In her 2017 Paris Review essay, “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?,” Claire Dederer attempts to navigate the space between the art we love and the messy people who created it. How can we be the educated, aware, cultured people that we know ourselves to be and still value works of Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, or Miles Davis?
Certainly, we know better than that. We canceled them years ago!
And that is where the problem starts, as Dederer points out.
“Who is this ‘we’ that’s always turning up in critical writing anyway?” she writes. “We is an escape hatch. We is cheap. We is a way of simultaneously sloughing off personal responsibility and taking on the mantle of easy authority. It’s the voice of the middle-brow male critic, the one who truly believes he knows how everyone else should think. We is corrupt. We is make-believe. The real question is this: can I love the art but hate the artist? Can you? When I say we, I mean I. I mean you.”
Also in 2017, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was challenged about its presentation of Balthus’s Thérèse Dreaming. “We” called this artist a pedophile and demanded the obscene painting be removed from the wall. The Met refused. “We” became more outraged.
Enter Luca Guadagnino, director of the remarkable and brave new film, After the Hunt, to challenge this moment and contemplate how “we” arrived here.
Julia Roberts is simply astonishing as Alma Olsson, a philosophy professor at Yale. And by that “I” mean that she is able to make me forget about her incredible body of work and just bear witness to Alma’s dilemma.
Following the opening credits—which appear in the same font Woody Allen uses—we find Alma hosting a cocktail party where she appears to be well on her way to obtaining tenure. Then her star student, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), confides in Alma that another professor, Hank (Andrew Garfield), sexually assaulted her after the party. Maggie doesn’t just want Alma’s support in calling Hank out—she righteously demands it. Shortly thereafter, Alma confronts Hank on the matter, and—well, what happens next is twisty and thought-provoking in all the best ways.
After the Hunt is a good hard look at how this next generation will attempt to parse the tangled mess of behavioral guidance that “we” has modeled. Guidance which suggests that all of the gray areas of life—the parts where challenges and struggles exist, where feelings clash with thoughts—have been eradicated so as not to trigger the very outraged (not wrongly, if I may) among us.
In this new world, empathy and consideration have been wiped away, leaving behind only the brutality of extreme judgment to point the way forward. As Dederer writes, “When you’re having a moral feeling, self-congratulation is never far behind. You are setting your emotion in a bed of ethical language, and you are admiring yourself doing it. We are governed by emotion, emotion around which we arrange language.”
And it is language that is explored and exposed in After the Hunt. Language, which remains the only tool available to attempt to build the truth—which, as it turns out, has nothing to do with free speech. For Alma, Hank, and Maggie, as well as for you and me, maybe this is the moment to consider the mirror before the megaphone. And if all of this makes you a bit uncomfortable or scared to speak your mind, then I point you toward Alma Olsson’s wicked whisper in the final act of After the Hunt: “Not everything is supposed to make you feel comfortable.”
Scott Z. Burns is a screenwriter, producer, and director
