sigma italian owns 2019 libs
luca guadagnino snipes at #metoo from his trump-era couch in after the hunt // fresh off the presses! the MAN v. MACHINE bracket in zine form
My goal with this newsletter is to write about new films as they reach general release, along with some seasonally appropriate commentary on other cinematic events and interests. This week we’ve got Luca Guadagnino’s edgy new film After the Hunt, plus a cool new MAN // MACHINE bracket zine that you can download and share. **SPOILERS FOR AFTER THE HUNT.** This newsletter comes out every Friday, which this week means Friday.
The Venice premiere of After the Hunt was spoiled by a torrential downpour; my screening was ruined by a boomer couple who spent the entire time scrolling through Facebook while complaining in increasingly audible tones about the runtime. I’d like to say I watched Luca Guadanigno’s #MeToo drama with an open critical mind, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t spend the final hour searching my seat for loose popcorn kernels to throw at the back of their heads.1
Wrath must mess with perspective, because I so thoroughly enjoyed the first half of After the Hunt that the second couldn’t possibly garner so much antipathy without some outside agitation. This is the exact star-powered manners play you’d hope for in a Challengers follow-up, and for about an hour I was pretty sure the thumbs-down Venice crowd was just salty about getting soaked. Julia Roberts is a high-power ethics professor vying for tenure. Ayo Edebiri is the heiress PhD student who idolizes her. Something happens late at night between Edebiri and rival professor Andrew Garfield, and pretty soon everyone is fighting about #MeToo and Agamben. This is a beautiful setup for a Guadanigno movie, and the Malik Hassam Sayeed cinematography and the Reznor/Ross score push it right to the top. But my goodwill didn’t outlast act two, and by the time the boomers were literally shouting about how bored they were it was impossible not to agree.
Maybe After the Hunt was doomed from the start. If you’re going to make a movie in 2025 about a second-wave feminist professor on the cusp of getting cancelled, you have to be ready for some eyerolls. What you probably shouldn’t do is regularly remind your audience that they’ve already seen Cate Blanchett do it better. After the Hunt is the “Already Gone” to Tár’s “Halo,” not necessarily outright theft but an also-ran made lesser by proximity. Tick-tock backing track, text message overlays, menswear-inspired suits, a Sorkin-esque scene where a hot professor totally owns a snowflake zoomer for not understanding Continental ethics: we’ve seen so much of this before that it seems like someone must be Doing Something. What that Something might be, I have no idea, which is kind of the whole problem.
Tár puts you in the perspective of the cancelled person and makes no attempt to answer if the cancellation was justified. It garnered all sorts of annoying discourse when it came out, but a few years later what survives is less a commentary on cancel culture than an artful manipulation of culture-war conflicts to craft one of the great characters of contemporary cinema. After the Hunt operates in similar waters, a dark-academia manners play built on the he-said, she-said vibe of a viral NY Times Magazine story, amplified by the catty tension Guadagnino perfected in Challengers. Julia Roberts is all crisp-denim power with an undertone of dry heaving. Ayo Edeberi’s eyes flare and fingers curl in menacing ambiguity. There’s a cuck husband. There’s a sigma scholar. There’s a dark hallway and a mysterious envelope.
And then it goes haywire - not in a fun way, but an abrupt descent into aimlessness. Partially I think because Luca gets into Euro edgelord territory at the expense of subtlety. Partially because the prestige allure of Tár’s six Oscar nominations hangs heavy over the production. But mostly, I think, because the script isn’t very good. When it drags it reads like Ryan Murphy at his worst, and when it sings it’s so much in the key of Todd Field that it’s almost as embarrassing as Edebiri’s imitation of Roberts’s outfits. Garrett’s greatest sin is her sacrifice of taut genre exercise for middlebrow cliché. Sometimes you need a movie about sexual politics to be all wit and no ideas. It worked for Black Bag earlier this year, and it worked for Gone Girl on the other side of the #MeToo/#GamerGate era. For a minute, After The Hunt seems like it’s following the game plan. Then it delves into Julia Roberts developing an opioid addiction and loses itself.
Act three is a disaster, but the final scene shows us everything After the Hunt could have been had it only stuck to its guardrails. We jump from 2019-20 to 2024-25 via CNN footage of the Palisades Fire. It’s the Trump era, baby - men are back, P.C. is dead, #MeToo is over. Edebiri and Julia Roberts meet up at an Indian restaurant. It’s clear that everything we’ve been dragged through was artifice: Edebiri was lying; Roberts was vying for tenure; the politics on display were nothing but two powerful women fighting for relevance in Humanities academia, the stupidest and least relevant of all high-powered career tracks, the crystallization of fights that do not matter.2 The truth is less important to either of them than the publication that alludes to its existence. A sexual assault case is a fight to be won, and all the survivor gets is one step closer to tenure. The titular Hunt is the key here: this is a film about the gamification of campus politics, two elite women battling for supremacy in a time of ethical sensitivity without very much care for the human shrapnel around them. In 2019 it was politically impossible to do anything other than pick a side. Now, as two former enemies come together over a pleasant lunch, the hunt is over. Edebiri is fine, Roberts is fine, even Andrew Garfield is fine. It was all a game, and none of it mattered.
After the Hunt could have been, should have been, a film about the ways smart people manipulate media iconography to get ahead in elite circles. It could have exposed the vacancy of virtue signalling, but more importantly it could have revelled in the venomous parlor politics that nearly won Conclave Best Picture. No one thinks Conclave said anything interesting about Vaticanology: it was just a fun time. There would be something revelatory - even liberating - about After the Hunt doing the same with campus wars. Not to say none of this matters, exactly, but to suggest that a conflict we took deathly seriously is just another opportunity for play.
That’s a pretty hot take, and I’d be willing to entertain it if Luca did it first. Instead, After the Hunt comes off like a scramble for the first fruits of the second Trump era that’s only missing a Sydney Sweeney appearance and a few more uses of the r-word. The movie wrapped filming on August 2024. Most of its production took place in a world where there might have been a second Joe Biden term. The CNN footage of the Palisades fire has to have been superimposed, and the dialogue around it was written as generically as possible, a “look at this new disaster” exchange composed under the assumption that surely something would happen that made all these 2010s fights irrelevant. I guess that’s prescient, but it also grounds the film in The Moment while admitting that it has no idea what that Moment actually is.
That’s a shame, because there’s a tight film about media manipulation in here. It was just written too fast, and with too few rounds of editing, to actually come into being. Someone could build a fantastic bit of cynicism on this premise. This exact group of people could have done it. It might have been offensive and disagreeable, but at least it would have been something to argue about.
Instead, we got a mess. Oh well. You win some, you lose some in the culture war. Surely Luca’s next project won’t have any of these problems.
You asked for it, now you’ve got it: the MAN//MACHINE bracket in a handy one-page print format. Back in January I had big dreams about making a monthly-ish MAN // MACHINE zine, but my gluestick ran out and I never made it past the first couple issues. I stole a new gluestick from work to make this one and reduced it to one simple page to preserve our staple stock. Download it here! Then print it out and distribute it to all your friends, family, coworkers, Free Little Library perusers, trivia opponents, etc.
The first few brackets have been trickling in and the results are interesting. Remember that they’re due 13 November at 11:59pm. Plenty of time to do some research and some watching.
This week we’re highlighting the classic battle of evil spaceship vs. evil boat: Paul Anderson’s Event Horizon up against John Bruno’s special effects showcase Virus. Event Horizon has a small but mighty cheering section that might overwhelm its negative critical reception, but Virus’s all-star ensemble cast of Jamie Lee Curtis, William Baldwin, and Donald Sutherland might have the M//M juice.
Go watch some movies, go make those brackets. If ships aren’t your vibe, there are lots of other horror options on there to get you ready for Halloween. Here’s a button again for you to press:
Thanks for reading *life is disappointing.* If you found this newsletter slightly less disappointing than the rest of your life, consider liking, commenting, sending me money (thanks!) or subscribing. Subscribing will get you exactly what you get here but sent to your email inbox. We’ll be back next week with a review of The Mastermind and maybe Roofman if I can figure out how to get to it.
I didn’t find any. Which is fine because I definitely would have missed.
Just kidding, philosophy and critical theory definitely matter, and it’s totally important that we defend the Humanities, something I have devoted my life to something that is really actually good and essential and vital to the human race.