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Caving to political pressure to cancel movies is not good for anyone

Here’s the thing about the right-wing outrage machine: it’s really good at manufacturing controversy. (Remember Unplanned?) Progressives will always be hamstrung by the need for demonstrable proof of a wild claim, or a context in which to understand a given thing the barking heads on Fox News – or the addled, low-information voter who became the President of the United States – can fire something out into the world and trust their viewers and followers to pick it up and yell about it as though they were passing along the word of God. Which, I guess, they might as well be. It’s all about the sound and fury the substance of the claim is irrelevant.

On August 5, when Donald Trump found himself in need of a win after a disgraceful response to a pair of mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton – you know, when he got the name of a goddamn city wrong – he seized upon Fox News’ coordinated attack on the upcoming Blumhouse thriller The Hunt, in which wealthy Americans abduct poor Americans – mostly Southerners, based on the accents we hear in the trailer – to hunt them for sport.

After randomly declaring to reporters that “Hollywood is racist” on the following Friday, Trump elaborated.

“Liberal Hollywood is Racist at the highest level, and with great Anger and Hate!” he tweeted. “They like to call themselves ‘Elite,’ but they are not Elite. 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…. [sic] ….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!”

I don’t think Trump would consciously order violence against The Hunt I don’t think he does anything consciously anymore – it’s all reflexive spite. But I do think that he’d complain again if Universal announced it was releasing The Hunt, because he never abandons a topic that gets him attention, and Universal knows its movie now has a target on it for the rest of Trump’s presidency.

It’s also far too easy to imagine a massacre in a movie theatre. We know what that looks like after the 2012 shooting in Aurora, Colorado, when a man opened fire at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises, killing 12 and injuring 70. No one ascribed a political motivation to that incident, accepting the NRA’s narrative about mental illness and lone wolves. Warner Bros. responded by pulling the trailer for Gangster Squad – which included shots of characters exchanging gunfire in a theatre – and reshooting the film’s ending to avoid upsetting audiences, which now seems almost charmingly naive. It’s not the movies that upset people, it’s the world they return to once the lights come up.

And that’s a world increasingly corroded by conspiracy theories and allegations, which, repeated often enough, become fact.

It was easy to frame The Hunt as an act of provocation by elitist Hollywood types it fits right into the conservative narrative. (I’ve been waiting for one of these agitators to note that the director’s name, Craig Zobel, sounds awfully Jewish.) And of course there’s almost nothing to disprove the allegations, since no one has seen the actual film.

Watching The Hunt’s trailer, though, it seems like Trump pulled that racism charge out of his ass. There’s precisely one person of colour in it, a Black woman who appears to be one of the wealthy people running the film’s eponymous murder game. Everyone else, hunters and hunted and bystanders, is white. From the trailer, we can assume GLOW’s Betty Gilpin plays the hero, who hails from Mississippi, and Hilary Swank is the villain, a coastal type who holds meetings in skyscrapers.

That trailer is all anyone has seen of The Hunt, which as of last week was still in post-production. The Fox anchors were reacting to an August 6 Hollywood Reporter story by Kim Masters and Tatiana Siegel, which reported on Universal rethinking its marketing strategy for The Hunt in response to the recent mass shootings.

That story quoted provocative dialogue from a draft of Damon Lindelof and Nick Cuse’s screenplay – originally titled Red State Vs. Blue State – in which someone refers to a “ratfucker-in-chief,” and another character calls their human prey “deplorables.”

These quotes were taken from a script, and may not even appear in the finished film. Director Zobel tends toward more nuanced storytelling, as expressed in the excellent psychological thriller Compliance and the thoughtful Z For Zachariah. But it was more than enough for Fox News to decide his new movie was explicitly about wealthy liberals preying on Trump supporters, and for Trump to pick up that message and run with it.

Right-wing news sites and social-media accounts carried it even further. On Saturday, in response to the controversy, Universal dropped The Hunt from its schedule. And the outrage machine got its victory, just like it did last summer when culture warrior Mike Cernovich orchestrated a hit on James Gunn over old tweets, which led Disney to drop him from the next Guardians Of The Galaxy movie. (Eventually they brought him back on, but not before DC and Warner snagged him for their Suicide Squad sequel.)

Universal has withstood similar pressure in the past – remember the furor over the supposed absence of the American flag in First Man last fall? – and America had already moved on to the next outrage as Trump feuded with his former communications director Anthony Scaramucci. But I don’t think the studio will reverse itself on The Hunt any time soon. That movie’s going to go straight to streaming and disc now – maybe as an Amazon Prime Video exclusive, since Blumhouse already has a relationship with that platform – because the odds of some Trump true believer shooting up a theatre where it’s playing are just too great to ignore.

That’s where we are now, after years of unchecked dog whistles and calls to action. As journalist Brandon Friedman pointed out last week, the El Paso shooter’s manifesto reads like it was cut and pasted from the tweets and TV appearances of Trump and his fellow travellers. And last year, a Florida man sent 16 pipe bombs to people he considered enemies of Trump – because Trump had complained about them on his Twitter feed. (Earlier this week, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.)

No one knows what will provoke the next outrage, so there’s no way to plan for it – which is, of course, the whole point. The mob just wants everyone afraid to make a statement, to stand up, to push back. Don’t make entertainment that speaks to the political moment, or addresses the real world. Smooth it out. Dumb it down. Go along to get along, and nobody gets hurt. (But keep making Purge movies, they like those.)

I used to think these bullies would eventually pick the wrong fight, and humiliate themselves spectacularly, but that hasn’t happened. They don’t feel humiliation when their screaming theories turn out to be utter bullshit. They can’t be shamed into an apology. They refuse to be corrected. They just start shouting about something else.

Maybe in six months they’ll forget The Hunt ever offended them, and Universal can roll it out quietly and safely. That’d be nice. But I’m thinking of all the other projects between now and then that will be tweaked so as not to cause new offence, or get cancelled outright. That’s not good for anyone.

@normwilner

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