How Donald Trump became the “film-critic-in-chief”
“For once, a major Hollywood film studio was about to release a movie sympathetic to Trump voters,” said Kyle Smith in National Review. But then “our film-critic-in-chief”, Donald Trump, had it cancelled. Universal Picture’s The Hunt, originally due for release next month, is a satire depicting a pack of “private-jet-loving Davos globalists” who kidnap and hunt red (Republican) state “deplorables” – the people who voted for Trump – for fun. “War is war,” says a member of the coastal elite as she shoves “a stiletto heel through the eye of a denim-clad hillbilly”. It’s clear from the film’s trailer that the urbanites are the bad guys, and that the audience is meant to sympathise with the red-staters. But sadly President Trump “doesn’t have the most finely tuned irony gauge”, and after he denounced the film on Twitter, the studio pulled it.
The president’s “misreading of the film doubtless reflects his own persecution complex and television watching habits”, said Noah Berlatsky on NBC News. He denounced it after hearing Fox News pundits condemning it – they, too, having failed to notice that the movie is “a persecution fantasy in which wealthy liberal Clinton voters are shown to be as nefarious and blood
This was a “perfect storm of disastrous timing”, not censorship, said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. The studio itself recognised that releasing The Hunt in the immediate wake of the El Paso and Dayton shootings was a bad idea. In today’s climate, a movie about “Americans ritually shooting other Americans” over politics would not feel like “megaplex escapism”. But I suspect the movie won’t stay on the shelf forever. Universal spent a lot of money making it and will wait for a better moment to put it in theatres. “The Hunt will likely seem a lot less incendiary” next spring, when memories of the recent gun tragedies have faded. Indeed, if the studio waits that long, a movie that was originally titled Red State vs. Blue State “might actually seem ideally timed for the presidential civil war of 2020”. thirsty as Fox always suspected”. The Right is so paranoid that in this instance it doesn’t even “recognise its own paranoid fantasies”. But the row sets a worrying precedent, said Alissa Wilkinson on Vox. When presidents can shut down a movie release because of something they heard on TV about the trailer, it marks a move toward censorship that “flies in the face of First Amendment freedoms”.