I have been reading some about the upcoming Julia Roberts vehicle After the Hunt, and thought of writing a post about it, but The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg beat me to it.
To sum it up, Goldberg argues that Luca Guadagnino’s film After the Hunt, a psychological thriller centered on #MeToo fallout, already feels outdated despite its recent release. The movie reflects a period near the end of Joe Biden’s presidency when backlash against “wokeness” and self-righteous progressivism was peaking. The author contends that, in today’s climate of government crackdowns on campus activism, the film’s critique of oversensitive college students seems misplaced and even reactionary.
By portraying characters consumed by resentment toward progressive ideals, embodied in its ambiguous sexual assault plotlines and caricatures of privileged, identity-conscious youth, the film unintentionally exposes the bitterness of what strategist Aaron Huertas once called “reactionary centrism”: a political stance that masquerades as balanced but is fixated on attacking the left.
I think that Goldberg is onto something here, because in 2020, during a pandemic that no one had any idea how it would end, and the George Floyd protests, people like Brian Grazer, the film’s producer, were obsessed with “cancel culture.” Because of this, the movie already feels a little dated, but nonetheless, Grazer and Guadagnino marched on with a movie that is being described as a kind of hysterical cry from the privileged about how the commoners are nothing but liars who are mean to them.
Grazer was shown in a pro-Trump documentary talking about how the Dems wokeness and Biden being old made him vote for Trump and how his colleagues canceled him for it, a familiar refrain because of Murc’s Law (the concept that only Democrats have any political agency so anything bad a GOP person does, including a “centrist” voting for Trump, is the fault of the Democrats). The Dems Made Me Do It is more or less the theme of the movie, which also seems to insinuate that Black queer students are only there because of quotas, and also that they are disingenuous.
I am not too shocked at this tone-deaf level of political awareness from Hollywood big shots. The movie Civil War posited a scenario where California and Texas are allies. Of course, this is nonsense for anyone with a bit of political awareness, because the idea of Gavin Newsom and Greg Abbott as military allies is hilarious. Not so, said the director, if you believe that it’s because of, wait for it…
Okay, then. Grazer also produced a completely political tone-deaf movie that you may have heard of, directed by Ron Howard: Hillbilly Elegy.
There’s a lot of nefarious garbage in this movie, just based on how people who participated in it are talking about it. One, the film itself is vague on whether the sexual assault that is the center of the movie actually happened, but not to Grazer. He is 1000% clear that it was a big woke lie.
Producer Brian Grazer seems to be publicly taking a side, though, telling THR, “Before this project existed, I was very much in the anti-woke category, it just got too extreme. And this movie shows the damage of that by dealing with false accusations on the Yale campus, in this case, and what false accusations can do — they can and will destroy somebody’s life. And I just thought that was really, really important.”
Note what director Gudagnino says about it…Sexual assault accusations are just so darned complicated, so complex, who knows what really happens?
Stuhlbarg, in his third collaboration with Guadagnino after Call Me by Your Name and Bones and All, noted, “It’s a very complicated script and could be taken as quite talky, but it’s just the background for some really interesting relationships between us [gesturing to Roberts] and some colleagues in school and what’s really going on and what we are privy to and what we’re not privy to. It’s a wonderful mix and he’s always got some interesting perspectives on stories like this.”
And although Guadagnino has said the project is not a #MeToo movie, Garrett said “it feels like it’s interacting with themes that have been in the cultural imaginary since #MeToo,” explaining, “the explosion of the way we talk about women’s narratives — especially in these highly codified, power-dynamic-ridden spaces and the power abuses that can be born from that — I think that’s going to be shaping the way we talk about instances like what’s portrayed in the film for years to come.”
That was a lot of words that meant little, and if I were a woman who was sexually assaulted in the past, I would be furious at that. But then again, the wealthy and the privileged do not like it when they are told no, and stuff like this movie makes it clear. Even if that means supporting someone who is destroying the country like Donald Trump.
The last word goes to Patti Smith.