Morrissey and the Smiths come up in After The Hunt, director Luca Guadagnino's new movie starring Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Chloë Sevigny. As Time’s review explains, there's a scene in which Sevigny — in character as Kim, a Yale Philosophy Department psychotherapist — expresses surprise that a Morrissey song is playing at a college bar given that he has become a pariah among progressives for aligning himself with right-wing causes. Roberts, in character as Kim's fellow Yale philosophy professor Alma Imhoff, corrects her: It's a Smiths song, "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now," not solo Morrissey. Sevigny shrugs as if to say the distinction is moot.
Because of that sequence, Morrissey and the Smiths also come up in Roberts' new interview with The Times of London. In the feature, in which journalist Greg Williams describes After The Hunt as a "MeToo ethics sizzler," Roberts argues that even if Morrissey is problematic, people should still engage with the Smiths' music.
"I love the Smiths," Roberts says, in the context of a conversation about, per Williams, "separating the art from the artist, cancellation, and if it is best to just bin your copy of The Queen Is Dead." Roberts continues, "If we do that, we cheat ourselves from having a fully realized understanding. If you don’t know what it is that you’re being shielded from — how can you know better, do better, create better?"
Roberts has more to say on this topic: "Some things are big, horrible, ugly. And we can all agree that, yes, that was bad. Let’s not do that again. But, then, there are other times where you think, well, who’s to say that this should be put in a barrel, set on fire? Who says that? We need nuance." Our own Danielle Chelosky, who rated the Smiths' 10 greatest songs just last year, would be inclined to agree.
