What hap­pens when real-world tragedy inter­sects with movie violence?

There’s a wicked­ly potent joke in the fourth sea­son of Bojack Horse­man about a film fea­tur­ing a graph­i­cal­ly depict­ed pub­lic shoot­ing. The release gets pushed back due to a sim­i­lar shoot­ing in the show’s ​‘real world’, then delayed again when anoth­er shoot­ing takes place right before the new pre­mière date, and so on and so forth into per­pe­tu­ity. It’s a grim, absurd reflec­tion on the fright­ful fre­quen­cy with which unsus­pect­ing cit­i­zens find them­selves under fire on Amer­i­can soil.

Two such inci­dents took place with­in the span of 24 hours ear­li­er this week, and the rip­ple effects of the dual tragedies have like­wise com­pli­cat­ed the exis­tence of art hing­ing on vio­lence. After a cumu­la­tive total of 34 peo­ple became casu­al­ties of shoot­ings in Day­ton, Ohio and El Paso, Texas, Uni­ver­sal sud­den­ly found itself in a dis­tress­ing­ly famil­iar quandary.

The upcom­ing hor­ror film The Hunt had been slat­ed for a roll­out on 27 Sep­tem­ber. The plot updates a Most Dan­ger­ous Game-type sce­nario for an era of class con­flict, as ​“elites” track and kill adult prey from mid­dle Amer­i­ca. The trail­er fea­tures a not-insignif­i­cant amount of footage in which human beings shoot oth­er human beings, an image the Amer­i­can pub­lic may not be so keen on see­ing at this par­tic­u­lar moment.

Now, The Inde­pen­dent reports that Uni­ver­sal has decid­ed to pull all adver­tis­ing for The Hunt in advance of its release date, which will not be delayed. The piece quotes a rep­re­sen­ta­tive for Uni­ver­sal as cit­ing ​“sen­si­tiv­i­ty” as their ratio­nale for keep­ing the trail­er off of TV and out of the Internet.

We can expect more and more sto­ries like this – many of them with post­pone­ments, if not full can­cel­la­tions – as long as America’s lead­ers con­tin­ue to pin the blame on the straw­man scourge of video games instead of enact­ing sen­si­ble firearm leg­is­la­tion. (As long as they’re not too busy com­mis­sion­ing grotesque YouTube videos show­ing off how much shoot­ing sur­vivors love them.) This cycle will con­tin­ue until real life grows as ter­ri­bly sur­re­al as the car­toons lam­poon­ing it.