people selected for the hunt are guilt of more than simple right-wing political positions but are also spousal abusers and such. (Though that itself ignore that domestic violence spans the political spectrum and reveals more about the screenwriters than perhaps they intended.) The central hero is a Red Stater who was selected by mistake when her name is confused for the hunt’s actual target.
I find it amusing that before Fox News, Trump, and PJ media jumped into the fray certain that this was nothing more than a liberal hit job on ‘real’ America that the most sympathetic characters were likely to be the conservatives being hunted. Narrative fiction, at least in the European tradition, is about character struggling to overcome adversity to achieve a goal and in that mold the characters an audience is most likely to root for are the ones fighting to survive. They have with the highest stakes in the conflict, are the ones suffering at a disadvantage, and the ones more likely to fail. I am reminded of a WWII training film about enemy interrogation where an allied aircrew is captured by the German and subject to various tricks, threats, and subtle techniques to divulge classified information. When I watched the film it was very difficult not to root for the Germans. They had the objective, they were facing the clock, and to win all the Americans had to do was shut up and say nothing. I suspect this script, in addition to being bad satire, would have placed the audience sympathies with the hunted.
