A Strange Movie: After the Hunt

Julia Roberts in a psychological thriller: what could be better?

I approve of Julia Roberts in just about anything else. But in AFTER THE HUNT she is wasted, as is the viewer's time.

BBC called it "more of an admirable project than an engaging drama. " And that is being kind.

Roberts plays a professor of philosophy, at Yale, on the edge of receiving tenure. The stakes are rather low for something marketed as a "thriller": will a #MeToo scandal keep her outside of the magic threshold of academic tenure?

I'll spoil it for you (no harm done, I assure you!), the answer is "yes," at least for a period of five years. The implication of the final scene -- a flash-forward -- seems to be that her character, Alma, has recovered her upward path five years after the events displayed in the main narrative line.

Back to the mainline. The harassment scandal involves Alma's Platonic but flirtatious man friend, Hank, who is also a candidate for tenure, and Alma's favorite grad student, a young black woman named Maggie who is writing a thesis about sex and identity apparently inspired by Michel Foucault.

Not incidentally, Maggie is working on her dissertation, and she seems to have engaged in plagiarism in the bits and pieces of this would-be masterpiece that have circulated.

Anyway: the #MeToo scandal arises because Hank either assaults/harasses Maggie or Maggie makes a false claim he did. Alma gets caught up in that twinning of possibilities because she expresses incredulity when Maggie tells her about it. Not only do we the viewer never see whatever the underlying offense was, we never hear any very explicit statement by Maggie or anyone else, of her charge. It seems to be agreed by all on screen, though, that if Hank did what Maggie apparently has said he did then he has "crossed the line."

Hank denies he did it, and there is a barely-alluded-to sense that Hank had confronted Maggie about the plagiarism, and that these allegations might be a defense on her part against the threat that plagiarism poses to her eventual doctorate and academic career path.

Meanwhile, it appears that Alma has some dark secrets in her past that may or may not bear on any of this.

Anyway ... I end where I began. Please don't go. The movie is a waste of time. The one scene in it that I enjoyed was where Alma is reaming out a student of hers (an undergraduate, I think, though in an advanced seminar). The student had objected to some ambivalence in a philosophical position Alma had just described to her.

Alma responds harshly, saying "you are in precisely the position of a sweaty tourist looking at a Jackson Pollock painting in a museum who says 'my child could do better than that.'"

Good line. I love the specification that the hypothetical tourist is sweaty. I have also been on both sides of aesthetic-literary-philosophical arguments. I have sympathies working both with Pollock and with the sweaty tourist. That fact might have made me part of the target audience for this mess of a movie. The more the pity.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

The Lyrics of "Live Like You Were Dying"

Back in 2004 Tim McGraw recorded the song "Live Like You were Dying." As a way of marking the one-decade anniversary of this song, I'd like to admit that a couple of the lines have confused me for years. I could use your help understanding them. In the first couple of verses, the song seems easy to follow. Two men are talking, and one tells the other about his diagnosis. The doctors have (recently? or a long time ago and mistakenly? that isn't clear) given him the news that he would die soon. "I spent most of the next days/Looking at the X-rays." Then we get a couple of lines about a man crossing items off of his bucket list. "I went sky diving, I went rocky mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu." Then the speaker -- presumably still the old man -- shifts to the more characterological consequences of the news. As he was doing those things, he found he was loving deeper and speaking sweeter, and givin...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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