65. The Most Dangerous Game (1932)

Directed by Irving Pichel and Earnest B. Schoedsack
Written by James Ashmore Creelman
Starring Joel McCrea, Fay Wray, and Leslie Banks
cw: the Holocaust, animal slaughter

We read the story in seventh grade, which was anthologized in the well-worn copies of our English textbook. “Is this an example of man versus nature or man versus man?” Mrs. R asked afterward. We watched a lot of old, TCM-type movies in that class, like The Prince and Pauper, Huckleberry Finn, The Miracle Worker, and The Diary of Anne Frank. The latter two, Mrs. R believed, had powerful things to say about compassion. I got the sense that the brutality of the Holocaust disturbed her more than, you know, the actual genocide. “If you have to kill someone, can’t you find a more humane way to do it?” she wondered aloud. My computer teacher was an open Holocaust denier; my social studies teacher said more than once that any attack on Israel could lead to the Rapture. What the fuck was up with that school in 1994? Twenty years later, the school priest, a garbage person who defended my bullies, ended up at the diocese where my mom taught until her retirement a few years ago. She described to me all his debilitating health problems, and I couldn’t find a shred of sympathy in my heart for him. It’s coming up on a decade since that fateful shark taco, and eating meat still feels weird. Is there any moral difference between me and Count Zaroff? Though sometimes I think veganism can be a form of cultural imperialism, destroying the food traditions of people of color (case in point: I still don’t know how to make Filipino food). I keep telling X that, one fine day, I’ll kill and butcher an animal myself. I want to understand the intrinsic arrogance of eating meat: my life is worth more that the life of this adorable creature. Her response is always something in between You’re never actually going to do that and a loving WTF is wrong with you. Growing up in the Philippines, my mom regularly beheaded and plucked chickens for dinner; now she says she couldn’t gut a fish. There’s an infamous story about how, the day my mom turned nine (?), my abuela had her daughter’s favorite goat slaughtered for the birthday feast. It’s actually kind of hilarious, the way my mom tells it.