Taking bullets for beliefs

The Hunt (now streaming on Peacock) came out in March of 2020 and is a 90-minute (hooray) action/horror movie about a group of rich, effete liberal cultural elites who hate the gun-toting freedom-loving conservatives who also hate them and complain about them on the internet and on their podcasts.

In the movie (rated R for bloody violence and bad language), the internet-complaining, unlike most internet-complaining, actually works to such a degree that the cultural elites momentarily have their reputations damaged and must relinquish their positions as board members at the Kennedy Center, CEOs of companies, denizens of the Time 100, etc. This of course makes the elites really, really mad.

But instead of meditating or centering or calling BetterHelp, the cultural elites hate the Twitter conservatives so much that they drug them to sleep, fly them to Croatia, and hunt them for sport. This is one of those dystopian movies that is loosely based on a short story (The Most Dangerous Game) and also makes a bunch of allusions to George Orwell’s Animal Farm, which probably makes it a lot like a lot of other dystopian movies.

Here’s a list of things, in no particular order, that I loved about this movie:

• That it was 90 minutes and not two-and-a-half hours. We’ve lost the art of the 90-minute 1990s action film, and this movie reclaims it in hilariously satirical fashion.

• That the movie lampoons sophomore Poli-Sci 2020ish stuff like cultural appropriation (when a rich white guy wears a kimono), whether it’s appropriate to say “black” now or still “African-American,” the word “problematic,” and NPR, which the movie says out loud is the distinct purview of white people with money and educations.

• That nobody is really allowed to like this movie, which probably explains a lot about why it got slaughtered at the box office and nobody really saw it. The movie was released at the height of “feeling uncomfortable about everything political,” and was also released at the height of real-life cultural elites shutting down America and making it illegal to go to a movie—which, come to think of it, probably has the most to do with nobody having seen it.

• That the movie also lampoons conspiracy theories, the greatest of which (not in the movie, only in my mind) being that maybe Covid was a virus concocted to not only deliver an election but to prevent the release of this 90-minute action movie (kidding, sort of).

• That this movie is, in part, about people hunting down the people who talk trash about them on the internet and trying to kill them, which I’m guessing is a fantasy that all of us in the “writing professionally online” racket have indulged, at least for a moment, at one time or another.

• That if this were to happen now, it would probably be the fine roster of WORLD Opinions writers who are drugged to sleep and shipped to Croatia, and that I’d be skulking around in the woods trying to survive with Carl Trueman, Nathan Leamer, Hunter Baker and only our wits to save us.

Seriously though, this movie is off-the-charts Total Depravity of Man and offers very little in the way of Imago Dei. It is a deeply cynical read on what would happen if all the hate we spewed on the internet (or carry in our own hearts) were to somehow play out in real life, which the year 2020 introduced in a less-conceptual way. Spoilers: We’d all be dead, probably.

In this, the movie is a wildly successful commentary on how people view other people, regardless of where said people reside on the political spectrum. Both conservatives and liberals take literal (and figurative) bullets in The Hunt, in that it paints with some pretty tried-and-true stereotypical brush strokes—inasmuch as not all liberals actually sip $250 chardonnay in kimonos, and not all conservatives are monosyllabic knuckle-draggers.

The question, of course, for Christians is, “How do we think about the people whose ideas we sometimes (or pretty much always) hate?” It’s a worthwhile question. The Bible calls us to some pretty radical behavior in this area, namely, that we are to pray for our enemies. Easier said than done, of course, but aspirational nonetheless.

Don’t watch this movie if any of the following apply to you: You have no sense of humor (be honest, you know who you are), you’re squeamish about violence, you’re from Arkansas (the accents are pretty over-the-top), you’ve ever hunted anyone for sport, or are David French (the amorphous “middle” sadly takes no bullets in The Hunt).

Honestly though, I don’t want to carry hate in my heart. I don’t want to call my neighbor “raca.” And while I probably won’t be carrying a machine gun through the woods anytime soon, I’ll be sitting across meeting-room tables from people with whom I disagree. They bear Christ’s image, like I do.