Some Thoughts on Stephen Hunter

Who is Stephen Hunter?

From 1971-1996 he was a film critic at the Baltimore Sun (every critic's dream) and since that year he's written for the Washington Post. As liberal as that paper is accused of being by fair-and-balanced types like Bill O'Reilly and John Gibson, one can find a good, patriotic, America-loving conservative in the chief of its film department. He's actually expressed admiration for Dick Cheney's "samurai blankness" and, on the occasion of Cheney's famous hunting accident, wrote that "Some may say of Cheney: He was really unlucky." Unlucky?! What about the poor fucker Cheney blasted with a shotgun?!

ANYWAY, about two months ago Hunter wrote an article about an essential quality he felt lacking in modern-day cinematic protagonists: heroism, or more specifically masculine heroism. Hunter claims that stars like Ben Affleck or Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow are "too pretty." Hunter lionizes characters like John Wayne's hero in "The Searchers," a loner whose irrational bloodlust for the In'juns drives him to search for a kidnapped white girl. Naturally, in the end, he reneges on his claim that it's better for her to die than be an Indian, instead hugging her and telling her to come home in a screenplay maneuver whose narrative logic isn't unlike that found in "Snakes on a Plane." After all, if Wayne had carried out has masculine mission to assert white goodness over Indian otherness, how could audiences sympathize with him?

"Where have all the action heroes gone?," Hunter asks. "They certainly haven't gone to be soldiers; no, they've gone to be sensitive, not so much in the touchy-feely way, but in that way that strikes at their essence. They no longer dominate." He later writes that "Only a few boys seem to have the man-junk that can get them through the heavy lifting of a hero's role."

So Hunter's ideal action hero is a dominant male with huge balls. Well, forgive me for calling an Expert Well-Paid Well-Published Well-Polished FILM CRITIC an ignoramus, but perhaps he's forgetting about a character who's become as iconic as Indiana Jones over the past thirty years: Ripley, Sigourney Weaver's protagonist in the "Alien" films. I defy anyone to name me a more spine-tingling, get-ready-for-some-ass-kicking moment than Ripley walking out in her power-loader to face the Alien Queen and spitting out "Get away from her, you BITCH!" with such vitriol and conviction that the Academy Award nominated Weaver for Best Actress for her performance. Let's also not forget Uma Thurman's Bride in the "Kill Bill" movies. Besides, it seems that successful action films these days (do they exist anymore?) are less and less about one-person tour de forces like Indy, Ripley, or John "Die Hard" McClane. One might say that the last action hero was Mel Gibson's Martin Riggs in the "Lethal Weapon" movies, a man pushed to the edge of insanity- and watching those movies now, one wonders just how much acting Gibson had to do.

Back to Hunter. His non-fiction book is called "Violent Screen: A Critic's 13 Years on the Front Lines of Movie Mayhem." The front lines of movie mayhem? You're telling me that your idea of a battlefield involves sitting in cinemas, seeing movies for free and writing asinine reviews about them, all the while developing a quite impressive double chin? Is being a movie reviewer as dangerous as facing down Charlie?

Film criticism shouldn't be viewed as some kind of battlefield with its combatants seeking out to prove themselves. It should be a community of devotees to the art of cinema who love, understand, and know the movies and wish to share that love, understanding, and knowledge with a larger audience. A man whose delusions of grandeur con him into the belief that he is a rootin' tootin' gun-totin' cowboy has as little place in that arena as he would as President of the United States (whoops). Surely Hunter's article is not the work of someone forcing his own petty sexual insecurities onto Washington Post readers unfortunate enough to read his critical Holocausts, filled with Hunter's signature bombastic, arrogant prose. He's almost like the character played by his fellow Stephen, Colbert- but without the awareness that he is a self-mythologizing prick.

So who is Stephen Hunter? I'll tell you: Stephen Hunter is someone who deserves to DIE.