[THE HUNTING GROUND screens Thursday March 16th at 7:00 pm at the Nightlight Cinema in Akron.]
Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.
Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.
Call it urgent victim-culture
programming for Women’s History Month, or call it (as I would prefer) a warning
to anyone seriously thinking of sinking a fortune into a college education,
when diplomas are largely worthless in today’s no-jobs economy. But Kirby Dick’s
incendiary feature THE HUNTING GROUND will stick with you, and prove that
feminism and sexism are no match for the biggest “ism” of all – tuitionism.
The documentary
is a blistering expose about how "sexual violence has always been part of
the college experience," as one interviewee puts it.
But in Great
Recession America, the filmmakers charge, universities are so greed-driven and
desperate as to resist expelling known sex predators - especially if the
violators are student athletes crucial to sports success/largesse, and brothers
in powerful fraternities.
Rape victims,
meanwhile (including male ones), find themselves facing unsympathetic campus
law enforcement and open hostility from peers (particularly when a BMOC
football hero is accused).
I am given to
understand that THE HUNTING GROUND actually follows up a previous nonfiction film
by Amy Ziering (serving as producer here) entitled THE INVISIBLE WAR, about
sexual harassment in the now-co-ed military. I haven’t seen THE INVISIBLE WAR,
but those inclined to condemn it as a bunch of liberal FAKE NEWS to defame America’s
fighting/groping men can at least take heart here that Kirby Dick and Amy
Ziering really play no political favorites in THE HUNTING GROUND. The pathology
of sanctioned date-rape and student women seen as disposable pieces of meat by
money-grubbing administration extends even to bastions of liberal-feminism such
as Harvard and that Mecca for righteous-leftie intolerance and anti-Trump sentiment, UC-Berkeley (whose faculty refused interviews).
Director Dick
names names in breathtaking fashion at Florida State, UNC-Chapel Hill and Notre
Dame, and if there is any flagrantly false note here, it is the stated hope
that this situation will change anytime soon. One doubts it.
Amazing
bad-timing fact: just as THE HUNTING GROUND was making its initial 2014 run in
art-houses and festivals, the Rolling Stone magazine found itself having to
retract a story about on-campus rape at the University of Virginia, in which
the principle victim turned out to be lying (Amazing coincidence-fact: that’s
also the plot of one of local mystery writer Les Roberts’ thrillers, relocated
to a facsimile of Oberlin College).
So depending on
one’s bias and blinders, you can either disregard the fear and allegations
here, or wonder why any parent of a daughter (maybe even a son) would consider
the open-season environment of American colleges to be a worthwhile investment.
Except maybe in criminal studies. (3 ½ out of 4 stars)
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