The Hunt is almost impossible to defend – so why does my intuition tell me it was wrong to ban it?

So much for the right being the side of unlimited free speech

When it was announced a few days ago that The Hunt, a satirical thriller film about human beings literally hunting other human beings, would never have a theatrical release in the US, I wasn’t particularly heartbroken – but I was puzzled. It’s not every day that a movie gets pulled from American cinemas. When that happens, it usually signals a serious problem with the overall quality of the film rather than the substance of its content. In explanation, a spokesperson from Universal Pictures said that “now is not the right time to release this film”, suggesting someone had decided the film was too violent or divisive to see the light of day. And that's unusual.

That The Hunt is a violent movie is not up for debate. That’s obvious, even after watching just the film’s trailer. There’s a reason it’s rated R, and that reason is that it depicts people killing or attempting to kill one another with a variety of weapons, from firearms to the pointy heel of a stiletto. And there’s no denying that its premise is controversial, to say the least. The Hunt depicts a group of people hunting (for fun) a group of other people, who are reportedly referred to as “deplorables” (the term doesn’t appear in the trailer, nor did it appear in the film’s original synopsis, but it has been used in numerous reports about the film.) “Deplorables”, of course, immediately calls to mind the 2016 presidential campaign, when Hillary Clinton used the phrase “basket of deplorables” to refer to part of Donald Trump’s electorate. The term has been re-appropriated and used proudly by Trump’s supporters, in the same way that “Nevertheless, she persisted” became a rallying cry for feminists after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell used it in reference to Senator Elizabeth Warren in February 2017, i.e. three lifetimes ago.

While the trailer for The Hunt doesn’t include overt political references, it does have obvious political undertones. The “prey” come from Wyoming, Mississippi and Florida, three states that voted for Donald Trump in November 2016. Hilary Swank’s character, who appears to be the brains behind the monstrous hunting operation, is evidently wealthy. “We’re paying for everything, so this country belongs to us,” she says, the embodiment of a rich horror him villain who could read like a deformed version of the college-educated East Coast elites who still believe in trickle-down economics. Oh, and The Hunt was, according to The Hollywood Reporter, originally titled Red State vs Blue State, so, yes – it’s political.

In case this is even a question, I don’t believe in hunting down people based on their political beliefs, no matter what they are. If The Hunt were about a bunch of men hunting women, or a bunch of straight people hunting queer people, or whatever identity combination you’d like, I’d probably be writing a column about the ludicrousness of it all, satire or not. So why does my intuition tell me that it’s not a good idea to scrap it entirely?

Well, it’s complicated, so let’s begin at the beginning.

Universal Pictures originally decided to put its marketing campaign for The Hunt on hold after two mass shootings in Dayton, Ohio and El Paso, Texas occurred on two consecutive days earlier this month, leaving a total of 32 people dead. Of course, that was the right move. No one could successfully argue against a movie studio’s decision to suspend a marketing campaign to show sensitivity in the face of such agonizing events. (Having said that, do I believe movies are to blame for mass shootings? No, but that’s a story for another day.)​

The studio’s decision to pull the movie altogether, however, came a few days later, and – in a sequence of events that is impossible to ignore – the day after President Trump took a stab at “Liberal Hollywood” on Twitter, claiming it was “racist at the highest level” (and while, yes, the movie industry definitely has issues with race and representation of performers of colour, those were most likely not what the president was referring to). He enigmatically bashed “the movie coming out”, which he alleged was made “in order to inflame and cause chaos”. While he didn’t explicitly name The Hunt, it seemed obvious that he was talking about the thriller (because, if he wasn’t referencing The Hunt, then what impending release was he referring to? The upcoming Mr Rogers biopic starring Tom Hanks? The live-action remake of Mulan?)

Next, sources told The Hollywood Reporter that studio executives, as well as the filmmaker, had received death threats following the announcement that Universal would put its marketing plan on ice. Ultimately, sources told the website, it didn’t seem worth putting out an $18m film with such a high potential for outrage in such a poor climate.

On social media, some conservatives have celebrated the cancellation of The Hunt, bashing the film or its premise, and playing into the very divisions the film was allegedly reinforcing. Those who have expressed outrage at the very idea of a movie about rich citizens hunting down middle Americans (which is shocking, no one is disputing that) seem to have completely lost track of the fact that the film is satire. And – this is the part I will keep screaming into the abyss until we collectively run out of air – in the trailer, all signs suggest that the people being hunted were portrayed as the good guys.

This is important. Nothing in the trailer for The Hunt makes you empathise with the hunters. Absolutely nothing. When one of them anxiously wonders, presumably about the murderous elites, “How are they getting away with this?”, you empathise with the question, because you’re not a sociopath and you know – it’s not a hard concept to grasp – that hunting down and killing other people is bad. When Betty Gilpin’s protagonist Crystal tells Hilary Swank’s character: “Lady, you’re crazy,” you can only agree, because again, this lady thought it would be fun to kidnap a bunch of people and let other people hunt them for sport!

It seems pretty obvious, then, that the point of The Hunt wasn’t to show what a great idea this is. Who knows - the movie might have full of biting, insightful social commentary. Perhaps it would have highlighted the divisions currently ripping America apart in an unforgiving, albeit gory, way. But I guess we’ll never know, unless rumours of an international release of the film turn out to be true, and we all travel to the right countries at the right time.

Needless to say, seeing conservatives rejoice at the cancellation of a movie they found offensive is so ironic that I don’t even know where to begin. Isn’t the right supposed to be the side of limitless freedom of speech? Isn’t it the side of “facts don’t care about your feelings” – the side that derides “snowflakes” and sensitivity and rails against de-platforming?

Yes, it's a curious thing. When you read the conservative reactions to the canning of The Hunt, you get the feeling that it’s almost – almost – as if the right never really cared about free speech after all.