Hunting for a good watch

So I was looking watch a film this Sunday evening, it had been a nice day - I had written a beginning to a new chapter of my thesis, taken my dog for a walk, smoked maybe three cigarettes more than I should have and was looking to catch up with what the wizards at Hollywood were doing to re-invent the state of narrative in this unholy mess of a situation that we find ourselves in. Scrolling through IMDB, a name caught my eye - ‘The Hunt’; I clicked on the link and saw a portrait of Mads Mikkelsen, and since I like grouchy east Europeans, decided that I should give it a try.

So I downloaded the film. And began to watch - The Hunt. Not unlike the premises of The Hunger Games, we begin by witnessing a group of people loosely known to each other who find themselves in a predicament where they are gagged, and near the clearing of a forest. The gags, are hardly cheap chokers out of a porno, more like police handcuffs in make, so some money may have gone into manufacturing them. Some interact briefly: trying to see what the fuck is going on, until a cargo container is revealed by the pan of the camera. We are given a sense that some may have been here before, as a gagged fat man tries to tell another old timer that it’s a trap, but he ignores him and opens the box. Besides a pig which jumps out wearing a shirt, we see the old timer drag out a case of guns, just before the group is shot at by an unseen assailant with a rifle from an elevation.

No plot, no introduction, hardly any characters - but people, thrown in a situation. Heidegger would be proud, but this isn’t life. Yes, I know this is a movie, but art does take its inspiration from somewhere. And, here - sadly I do see the point. In the midst of an epidemic, where we do not know what the extent of a biological threat may be, from those who we know ‘personally’, where buying groceries is now undertaken in the guise of a literal mask worn on one’s face, trust isn’t a commodity that seems to be circulating easily. The intrigue of betrayal, for Hollywood and the silver screen who do seem to have a taste for it really does seem to have been assimilated.

The group we see, are hunted. Why? Who gives a shit. By whom? Only the curious or the ‘bad ass’ aka - survivors would care to find out. I mean, every song of exodus was about escaping a persecutor, not some existential inquiry into the motives of an enemy, a question which usually arises after the dust has settled, by those who review a situation. Even if, caught in the midst of a firefight, and having access to a car which can take you away from clear and immediate danger, an individual chooses to head back in with no clear purpose part from finding the perpetrators, without reporting the situation to any authorities, we know that this is not a matter of civilisation in any proper sense. This is what our protagonist, a drawly slender blonde with an elfish face chooses to do. This, friends - is the action movie today.

Notice anything? No Mads Mikkelsen yet. Not that it matters. After committing half an hour to novel and fairly well scripted action, which makes humour out of carcasses while keeping dialogue real enough to hook the viewer into a sense of believing that whats going down is not in any sense ‘staged’ - the casual movie watcher, such as myself is already far too invested to not give a shit about whats around the corner…

The Hunt (2020) is a film about rich elites hunting whistleblowers who rose against them for sport. A facet of reality, which looses novelty post wikileaks, and what we have witnessed by even our own governments since then. Yet, to stage this - in its obvious antagonism, portraying the existentiality of the antagonists, their humanism, their values, tastes - and the perhaps parodied hyperbole of their acts; we get to enjoy some roughhouse 90’s style action in a world which ‘no longer needs action heroes’; thats yesterdays beer in me speaking, but its true.

The hunters ride in private jets, sip champagne, they transport their prey like cattle, and organise the beginning, the middle and the end of the roles they are to play. Of course, the hunted are not animals, they are given a voice, express their interrelationships, their roots, their likes and dislikes etc. In other words, there is ‘democracy’ of representation in the modern action movie. They still however are the hunted, and perhaps this is why literary theorists from yesteryears emphasised plot as opposed to voice in charting what actually happens in a narrative.

But I love the fact that our new Uma Thurman goes back for them. The killings, the action I should rather say, is exciting - but a gunfight is not what I’d like to describe, so let me skip to the final showdown.

The blonde hunted-turned-hunter meets the rich brunette, who could perhaps pass as Kate Beckinsale’s silhouette. She is forced to surrender her gun courtesy a bomb by the gate and the voice on the receiver which tells her about it, and enters to meet the mistress of the house, who is cooking and like a good governess, explaining proprieties to her guest. They seize each other up, really not knowing who the other is, and this seems almost the point of this ‘final showdown’ - the ambiguity of whether the hunted is really who the hunter believes them to be.

Earlier in the film, before the blonde decides to head back into the midst, she narrates a story regarding a jackrabbit who is beaten by a tortoise at a race. The brunette calls her snowball, after a pig who tries and tells the truth from Orwell’s animal farm - animal symbolism seems only in place in a story where human life counts for less than the props which stages it, but the smashing of it seems all the more fun perhaps.

She wins, and a rabbit appears before her. ‘The Hunt’ that I was looking for, starring the the gruff eastern European was made in 2012.

It is about a high school teacher whose fighting for the custody of his son when he falls in love. On the IMDB page, the have a trailer, near whose end you can see a snowy field with a flock of rabbits running across it. Browsing is a bitch these days, and I was not the most meticulous - but, I must say watching this later iteration did teach me something.

The eye catches similarities, across the panorama of its view. We know only that which we can either tell with certainty or believe. Ambiguity as to who the other person is, is almost always a facet that animates human interaction, and yet - in the foreground, in the background, in the account offered by the other, in maybe nothing more than a theme which emerges, we gather a sense of whats happening which cannot be localised to the detail in question. In other words, comparison is the mother of discovery, even if all we discover is a plot.

When the cyberpunk girl at the beginning of The Matrix meets Mr. Anderson for the first time, she tells him to follow the white rabbit. This is what our blonde, aka ‘Justice4Yall’ does, into a private jet, wearing a black dress, with a gun in her hand. She informs the pilot and the stewardess that she has slain her assailants, and would like to be flown home. Having been offered a seat, she has champagne and caviar, asking the stewardess who we also saw at the beginning of the film to join her. We don’t know where her home is. Nor does the pilot.

This seems to be the weird spatiality that the contours of our contemporary scene appear to be. We know that there are those above us, in terms of rank, access to resources, position etc. We know that we are being fucked, even if we are on the top of some pyramid, and we are not really sure who it is that is doing it, yet are sure - even up to armed violence that something must be done about it.

This is really like an activist mentality gone bad. Sometimes, it is indeed necessary to sit back and do nothing, ie. to think about the situation, and what it means to us. Amidst the sense of alienated withdrawal, the mystery of the others, the identity of the protagonists, amidst scenes of fake refugees, in a foreign country which isn’t really foreign, a fake mom and pop store and other such assemblages, we are introduced to a world where the contours of what seems to matter and what doesn’t is changing rapidly, often at gunpoint.

The journalist in me would like to see in this, circus ride a muted, though very vocal call for good storytelling, for this staging of our collective predicament does speak or rather perform how much we do not know, and the action movie picking up on this is refreshing for it demonstrates how a genre itself is learning not merely from the headlines but from what is unsaid in them.

Thought however, does require a circumstance which encourages it. There is such a thing as a pleasure to thinking; a reason why it was once called ‘the dear delight’. I like to see this film as an unstated advocacy of the latter, and in this sense, despite it being a reinvention - I would see this film as puritan in its terms of demonstrating how perhaps the social commentary from Rambo: First Blood for instance, may not have completely withered out.

Port Trust, Chennai, 2021.