‘Hunters’ or — The Evil of Banality?
(Warning: contains very strong language)
I had a particularly nasty tummy bug yesterday that confined me to my sofa for the entire day. I was exhausted so wanted something I deliberately didn’t need to care about to pass the time, something it didn’t matter if I fell asleep during, when I remembered a friend had asked me if I’d seen ‘Hunters’ on Prime. “It’s awful,” he told me, “Like Tarantino directs Nazi hunting X-Men but even worse than that sounds.” It sounded fucking awful, so I blearily switched it on out of morbid curiosity as my stomach gurgled like an angry coffee percolator in protest. “Christ, this does look truly shit,” but I had so little energy I ended up watching the entire series in a sort of semi-coma… in one ten hour sitting with only dashes to the toilet to instigate any physical movement. It was a nightmare on many levels.
‘Hunters’ touch-stone isn’t so much Tarantino as the latter Wolfenstein games which, to be honest, are the early Castle Wolfenstein games rammed through the prism of Quentin’s tiresome ‘Inglorious Bastards’ where a group of wise-cracking Nazi hunters consisting of various kick-ass stereotypes set out take down a new Nazi order in an alternative history 1970’s America. It’s ‘The Man In The High Castle’ with low intelligence and simply an excuse for everybody who isn’t a Nazi to continuously shout “Let’s kill some motherfuckng Nazis!” much like Brad Pitt did in Tarantino’s film. It’s extremely tiresome and wearing and is one of the reasons I hate the recent games.
Yet Wolfenstein didn’t use to be like this, having much more in common with Indiana Jones or ‘Where Eagles Dare’ and functioning as an action/espionage adventure but since its release Tarantino’s ‘Jewish revenge’ film has, as usual with his work, trickled down into some of the more juvenile and impressionable quarters of pop-culture. So Wolfenstein is no longer action-adventure fun but now purely “Nazis are evil so that means we can do whatever the fucking hell we want to them with mandatory swearing and violence because they’re fucking Nazis!” as though the Holocaust happened so gamers could act like duel-wielding cunts.
‘Hunters’ takes Wolfenstein’s set-up, aesthetics and offensiveness and runs with it, drops it big time then wanders about utterly lost realising its painted itself into a morally bankrupt corner, ultimately playing coy and, therefore, compromised. So the team of Hunters are introduced in superhero type animations highlighting their specific abilities making you think this is going to be a cartoon style, bad taste romp before dropping all that entirely, including their abilities, and just stumbling about like a drunken asshole at a Comic-con convention.
‘Hunters’ also drops any sense of alternative reality and we quickly realise that it is attempting to say that all this could REALLY have happened, pulling in real world events and claiming the Nazis were responsible for them in their attempt to create a Fourth Reich. This results in some seriously clunky, and deeply offensive, crow barring-in of historical events — the New York black-out, South American sanctions etc — that violently jar against the fantastical elements and undermining any consistent tone.
Although the biggest misstep is what the series thinks is its big, shocking, mid-season reveal — that the Americans GASP SHOCK HORROR brought Nazi scientists back over to the United States to work in the military industrial complex. Whoa, you’re frying my mind man, daddio. Not only is none of this a surprise or a shock but it’s been public knowledge since day one. Had the writers of this show not realised that ‘Dr Strangelove’ had already been out for ten years before this series was set or that almost every post-modernist writer in America had been dealing with this openly? And ‘Hunters’ brings nothing new, other than violence and bad-taste to any of this, saying less over its ten hour run-time than Pynchon did in half a sentence of ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’.
‘Hunters’ also fires endless pop-culture references at the viewer, a thoroughly 21st Century phenomena, which come so thick and fast that many are inaccurate anachronisms (’Kramer vs. Kramer’ was release in 1979 whilst this series is set in ’77 and if ‘Hunters’ can’t get its ‘Kramer vs. fucking Kramer’ facts right how can we trust it on anything, let alone the Holocaust, for that matter?). They’re all there purely there for a lazy gag. Likewise the constant talk of Batman and superheroes are utterly contemporary as no geek back in ’77 would talk about the Caped Crusader in the way this series does (Adam West’s ‘Batman’ was still in syndication at this time but these people talk like Kevin Smith fans).
Most disconcertingly, for all its supposedly controversial edginess, ‘Hunters’ has zero genuine bite or satirical power. It toys with the idea that America has a right wing element to it but the blame for that is put on the United States having imported Nazis into the nation, an oddly fascistic notion in itself, rather than addressing the fact that the good ‘ole US of A has had deeply fascistic qualities since its inception (is this why the word ‘Nazism’ is bandied frequently about but never ‘fascism’?). Likewise, half-way through, there is a badly written, cliché riddled ‘sketch’ called ‘Why does everybody hate the Jews?’. All the usual reasons are given — they’re greedy, they killed Jesus — but there is never any mention of Palestine or Israeli foreign policy hence missing an opportunity to say something genuinely interesting, satirical and important. It renders the entire series even more into a state of facile, outré posturing.
The biggest mistake, as with Wolfenstein and Tarantino, is to make the Nazis objectively and moustache-twirlingly evil. This is done as an excuse for gleeful, guilt-free, violent retribution but at the expense of one of the real reasons the events leading to the Holocaust happened, namely the banality of evil, almost as though the writers had never even heard of Hannah Arendt or Gitta Sereny let alone actually read them before embarking on this project. Neglecting this aspect of The Final Solution is as worrying as it is irresponsible and insulting, and I haven’t even touched (and don’t particularly want to) the deeply revolting Holocaust “recreations” displayed here.
‘Hunters’ biggest crime though, as if all the above wasn’t enough, is, ironically, much more prosaic in nature in that it’s mind-numbingly boring and dull. It’s an awful video game cut-scene expanded to over nine hours, so it at least has one thing in common with ‘Shoah’ in that it’s a gruelling, multi-hour, soul-destroying experience, although that’s the ONLY thing this piece of inane shit has in common with Lanzmann’s work. Desperately flailing about in an attempt to grab attentions it lets slip any sense of narrative through-line, quickly becoming a nonsensical mess. Plus, each episode starts with a warning about ‘adult content’ and ‘for mature audiences only’ yet the entire enterprise is screamingly infantile; I can’t think of a single adult who could stand a single minute of this unless waylaid by debilitating digestive issues.
There’s an unnerving rise in the fetishisation of Nazism in the name of entertainment recently that I’m finding disturbing and what with this, Wolfenstein, Tarantino and ‘Jojo Rabbit’ I’ve seen more swastikas and Nazi paraphernalia over the last few months than I would have if I’d been living in Nuremberg at the height of the Third Reich. As I’ve said before, Hitler may has lost the war but if he knew how much exposure he was still getting today he’d be jumping about like… well, like a badly thought out caricature of himself.
‘Hunters’ is a reprehensible, ill-conceived, insulting, boring, lacklustre, irresponsible piece of garbage. It is badly written to the point it should never have been read at the script stage let alone commissioned.
There were a few bursts of unmitigated excitement yesterday though and that’s when I had to frequently dash to the toilet every 45 minutes hoping I’d get there before I soiled myself and I can tell you that the hot liquid (possibly even plasma) that came firing out of my anus at the speed of a V2 rocket had more substance, was better constructed and was way less offensive than what I watched on Amazon prime yesterday.
Avoid this like a virulent stomach bug.
