The Hunt & Prisoners
are thematically the same film but made with inverse worldviews on the nature of anarchy
I just figured out, having posted my response to The Hunt, that Prisoners is thematically the same film. What is interesting is the difference between the worldviews exhibited by the creative choices of the filmmakers.
As I said and will not re-iterate at too great a length here, The Hunt steers clear of nihilism by really focusing on the reality of human behaviour in a community of the type in which it is set. It remains believable and tragic without ever veering towards cinematic convention or plot twists. Made in Denmark, it is quintessentially Danish - the traditional songs, the drinking together, the annual hunt to bring boys into manhood. The underlying calm and decency of the Danish idea of living together is tested and ultimately destroyed by what happens in the film, but in a strange sense it endures - the same community that still harbor resentment towards our protagonist still band together at the end to (falsely) project a united front when welcoming his son into the society of adults. In the Danish construct, this story is about a community destroyed by a lie and unable to return to normality after the intervention of the authorities. Even being found innocent cannot reinstate Lucas in his town’s esteem.
Prisoners, on the other hand, is a uniquely American film. Plot twists aside, the muscularity and individualism with which Jackman goes about brutalising the accused Alex (when in fact it turns out that he himself is a victim) is Murka through and through. In the final twist, Jackman’s understandable desire for justice in fact destroys him until he is (presumably) rescued by Detective Loki at the very end. The fact that Alex is not the perpetrator, and neither is the other red herring Bob, leads to Jackman’s undoing. It is only Loki’s brilliant deductions at the very end that lead to the whole sordid affair being unveiled. Alex being allowed to go free by the police on lack of evidence is manufactured as a bad thing in order to continually lead the audience to jump to conclusions one way or the other. In the American construct, this story is about an individual destroyed by the truth and only saved by the authorities. Jackman makes the same deductive leap that the town does in The Hunt, but in his case there is no lie at the bottom of it - his daughter is missing and Alex, while innocent, is still involved but in a different way than we are initially led to believe. It is the full truth which destroys him, not a lie, and it is only the intervention of the authorities (in the person of Detective Loki) hat can resolve the situation and save him from the (literal) hole he has put himself in.
I could go on, but we can leave it there with the following sweeping but I believe apt statements.
The Danish take on this story is that the community is the basis of real life, and that changes within that community cannot be easily remedied or altered by the intervention of the authorities. In this community, being with one another on a daily basis breeds trust, and when that trust is destroyed, albeit falsely, nothing can restore it. This is a profoundly anarchic idea, which is that real life derives from the relationships between individuals in community, sharing some sort of social or cultural tradition to bind them together, and that the actions of those individuals have a tremendous impact on the viability of that community. In this story, external authority is (at least when it comes to matters of the home and of the heart) irrelevant, because the community looks after its own and will make its own decisions about what is right or wrong (for better or worse).
The American take is that there is no such thing as society, merely atomised individuals commonly regulated and protected by external authorities who take dispassionate action to save them from themselves, even when the people don’t know what’s good for them and believe the authorities to be wrong. All resolution in the American story is provided by accepted authority, and all of the mistakes are made by individuals acting according to passions, beliefs and suspicions. This jibes with the American idea of what anarchy is, which is to say chaos.
Anarchy is a leaderless, uncentralised community of freely associating individuals making important decisions for themselves about their lives and the place in which they live. You might notice that this is much closer to the Danish construct I outlined above. The modern political view of anarchy is that it means chaos - the removal of all authority and a reversion to a Hobbesian war of ‘all against all’ in which nobody is held accountable or restrained from extremity. The repeated use by politicians and the media of the word ‘anarchy’ or ‘anarchists’ to describe destructive rather than genuinely anarchistic behaviour is a clue to the mainstream attitude being cultivated on the subject.
The Tesla quote which is the first post on this blog suggests the existence of a core of knowledge and ideas present in our universe. The subtitle of this blog, which is ‘Reading the mind in the sky’, is a reference to this idea of a central theme or idea being expressed in multiple forms by diverse creative individuals in a compressed (effectively simultaneous) time frame. Armageddon and Deep Impact, for example, or that South Park episode where Cartman pretends to be retarded in order to compete at the Special Olympics which is also a Farrelly Brothers movie called The Ringer starring Johnny Knoxville as Cartman, essentially. More recently, The World’s End (post forthcoming) and This Is The End are another good example of the same idea made independently by different people at the same time.
I submit that The Hunt and Prisoners belong in the same cannon. They both frame a single idea, which is that when our children are threatened we turn into something else entirely. More broadly, they state that most social relationships, no matter how long-standing, are negotiable in a big enough crisis. These may be simple truisms, but the manner of their interpretation holds a powerful mirror to the nature of the societies in which the individual stories were told.
And that’s the connection you didn’t see.
