George Orwell said, “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
Political language most certainly includes speeches made from the White House lawn or tirades spewed across news channels. However, political language has seeped into another area of our culture, and its appearance has become less and less subtle as the years have gone by.
That area is Hollywood.
With so many actors and actresses coming out against President Trump, it’s difficult to imagine Hollywood churning out a movie with zero political bias.
Enter the newest addition of political rhetoric disguised as cinematic creation: The Hunt.
Less than a week before mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton took 31 lives, Universal Studios released a trailer for The Hunt. This video showed the gruesome premise for the upcoming movie. In it, a group of people were kidnapped and taken to a secluded area of countryside, where rich elites could hunt them for sport.
Past tense is used in the video’s description, because the trailer was recently taken down, accompanying a decision by Universal to cancel plans for releasing the movie. However, the underlying messages and themes contained in the short-lived trailer still reveal much about the movie’s true content.
Included in the trailer was a portion of dialogue among the elites:
“It’s just business,” one says. “Hunting human beings for sport.”
Now, this line alone is astoundingly morbid just by itself. We have reached a point in our society where we are so desensitized to violence, that the movie-makers have to reach beyond, have to go further, in order to capture attention. The good guy vs. bad guy, justice vs. evil routine no longer fills theater seats, forcing studios to think up something edgier, something with more stopping power.
However, that wasn’t the end of the section of dialogue in the trailer. A different elite responds: “They’re not human beings.”
If the trailer were a joke, this would be the punchline. It perfectly wraps up the message being conveyed. They’re not human beings.
As we all know, trailers give glimpses into the movie, sometimes without context. But this line is astounding nonetheless, and vaguely familiar.
From the looks of the trailer, the rich, evil people kidnapped ordinary people in order to have fun hunting them. From the sound of the trailer, they were attempting to explain away their actions, by saying, “They’re not human beings.” If they can make the victims of their actions somehow less than human, somehow no longer actual people, then what they’re doing is less wrong. If the people who are kidnapped and subsequently hunted like wild animals are in fact, exactly that, wild animals, then there’s no harm done, right? No one would be up in arms over a hunter killing a deer, so why is this any different?
I hope this argument sounds familiar to you because it’s the exact argument that so many pro-abortion advocates use to support abortion. At the point of conception, a new life has begun. So, if that growing baby inside a woman is a human being, then killing that baby would be wrong. It would be murder.
So how do pro-abortion advocates respond? They argue that the baby really isn’t a life, really isn’t a human until after he/she is born. And once they’ve made the baby no longer a human (simply reducing him/her to a source of fear or inconvenience for others), then it’s not a far stretch to say that the dismemberment, removal, and discarding of that baby is perfectly acceptable. After all, it’s not a human being.
The political language is subtle and often woven into the plot or dialogue. The movie’s script also reportedly contained the line: “At least The Hunt’s coming up. Nothing better than going out to the Manor and slaughtering a dozen deplorables.”
This language is vile and overtly anti-life. Sometimes we don’t hear it for what it is, but we still hear it. The concept of a group of people labeling another group of people as not human (in the abortion discussion) or deplorable (in the right vs. left discussion) is the concept that the left would like the rest of us to be comfortable with.
In the movie, it might have appeared to be a different motive, but it’s really not. In this pseudo-world (however short-lived) created by Hollywood, the elites labeled a group of people as less than human so they can have fun hunting them. In real life, liberal elites label a group of people as less than human to further their pro-abortion stance.
Lies are made to sound truthful. Murder is made to look respectable. And pure wind is given an appearance of solidity.
How unfortunately accurate Mr. Orwell turned out to be.
