Much has been made of the new movie The Hunt without anyone actually seeing it (or at least being able to write about it). This confusion has been so pronounced that it was part of the reason the film was pulled from its September 2019 release and is now the central feature of the movie’s marketing campaign. There seems to be a belief that the movie is about left-wing people hunting right-wing people for sport, and that’s true. That is the set-up of the movie, but context matters. The Wizard of Oz is technically about a Midwestern girl who drops a house on a lady and steals her shoes. Context matters.
While the set-up of the film is that left-wing people are hunting right-wing people, the context of the film is that both sides are purposefully depicted as stereotypes. I won’t get into any spoilers since the film doesn’t open until Friday, but the movie is very clearly using specific ideas in an overblown way. It’s the rhetorical device of showing these people at their most absurd. When a left-wing hunter is about to kill a right-wing person and before shooting him says, “Climate change is real, asshole,” that’s not a moment for all the left-wing people in the theater to stand up and cheer for science. Writers Damon Lindelof and Nick Cuse are purposefully reducing and stereotyping these characters into caricatures to accentuate the point of political differences leading to dehumanization.
The irony of The Hunt is that the film found itself in the middle of a political maelstrom when the actual movie is fairly apolitical in its beliefs. It doesn’t side with left-wing or right-wing people because it’s more concerned with how we dehumanize people, particularly in our political discussions on the Internet. I personally don’t think that amounts to much, but if you’re worried that The Hunt will attack you for your political beliefs, you don’t need to be concerned about that.
