Consuming Gothic: Food and Horror in Film 9781137450500, 9781137450517, 2017930628, 1137450509, 1137450517

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CONSUMING GOTHIC Food and Horror in Film Lorna Piatti-Farnell

Palgrave Gothic

Series Editor Clive Bloom English and American Studies Middlesex University Ilford, Essex, United Kingdom

Aim of Series This series of gothic books is the first to treat the genre in its many interrelated, global and ‘extended’ cultural aspects to show how the taste for the medieval and the sublime gave rise to a perverse taste for terror and horror and how that taste became, not only international (with a huge fan base in places such as South Korea and Japan) but also the sensibility of the modern age, changing our attitudes to such diverse areas as the nature of the artist, the meaning of drug abuse and the concept of the self. The series is accessible but scholarly, with referencing kept to a minimum and theory contextualised where possible. All the books are readable by an intelligent student or a knowledgeable general reader interested in the subject. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14698

Lorna Piatti-Farnell

Consuming Gothic Food and Horror in Film

Lorna Piatti-Farnell Auckland University of Technology Auckland, New Zealand

Palgrave Gothic ISBN 978-1-137-45050-0    ISBN 978-1-137-45051-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-45051-7 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017930628 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom

Acknowledgments

I always find it difficult to bring a project to a close, especially when the topic is something that I have been thinking about for years. Overall, this book feels more like a beginning, rather than an ending, as I definitely did not get an opportunity to discuss in depth everything that was on my mind, and needed attention. As I was writing, I kept thinking about all those ‘other things’ I wanted to get into, but there just wasn’t scope on this occasion. So my critical affair with the horrors of food and ingestion is, it would seem, far from over. In these terms, I must acknowledge and thank all the theorists and scholars who have informed my work, and signal that, whenever possible, I have used the more recent editions of their work, and referenced them accordingly. I would like to thank Felicity Plester (Commissioning Editor) and Clive Bloom (Series Editor) at Palgrave for their enthusiastic response to my project, and for giving me the opportunity to work on it. I would also like to thank Auckland University of Technology for giving me the time to write this book and the Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand (PopCAANZ) for their support in the form of a Book Publishing Grant. Sincere gratitude goes to all the members of my international academic network – especially within the Gothic Association of New Zealand and Australia (GANZA) – for their interest and encouragement. I am very grateful to Corey Walden, my research assistant, for all his help with proofreading and formatting. A special ‘thank you’ goes to Catherine Spooner and Donna Lee Brien, for taking the time to look at my notes when this book was but a forming idea in my head. v

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Acknowledgments

On a personal note, it would be remiss not to thank my friends and family for their continuous support and interest. Particular gratitude goes to mamma and papá, Mary Richards and Frank Schlaffmann, Aimee and Dan Packer, and Natalie and Brett Baker for the endless supply of cheer, good food, and popular culture discussions. Above all, my most heartfelt gratitude goes to Rob Farnell for always being there and believing in me.

Contents

1 Approaching Food and Horror   1 2 Horror Matters: Abominable Substances and the Revulsions of Orality  39 3 Consuming Hunger: Body Narratives and the Controversies of Incorporation  89 4 A Taste for Butchery: Slaughterhouse Narratives and the Consumable Body 133 5 Feeding Nightmares: Madness, Hauntings, and the Kitchen of Horrors   179 6 A Bitter Feast: Dining Tables in their Horror Contexts   221 7 Conclusion: Consuming Gothic and Its Discontents   261 Filmography267 Index271 vii

List

of

Figures

Fig. 2.1 As the victim of a witchcraft ritual, Felicia Alden (Veronica Cartwright) vomits the cherry stones in The Witches of Eastwick (1987) Fig. 2.2 Body modification and the horrors of coprophagia in The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009) Fig. 3.1 The body of the ‘fat man’ is approached cautiously in Se7en (1995) Fig. 3.2 Trevor Reznik (Christian Bale) exposes his hauntingly emaciated body in The Machinist (2004) Fig. 4.1 A meat hook awaits the unfortunate Pam (Teri McMinn) in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) Fig. 4.2 Doug Bukowski (Aaron Stanford) is locked in a freezer filled with human body parts in The Hills Have Eyes (2006) Fig. 5.1 Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver) discovers the ‘haunted eggs’ exploding on her kitchen counter in Ghostbusters (1984) Fig. 5.2 The Other Mother prepares breakfast in Coraline (2009) Fig. 6.1 The famous dish in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984): snake surprise Fig. 6.2 The eponymous title character (Cortney Palm) in Sushi Girl (2012)

47 60 99 116 148 169 181 203 224 241

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CHAPTER 1

Approaching Food and Horror

As a young girl growing up in the 1980s, the fictional spectrum of my childhood was peppered with a number of popular culture narratives that often featured all manners of disgusting and monstrous things. As far as the representational world of horror was concerned, vampires, zombies, hauntings, and even the odd serial killer were features that I recognised as – if not common – at least accepted parts of my film education. Yet, I distinctly remember the first time I was truly horrified by a film, and this was marked by my first encounter with David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986), a now iconic film that tells the Kafkaesque tale of Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum), a scientist working on a teleportation device. I watched the majority of the film with anticipation and only the expected amount of discomfort: I squirmed at the sight of the twitching and mangled body of the unfortunate baboon – the victim of the scientist’s failed experiment – and wondered if, after the infamous fusion incident with a fly, the scientist himself was actually ever going to turn into a human-sized insect, knowing that he inevitably would. In spite of the abundance of body modification horror, however, and the unavoidable notions of Otherness that invade and pervade every note of the film, the most alienating and horrifying moment for me was to witness the transforming  – but still suggestively humanoid – fly–human hybrid Seth throwing up on a powdered doughnut, with the intent of dissolving the food before consumption, just as a fly would. At the sight of his dismayed girlfriend’s reaction, even Seth candidly admits that his action was “disgusting”, but the dark humour © The Author(s) 2017 L. Piatti-Farnell, Consuming Gothic, Palgrave Gothic, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-45051-7_1

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of the comment does little to remove the sickening nature of the event. As a young viewer encountering the scene, I felt strange, and profoundly distressed; my own stomach twisted and I began to experience the effects of nausea. At the time, I did not recognise that this Gothicised moment of oral disgust in The Fly acted as a clear sign of the scientist’s loss of humanity, but that did not matter. The scene still had its desired effect: in its viscerality, it was profoundly frightening and, in its subtle use of the narrative of disgust in relation to the culture of consumption, made excellent use of what I have now come to identify as ‘food horror’. Ever since my first encounter with The Fly, my imaginary horror-scape has been attuned to food, a curiosity that later developed into a broader critical interest in how food itself is represented in literature, film, and television. It has taken me a long time to conceptualise my thoughts on food and horror in film, the latter being an extremely evocative medium for me, and therefore an inherently complex one. This is due to film’s long-­ standing tradition of horror – and how this “markets” the experience of fear (Hantke 2004) – which becomes unavoidable whenever any considerations of disgust come into sharp relief. Even considering the history of film as a ‘horror medium’, however, the critical coupling of food and horror may seem, at first, an odd and outlandish choice. While a few instances where the ideas of consumption and horror merge may be particularly famous and have easily captured the wider imagination of film viewers – from The Exorcist (1973) to The Silence of the Lambs (1991) – the construction of a whole category of film experiences in relation to the ‘horror’ of food may raise a few highbrows. And yet, I quickly realised – through both critical interest and a simple fan-based love of film – that the narrative that links the idea of food and consumption to notions of horror, disgust, and even fear tacitly runs though a significant number of films across the broader genre spectrum. One must only think here of the now classic film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971): while no instances of blood and gore appear, one would be hard-pressed not to perceive the children’s visit to Wonka’s factory as frightening, from the dreaded ride on the paddle boat – littered with an array of disturbing images – to the punishments reserved for the naughty children, including ‘horrific’ body modifications and the promise of death in the factory’s furnace. At the heart of the experience lies food, insinuatingly sweet and tempting, and utterly irresistible, acting as the conceptual catalyst for all the horrors of the factory and, suggestively, for the critiques of Western consumer-driven life that are latent to them, including the curse of over-eating (Cargill 2013, 103). Food,

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the most necessary and unavoidable aspect of life, becomes a metaphorical embodiment of destruction: for food at the Wonka factory ‘kills’, and, in truth, one will struggle to construct a more horrific experience than that. Broadly speaking, a focus on food cultures has captured the attention of not only scholars, but also of members of the wider community, as an emphasis on consumption, mis-consumption, and food-related bodily experiences has captivated the political and intellectual frameworks of Western cultures. In “Towards a Psychology of Contemporary Food Consumption”, Roland Barthes shows an interest in applying a semiotic model to consumption, arguing that “food has a constant tendency to transform itself into situation” (1997, 23). Barthes’s contention has been significantly echoed not only in academic research within a number of disciplines, but also in forms of media representation. From celebrity cooking shows to television food diaries and cinematic narratives that focus on gastronomic journeys of self-discovery, food has long ceased to occupy its role as ‘just nourishment’, and has become an inescapable part of representation within popular culture, especially in connection to the experience of spectacle (Debord 1994). In particular, one must not forget the array of television programmes – including and notably The Biggest Loser, a show that first aired in the United States in 2004 – and contentious documentaries – such as Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me (2004) – that subtly construct a narrative for the ‘horrors’ of contemporary consumption, where food slowly destroys the body, and being overweight continues to be exemplified by stigma (Kwan and Graves 2013) and multiple layers of cultural disgust. Simultaneously, a resurgence in horror aesthetics has been unavoidable in various forms of cultural expression, with film as an important foregrounding presence, where re-imaginings of monstrosity and fear – from zombies to vampires, deformed creatures, serial killers, and hauntings  – have brought attention to multiple ways of living, dying, and being in our contemporary context. In this, food appears to be acting as a tacit presence that, even though not openly addressed or identified, strongly operates as part of the construction of horror aesthetics and narratives. One need only think of television examples such as Hannibal (2013–2015) – where eating and cannibalism are at the centre of the show’s conceptual structures – but also The Walking Dead (which first aired in 2010), where the search for food often drives the narrative, in a post-apocalyptic world where our consumer-capitalist structures have collapsed. Not to mention, of course, the fact here that humans themselves have been frighteningly

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re-conceptualised as ‘food’, in the midst of a zombie invasion – even if the term ‘zombie’ is never used in the show. As popular culture discourses of the still nascent twenty-first century become prominent, one can notice an increasing coupling of horror experiences with food and consumption: film is a particularly rich medium in this, where odd and strange food practices are recurrent, and the boundaries between human and inhuman, self and ‘other’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are called into question. This is, of course, not a prerogative of our contemporary context, as instances of ‘food horror’ have been widely recognisable in the history of cinema, with examples such as Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962), Theatre of Blood (1973), and Delicatessen (1991) being of particular note, as notions of disgust, fear, haunted oralities, and punishment are clearly merged with the embodied spheres of consumption. Indeed, there is a certain unavoidable Otherness about the very process of eating. Food, an external, foreign matter, enters our bodies. In order to gather nourishment, we must process it, assimilate it: in short, we must make it part of ourselves. While eating is commonplace, and foods can be either known or unknown, there is a layer of unfamiliarity that is intrinsic to consumption: when food is outside of our bodies, it is inevitably ‘not us’, it is something that – conceptually and physically – does not belong to us. It is alien, strange, different, even if, commonly, it is not openly considered to be so. Lisa Heldke persuasively suggests that, in eating, “we leave the familiar in order to encounter the unusual, unfamiliar, strange, Other” (2005, 385). Eating involves the familiarisation with tastes, smells, and textures, and the acceptance of something ‘unknown’ coming into our bodies. Even when knowledge is present, and familiarisation taken for granted, food is still extra-corporeal, as far as our own bodies are concerned. Eating transforms our bodies, but it also affects our identities: for what we eat, and how we eat it, is never truly separate from our notions of ourselves. Consumption – far from being a simple biological process – is complicated by layers of psychological and cultural relevance; this already complex relationship becomes even more opaque when disturbing visualisations of horror materialise the elusive concepts of ‘allowed’ and ‘not allowed’, ‘tasty’ and ‘disgusting’. Food is a liminal subject (Falk 1994), one that breaks the seemingly fixed boundaries of the body, society, and culture. How we approach eating and what reactions we have to the food – from pleasure to disgust  – are part of subconscious, cultural reflections that are sited in our psycho-social structures, and reflect upon ­ourselves

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as much as our preferences reflect on the food. It is the very mixed nature of food and consumption, in relation to both the body and the self, that forms the inspiration for this book, where the central aim is to explore how food is represented in film in relation to what is horrific and disturbing, and what common, but intrinsically alienating, cultural practices that representation reflects.

Food Studies

and Food

Horrors

In recent years, the area of ‘food studies’ has become recognised as a critical field in its own right. Food studies is a broad and distinctly interdisciplinary area of enquiry, which synthesises multiple approaches, from anthropology to gender studies, from cultural materialism to agrarian socio-economics, from gastronomy to media studies. At the centre of the field, in its multifaceted incarnations, lies an interest in how food not only intersects with various aspects of life – and, one might say, becomes synonymous with life itself – but also how eating and cooking provide us with an important social, historical, and cultural framework for the deconstruction of our identities in context. Important texts such as Stephen Mennell’s The Sociology of Food and Eating (1983), Paul Fieldhouse’s Food and Nutrition (1986), Deborah Lupton’s Food, the Body and the Self (1996), and George Ritzer’s The McDonaldization of Society (2000) have been instrumental in classifying food as a critical entity that goes well beyond notions of simple nourishment. So much so that by the time Jeff Miller and Jonathan Deutsch’s Food Studies: To Research Methods (2010) was published, the scholarship had successfully identified the polygonal concerns of food studies as a field. Phenomenologically speaking, food has recently attracted a good deal of critical attention in its conceptual connection to our corporeal experience. Undoubtedly inspired, to various degrees, by the work of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, food phenomenologists have identified eating as part of our ways of ‘being-in-the-world’. Recent examples such as Marika Tiggeman and Eva Kemps’s “The Phenomenology of Food Cravings: The Role of Mental imagery” (2006) and Fransisca Hok-Eng Tan’s “Flavours of Thought: Towards a Phenomenology of Food-Related Experiences” (2013) have established food as an important aspect of phenomenological enquiry, and connected the notion of subjectivity to eating in the broader context (Edwards 2013; E. R. Douglas 2013).

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And although phenomenological frameworks do not fully account for the cultural discourses that construct food narratives in contexts, a phenomenological approach to the eating body still provides a useful point of departure for an analytical conceptualisation of food in a fictional medium. Scholars such as Dabney Townsend (1997) and Carolyn Korsmeyer (2002) have also been particularly successful in integrating discourses of philosophy, aesthetics, and phenomenology in connection to food and the senses, confirming the profoundly interdisciplinary nature of the field. It is not surprising to find a richness of psychoanalytical approaches within food studies, considering the fact that psychoanalysis as a field has dedicated particular attention to consumption and ingestion as part of the construction of the self. Even beyond the founding work of Sigmund Freud – which, of course, still provides essential scholarship on notions of orality – prominent texts such as Melanie Klein’s well-known essay “Love, Guilt and Reparation” have proven instrumental in highlighting the part played by food in the construction of the self as a separate entity (2002). Lacanian perspectives have also identified food at the centre of process of identification and separation – especially between mother and child. Julia Kristeva famously identified food as an important part of her theory of abjection in Powers of Horror (1982), a critical stance that was later echoed in the works of Elizabeth Grosz (1994, 1995) and Pasi Falk (1994). While relying solely on a psychoanalytical approach by itself is inevitably limited, the complexity of the psychoanalytical account still provides important notions for uncovering the eating body as extremely volatile and malleable, and for identifying consumption as part of a horror narrative, especially in connection to a sense of ‘otherness’. As far as food is concerned, the psychoanalytical dimension of food has also found a successful partnership with feminist and gender studies, where for decades researchers have assembled important scholarship – especially in connection to issues of body image and the critical dimension of eating disorders – and continue to do so successfully (Bloom et al. 1994; Silverstein 1995; Benjamin 1998; Gordon 2000; Avakian and Haber 2005). The critical interpretation of food has perhaps arguably found its more prolific area of research in the intersecting disciplines of sociology and cultural studies. Here, the impact of food studies is vast and widereaching, with several aspects of dining, eating, and cooking being given significant attention. Food is an extremely prevalent presence in sociological studies, ranging from discussion of class and health (Goody 1982; Gillespie and McNeill 1992; Alkon and Agyeman 2011; Caplan 2013;

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Graham-Leigh 2014; Parsons 2016), race (Witt 1999; Warnes 2008; Earle 2014), cuisine and national identity (McGee 1984; Ferguson 1994; Civitello 2007; Cwiertka 2015), and beyond. Precursory works by George Simmel  – ­especially his influential article on the “sociology of the meal” (2010) – opened the way for the establishment of what is now known as the ‘sociology of food’: an important sub-area of research, with many other scholars following in Simmel’s footsteps (Mennell 1985; Wood 1995; Belasco 2008; Germov and Williams 2008; McIntosh 2013). Considerations within this particular area of food study primarily focus on gastronomic organisation, social communication, and, of course, matters of taste. In his much-quoted book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984), Pierre Bourdieu has been particularly successful in conducting studies on how food contributes to our conceptions of class identity and “cultural capital”. Although Bourdieu’s text is decades old, it is still extremely influential in identifying the social and sociological uses of food as an instrument of communication. Bourdieu’s work continues to generate interest also as an inspirational source for more recent sociological studies with food at their centre, especially within a consumer framework (Kass 1999; Belasco and Scranton 2001; Flammang 2009; Johnston and Baumann 2009). As far as food is concerned, sociological discourse has also found a successful critical counterpart in historical enquiry, identifying the connection between food and historical notions of power. In Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom, social anthropologist Sydney Mintz reminds us that “food is never simply eaten [… it] has histories associated with the pasts of those who eat” it (1996, 7). This contention proved largely persuasive for food scholars: in recent decades, a number of texts  – including Mintz’s own Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1986) – have been very influential in highlighting how the food system – from production to sales, preparation, and consumption – is riddled with notions of social, cultural, and racial superiority, as well as the workings of consumer capitalism. This is, unsurprisingly, an area of food studies where scholarship has been particularly plentiful in recent years (Nestle 2007; Pollan 2007; Vester 2015; Corvo 2016; Howard 2016). Discourses of food and power have further found fertile ground in feminist research, where discussions of gender roles and the family’s socio-economic organisation have pivoted on the understanding of food as an important denominator (Charles and Kerr 1988; Cline 1990; DeVault 1991; Counihan and Kaplan 1998; Cairns and Johnston 2015).

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For its part, cultural studies has not been remiss in providing its own take on food and eating, with many nuances being presented and analysed in recent times, often sited in the merging critical areas of culture and history. Prominent scholars such as Paul Fieldhouse (1995), Alan Warde (1997), and David Sutton (2001) have given specific attention to the important function of cooking as a sociocultural and socio-­historical practice, especially in relation to the intersectional notions of tradition, cuisine, and custom. The focus on ‘cultural memory’ is indeed prominent across the spectrum of food studies, often intersecting with notions of diaspora (Mannur 2010; Halloran 2016), geo-politics (Wilk 2006), nostalgia (Ritivoi 2002, Swislocki 2009), and heritage (Timothy 2016). Scholarly publications on the cultural organisation of food have intersected with a number of sub-disciplines, including cultural anthropology. This area of research has been particularly successful in capturing the multifaceted aspects of food, eating, and cooking as part of our everyday networks of signification. The critical focus of these studies has been varied and polygonal, from gender to body politics, recipes, and cookbooks (Giard et al. 1985; Lupton 1996; Counihan 1999; Theophano 2002). This is an unsurprising development, considering the malleable nature of cultural studies as a field in general, and the varied definitions of ‘culture’ in which food as a communicative entity is placed. One can also notice a distinct growth in criticism focusing on the depiction of food in literature. Important texts such as David Bevan’s Literary Gastronomy (1998), Susannah Skubal’s Word of Mouth: Food and Fiction After Freud (2002), and Sarah Sceats’s Food, Consumption and the Body in Contemporary Women’s Fiction (2004) were instrumental in establishing food as a tropic presence in literary criticism, as far as the current critical environment is concerned. Fictional narratives have been particularly privileged in their position as a topic of food interest, with an array of publications currently in circulation. These works – which are far too many to list in their entirety, if one considers both books and the plethora of journal articles currently already published – continue to expand the reach of the food-literature dichotomy, including discourses of gender, genre, national identity, ethnicity, and history (Ellmann 1993; Schofield 1989; Biasin 1993; Lane 1995; Shapiro 1996; Gowers 1997; Warnes 2004; Appelbaum 2006; Fitzpatrick 2007; Aoyama 2008; Xu 2008; Keeling and Pollard 2009; Piatti-Farnell 2011; Carrington and Harding 2014; Cognard-Black and Goldthwaite 2014). Although food occupies a distinct position within literary criticism, this is not to say that the focus is exclusive to that field.

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Fabio Parasecoli’s Bite Me: Food in Popular Culture (2008) is an engaging example of how food criticism can be integrated into analyses of representational media in the broader popular culture spectrum, including film and television. For his part, Parasecoli does provide a useful critique of notions of hunger in relation to horror narratives, but his discussion is primarily confined to ‘supernatural’ creatures such as vampires and other “voracious monsters”, as he terms them (37). The latter is not an uncommon feature, and the politics of consumption have appeared on a number of occasions in critical works focused on Gothic horror icons and creatures, including and especially the vampire (Auerbach 1995; Heldreth and Pharr 1999; Probyn 2000; Maberry 2006; Piatti-Farnell 2014). Overall, food has not escaped the attention of film criticism, with a number of books – from single-authored to edited collections – being produced on the topic in recent years. Jane Ferry’s Food in Film: A Culinary Performance of Communication (2003), James R. Keller’s Food, Film and Culture: A Genre Study (2006), Anne L. Bower’s Reel Food: Essays on Food and Film (2012), and Tom Hertweck’s Food on Film: Bringing Something New to the Table (2015) have all capitalised on the narrative and conceptual space that food occupies within the film medium, and have initiated important conversations in the identification of what is now often labelled the “food film”: a cinematic narrative where “food production, preparation, service, and consumption play an operative and memorable role” (Keller 2006, 1). These important texts, however, have only given sparse attention to horror as either a genre or a manifestation, opening the way for more contextualised discussions of ‘food horror’ within the cinematic narrative. Worthy of note is also the more intertextual study of possible ‘anxieties’ connected to food  – often in relation to cultural taboos such as cannibalism – presented by Diane Carson, Cynthia Baron, and Mark Bernard in Appetite and Anxieties: Food, Film and the Politics of Represen­tation (2014). In spite of the title, however, horror – in its various incarnations – only features in parts of the study, and this book is more concerned with the anxieties connected to the food industry in general, and how these are reflected in utopian films and documentaries. Overall, the wide-­ranging focus on food in cinematic criticism seems fitting. Food itself, as Anne Bower puts it, has been part of the way in which, for over a century, “movies have been telling us who we are”, constructing “our aspirations” and “filling our minds” with “ideas about love and romance, innocence and depravity, adventure, bravery, cruelty, hope and despair” (2004, 3).

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To find a more focused interaction between forms of horror – including the multifaceted notions of disgust and fear – and the representation of food, one must turn, unsurprisingly, to Gothic horror studies as a discipline. As far as the general context of horror goes, the list of critical works is healthy and plentiful, and continually evolving, especially in connection to film and media. In the post-2000 era, academic research has ranged from evaluations of regional incarnations of the genre and its geographical nuances (Murphy 2009, 2013; Lazaro-Reboll 2012; Marak 2015), technological repercussions and aesthetic properties (Tibbetts 2011; Blake and Aldana Reyes 2015), the history of horror (Skal 2001; Wilshin 2005), cultural discourses concerning its representation and characterisation (Prince 2004; Conrich 2010; Towlson 2014), bodily discourses (Spooner 2004; Mulvey-Roberts 2016; Aldana Reyes 2014), and even the very ‘philosophy of horror’ as a genre (Worland 2007; Fahy 2010). As the scholarship continues to evolve, the presence of food has also begun to appear more and more commonly in books focused on horror as a topic of academic discussion, especially in film. A number of critical works have been particularly attuned to the relationship between food, disgust, abjection, fear, body modifications, and the politicised horror n ­ arratives of monstrous ‘meat eating’ (Creed 1993; Gelder 2000; L. Russell 2004; Cherry 2009; Hutchings 2004; Cassidy 2016; Kimber 2016). These impor­ tant examples have successfully integrated food within the scope of Gothic horror scholarship, and critically contextualised how, as Lauren Russell puts it, food offers another approach into interpreting our bodies, playing “on and against our desires and appetites through surprising moments of attraction and revulsion” (2004, 225). Whilst both food and horror in general have received considerable academic attention, cinematic scholarship has largely neglected to produce a unified volume that focuses solely on ‘food horror’ as a topic of critical interest. Although very successful in their analysis, most critical works have had a tendency to either focus on a specific aspects of ‘food horror’ – such as cannibalism, a topic that has received much critical attention (Brottman 2001; Slater 2002; Walton 2004; Brown 2012) – or to amalgamate the presence of food in horror into the broader representation of the horror experience in film and other media. In response to this, my volume offers a fully food-focused and consumption-centred counterpart, and expands on the existing scholarship on both horror and food phenomena in film and culture. In particular, my work follows on from recent evaluations of horror in connection

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to fear and disgust – as exemplified in Xavier Aldana Reyes’s book Horror Film and Affect (2016) – and elaborates on the place occupied by food as a Gothicised entity, in visual, cultural, social, and physical terms.

Bodies

that

Eat

The very experience of food relies on the enactment of corporeal relations between ourselves and the world  – not only in terms of the food itself, but also in terms of the surroundings in which we consume it, and the sensorial stimuli we derive from it. At a basic level, we experience eating as a combination of stimuli, from the physiological experience of hunger, to the feeling of satiety that comes after a meal. During the stages of consumption, matters of taste, smell, and touch aid the construction of eating as an embodied practice that refuses to be static, but evolves according to the different stages of our relationship with it. In eating, as Espeth Probyn remarks in her study Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities, “we experience different parts of our bodies” (2000, 60). Eating makes us aware of our bodies, its boundaries and demands, and, in a way, it is in eating that we construct our own perception of the lived experience, both intrinsically and extrinsically. The body is whole, but that does not mean that it is forever sealed tight, and separate from the effects of the outside world – the same world that Merleau-Ponty would identify as the instigator of “being” (2005), and all human experiences as we know them. When it comes to eating, the body is at the centre of our relationship with food, not only because it is, to put it simply, the body that physically eats; it is also because corporeal politics are never far removed from the perception of eating in context, and how the two reflect upon ourselves in terms of identity, both as individuals and as groups. Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd remind us that “each body exists in relations of interdependence with other bodies and these relations form a ‘world’ in which individuals […] exchange their constitutive parts – leading to the enrichment of some and demise of others” (1999, 101). The body needs food for nourishment. This biological truth, however, is but the starting point of our relationship with it. In the Western World – where food scarcity is not generally an imposing factor – even the notion of necessity becomes politicised by workings of ethnocentric behaviour, which construct the cultural privilege of disgust. Food items abound and are (in principle) accessible to all; food continues to be entwined with frameworks of desire, that in turn affect our understanding of constraint, excess, and depravation.

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The consumption of food, and the effects it will have on body shape and presentation, is entangled with notions of beauty and desirability for the body itself. Food, therefore, is at the centre of body politics, as much as of frameworks of behaviour and cultural organisation. Anything, broadly speaking, belongs to the cultural sphere, and our perception of the body – especially the eating body – is always powerfully connected to the cultural constructs the define it. In these terms, the eating body – or, at times, the body that refuses food – should not be viewed simply as an analytical framework, or even an empirical theme, as this denies the functionality of the body in relation to consumption, and fails to acknowledge the important dynamics of cause and effect that connect the experience of embodiment to our cultural everyday. A promise of dark discovery lurks behind every meal, a suggestion that could easily take the subject through a tunnel of horror, disgust, and (de)generation. The intricacies of those experiences, however, cannot be explained only through phenomenology: the intermingling of bodies, and the part they play in constructing a discourse of consumption, work only as the starting point for identifying the cultural regulations that lurk within the cinematic politics of food. To take up a distinctly rhizomatic trajectory that, at least at this stage, is delectably intriguing, one need only recall Félix Delueze and Gilles Guattari in their contention that eating reveals “a precise state of intermingling […] including all the attractions and repulsions, sympathies and antipathies, alterations, amalgamations, penetrations and expansion that affect bodies […] in relation to one another” (1988, 90). The body ‘that eats’ gives us an insight into how the perception of the effects of food on the body – from thinness to fatness – is profoundly connected to our cultural notions of right and wrong, desirable and repulsive.

The Edible and the Inedible, or, Food as ‘Other’ In her evaluation of taste as part of our cultural frameworks, Carolyn Korsmeyer contends that, as a mode of operation, eating “requires that objects become part of oneself ”, and its exercise inevitably requires “risk and trust” (2002, 101). In eating, individuals are often ‘at the mercy’ of the cook, and the concept of trust not only involves the knowledge that the food will taste, culturally speaking, ‘good’, but also that no harm will come out of consuming it. That sense of ‘harm’ is of course multifaceted: it concerns not only the obvious risks of being physically damaged by the

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food, in terms of poisoning and all its associations, but also the sociocultural, and, to some extent, psychic notion that the wrong food might ‘damage’ us as cultural entities: that is to say, that eating the ‘wrong’ foods would challenge our identities and our sense of self (Jackson 2015, 12). Within this, one can find that the notion of edibility also defines the identification of one set of behaviours as preferable to others, especially if those ‘others’ also accompany what is seen as culturally disjointed and alien. The classification of ‘edible’ inevitably creates categories of disgust and revulsion, and sediments those reactions of mistrust and even fear that are at the heart of food horror, in its multiple guises. Food systems that exceed or regress our own boundaries of acceptability are, generally speaking, viewed as “wrong, irrational or misguided” (Fieldhouse 1995, 31). As a corollary to this tacit, yet unavoidable expression of cultural belonging, we have the representation of disgust and revulsion in relation to food and consumption as the identification of that which we view as ‘Other’ in our culture, and an expression of the cultural anxieties that surround our behaviour in terms of bodily and psychological reactions. The categories of ‘food’ and ‘edible’ are not, in spite of what may appear to be the case, one and the same. Broadly speaking, food is the large category that encompasses all that one can eat and potentially draw nourishment from. ‘Edible’, on the other hand, delineates a category of what is acceptable within the human cultural framework, and is applied to ‘food’ in order to decide whether it should in fact be consumed or not. To give an example that is unavoidable, as much as it is evocative, human flesh can easily be consumed as ‘food’, but not many within our Western c­ ultural discourses would admit or accept that human flesh is ‘edible’. While I do personally hold reservations about this simplified distinction – wondering if, in fact, it is the label of ‘food’ that actually carries the weight of cultural definition, removed form its physiological edibility – the broader approach of the scholarship appears to be clear. Discussing the boundaries of food preferences, Paul Fieldhouse contends that food ideologies exist as an agglomerate construction: they are formed by the sum of “attitudes, beliefs, customs and taboos affecting the diet of a given group” (1995, 30). Reactions, of edible acceptability or disgust, are reliant on the tacit narratives of cultural control that deem substances as belonging to either edible or inedible categories. It is an inevitable realisation that constructions of ‘allowed’ foods and edibility are ethnocentric in nature, and silently control both ingestion and accumulation, by deeming one food system  – with its bodily, social, racial, and even economic regimes – as superior to the other.

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The very notions of ‘edible’ and ‘inedible’ arguably lie at the very core of both the conceptual and aesthetic boundaries of food horror, and what reactions to this are deemed as appropriate. The dichotomous categorisations of edible and inedible are, of course, deeply reliant on representational frameworks and identifications that are human-bound: with the exclusion of matters that are chemically ‘poisonous’ to the body, no intrinsic characteristic in terms of good or bad exists within a food in itself; or, to be specific, what matters can be deemed as food, and within that category, what is actually appropriate to be deemed as consumable. In truth, the very notion of food is not a universal one: just because something can be eaten, and even if nourishment can be derived from it, that does not mean that our responses to that substance will be favourable. Fieldhouse contends that, as far as food disgust is concerned, “the actual flavour of the food is irrelevant, for we don’t even have to taste a food to label it as unacceptable and disgusting”. Fieldhouse even goes on to say, and controversially so, that “sometimes people will quite happily eat a food until they discover what it is that they are eating” (1995, 31–32). The application of edibility rules is, of course, a tacit one, and, more often than not, individuals are unaware of how codified and unified their reactions to consumption and un-consumables actually are. The constraints of dietary regulations, as well as the reactions that accompany consumption, remain part of our cultural and socio-historical frameworks: they are often so deeply rooted within our organisation, and so deeply assimilated into our psyche – in this case, the Western psyche – that our reactions and our choices are often perceived as ‘normal’, or even ‘natural’. Both perceptions of naturality and normality, when it comes to eating, are of course an illusion. Fieldhouse further suggests that in observing the broader scope of “codified food rules”, individuals make “a public demonstration of belonging to a group”, and in reiteration their choices and their reactions “provide themselves with a private affirmation of identification” (1995, 182). What delineates the boundaries of acceptability is a complex structure of social, cultural, and even economic discourses, which blend and merge to identify our acceptance of substances as ‘good food’ within the realm of our anthropological organisation. The delineation of a substance as food, and its further categorisation as either good or bad – and, therefore, more critically speaking, edible and inedible – is part of the construction of cultural narratives that are, for the most part, circumstantial and arbitrary, but have gained precedence over the way in which we behave and are part of our systems of identification and power. In his well-known essay “Eating Virtue”, Paul Atkinson argues

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that “food is a liminal substance; it stands as a bridging substance between nature and culture, the human and the natural, the outside and the inside” (1983, 11). That we recognise food as such, and that we accept it into our bodies, is the result of cultural familiarisation: our context tells us that the food is ‘right’, and that it is ok to ingest it. But consumption is steeped in horror, for we do not truly know the foods we are allowing into our ­bodies until it is too late: once the oral threshold has been breached, we have been colonised by the food, connected to its sensorial and physiological boundaries in virtue of its liminal properties. Heldke also suggests that “understood in a context in which selves are set off sharply from each other” and “defined in terms of how we stand alone”, these “encounters with Otherness have enormous power” to define our selves for our selves (2005, 385). Once the food is swallowed, it becomes us, and as such, we become the other, the unfamiliar matter, the unknown. To be even more specific, any individual can be made to eat a variety of substances, either organic or inorganic. However, our reactions to that consumption will vary according to our sociocultural background, and the systems of acceptability and edibility that we apply in the process. There is arguably no society where, as Fieldhouse argues, “people are permitted to eat everything, everywhere, with everyone and in all situations” (1995, 182). Even though Fieldhouse’s statement might appear too assertive in its identification of food regulations and categories, the important point remains that, as far as cultural and societal controls are involved, no substance is ever contextually removed from categorisations of acceptability. To some extent, all food regulations are codified, and so are our reactions to habits and preferences, whether this ranges from the cultural everyday – for instance, the acceptability of a sandwich as a lunch edible – to the perception of the cultural extreme – including what actually is acceptable as an edible, from meat to larvae. Food rules, as such, are therefore inevitably codified not by notions of naturality, but by cultural context and its social manifestations. As a result, so are pleasure and its counterpart, disgust. This careful, yet silent assemblage of sociocultural structures is what creates instances of food horror in film, in general terms and, even more so, in the arguably insular representation of our Western context: it relies on the viewing audience belonging to a certain cultural group and obeying, even if tacitly so, a behavioural system that defines the limits of consumption aesthetically and viscerally. That same system employs definitions of edible and inedible, desirable and repulsive, in order to identify that which we simultaneously fear and desire within our contemporary moment. As Nick Fiddes reminds us, “the foods we select reflect our

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thought, including our conception of our actual or desired way of life and our perceptions of the food choice of people with whom we wish to identify. We eat nothing but as part of our culture” (1991, 33). Notions of health and danger, decency and immorality, are often overtly called upon by a particular social group, within its broader cultural organisation, in order to justify the unspoken choices that deem certain food and subcategories of foods as inedible and ‘wrong’. The rational mind is channelled as the clear identifier of unacceptable food systems, and that same outlook deems all consumption practices outside of that system as irrational, immoral, and, at times, even frightening. The cultural implications of normality linger within the horrified reactions of disgust and repulsion, which convey the breakage of the accepted food system. When it comes to food and the experience of horror, what is ‘normal’ is not “thought of as an expression of individuality”, but rather as an “aspect of group identity” (Fieldhouse 1995, 52). This seemingly obvious, yet carefully orchestrated interaction finds even greater power in the association with death, and the idea of danger, so to establish a connection between the consumption of wrong foods with notions of immorality, disintegration, and monstrosity.

Approaching Disgust,

and the Inevitable

Abject

As both a visceral and a cultural category, disgust is highly controversial. In response to a broad history of general scholarly unawareness, Michelle Meagher contends that disgust, unlike desire, “is not a fashionable category for aesthetic philosophical enquiry” (2003, 24). In recent years, a number of researchers from numerous disciplines have attempted to address the previous scholarly gap that addresses disgust as both a concept and an experience, continuing the line of academic research primarily started by Aurel Kolnai in his 1929 phenomenological work Der Ekel (W.I. Miller 1998; S. Miller 2004; Kolnai 2004; D. Kelly 2011; McGinn 2011; Korsmeyer 2011; Menninghaus 2012). Lines of enquiry have greatly focused on evaluations of disgust as either a ‘natural’ or ‘constructed’ emotion, lying somewhere in-between the scales of nature and nurture, where preservation of the body  – in relation to actual physical harm  – collides with the structures of cultural regulation. The impact of disgust as both a physiological and cultural entity particularly resonates, as Jack Morgan argues, whenever “Gothic-relevant words” such as “revulsion”, “panic”, or “gross” come into play (2002, 7). This is even truer when it comes to

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dietary disgust, and its extreme manifestation into horror, both visceral and aesthetic. Stephen Mennell suggests that rationality has very little to do with the experience of dietary disgust, and to why some foods will be regarded as pleasant while others “come to be viewed with disdain, shame and embarrassment” (1985, 32). In these terms, disgust is primarily a feeling of repulsion and then avoidance, and does not n ­ ecessarily involve any manifestation of fear. The category of ‘disgusting’ is also applied to the body inasmuch as it relates to the breaking of boundaries, to the consumption of excess, and the destruction of its physical and conceptual boundaries of propriety. In her volume Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas famously connected the very idea of disgust to cultural notions of “pollution”, and the rubrics of “clean” and “unclean”. These are understood particularly through the framework of religious dietary prohibitions – as set out within the biblical book of Leviticus  – and refer not only to food, but also to the body that will inevitably be ‘contaminated’ if consumption takes place (2003). Anthropologically speaking, disgust is connected to the various facets of what is deemed ‘taboo’, and Douglas effectively represents the notions of revulsion in connection to the culturally abominable. Although Douglas employs a largely religious framework to contextualise notions of pollution in connection to dietary taboos, her considerations can be transported to a secular context, where religious prohibitions are only echoes of behaviour within the wider cultural scope of Western organisation. The broader definition of disgust, in connection to notions of impurity, also becomes salient as one considers the psycho-­social connection that an individual holds to the body, and the matter that the body consumes (Harbottle 2010, 20). As far as notions of pollution, purity, taboo, and disgust go, the mouth is a privileged orifice in that it is absolutely instrumental in expressing the connotations of food horror, particularly (and not surprisingly) when matters of ingestion are involved. The mouth is, as psychoanalysis has taught us, an instrument of pleasure. Food comes through the mouth, even before we learn to discern the pleasures of taste, and the oral dimensions of life introduce us to comfort and our very initial interpretations of love. Once matters of taste become salient, then the mouth gives pleasure in that it allows our favourite foods to be savoured and enjoyed. Taste is, of course, a culturally constructed entity, but even within the bounds of cultural control, one cannot deny the part played by the oral orifice in experiencing culinary pleasures. As far as consumption is concerned, where there is pleasure, displeasure also inevitably lurks only to evoke, in

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a culinary twist, the idea of stability versus chaos – an idea already amply suggested by Douglas in Purity and Danger. Nonetheless, the associations with pleasure that come with a particular food quickly dissipate once the food itself has gone through the mouth. By being firstly chewed, and then swallowed into the further parts of our digestive system, food conceptually ceases to be food, and becomes something else. Once food goes into the mouth, William Ian Miller argues, “it is magically transformed into the disgusting” (1998, 96). Of course, and in spite of Miller’s colloquial use of the term, the transformation has very little to do with ‘magic’, and more to do, inevitably, with cultural rules that are likely the product of our diverse and multifaceted anthropological practices. Due to the nature of the subject  – where disgust plays a big part in constructing the cinematic representation of food horror  – it will come as no surprise to learn that Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic notion of the abject in Powers of Horror has acted as a solid critical foundation for my approach to food and horror. Abjection is the feeling of fear, anxiety, and disgust that arises in the subject at the sight of certain horrible substances; these matters are primarily fluids oozing from the body – such as faeces, urine, menstrual blood, spittle, and vomit – and dirty, rotten substances, including decaying food and waste. Food, even when it is not rotten, is particularly entangled with notions of the abject in virtue of its boundary-­ breaking properties. Food is an alien matter that literally goes inside the body and, in so doing, ‘becomes’ the body. It is therefore logical to see that food and oral experiences figure prominently in Kristeva’s work: spit, rotten food, vomit, and faeces are particularly privileged in their abject forms as they “disturb identity, system, order”; they “do not respect borders, positions and rules” and lie in-between, “ambiguous and composite” (1982, 4). These substances threaten the purity of what Kristeva calls, in an echo of Douglas’s work, the “clean and proper body” (1982, 76). Even if one wanted to remain distant from pseudo-spiritual notions of incorporation and metaphorical osmosis, there is no denying the ability possessed by food to invade the body, to force it open and make it accept a substance that it desperately needs to survive. The very notion of necessity, however, does not preclude food from having a psychic effect on the individual, long before culture and sociality have come into play, and even more so once they have. Food loathing, Kristeva remarks, is the “most elementary and most archaic form of abjection” (1982, 2). Although Kristeva identifies abjection as a psychoanalytic process taking place during infancy, she recognises that, even in adult life, the

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abject will continue to erupt from consciousness, awoken by those substances that invade the purity of the body and threatening the existence of the ‘I’: “there looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the unthinkable” (1982, 1). Nonetheless, it is that same threat that ­paradoxically maintains the stability of the ego, which continually regenerates from the ashes of disgust and repulsion. The moment that food enters the body, it transforms into a defiling substance, because it encroaches upon the body, it demands exchange, it imposes mingling. Food draws attention to the body’s openings, and to its bodily functions: to its fluids and its excrement, to its unavoidably material nature. In this, the consumption of food is tacitly well-suited to communicating the horror experience. As Elizabeth Grosz puts it, abjection “is a refusal of the defiling, impure, uncontrollable materiality of the subject’s embodied existence. It is a response to the various bodily cycles of incorporation, absorption, depletion, expulsion […] necessary to sustain itself and yet incapable of social recognition and representation” (1995, 72). For we do not want to be reminded of just how material and impure our bodies really are, and wish to suppress the awareness of our materiality, which eating so forcefully represents. “The virtual impurity of food”, as Kristeva argues, “designates the other (the natural) that is opposed to the social condition of man” (1982, 75). Abjection, one might suggest, is continually unacknowledged as lying underneath the surface of consumption. Although the notion of abjection informs my approach to ‘food horror’, it is not always namely so. While Kristeva’s theories of abjection are persuasive and useful in identifying the experience of aberration and psychological estrangement that derives from encountering ‘horrific’ food, they are not fully satisfying when it comes to approaching that feeling culturally. The latter is, as far as the representational framework of film is concerned, virtually indivisible from any intersecting associations between consumption, the culinary, and the Gothic. At times, the abject remains a tacit presence that is more a starting point, rather than a framework. That is to say, the Kristevan notion of abjection helps me to contextualise the idea of food as horrifying – or, at least, of food as an integral part of the visceral and aesthetic projection of horror – but it is not, as far as both rubric and conception go, the only shaping theoretical approach to the analysis. While useful, the denomination of ‘abjection’ is too elusive and too dissatisfying to be used as the sole approach to food horror. Most

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of all, this is because Kristeva herself projected a very nebulous vision of disgust, and I – like others before me – believe the latter to be more than a simply psychoanalytic notion (Aldana Reyes 2016). As far as reaction and perceptions are concerned, the very notion of disgust is constructed by the interaction of multiple territories, and any analytical approach to its manifestation must be aware of its multifaceted nature. Therefore, a meta-critical framework interacting with not only psychoanalysis, but also with sociology, cultural anthropology, and even history is required if one hopes to grasp the polygonal properties of food as a horror medium in its broader cultural contexts, including film.

Constructing ‘Food Horror’ in Film Although eating is a universal activity, food is constantly crossing boundaries and shifting registers – from biological to political, from economic to sexual. Eating, in these terms, is not simply a backdrop occurrence in contemporary cinema, but functions as part of a symbolic structure of meaning that exposes the films’ debt to consumer and popular culture. Arjun Appadurai’s long-standing suggestion that all consumption practices can be simultaneously viewed “as highly condensed social facts” and vectors of “collective representation” still rings true, especially when representations of food are placed in the highly coded context of film (1981, 494). The protean abilities of food as both a cultural and a representational device provide the starting point for constructing the strangeness and alienating frameworks of horror experiences, as consumption  – a seemingly wellknown and understood practice for all humans – becomes defamiliarised and ‘tortured’. Food, in this sense, becomes uncanny, and a medium for uncovering the latent fears of society that lie dominant under the surface of cultural regulation. While film is often thought of as a visual, or at best visual-auditory, medium, the cinematic experience is not simply confined to sight and hearing alone. Through the manipulation of both image and sound, film is able to evoke an array of sensorial stimuli and somatic reactions – from hunger to thirst, from flavour to texture – which expose, as Marsha Cassidy puts it, the “visceral simulations” of our everyday life (2016, 65). The experience of food is profoundly entangled with the sensorial dimensions of taste, smell, and touch, as these construct our cultural notions of the culinary. These dimensions become particularly important when it comes to the evocation of ‘food horror’, as sensorial experiences are not universal

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and absolute, but their evaluation relies instead on our cultural understandings and judgments. As film is an ‘imaginary’ medium, the evocation of both pleasure and disgust in particular – and its intersecting notions as part of both bodily and social horror – relies predominantly on both “cultural specificities” and mnemonic recollection (Stano 2015). The latter, in particular, must take place in the viewer in order for the full experience to be communicated. When it comes to food, this interaction must be particularly successful if a conceptually realistic experience for the viewer is to be created, as eating is an intrinsically multisensory practice and, as a process, refuses to be confined to one set of bodily reactions. In order for the full food experience to be captured, the film’s narrative – and its cinematographic and auditory set up – must be carefully orchestrated so as to fully evoke the memory of a sensorial experience, from touch to smell, and even taste. The “cinematic hunger artists” – to use James R. Keller’s definition, which is in turn inspired by Maud Ellmann’s book The Hunger Artists – must be able to “manipulate gustatory imagery in order to increase the sensory response of the film audience to a medium that cannot access smell or taste”, but nevertheless “seeks to create a full sensory response to a strictly visual and auditory medium” (2006, 1). The sensorial experience of food in film is, therefore, strictly sited in recollection, where the very notion of memory does not operate as a past entity, but is actualised into the present in virtue of its cinematic evocation. When it comes to the experience of food within the cinematic medium, the most salient parts of the culinary experience – namely, taste, smell, and touch – remain inexorably inaccessible to the audience. Memory and recognition are at the centre of the process of cinematic sensorial evocation. Discussing the interaction between memory and the senses, Dan Sperber contends that the experiential senses – especially smell – often rely on the construction of “mental images” (1975, 117). As far as the construction of food and eating in film is concerned, the process begins with a conceptually inverted starting point, where the images are readily presented by the film’s narrative, and their sole purpose is to conjure the ‘mental’ experience of the other senses, so the audience can share in the characters’ experiences. In order for a response to food – either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – to be fully generated, the film must rely on the successful interaction with, as Keller puts it, the audience’s “cognitive processes”: this is to say, the audience must be able to actively “recognise and interpret” (Keller 2006, 3) the visual and auditory stimuli provided by the narrative, so as to be able to translate them into broader experiences associated with the other

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senses. Failure to do this will result in an ineffective evocation of not only sensorial stimuli, but also the experiences that are meant to generate from them – from pleasure to disgust, from happiness to repulsion. To put it simply, if a member of the audience has never smelled blueberry pie in real life, then the recollection of the experience of blueberry pie in film will not be fully communicated, and neither will any emotion associated with it. Within film as a medium, one cannot underestimate the importance of the actors’ reaction in order to communicate the experiences of disgust, reticence, and even fear. In order for an unpleasant sensorial experience to be communicated, film needs to capitalise on the externalisation of multiple reactions, which, when connected to paradoxically intangible senses, can only be successfully communicated via an overemphasised use of both visual and auditory prompts. The metonymic expression of disgust, in particular, is successfully rendered by facial expressions, and this is where the actors’ ability to communicate sensorial emotions will be essential. And while “naturalistic acting” in horror film is often considered to be “better acting”, and to make for a more “effective” rendition of emotion in horror film (Roche 2014, 293), the constructed rendition of food horror in terms of sensorial experiences does not necessarily suffer from an over-­ enhanced acting performance. The actors’ sonic responses will also be a very important asset in film for communicating the experience of odours and tastes; as is, of course, the careful usage of a culturally coded sound mix that will complement the visual representation of something as either ‘pleasing’ or ‘repulsive’. As far as expressions and reactions in film go, we cannot “just focus narrowly on the face”, but we must expand “the somatic lexicon of disgust” to include “recoils and cringes” (W.I. Miller 1998, 86). Gagging sounds are also an important part of the expression of food disgust, in its various forms; these, indeed, belong to the everexpanding repertoire of disgust reactions, which become particularly relevant whenever we encounter food that has ‘gone wrong’. Nonetheless, the experience of the senses, either “direct” or “reflective”  – to use the terms favoured by Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin in his well-­known treatise The Physiology of Taste (originally published in 1825) – is never a ‘natural’ process. Our judgements over sensorial stimuli, especially the embodied dimensions of taste, smell, and touch, are always mediated via the evaluative framework of culture. While broad notions of personal preference must always be taken into account, the cultural framework is deeply entangled with our experiences of food, so that any interpretation of sensorial stimuli is constantly mediated by our sociocultural and socio-­historical

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context. In terms of food, our sensorial responses  – especially in terms of taste and smell – are inevitably coded, and any evaluation of an experience as either pleasant or unpleasant will rely on a careful interaction between physical reactions and contextual knowledge (Classen 1993). One must be attuned to a certain interpretation to a particular food – as well as its taste, smell, and texture – as culturally ‘unpleasant’, in order to perceive it as such. This notion is particularly relevant within the bounds of film as a fictionbased medium, as any rendition of the sensorial experience of food will be reliant on a conceptual exploitation of the audience’s visceral responses, which are inevitably mediated by their cultural context. Keller suggests that, within the cinematic context of food, “there is little chance that the audience would imagine an appealing gustatory experience if the images of consumption were coded as unpleasant” (2006, 4). That coding, however, is not universal, and relies on a careful interaction of previous knowledge, cultural discourse, and aesthetic conduction. The interdependence between culture and food responses becomes even more important if one considers food as part of a horror narrative, for, in truth, there can be no evocation of disgust and even fear, unless one perceives the experience of a particular food as such. As a critical side-note, it is essential to flag, even at such an embryonic level, that the rendition of ‘food horror’ in film is not simply connected to eating, or food as a matter in itself, but also extends to the practice of cooking. Gastronomic sociologist Graham Tomlinson argues that cooking represents “the most instructed activity for the general populace in our society” (1986, 203). The cooking of food is not simply reliant on the successful assemblage of ingredients, and the precise estimate of timings: it is indeed a process of performance, where the cook engages the wouldbe-eater in a social, cultural, and even psychic dialogue. Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster have gone on to suggest that the recipe “is itself a narrative which can engage the reader or cook in a conversation” where “the recipe provides part of the text” and the “reader imagines (or even eats) the rest” (2003, 2). The recipe acts as the foreground of that relationship, the almost tangible connection between intent and success, between idea and product, between giver and receiver. The process of food preparation is an unavoidably intimate one: the cook engages with the food physically, establishing a tactile relationship with the ingredients that is (probably) a hundred times more familiar than any interaction that will take place at dinner between guests. While the cook may not physically ‘touch’ the diners, the food will be ingested and consumed, literally entering the bodies of those who eat it, therefore becoming the eater. So, one might suggest

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that food is both a physical and a conceptual conduit between the cook and the eater, between the one who prepares and the one who consumes. The process of consumption, however, is not simply about chewing, swallowing, digesting, and finally expelling matter. It is a cultural practice where cooking also becomes performative, and where the dishes are, in a conceptual twist, an extension of the cook. This idea makes not only food, but more specifically the cooking process a highly liminal practice, one that bridges the gaps between corporealities, and allows a subliminal imaginative connection to be established between those who cook, and those who eat. I have previously argued, in a different critical context, that cooking is a civilised practice. I employ the term ‘civilised’ not in its colonial understanding, but as a signal to those ritualistic practices that we subconsciously regarded as essential for our cultural constructions of appropriate behaviour. My approach has been actively inspired by the anthropological understanding of cooking as part of ritualised behaviour (Lévi-Strauss 1970; Douglas 1972; Barthes 1994, 1997; Lupton 1996; Wrangham 2010). Cooking, as Lévi-Strauss persuasively argues, functions as the exemplification of human control, and is therefore understood as a process of “cultural transformation”, not only as far as the food is concerned, but also in relation to the cook as well (1997, 29). Lévi-Strauss maintains that the categorisation of a practice as cooking underlines a “double opposition” between “elaborated/unelaborated” and “culture/nature” (1970, 20; Stano 2015, 7). Therefore, one will need to be particularly attuned to the representation of the kitchen – as well as the dining tables – as a conspicuous area. Kitchen and dinner tables, as Janet A. Flammang suggests, are “repositories” for memory, and, as such, clear cultural mirrors towards our practices and identities (Flammang 2009, 120). Notions of disgust, as well as broader definitions of both social and bodily horror, will inevitably be connected to food preparation as well, as reactions to food – and the visceral nature of the eating body in context – will also carry a bearing on how we perceive the practice of cooking. That is to say, a given representation of the practice is deemed as appropriate, not only visually, but also conceptually as well. For instance, foul smells and foul textures do not belong in ‘acceptable’ kitchens – nor on dinner tables, generally speaking. Inevitably, constructed reactions to cannibalism as a cultural trope play an important part in the visual and sensorial metonymic reactions to food horror in film, on both the characters’ and the audience’s part, especially when placed within the ‘unthinkable’ cinematic context of the civilised kitchen.

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This Book Strictly speaking, this book is not about ‘horror film’. This categorising label is too astringent in its conception, and often fails to recognise the notion of horror as more than simply blood and gore, and encapsulating a type of revulsion that is, in itself, as successfully connected to the social and cultural aspects of life as it is to the physical. Moments of food horror might manifest in films that in themselves are not strictly classifiable under the umbrella of the ‘horror film’. The social, cultural, and even physiological properties of food make this an ideal medium to transfer narratives of horror that go well beyond simple notions of bloodiness. Naturally, when food and blood mix, and the tortured viscerality of the body is called into account, the horror that is generated will be more effective, noticeable, and of impact. Disgust is a multifaceted notion, as is the very idea of horror in its multiple incarnations (S. Miller 2004, 3). Simultaneously, one cannot simply equate disgust with fear – in the same way that “danger” and the cultural threat of “category violation” are not, strictly speaking, one (Schneider 2004, 138). And while the two often interact in the representation of food horror, they are not necessarily synonymous. It might be, at times, that moments of food horror simply find an ideal siting in cinematic narratives that are categorisable as horror in the more traditional sense. Therefore, many food horror instances – from the disgust of consumption to the overbearing nature of the transgressive eating body and the slaughterhouse-style torture of cannibal consumption – are to be found in what we commonly refer to as the ‘horror film’. All the same, no blood or physical torture are necessary to convey the sociocultural horrors of breaking food categories and the perception of acceptable food behaviours, as the cultural frameworks that regulate them also dictate our reactions to their conceptual interruption. In response to this, this book does not claim to be an analysis of horror as a cinematic genre, and presents itself, more broadly, as an analysis of the multidimensional incarnations of food horror in film. Food horror is not a matter of genre, but a matter of effect, and it operates on the cusp of cultural regulations that cannot be tied down to a simple rubric definition. Ultimately, my volume aims to provide a schema for identifying the building parameters of the ‘food horror film’, and provide a conceptual framework for the establishment of ‘food Gothic’ as a separate representational entity. My study purposefully takes an interdisciplinary approach to the food horror film, and synthesises perspectives from a number of

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disciplines, including film studies, anthropology, cultural materialism, postmodern thought, psychoanalysis, gender studies, evolutionary theory, and, of course, the approaches coming from the field of food studies. Although possible critical frictions may exist between some of these critical currents, my own approach is sited at the critical intersection between them, and draws strength from their points of juncture, rather than their differences. Because I am particularly interested in instances where the ordinariness of eating and cooking – anthropologically speaking – are subverted and, to some extent, tortured, I have made the conscious decision of not focusing on examples of ‘horrible consumption’ as connected to creatures such as zombies and vampires. As far as our human structures go, there is nothing ever ordinary about vampires or zombies, or other creatures of a monstrous nature. The latter are, by anthropological definition, “extraordinary” (Weiss 2008, 75), and therefore outside of our common networks of food preparation and consumption. While cinematically witnessing their extraordinary feeding habits – from drinking blood to consuming human flesh – may evoke disgust and even fear, the creatures themselves are culturally subversive from the on-set: as such, they do not lend themselves to an interrogation of how food – a common and commonplace presence in our human lives – can shift conceptual boundaries and cross the threshold between ‘common’ and ‘uncommon’, ‘familiar’ and ‘unfamiliar’, which is where, I argue, the true horror lies. Broadly speaking, my study engages with the contextual nature of representing ‘food horror’ in post-1980 film. The choice of focusing on the post-1980 era, as far as the films analysed are concerned, is driven specifically by the identifiable shift in relation to everyday practices and how we ‘consume’. In the post-1980 era, the very notion of consumption, not only in connection to the dimension of food, in relation to consumer-­capitalist practices, especially in Western terms, took on a different critical and cultural meaning. As socio-economists Gil Troy and Vincent J. Cannato remind us, the 1980s – especially in the Anglo-American context – represented a period of “economic vitality” and “entrepreneurship”, which “incorporated” and “mainstreamed” many of the “social and cultural revolutions” of previous decades (2009, 8). In this context, it does not surprise to see the 1980s perform as one of the ‘golden ages’ of food horror in film – with examples ranging from Poltergeist (1982) to Gremlins (1984) and Ghostbusters (1984) – the clear narrative of over-consumption marking a critical shift in the representational world of cinema as well. These films

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marked the beginning of a new trend in relation to the intersecting dimensions of food and horror, acting as predecessors to more recent infamous examples such as The Human Centipede trilogy (2009–2013). Naturally, many years have passed since the 1980s, but one might argue that this decade marked a clear change in our approaches to consumption, and we still experience the effects of this change in our twenty-first-­century context. Although the focus for this book still remains, broadly speaking, on the period following the year 2000, it is necessary to consider prominent examples from the years leading up to the turn of the new millennium, as these provided an essential framework for the development of representational structures in our contemporary moment. In terms of the chronological framework, notable exceptions are made for a number of films, including Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974); the decision to include these examples was based not only on their iconic value, but also in view of their important function as critical and conceptual predecessors to the sociopolitical and aesthetic approach to the representation of food horror in the post-1980 era. As Wheeler W. Dixon reminds us, we cannot fully grasp the “various permutations” of the horror narrative in our present time without tracing its “themes” and “iconic structures” through “the past”: only so we can get “some clues” into “the direction it will take in the future” (2010, x). It is also important to mention that a number of the films I focus on in this volume are often either adaptations of literary texts or remakes of previous narratives, cinematic-, television-, or even theatre-based. While both the adaptation and remaking processes are important considerations as far as the reconstruction of the cultural context of texts is concerned (Verevis 2006; Nicklas and Lindner 2012), my approach does consider the film narrative in itself, as it exists in its current incarnation. With only a few exceptions, I mainly focused on the most recent incarnation of the narrative in its cinematic form, in order to capture the evolutionary and contemporary journey of food horror in the multisensory medium of film as connected to our contemporary moment. Although primarily focused on Anglo-American examples, my analysis maintains a broader awareness of the transnational film context, with the inclusion of examples such as Dumplings (2004) and Dans Ma Peau (‘In My Skin’, 2002). The core of the book is divided into five subsequent chapters, each concentrating upon a particular aspect of representing food horror in contemporary cinema, from oral revulsion to monstrous appetites, from cannibal slaughter to the horror dimensions of kitchens and other areas

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of consumption. While the chapters are thematically divided into specific areas of interest, these are inevitably interconnected, and there are a number of conceptual threads that run through the entire volume. These include, in particular, multifaceted interrogations of hunger and the cultural projections of disgust and abject. The notion of cannibalism also runs through a number of grounding critical narratives, as do the recurrent impact of both consumer capitalism and body politics. Chapter 2, “Horror Matters: Abominable Substances and the Revulsions of Orality”, pivots around concepts of both abjection and taboo – from rotten food to excrement, and even pets – interrogating the relationship between transgression, regression, orality, and identity. Focusing on examples such as Cabin Fever (2002), The Crazies (2010), The Babadook (2014), Case 39 (2009), Poltergeist (1982), Fatal Attraction (1987), The War of the Roses (1984), The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009), Under the Skin (2013), The Stuff (1985), and Grace (2009), this chapter explores the different modalities of food-related repulsion in connection to the concepts of ‘abominable matter’ and ‘abject orality’. Both instances of ‘outfluxes’ and ‘influxes’ are considered, as are slimy substances and the abject materiality of the maternal body. The boundary between longing and revulsion becomes thinner, and the close, paradoxical connection between food abjection and food attraction is thrown into sharp relief. Putting matters of corporeality, transgression, and excess at the centre of the discussion, Chapter 3, “Consuming Hunger: Body Narratives and the Controversies of Incorporation”, unveils the concept of hunger – or the lack thereof – as an agent of horror in film. Cinematic examples that are drawn upon include Se7en (1995), Thinner (1996), Feed (2005), The Machinist (2004), Black Swan (2010), Ravenous (1999), Blade (1998), Hunger (2009), Hannibal (2001), and Dans Ma Peau (2002). The notion of ‘real hunger’ is explored, and the horror connected to the inability of controlling one’s physiological impulses, as far as food intake is concerned. The revulsions of the culturally inappropriate body are unveiled through disturbing images of food and eating, from overconsumption and forced consumption, to self-cannibalism and starvation. In particular, the aesthetic and cultural intricacies of the starving body are scrutinised. Similarly, the obese body is also surveyed, together with the repercussions of what is perceived as ‘monstrous’ consumption. Ultimately, Chapter 2 problematises the issue of hunger in connection to both disgust and illicit desires, including the threat of cannibalism.

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Continuing on the discussion of abominable practices, Chapter 4, “A Taste for Butchery: Slaughterhouse Narratives and the Consumable Body”, pursues an analysis of how cinematic interpretations of violence, body torture, serial killings, butchery, and ‘savagery’ are juxtaposed to images of consumption and the culinary. Cultural interpretations of ‘rawness’ and meat-eating are also taken into account. These representational parallels – and their focus on ‘cannibal slaughter’ – are interpreted as critiques of mainstream food cultures. While bearing in mind the traditional conception of cannibalism as linked to racial politics – a critical strand that is well established in Gothic and postcolonial studies – my analysis pursues a more contemporary interpretation of anthropophagy. Employing examples such as Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), American Psycho (2000), The Hills Have Eyes (2006), Bitter Feast (2010), and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), I examine the practice of cannibalistic butchery as a metaphorical representation of the disintegration of the body as a cultural and emotional entity in the light of consumer-capitalist structures. Re-engaging the discussion with the cultural regulations of the everyday, Chapters 5 and 6 explore notions of food horror as connected to spaces of food preparation and consumption, uncovering them as sites of revulsion, secrecy, and unpleasantness. Chapter 5, “Feeding Nightmares: Madness, Hauntings, and the Kitchen of Horrors”, explores the practice of cooking – and the kitchen as its main site – as a part of a destabilised narrative of Otherness and alienation. While discussing the preparation of food, and its long-standing Western cultural associations with caring, motherhood, and ‘love’ – and engaging with examples such Ghostbusters (1984), Gremlins (1984), The Stepford Wives (2004), Coraline (2009), Compulsion (2013), Dumplings (2004), and The Road (2010) – the chapter uncovers the everyday kitchen as an unexpected site of hauntings, madness, hallucinations, murder, and even cannibalism, latently situated in the midst of seemingly common scenes of food preparation. The chapter also takes a critical journey into the instruments of violence situated in the kitchen – especially the knife – as illustrated in films such as Psycho (1960), The Shining (1980), Misery (1990), and Maggie (2015). In continuation of the spatial narratives of abhorrence and fear, Chapter 6, “A Bitter Feast: Dining Tables in Their Horror Contexts”, uncovers how film destabilises and plays with the notion of food and wholesome culinary experiences – which often encapsulate the cultural goodness of Western societies – by upsetting the cultural stability of the dinner table. Far from evoking any notion of commensality

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and interpersonal bonding, the dinner table is exposed as a site of loathing, violence, subverted bodily intimacies, and cultural alienation, as films such as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), Beetlejuice (1988), The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), American Beauty (1999), Kill Bill: Vol.1 (2003), and Sushi Girl (2012) are scrutinised. Chapters 5 and 6 operate as counterparts to each other, as it would be critically counterproductive to explore horror instances connected to food preparation without continuing the discussion to include spaces of consumption. Overall, it must be signalled that the film examples used do not represent a comprehensive list of instances of food and horror in cinema, as the latter would be a virtually impossible task to complete in a single volume. Instead, the films included function more as evocative examples of particular representations of the narrative of ‘consuming Gothic’. Whilst bearing in mind existing scholarship on both canonical ‘Gothic texts’ and the importance of food as a cultural tool – and reassessing the presence of food-related horror in films produced before the year 1980 – my book offers a different perspective on horror studies in cinema by introducing food as a conceptual framework, unravelling how represented experiences of consuming hunger, disgust, abjection, overeating, starvation, and bodily torture are connected to anxieties of a sociocultural, historical, and political nature. Simultaneously, my study addresses how the increased presence of food and culinary experiences in horror frameworks impacts on the definition not only of ‘horror’ itself but also on the Gothic as a whole, building conceptual connections between film and popular culture as a field of research. In my approach, I am of course more aligned with a critical understanding of the Gothic in terms of “Gothic horror”, which Jerold Hogle identifies as channelling the multiple monstrous manifestations of “hidden secrets” within our society through revulsion and fear (2002, 3). This provides us with an opportunity to interrogate a variety of intersecting preoccupations, in order to identify the cultural factors that have affected the representation, interpretation, and assimilation of different types of ‘food horror’ within the wider cinematic scope.

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Kimber, Shaun. 2016. ‘Meat, Meat, and a Man’s Gotta Eat.’ (Motel Hell, 1980): Food and Eating within Contemporary Horror Cultures. In Food, Media and Contemporary Culture: The Edible Image, ed. Peri Bradley, 125–143. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Klein, Melanie. 2002. Love, Guilt and Reparation: And Other Works 1921–1945. London: Simon and Schuster. Kolnai, Aurel. 2004. On Disgust. Ed. Barry Smith and Carolyn Korsmeyer. Chicago: Open Court. Korsmeyer, Carolyn. 2002. Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 2011. Savouring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. Kwan, Samantha, and Jennifer Graves. 2013. Framing Fat: Competing Constructions. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Lane, Maggie. 1995. Jane Austen and Food. London: Hambledon Press. Lazaro-Reboll, Antonio. 2012. Spanish Horror Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1970. Introduction to a Science of Mythology / The Raw and The Cooked. London: Cape. ———. 1997. The Culinary Triangle. In Food and Culture: A Reader, ed. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, 28–35. London: Routledge. Lupton, Deborah. 1996. Food, the Body and the Self. London: SAGE. Maberry, Jonathan. 2006. Vampire Universe: The Dark World of Supernatural Beings That Haunt Us, Hunt Us, and Hunger for Us. New York: Kensington. Mannur, Anita. 2010. Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Marak, Katarzyna. 2015. Japanese and American Horror: A Comparative Study of Film, Fiction, Graphic Novels and Video Games. Jefferson: McFarland. McGee, Harold. 1984. On Food and Cooking. New York: Scribner. McGinn, Colin. 2011. The Meaning of Disgust. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McIntosh, Alex. 2013. Sociologies of Food and Nutrition. New York: Springer. Meagher, Michelle. 2003. Jenny Saville and a Feminist Aesthetics of Disgust. Hypatia 18(4): 23–41. Mennell, Stephen. 1983. The Sociology of Food: Eating, Diet, and Culture. London: SAGE. ———. 1985. All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Menninghaus, Winfried. 2012. Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Sensation. Albany: State University of New York Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2005. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge.

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Miller, Jeff, and Jonathan Deutsch. 2010. Food Studies: An Introduction to Research Methods. London: Berg. Miller, Susan. 2004. Disgust: The Gatekeeper of Emotion. London and New York: Routledge. Miller, William Ian. 1998. The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Mintz, Sydney. 1986. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. London: Penguin. ———. 1996. Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past. Boston: Beacon Press. Morgan, Jack. 2002. The Biology of Horror: Gothic Literature and Film. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Mulvey-Roberts, Marie. 2016. Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Murphy, Bernice. 2009. The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2013. The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture: Backwoods Horror and Terror in the Wilderness. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Nestle, Marion. 2007. Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nicklas, Pascal, and Oliver Lindner, ed. 2012. Adaptation and Cultural Appropriation: Literature, Film, and the Arts. Boston: de Gruyter. Parasecoli, Fabio. 2008. Bite Me: Food in Popular Culture. London: Berg. Parsons, Julie M. 2016. Gender, Class and Food: Families, Bodies and Health. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Piatti-Farnell, Lorna. 2011. Food and Culture in Contemporary American Fiction. New York: Routledge. ———. 2014. The Vampire in Contemporary Popular Literature. New  York: Routledge. Pollan, Michael. 2007. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. London: Penguin. Prince, Stephen, ed. 2004. The Horror Film. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Probyn, Elspeth. 2000. Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities. London: Routledge. Ritivoi, Andreea Deciu. 2002. Yesterday’s Self: Nostalgia and the Immigrant Identity. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. Ritzer, George. 2004. The McDonaldization of Society. London: Pine Forge Press. Roche, David. 2014. Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and 2000s. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Russell, Lorena. 2004. Queering Consumption and the Production of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? In Horror Film: Creating and Marketing Fear, ed. Steffen Hantke, 213–226. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.

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Sceats, Sarah. 2004. Food, Consumption and the Body in Contemporary Women’s Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schneider, Steven J.  2004. Toward an Aesthetics of Cinematic Horror. In The Horror Film, ed. Stephen Prince, 121–149. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Schofield, Mary Anne, ed. 1989. Cooking by the Book: Food in Literature and Culture. Madison: Popular Press. Shapiro, Anna. 1996. A Feast of Words: For Lovers of Food and Fiction. New York: Norton. Silverstein, Brett. 1995. Cost of Competence: Why Inequality Causes Depression, Eating Disorders and Illness in Women. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Skal, David J. 2001. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Skubal, Susannah. 2002. Word of Mouth: Food and Fiction After Freud. London: Routledge. Slater, Jay. 2002. Eaten Alive! Italian Cannibal and Zombie Movies. London: Plexus. Sperber, Dan. 1975. Rethinking Symbolism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spooner, Catherine. 2004. Fashioning Gothic Bodies. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Stano, Simona. 2015. Eating the Other: Translations of the Culinary Code. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Sutton, David. 2001. Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory. London: Bloomsbury. Swislocki, Mark. 2009. Culinary Nostalgia: Regional Food Culture and the Urban Experience in Shanghai. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Tan, Fransisca Hok-Eng. 2013. Flavours of Thought: Towards A Phenomenology of Food-Related Experiences. INDECS 11(4): 400–414. Theophano, Janet. 2002. Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote. New York: Palgrave. Tibbetts, John C. 2011. The Gothic Imagination: Conversations on Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction in the Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Tiggeman, Marika, and Eva Kemps. 2006. The Phenomenology of Food Cravings: The Role of Mental Images. Appetite 45(3): 305–313. Timothy, Dallen J., ed. 2016. Heritage Cuisines: Traditions, Identities and Tourism. New York and London: Routledge. Tomlinson, Graham. 1986. Thought for Food: A Study of Written Instructions. Symbolic Interaction 9(2): 201–216. Towlson, Jon. 2014. Subversive Horror Cinema: Countercultural Messages of Films from Frankenstein to the Present. Jefferson: McFarland.

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Townsend, Dabney. 1997. An Introduction to Aesthetics. London: Wiley-Blackwell. Troy, Gil, and Vincent J. Cannato. 2009. Introduction. In Living in the Eighties, ed. Gil Troy and Vincent J. Cannato, 1–9. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Verevis, Constantine. 2006. Film Remakes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Vester, Katharina. 2015. A Taste of Power: Food and American Identities. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Walton, Priscilla L. 2004. Our Cannibals, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Warde, Alan. 1997. Consumption, Food and Taste: Culinary Antinomies and Commodity Culture. London: SAGE. Warnes, Andrew. 2004. Hunger Overcome? Food and Resistance in Twentieth Century African American Literature. Athens: University of Georgia Press. ———. 2008. Savage Barbecue: Race, Culture, and the Invention of America’s First Food. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Weiss, Gail. 2008. Refiguring the Ordinary. Bloomington: Indiana University. Wilk, Richard R., ed. 2006. Fast Food / Slow Food: The Cultural Economy of the Global Food System. Lanham: Altamira Press. Wilshin, Mark. 2005. A Cinematic History of Horror. Oxford: Raintree. Witt, Doris. 1999. Black Hunger: Food and the Politics of U.S. Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wood, Roy C. 1995. The Sociology of the Meal. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Worland, Rick. 2007. The Horror Film: An Introduction. Malden: Blackwell. Wrangham, Richard. 2010. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. London: Profile Books. Xu, Wenying. 2008. Eating Identities: Reading Food in Asian American Literature. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

CHAPTER 2

Horror Matters: Abominable Substances and the Revulsions of Orality

In Eli Roth’s 2002 film Cabin Fever, a group of college students travel to a remote cabin in the woods with the idea of spending an idyllic weekend in debauchery and liberating sexual encounters. While the set up for the plot is reminiscent of numerous well-known horror narratives that undoubtedly inspired Roth’s own film – from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) to The Evil Dead (1981) and The Last House of the Left (1972) – there are peculiarities about the narrative development of Cabin Fever. Upon their arrival at the cabin, the college students are ‘attacked’, not by a hoard of serial killers or an evil, demonic presence, but something even more insidious: one by one, they become infected with a virus of unknown origin, which slowly causes the flesh to decompose. As the audience, we watch in horror as it is revealed that, although the technicalities of the epidemic are left unexplained, the virus enters the body via ingestion: the medium for its spreading is in fact the water coming from the river into the house, as the dying college student Paul reveals to the group of townsfolk who are interrogating him. The well-known and only relatively cryptic expression of ‘there is something in the water’ rings horrifically true in Cabin Fever, and leaves us with a sense of helplessness that is both relatable and terrifying. The fear in the film begins with the knowledge that something as unavoidable and life-giving as water could in fact be the cause of death. Even more terrifying is the knowledge that no one can ever live without water, and the virus – the metaphorical embodiment of death itself – will creep into our bodies and, literally, destroy us from the inside. The latent echoes of traumatic experiences of scarcity and deprivation in developing © The Author(s) 2017 L. Piatti-Farnell, Consuming Gothic, Palgrave Gothic, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-45051-7_2

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countries – where individuals do in fact often die from consuming polluted water  – are but the beginning of the implicit cultural narratives being engaged in Cabin Fever. Incensed with fear of the virus that will, they expect, destroy their community, the townsfolk eventually kill all the college students, who they deem as infected, whether they truly are or not. Indeed, there is a sense in which the outsiders are seen as the virus itself, and the community openly rejects their ‘polluting’ nature and refuses to ‘assimilate’ them. The film concludes on a truly haunting note: once the threat of the virus is seemingly destroyed, local children are seen selling lemonade that they made using the same infected river water. Hinting at the fact that the disease will spread, once again, from within. It is telling to see an activity such as the selling and drinking of lemonade as synonymous with destruction. The lemonade stand, culturally speaking, is a well-known symbol of American ingenuity, a social phenomenon that encourages a sense of community, and communicates both “pleasure and charm” in the midst of tacit discourses of capitalism and entrepreneurialism (Hankin 2000, 4). Eventually, the threat of orality here manifests not through an outside influence, but through a very home-grown one, proving that, when it comes to food and horror, the fear comes primarily not from the outside, but from the interruption of our well-known and trusted cultural structures. In the case of Cabin Fever, the horrors of orality are cleverly employed to provide a veiled critique of inland American politics and cultural horrors: the townsfolk are portrayed as frightful, bigoted, and mistrusting of those who they view as ‘outsiders’. Cabin Fever makes a virtue of the extenuating circumstances connected to ingestion; that is to say, we must consume to live, but that which we ingest may be able to kill us, as much as it can give us life. In its approach to this, the film is not alone in portraying the anxiety that surrounds incorporation, and the helplessness we are exposed to when we consume. The Crazies (2010), for instance, also communicates the horror of drinking ‘infected’ matter. In this film an epidemic of violent madness  – so portrayed – quickly spreads across an unsuspecting American town after the inhabitants have consumed water infected by the toxic contents of a government-owned plane, which had previously crashed into the local river and infested the surrounding waterways. At the centre of this narrative of horror lies, of course, the focal point of all ingestion: the mouth. The mouth is a central locus in the construction of not only matters of taste – physiologically and culturally speaking – but also the boundaries of the body as an entity within the world. The mouth, as Pasi Falk

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argues, occupies a particular role not only as a “sensory body opening”, but also as the “site of judgement” (1994, 14). Across the interdisciplinary spectrum, scholarship has been plentiful in exploring and establishing the mouth as a liminal place, an in-between location with the conceptualised ability to open the body to the world, and allow the world, as it were, to become a part of us (Grosz 1994; Kitayama and Cohen 2010; Méndez-Montoya 2012). Historically, the importance of the mouth as having discriminating power has been well explored, identifying taste as both a sociological and sensorial entity (Howes and Lalonde 1991). Falk also openly asserts the mouth’s qualities as a “vestibule” (1994, 14). Although this denomination might seem superficially justified only in terms of the oral orifice as a site of judgement, it also hides a more metaphorical and perhaps slightly sinister attribution of the mouth as an ‘Othering’ and ‘Othered’ site. I call this interaction ‘sinister’ because of the potentially alienating nature of food, identifiable and unavoidable whenever the cultural regulation of texture and taste identify certain matters as ‘forbidden’, their consumption abominable, and, to put it simply, disgusting. The vestibulary nature of the mouth is underlined by Elizabeth Grosz in Volatile Bodies: “the mouth is especially privileged […] it functions both introspectively and extroceptively. It is a primordial link […] connecting perceptions from the inside to the outside” (Grosz 1994, 92). The mouth draws attention to our “intimate” relationship with food, as we ingest and assimilate our nourishment, and experience, in so doing, its textures, scents, and flavours (Méndez-Montoya 2012, 1). Structurally speaking, even though scholarship has been keen to identify the mouth as the judgement gate, in reality judgment happens long before food can reach the mouth: the entrance of matters into the oral area is allowed or denied according to ideas and perception that are culturally dictated, and only partially connected to culinary memories involving taste and touch. Taste is, for the most part, a culturally defined entity, and what one likes or dislikes can never be divorced from the cultural context in which the experience is placed. Alimentary rules intersect, and are often at odds, with our aesthetic perception: nourishment and taste are mutually exclusive, and the two can be in conflict, as far as the entrance into the oral gateway is concerned. Taste is also a perceptive entity connected to the identification of matters as either edible or inedible, with the cultural and anthropological consequences that this dichotomous differentiation entails: generally speaking, one “does not put in the mouth forbidden [and] polluting things” (Falk 1994, 14). The notional identification of something as ‘forbidden’

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carries with it a pseudo-religious connotation, highlighting the existence of hierarchical structures that inevitably draw attention to the overarching reach and extent of cultural regulations. The idea of presenting the mouth as a site of horrific exchanges has received particular attention whenever instances of either demonic, or even alien possession, take place. The threshold of the mouth is fully employed in order to convey the horror of forceful entrance. In Night of the Creeps (1986), alien brain parasites enter the body through the mouth, and slowly turn their hosts into murderous zombies. A similar occurrence takes place in The Hidden (1987), where a slug-like parasite is seen horrifically sliding out of one host’s mouth, only to crawl into the mouth of another. In Brain Damage (1988), the mouth lies at the centre of a broader alien plot, as the alien uses ingestion  – of mouthwash, among other things – to gain control over its victims. Clearly, the 1980s witnessed a disturbing fascination with parasitic creatures and aliens crawling in and out of human mouths, leaving not only a disturbing sense of discomfort in the viewing audience, but also a good dose of raised highbrows and open mouths, as far as latent meanings of oral interactions are concerned. The pre-1980 period also provides an array of examples where the mouth is the centre of invasion and horrific ingestion: famous examples include Shivers (1975)  – where red-coloured, phallic-shaped parasites enters the body through the mouth, incubate in the stomach for a period of time, and ultimately turn the infected victim into a sex-crazed maniac – and Alien (1979), where we find the now iconic image of the alien attaching itself to the host’s mouth to lay its fertilised egg, in a haunting evocation of reproduction systems. What brings together these examples – to mention but a few – is the interpretation of the mouth as a liminal and yet horrific orifice, and the use of orality to indicate torture, possession, and madness. Anthropologically, the ideas of pollution and invasion draw attention to the understanding of the human body as “pure”, or at least communicates the desire to maintain that which is deemed as “unclean” outside of ourselves (Douglas 2003). This interaction with forbidden and unclean gestures towards the identification of the mouth as the site of not only alienation, but also of the construction of revulsion and repulsion, and deems food an important entity in the wider structures of cultural horrors. The powers of the mouth have also been primarily linked to the mouth’s own status as the ‘most controlled’ sensory opening of the body. That control is of course not only identifiable in connection to food – and the understood influx into the body  – but also exists in the important

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areas concerning the “sublimated outflux of speech” (Falk 1994, 14). In topological, as well as functional and conceptual terms, the mouth is an in-between locus not only in terms of consumption, but also in terms of communication and emotional engagement. Discussing the physiological practicalities of the mouth, Brandon LaBelle suggests that “to eat, choke, swallow, and vomit are part of an elaborate physical mechanism that also balances and conditions our psychological being” (2014, 35). The intermediacy of the mouth is as unsettling as it is sanctioning, and it is precisely within this liminal space that the oral orifice gains its power as a catalyst for excess and transgression.

Outfluxes

in Context:

Vomit

and Beyond

As it is clearly and often suggested, the mouth is not only a site of influx: its intermediacy goes in both directions (Falk 1994). I would like to suggest that it is precisely that bidirectional structure that causes the mouth to be a simultaneously appealing and repulsive orifice. While the outflux of speech is culturally contextualised as the site of communication and civilisation, and therefore seems a ‘safe space’, other forms of outflux from the mouth are not as fortunate in their positive identification. The outflux of fluids, in particular, is commonly and culturally identified as disgusting and deplorable: the levels of disgust are often dependant on the visceral nature and source of the oral outflux. Spitting and vomiting are particularly privileged examples in this context. Spittle is commonly understood as disgusting − at least as far as the Western context is concerned – but its conception as an abominable matter is positioned lower than vomit on the revulsion scale, even though Kristeva still clearly identifies it as an “abject” matter (1982, 3). Notions of ‘bad tastes’ and ‘bad smells’ are also important factors, but one must wonder how culturally specific those definitions are, whether vomit is alienating because it smells bad, or whether that particular smell is regarded as unpleasant because it is connected to vomit. Where film is concerned, an audience is limited to a visual recollection of these sensorial and physiological stimuli. Their embedded cultural framework is therefore an essential device in the experience of disgust and alienation when witnessing and interpreting the act of vomiting. In a haunting scene from Se7en (1995), the character of David Mills (Brad Pitt) has the misfortune of encountering a bucket filled with an unknown substance. Mills approaches the bucket when it is still hidden under a tablecloth; to his horror, he discovers that it is filled with vomit.

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His reaction is probably what many would have in the circumstances: he quickly moves away from the horrible vessel and its abominable substance, his jerky and irregular flaying movements punctuated by gagging sounds and further expressions of revulsion. The circumstances in which the vomit appears are not presented as ‘disgusting’, as its presence is associated with the murdered body of a morbidly obese man, constructing an intentional conceptual connection between the repulsive ‘fat’ body and the defiling food waste. Upon announcing that the contents of the bucket are in fact vomit, Mills covers his nose with his hand, unwilling to catch even another whiff of the substance. The act of covering one’s nose here suggests that the vomit is perceived as a violating, polluting substance, threatening to invade Mills’ body and infect it with its defiling nature. The acted gestures communicate the presence of the distinctive bad smell that goes with vomit as a substance, and it is precisely the assemblage of these gestures that communicates the experience of disgust, even if, in reality, we never get an opportunity to witness the vomit. Indeed, there is no denying that Mills acts as if the vomit is actually dangerous. He erratically runs from it as if it were posing a physical threat. Yet, somehow, the reaction seems understandable, and, as viewers, we can easily empathise with the experience, even if, as the narrative goes, Mills is not presented as a particularly likeable character. Here, the suggested cultural narrative that constructs vomit as Other is an implicit one, but its meaning becomes explicit in action: there is an unspoken rule, especially resonant in our Western psyche, that “once food enters the mouth, it can only properly exit in the form of faeces” (W.I. Miller 1998, 96). And although faeces do possess their own dimension of disgust, vomit maintains a layer of revulsion associated with it that is profoundly alienating. Freudian psychoanalysis assured us about the sense of creativity and accomplishment that, somehow, children experience in the production of faeces. And although not all of Freud’s considerations account for notions of disgust, and even horror, in terms of our bodily functions and waste, a certain persuasiveness exists in recognising the expulsion of faeces as connected to notions of anal pleasure, as long as the faeces, once expelled, remain well beyond the bounds of our tactile experiences. This interaction, however, does not apply to vomit: no notion of pleasure is connected to the expulsion of food via the mouth. The act of vomiting is, both culturally and physiologically, perceived as not only alien, but also unnatural. Because of their perceived unnaturality, instances of oral expulsion are also often interpreted as conveying supernatural occurrences, with the idea

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of tortured orality communicating notions of possession, both in physical and mental terms. Of course, the most notable and notorious example of the association between evil and vomit can be found in The Exorcist (1973), where the unfortunate Regan (Linda Blair) expels a large quantity of green liquid, evoking not only the disgust that is deeply rooted in the very nature of vomit, but also recollecting the notion of decay and destruction in the colour green, a chromatic shade that both Christian narratives of apocalypse and physiological accounts give as the colour of death. The disgust inherent to witnessing vomit is skilfully employed to communicate the frightful nature of the possession. The revulsion caused by the oral expulsion both visually and culturally reiterates the sense of Otherness that accompanies the underpinning notion of the demonic. While The Exorcist is arguably the most famous historic case of cinematic oral expulsion, and its connection to horror and fear, other films in the contemporary era have also continued to successfully capitalise on the visceral evocation of the substance, in its various manifestations. In the more recent example The Babadook (2014), the troubled widow Amelia (Essie Davis) is seen vomiting a dark substance – intended to be the physical representation of her mental illness – which is presented throughout the film as an “evil monster” lurking in the house, and haunting both Amelia and her child Sam (Noah Wiseman). Vomiting – alienating and upsetting an experience as it is – is used here as a metaphorical conduit for the haunted disturbances of the human mind, as is the use of aberrant orality to communicate a sense of interrupted intimacy and subsequent fear. A point of note must be that there is nothing truly ‘unnatural’ about vomiting, at least as far as the workings of the body are concerned: vomiting happens through a series of physiological processes which are produced and instigated by the body, especially when sickness is present. All the same, the perception of vomiting as a disturbing and unnatural activity is unarguable; this is probably in view of the discomfort that the process causes, and the fact that, culturally and psychoanalytically speaking, we are witnessing what belongs ‘inside’, making us aware of our fragile bodily boundaries, and all that entails. As Jacques Derrida famously put it, the “buccal orifice” – or, more commonly, the mouth – sits at the borderline between “inside and outside” and plays a “paradigmatic role” not only for ingestion, but also in expulsion; vomit represents a break the “alimentary communion” that transforms the “fantasy” of sustenance into “a reality” (1986, xi). The perceived unnaturality of vomit is openly suggested in a number of films even where vomit itself is not actually present. What we have, instead, is the vocation of the vomit narrative, where the uses

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of the mouth as an orifice of ingestion are subverted and twisted in manners that clearly communicate alienation, Otherness, and, at times, the presence of evil in the biblical sense. In Case 39 (2009), a hallucination – caused by Lily (Jodelle Ferland), the narratively identified demon child  – triggers the character of Douglas J.  Ames (Bradley Cooper) to imagine that hornets are crawling all over his body. In an important scene, the hornets are actually seen coming out of Douglas, first through the eyes, and then, most explosively, through the mouth. A similar situation is presented in Constantine (2005), where the conspicuously named Beeman (Max Baker) is overcome by insects that horrifically emerge from within his own body and exit from his mouth in a swarm – in a haunting, but thankfully quick image – suffocating him. The connection between oral expulsion and the notion of evil seems to be well explored in contemporary film, with a number of narratives providing examples of this kind, including the violent bug-filled vomit stream in Drag Me to Hell (2009) and the truly terrifying moment of cherry regurgitation in The Witches of Eastwick (1987). In the latter example, we see the ‘witches’ (Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Cher) unknowingly perform a killing spell, with the help of the Devil (Jack Nicholson). Angered by the protests of Felicia Alden (Veronica Cartwright), the devoutly religious leader of the local community, the witches respond by consuming large quantities of cherries, sensually licking their flesh in the process. On the opposite side of town, Felicia begins to vomit cherry stones: the scene is graphic in its depiction of vomiting, as close ups and a clever use of sound effects aid the power of the visceral encounter, accompanied by Felicia’s repetitious gagging. Driven crazy by her constant religious ranting against ‘the witches’, Felicia is finally killed by her husband Clyde (Richard Jenkins), just as the cherry stones are overtaking her body. Here we see the liminality of vomit evoking notions of both witchcraft and temporal disintegration, as the boundaries of matter and performance are challenged and broken. The horror affect of Felicia’s cherry-stone vomiting is constructed via the juxtaposed notion of invasion, as she disturbingly expels remnants of food that she had never previously consumed. The vomit narrative in The Witches of Eastwick equals the invasion of the human body by the perceived evil that lies both within and without. The alienating nature of the vomiting act is employed to communicate the interruption of the ‘natural’ human narrative in favour of that which is unnatural (Fig 2.1).

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Fig. 2.1  As the victim of a witchcraft ritual, Felicia Alden (Veronica Cartwright) vomits the cherry stones in The Witches of Eastwick (1987)

In films where the presence of evil is explored, the oral invasion and expulsion narrative is what solidifies the presence of the demonic Other, and its successful subjugation of the human body. There is, indeed, something very final and very unavoidable about the breach of our visceral boundaries, especially when the oral orifice is concerned. The suggestion of pollution by evil, and the physical death that usually results from this, is more closely associated with orality than it is with any other sensorial area. William Ian Miller suggests that “the eye, ear, and nose are not blamed by the fact that they constantly take in bad sights, evil words, or vile smells” (1998, 98). While many instances of verbal encounters with evil exist in film, from The Exorcist to Case 39, the actual solidification of the victory of evil over the individual is communicated through the colonisation of the oral orifice as a site of both entry and expulsion. Although it would be unwise to generalise, and to exclude the presence of sensorial horror beyond orality, the oral orifice – even when taken beyond its Freudian associations – is what allows for the body to be put at risk, and, as a result, the mind as well. It is the interaction with the oral orifice that solidifies and materialises the expression of Otherness in the most visceral sense, in a way that words or the evocation of other sensorial stimuli, such as smell, never could. Orality is in itself about the breaking of boundaries, and when those boundaries are breeched, the stability and cleanliness of the human being falls. If it is true, as Miller contends, that “oral incorporation drives disgust” (1998, 98), then all uses of the oral narrative, from ingestion to expulsion, from eating to vomiting, will provide the most tangible representation of horror, as far as the notions of invasion and Otherness are concerned.

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Vomit occupies a distinct position in the construction of food horror in that it is no longer food, but recalls it enough to become uncanny; it evokes the haunting nature of our visceral functions, as well as the fragility of our bodies, which must constantly feed in order to exist. Vomit reminds us of our own abject nature, of that which, psychoanalytically speaking, we must “reject, cover over and contain” (Grosz 1990, 89). Vomit is too confronting, too boundary-breaking, and must remain within the body in order to preserve its integrity. The identification of vomit as an Othering substance is what cinematic narratives rely on to communicate the idea of disgust, and the difficulty of a particular situation. In the case of Se7en, for instance, the heinous nature of the crime, and the off-putting nature of the surroundings within the crime scene – from the hideousness of the dead, fat body to the filth that clearly pullulates in the small apartment – is heightened by the presentation and uses of the vomit trope. The discovery of the vomit-filled bucket reiterates the horror affect of the scene: it adds a sense of disconnection within the narrative, and to the viewing experience, and it does so precisely by evoking something as off-putting as vomit. What lies at the heart of the representation of this horror is the culturally perceived polluting nature of vomit as an alienating and alienated oral substance. There is something extremely offensive about vomit, even if it is nothing more than chewed food and gastric acids. And yet, chewed food is perceptibly disgusting, as are those who touch it in any fashion. The sight of chewed food – still in the mouth, ejected from it, and even before it has reached the stomach – “is revolting in the extreme” (Miller 1998, 96). All food that has entered the mouth becomes Other: it no longer belongs to our culinary system, and should never return into the narrative as an edible, or even viewable, substance. Chewed foods are, to use a suited metaphor, ‘buried’ within the insides of the body, and we are not particularly keen to witness their return; if we do, they haunt us, in a manner that, as far as culinary regulations are concerned, is akin to the idea of a ghost. Masticated, or partly digested food, is a cultural taboo: untouchable, unclean, and disgust-evoking. Miller attempts to explain this reaction to masticated food and its most violating incarnation, vomit, in terms of transformative power: once chewed, food is no longer “food” but transforms into a “gooey thing” which should never be encountered again (1998, 96). Vomit is, one might argue, the visceral uncanny. It is a crisis of the natural inasmuch as our bodily functions are concerned; it is a return of that which should never be witnessed again. It evokes a breakage in boundaries on which our human relationships are founded.

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In  itself, of course, vomiting is not Gothic: only the conceptual structures of obstruction, subversion, possession, and transgression that are presented in the fictional world of cinema make it so, drawing attention to its ability to convey the horror experience of our own embodied existence. As far as oral disgust is concerned, a permissibly tangential mention must be given to other oral outfluxes, including the emission of obnoxious gases via the notion of ‘bad breath’. Physiologically speaking, bad breath is commonly signalled as evidence of decay, and therefore lends itself, metaphorically speaking, to communicating illness and even death. The unpleasant oral outflux is strictly connected to the olfactory reaction and the reception it creates. Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott observe that “smell is not simply a biological and physiological phenomenon […] smell is cultural, hence a social and historical phenomenon” (1994, 3). Classen, Howes, and Synnott are very successful in showing that our perceptions of smell, coded in terms of pleasure or displeasure, are not transhistorical, and are always dependent on context, as well as culture. Therefore, the determination of oral outfluxes as either pleasant or unpleasant also depends on the acculturation of smell as either one or the other, as well. This interdependence is illustrated in film. One need only think of Scrooged (1988): here, the strangely animated corpse of the long-dead Lew (John Forsythe) appears to his unsuspecting friend Frank (Bill Murray), in order to provide a warning on Christmas Eve, in a clear echoing and adaptation of Charles Dickens’s famous tale, “A Christmas Carol” (1843). Lou’s body is in a questionable state, rotting as corpses should, even magically reanimated ones. In spite of the visual aids that designate Lou’s body as ‘dead’, a formal sensorial dimension is added to signify his decaying status, and it is to be found in the performance of bad breath. When Lou speaks close to Frank’s face, Frank reacts with clear repulsion and signals with his hand that Lou’s breath is foul. The foulness of the breath is conducive to the corpse’s unarguable Otherness, as Frank’s expression clearly communicates his experience of displeasure and disgust. While the visual status of the corpse in Scrooged is unavoidable, I would like to suggest that it is precisely the manipulation of oral and olfactory sensibilities that more successfully communicates the presence of decay, as the imagination of a rotting smell adds a profoundly and unavoidably visceral layer to the exchange. The certainty of intersensorial displeasure is communicated as Lou breathes his uncanny rotting breath, but this should not come as a surprise: smell and taste are deeply interconnected, and the transgression of one usually entails the manipulation of the other. Smell and taste

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both belong to the category that Dabney Townsend and Carolyn Korsmeyer term the “bodily senses”: conveyors of experiences that are often underprivileged and regarded as “too visceral” in connection to the hierarchically and philosophically higher “distant senses”, such as sight and hearing (1998, 361). Specific smells and tastes are associated with mental images, and consist of representational characteristics that almost transcend the physiological development of sensual stimuli themselves. The outflux of the mouth in Scrooged is deployed in order to establish the cultural dimension of smell, becoming the locus of Gothic horror, which, in this case, is sited not within the realm of visual representation, but within the ephemeral, and yet fully relatable, dimension of olfactory stimuli.

All That is Rotten The identification of both orality and the experience – or perception – of smell as part of the horror narrative should not truly come as a surprise. Marcel Proust famously addressed the embodied importance of both taste and smell, bestowing upon oral and olfactory stimuli the ability to recall the past: When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful remain poised a long time, like souls remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest. (1982, 50)

Certain uncanny qualities, therefore, are attributed to taste and smell, recalling a distinct return of the dead – or, perhaps, of the undead. This gives way to the suggestion that, as far as memories and perception are concerned, both taste and smell are ‘undead senses’, living in memory, yet buried within the folds of our cultural narratives. Social ideologies, David Howes suggests, are “conveyed through sensory values and practices” (2005, 4). Nonetheless, when the dimensions of consumption and horror are merged, the experiences of the senses become entangled with notions of fear and repulsion, intrinsically embedded within the folds of material culture. As a cultural dimension, disgust is deeply connected to contextual and tacitly acknowledged notions of beauty and hedonic pleasure, in that it also recalls notions of normality and appropriateness. Indeed, the very concept

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of ‘normal’ – in all its various, contextual, and multifaceted understandings – is what the notion and development of disgust pivots on. Disgust signals the breakaway point from what is proper and acceptable, from the very notion of safety and propriety. Simultaneously, scholars such as Colin McGinn have been persuasive in showing that, technically speaking, fear and disgust are distinct forms of emotion. Fear, McGinn contends, is a provident reaction that “operates to protect the person” from “danger”, with an aim to avoid “damage” (2011, 5). In his bid to differentiate fear from disgust, McGinn goes on to claim that any avoidance of contact is “an instrumental aspect of fear, not its essence”. It is this very focus on “avoidance” that, broadly speaking, separates fear from disgust. The latter, on the other hand, is sited in the realm of aesthetics, where “the appearance of the object”, and not what harm it can do to the body, generates a reaction (2011, 6). While I am not fully convinced by the notion that disgust, as both a conceptual and aesthetic emotion, does not operate in terms of protection and keeping one’s body from harm, McGinn’s differentiation between ‘fear’ and ‘revulsion’ helpfully draws attention to how the latter is sited in avoidance. It is precisely this notion, and its more culinary-­guided incarnation as ‘refusal’, that delineates the uses of revulsion in establishing food’s powers of horror. Disgust is a visceral reaction, but its foundations are not to be found in the body – as paradoxical as this may sound – but in the psychosocial structures that delineate the boundaries of that which is proper, and that which is not. As the visceral epitome of the latter category, disgust is entangled with both physical reactions and cultural transformations. The term ‘transformation’ here is used conspicuously to signify how disgust points towards the identification of a change, a shift in both aesthetics and cultural poetics, through which the ‘proper’ has become ‘improper’. It is not surprising to find that categories of food figure prominently in relation to our cultural registers of disgust: from spoiled to rotten matters, to foods that do not fit our cultural categories of ‘edible’, disgust mixes with consumption in a number of ways, so that food disgust, or ‘food loathing’, becomes a naturalised reaction, an accepted and expected response to what is seen as improper. When it comes to categorising foods as ‘inedible’, the process is not unilateral and autarchic. I am not simply talking about matters that are deemed ‘inedible’ as they literally cannot be digested  – such as, for instance, rocks or fabric. Neither am I simply referring to the culinary classification of matters that are, culturally speaking, ‘abominable’ – such as human flesh or, as I will discuss later, pets. What must be included in the broader categorisation of ‘the inedible’ are also substances that once

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were considered ‘edible’, but which are suddenly biologically transformed and ruled out of the structures of human consumption. I refer here to a specific category that, when culturally constructed and perceived as such, instils horror in any witness or prospective eater: rotten food. This category is, in truth, much more difficult to clearly identify than one might think. Claude Lévi-Strauss famously included the rotten – together with the raw and the cooked – in his triangular categorisation of food as one of the basic and unavoidable culinary categories in human organisation. However, while Lévi-Strauss’s work has been influential in schematic understanding of food statuses, his approach does lack a general desire to place the triangular food categories into a cultural framework for both aesthetics and reactions. It is therefore essential to understand how the ‘rotten’ truly works in our culinary structures, so that one can attempt to grasp its meanings in the representations of rotting food in film. First, and in spite of our cultural certainties, ‘rotten’ is a nebulous and ungraspable category. Notions of what is rotten and what is not vary from one cultural context to another, even if intersecting commonalities exists. One might be tempted to say that there are universal categories of the rotten that are inevitably connected to disgust; these include, for instance, putrefying flesh, and its sensorial evocations of abominable sight and unpleasant smell. Even notions of ‘dead flesh’, however, are not always reliable, and different levels of decay will delineate not only the subcategories of the rotten, but also where those subcategories are placed in our cultural structures. It is a well-acknowledged practice, for instance, that for meat to be consumed, the carcass of the animal should be left to hang and rest until it is ready, until – to put it simply – a little bit of putrefaction has set in. But that amount of putrefaction is allowed and expected, and therefore fails to generate disgust and horror. Carolyn Korsmeyer points us in the direction of seeing the rotten as a blurry category within both culinary and sociocultural structures, as it is not quite the food itself that calls for notions of “spoiled” and “inedible”, but the ways in which it is perceived: “different interpretations of the object of taste and smell yield different sense interpretations” (2011, 65). Examples of this abound, from the dreaded and now infamous Swedish ‘rotten’ herring (surströmming) – considered by some to be the smelliest food in the world – to kombucha (effervescent tea), or even sauerkraut (a famous staple of German cuisine). The process of “controlled rotting” – or, in these contexts, fermentation – is a common part of our human food structures, regardless of cultures. ‘Fermented’ tends to be the term that is commonly used, and much preferred to the socially distasteful ‘rotten’.

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To give an example that is not only evocative, but also globally recognised, consider cheese. While cheese is a common food that many enjoy around the world, it is produced by fermenting dairy products with appropriate bacteria and spores. The process of becoming-cheese “releases bad smells, some of them resembling bile, vomit, urine and faeces”, all these being, as Korsmeyer puts it, “exemplars of the disgusting” (2011, 65). Yet, for many people, cheese is not disgusting. In spite of the fermentation process that makes it what it is  – and transforms milk into something Other – cheese is not commonly thought of as rotten. And while some distinctly unpleasant sensorial abilities may persist in relation to cheese, enough to turn some prospective eaters’ stomachs, cheese remains commonly thought of as ‘edible’. The rotting process that transforms milk into cheese is controlled, administered, and, to put it simply, permitted. The term ‘rotten’ becomes excluded from the production and consumption structures of cheese, and therefore “disgust is replaced by savouring” (Korsmeyer 2011, 65). Only remote affective connections remain between cheese and ‘the rotten’, and while sensorial connections maintain its relationship to more abhorrent substances, cheese is an allowed and allowable form of rot. The cheese example draws attention to how the category of rotten is not, strictly speaking, simply connected to alterations and transformations in a food that make it, inevitably, something forbidden and unacceptable. Indeed, the conceptual understanding of that transformation is, as ever, imbued with the regulations of cultural control. In the case of the ‘milk to cheese’ transformation, the process must be the result of a carefully assembled and, above all, reasonably definitive and intended action. Anything in-between causes horror, disgust, and, to evoke Kristeva, abjection. It is not surprising that Kristeva should have used milk as one of the foods most connected to the process of abjection, causing “a gagging sensation” and “spasms in the stomach” (1982, 2). Kristeva, however, seems uninterested in identifying any cultural connection to the identification of foods as abject beyond their psychoanalytical connections. Indeed, it is necessary to see the transformative qualities of food beyond their psychoanalytic connections, and understand them as part of cultural discourse. In the case of milk, its transformative categorisation as rotten happens quickly and obviously. Without care and appropriate refrigeration, milk will go sour: it will congeal and it will smell. It will transmute into an inedible substance, a rotten, horrific matter. Milk that has gone sour, abandoned in the fridge or on the kitchen counter, has very little to do, conceptually speaking,

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with the appreciated and often lauded taste properties of cheese. Rotten milk is a horror matter, as much as it is a matter of horror. To see sour milk being poured is an unpleasant experience, and the thought of its disgusting smell – culturally perceived as such – is enough to cause people to gag and wretch. The mere imagination of drinking sour milk causes aberration and horror: sour milk is a palpable representation of culinary disgust. To illustrate the power of rotten transformation at work, a well-known scene in Minority Report (2002) is recalled. This film can hardly be categorised under the rubric of horror. And yet, an unsettling consumption moment places it in the foreground of its status as part of the ‘food horror’ narrative. In this film, a blinded John Anderton (Tom Cruise) is left in a room to look for his own sustenance. As he walks around in the dark, his outstretched hands fall on what he clearly recognises as a fridge. As the fridge opens, the audience are presented with an array of food that is not immediately unsettling, as the contents are filled with sandwiches and bottles of milk. However, only half of the items are to be considered ‘edible’, while the other half are clearly ‘rotten’. The film successfully renders the nature of ‘rot’ here by utilising elements of mise en scène that are conducive of the spoiled nature of the foods. Mould appears on sandwiches and the liquid in milk bottles is given the grey tinge that is customarily associated with spoiled foods. John reach out for an obviously rotten sandwich, and hungrily take a bite. What comes next is the unavoidable reaction of disgust, as John spits the food out – having recognised the unpleasant taste as the calling card of the rotten – and wretches as a result. John’s ordeal with rotten food is, unfortunately, not over, as, in order to eliminate the taste of spoiled food from his mouth, he once again reaches into the fridge, only to pick up and take a gulp from the bottle of sour milk. The whole exchange makes for a horrific viewing experience. The revulsion of encountering rotten foods is clearly rendered by visual reactions that aptly communicate the visceral experience of disgust. Gagging, spitting, and retching belong to the rubric of food horror, as the notion of rotten enters the unavoidable dimension of the culturally unspeakable. The power of physical reactions here is essential for the process of identification, as the rotten relies on cultural categorisation; otherwise, as Korsmeyer argues, culinary sensations would remain “inchoate and indistinct” in our hierarchy of experiences (2011, 65). Identification lies at the heart of categorising the inedible as such, and the taste and olfactory properties of food – even when just evoked in images – is where the notion of rotting food as horror lies.

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Although the category of rotten is often difficult to define, this does not mean that contemporary film does not play with its evocation in terms of how the Western psyche receives it. This is particularly true for the notion of putrefied flesh, and the several associated notions – aesthetic, multisensorial, and physical – that go with it. The use of maggots as an exemplification of the rotten, and the food horror that it derives, is common if not fully pervasive. In The Lost Boys (1987), the unfortunate Michael has his mind momentarily manipulated by a vampire and made to think that he is eating maggots and worms instead of rice: he looks in horror at the carton of fast food filled with squirming invertebrates and quickly proceeds to spit the food out. We, as the audience, are naturally horrified with him. This scene in The Lost Boys was also evoked in the vampire parody What We Do in the Shadows (2014), when guests dining at the vampires’ house are asked if they can see the worms on their plates  – predictably, they cannot. Maggots make a similar appearance in Ghost Ship (2002), where two members of the crew are seen playing culinary roulette with allegedly rotten tins of food: as they begin to consume a tin of ‘rotten beans’, the beans turn to maggots under the teeth of the unfortunate Munder (Karl Urban). As Munder open his mouth, maggots drop out in large quantities from his lips. Even though the acting is not exactly of a high standard, the sheer amount of maggots is enough for the viewers to imagine what they would feel like to eat, with texture and movement lying at the heart of the revulsion here. One scene in Poltergeist (1982) sees Marty in the kitchen, looking for a snack in the middle of the night. This takes place amidst the main family’s issues with paranormal possession and the viewer is attuned to the possibility that Marty’s foray into kitchen might end badly. Consequently it is no surprise to see that an encounter with the refrigerator turns into food horror. Marty begins to nibble on a chicken drumstick, while removing a sizeable steak from the fridge and placing it on the kitchen counter. Slowly, gurgling and squelching noises start emanating from the steak, as the meat – to Marty’s horror and our own – begins to crawl across the surface of the counter and break up into decaying pieces. As we watch with revulsion, more horror is in store for Marty: the chicken drumstick he had previously dropped on the floor is seen to be crawling with maggots, a sure sign of its decaying status. While the rotten and slightly explosive steak is horrific enough, it is the drumstick that truly captures our attention, by virtue of the fact that Marty was actually eating it only a few moments before. The mere suggestion that Marty may have

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been eating maggots – even though it is conferred that the decaying flesh might be nothing more than a hallucination – is enough to cause extreme revulsion and even dread. We imagine the taste of the rotten chicken flesh, and we almost feel the maggots squirming in our mouths, as they wriggle and twist. Imagination is what creates the horror effect of the scene, empowering food with its liminal abilities for disgust. The artifices of the disgusting are arranged so that, to borrow Jack Morgan’s words, the “apprehensions” reflective of “biological life” find a clear embodiment in their own simultaneous evocation and materialisation (2002, 41). Examples such as Poltergeist, The Lost Boys, and Ghost Ship further illustrate how maggots exemplify the bridge between body horror and food horror, as the two merge to embody the essence of our fearful connection with the rotten, and the part that sensorial imagination plays in defining the limits of abjection. The disgusting often makes an appearance through the representation of rotting flesh, where putrefaction breaks a number of cultural regulations, which collectively identify what is abominable, from notions of pollution to the horror of death. One unforgettable scene in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) depicts the two persecuted lovers escaping the clutches of the woman’s jealous husband by fleeing in a van full of rotten meat. As the contents of the van begin to roll around in the escape, the two soon become covered in the fluids of rotten flesh – smears of dubious red, brown, and yellow overcoming their bodies – an image that alone is enough to evoke the dread of putrefaction, and the “fearful disgust” (Aldana Reyes 2016, 56) of both the olfactory and tactile experiences that exemplify decay. Korsmeyer suggests that decomposing flesh is a clear “exemplar of the disgusting” and that its inherently horrific nature is associated with its ability to produce one of “the most revolting odours one can encounter” (2011, 66). Although levels of meat putrefaction ­litter our Western cuisine in a number of ways, the vision of meat that is fully decayed – too far gone, too smelly, too ‘dead’ – is enough to evoke the true dread of food horror. As far as film conveys, the putrefaction of meat is often communicated via the inclusion of visual representations of rot – from a sickening blackening of the flesh to an abominable oozing of fluids – but also via the additions of maggots, a well-known presence that speaks of putrefaction very loudly. The film Dread (2009) illustrates this, where the college student Quaid (Shaun Evans)  – while conducting a study on ‘fear’ – kidnaps Cheryl, one of his fellow researchers, and locks her in a room with a chunk of meat laid on a plate. It is revealed

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that Cheryl cannot even stand the smell of meat, due to some difficult and clearly unresolved childhood memories. Trapped in the room, and left without any other food, Cheryl is presented with no option but to eat the meat. She refuses at first, however, and, as time passes, the meat begins to rot: flies lay their eggs in the decaying flesh and the meat soon becomes ridden with maggots. The effective sound mix in this film provides a number of truly abject squelching noises when, finally overcome by hunger, Cheryl is forced to handle the meat and take a bite form it. This scene generates disgust because of its imagined sensorial abilities – the taste and the smell of rotten – which inevitably, as Xavier Aldana Reyes puts it, also causes “pity” and empathy (2016, 57). The horror effect of rotten meat, and the abominable thought of having to consume it, is communicated successfully through the combination of both visual and other recalled sensorial experiences, breaking the boundaries of not only acceptability, but also of physical and psychological safety. Rotten meat, especially when ridden with maggots, is more than simply taboo. It is the sensorial evocation of our own mortality, and the final representation of that which we fear in virtue of its own unsalvageable nature.

The Horrors

of Coprophagia

There is no denying that the thought of consuming faeces would instil horror and dread even in the most open-minded contemporary thinkers. Coprophagia – the most accurate term for consuming faeces – is viewed as one of the ultimate taboos, at least as far as food and consumption are concerned. In medieval times, the consumption of faeces was often viewed by certain Christian groups as clear evidence of saintly behaviour, the ingestion of the otherwise prohibited matter viewed as the ultimate sacrifice which would bestow upon the consumer a certain privilege and assumed connection with God (Miller 1998, 98). Eating faeces, whether one’s own or someone else’s, was part of the saintly rituals of purification, which also included the overall observance of starvation, excreta excluded (no humour intended). The medieval period, however, is nothing but a long and far-away echo within the structures of our contemporary Western world. Regardless of one’s secular or religious affiliation, coprophagia is consistently regarded as a disgusting practice, enough to discourage consumption altogether. Eating faeces is a beastly practice, and those who practice it put themselves as far away from notions of human civility as possible. Given these social revulsions, it is unsurprising that contemporary

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films have employed the trope of eating faeces as an extreme metaphorical transposition for the fall of civilisation and even morality. What is also unsurprising is that, generally speaking, very few films have actually employed the trope, remaining overall fearful of such a disgusting practice, and only reluctantly, if ever, engaging with its dynamics. One thing is for certain: whenever the consumption of faeces if portrayed, no positive associations are ever present, and the film tends to present itself either as a difficult and highly politicised social critique, or as a narrative carrying with it an intentional, and often critically empty, level of shock factor. When it comes to conveying the horror of disgusting food experiences in film – including the detestable experience of consuming faeces – taste is not, arguably, the only sense that is being called upon. Indeed, much of the construction of disgust, in the cultural sense, relies on the vocation of horrible and unpleasant smells instead. This is understandable, not only because smell and taste are so closely associated, as far as sensorial stimuli goes, but also because the dimensions of disgust that connect us to food are often experienced long before the experience of taste can actually manifest, if it ever does. For instance: the sight of rotten food will be undeniably disgusting; however, the experience of disgust remains mediated until the sense of smell becomes involved, or, so to speak, until we detect the unpleasant stench of rot and decay. Disgust, as far as food and oralities are concerned, is dependent upon smell. In the latter category, we find not only matters that are beyond their status as ‘consumable’ – such as rotten food – but also matters that should not be eaten, and embody the very notion of food abjection – such as vomit and faeces. Because of the anthropologically based connections that mediate both viscerality and aesthetics, food and disgust are “intimately related”, as so much of the cultural divide between purity and danger, and purity and impurity, “is staked on food” (Miller 1998, 88). In 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom controversially showed the consumption of faeces, and made for very difficult viewing. Salò’s narrative centres on the last few days of the fascist regime in Italy, when the Republic of Salò was established as a puppet state by the Nazi government in Germany. The film effectively communicates what it sees as the corruption of political and cultural ideals, as embodied by the very republic: its officials – a group of middle-aged men – are decadent, cruel, and obsessive, and openly engage in activities that are clearly perceived as perverse and despicable. Kidnapping a number of young men and women, the officials in Salò ridicule them and force them to steep

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to the lowest levels of human behaviour, depriving them of their dignity. Activities performed involve rape and physical torture, and, famously, forced coprophagia. Invited to what looks like a lavish banquet, the young men and women are instead made to consume human faeces, served on silver platters. The bestiality of the act clearly echoes the depravation of the officials, and provides a critique suggesting that the real-life republic of Salò – formally known as the Italian Social Republic, instituted between 1943 and 1945  – was seen as a ‘rape’ of the Italian people, and of the dignity of the country that was. The disgust elicited by the consumption of faeces clearly evokes the moral disgust felt towards the corrupted officials, who ‘tortured’ their own country, and steeped to the lowest levels by becoming the stooges of the Nazi government. Faeces are particularly effective in communicating the failure of political artifice: naturally malodorant, faeces are not only unfit for consumption, but also a violent sensorial assault on human sensibilities, and aiding the construction of immorality which is clear in the film. Faeces, as Miller puts it, “destroy the sublime illusions” constructed by “rank and class”: they are heavily “democratising” in interrupting the culinary cliché (1998, 99). The historical echoes are notable in Pasolini’s film, and the use of coprophagia exacerbates the notion of taboos as a moral representation, where matters of pollution do not stop at the physical boundary. In the more recent era, The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009) is a notorious and unavoidable example of coprophagia in film. Upon its release, the film was considered extremely controversial, and, like Salò, was even banned in several countries. The story is set in Germany and sees three ­unfortunate tourists kidnapped by the stereotypically tropic mad scientist – internationally renowned surgeon, Dr Josef Heiter (Dieter Laser). The future of the tourists sees them physically tortured in order for the surgeon to accomplish his evil plan and lifelong ambition: to surgically join three individuals, anus to mouth, so that they can form the eponymous ‘centipede’ shape of the title. The surgical procedure is horrific in itself – as it even involves the removal of all front teeth for the victims who are unfortunate enough – but the most visceral form of horror comes from the fact that the middle and final part of the centipede are forced to consume the faeces of those who are in front of them. This ghastly process is most likely what caused the film to be banned, and what earned its international notoriety. As far as the film’s narrative is concerned, however, the forced-feeding of faeces inspires excitement and delight in Dr Heiter who, upon witnessing the ‘head’ of the centipede preparing to defecate into the mouth of the unfortunate ‘middle section’, is

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desiderate enough to shout “Feed her!”, with glee. In truth, the consumptive disgust inspired by The Human Centipede is all but imagined: the incriminating section connecting anus to mouth is conveniently covered by bandages, and no faeces are ever shown in any fashion. What the film pivots on is the well-orchestrated performance of the actresses, whose wide-shot eyes and expressions of fear and horror – together with a succession of well-construed gagging gestures and sounds – are the only tools for even communicating that the consumption of faeces is taking place. Discussing the connection between fear, disgust, and the construction of the Gothic narrative, Jack Morgan contends that the horror imagination is built on “a powerful and dramatic refinement” of a represented fear rooted in “fleshy peril” (2002, 41). Yet, imagination of “fleshy peril” alone is enough for deeming the act of coprophagia as not only disgusting, but truly horrific, even if, one might be tempted to argue, the ‘real’ horror in The Human Centipede comes not from the suggested ingestion of faeces, but from the pervasive notion of confinement and bodily invasion, with the idea of consumption horror acting as an effective visceral pretext to the latent narrative of imprisonment (Fig. 2.2). The concept of taste, however, is not what truly constructs the idea of disgust in relation to food. Indeed, taste does not need to be an active factor in order to experience disgust; rather, it is the prospect of eating

Fig. 2.2  Body modification and the horrors of coprophagia in The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009)

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that constructs the dimension of revulsion in relation to food. That is to say, food horror is much more about smell, touch and, above all, the infringements of the cultural regulations that delineate our manners of eating – or, to be even more specific, what should be eaten, and what should not. As far as the expression of food horror is concerned, disgust, as Miller suggests, is often “misread as a taste-based emotion” (1998, 88). I find myself in agreement with Miller, and his suggestion rings even truer when one encounters the dimension of food horror in film, a medium which can only evoke the experience of taste – for the most part – but is clinically successful at conveying the effects of other senses, chief among which is of course sight. Naturally, there are instances in which the experience of ‘horrible taste’ is evoked, and that evocation contributes to the conveyance of the horror. Infamous examples such as The Human Centipede do this, where the experience of oral and food horror is pushed to its visceral limit. The narrative of disgust that emerges from both coprophagia, and the representation of forceful body modification, finds a conceptual identification in the theory of abjection. According to Kristeva, nausea is the expression of abjection manifesting, its very presence identifying the breach in bodily boundaries that maintain the stability of the subject as a separate entity. This narrative of breach, consumption, and disgust appears to be intrinsic to the representation of food horror in The Human Centipede. “Along with a sight-clouding dizziness”, Kristeva suggests, “nausea makes me balk at that [matter that] separates me from the mother. […] ‘I’ want none of that element […] ‘I’ do not want to assimilate it […] ‘I’ expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself ” (1982, 3). Rejection of the abject matter is what alerts the subject to the danger of disintegration, and simultaneously protects it. In these terms, nausea preludes avoidance and the split – both cultural and psychological – from that which is regarded as Other. In spite of its unavoidable conceptual evocation with the theory of abjection, however, The Human Centipede appears to negate the experience of abjection as readily as it recalls it. In the narrative, while the unfortunate individuals who have to swallow excrement clearly experience the disgust that comes from encountering faeces, the experience is pushed further by having to incorporate it into the body. For the unfortunate captives who form the centipede, there is no rejecting the abject matter, there can be no refusal to incorporate it. The abject becomes the subject, and, in turn, the subject becomes abject. In their surgically modified, unnatural state, the human parts of the centipede are as abjecting as they are abjected by their form and ways of consuming.

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The boundaries of the body are broken, erased, and made impossible. The cycle of expulsion is negated and the ultimate food horror manifests itself, as an inverted canon of consumption is established both within and outside of corporeal boundaries. Kristeva goes on to argue that abjection is “a desire for separation, for becoming autonomous” (1991, 136). That autonomy, however, is rendered impossible in The Human Centipede, as the impossibility to ‘separate’ is communicated both physically and metaphorically by the inconceivable sight of the bodies surgically sewn together. The consumption of excrement in The Human Centipede is beyond excessive or transgressive: it refuses to allow the very boundaries that even define the construction of horror, of its aesthetics, of its repercussions. For the horror of excrement is not actually witnessed in the film: no faeces are actually put on show, a clear denial of the abjected matter that we so wish to recognise and expel. What we are left with is the body horror of the Gothic imagination, the representation of abject taste and texture. While the bodily horror is enforced through visualisation, the power of abjection is evoked only in recollection, its power deriving from the memory of sensorial stimuli, and the imposition of the Gothic and the grotesque.

The Oral Savagery

of Eating

Pets

Keen observers of the presence of pets in film will inevitably recall a notorious scene in Fatal Attraction (1987) that sees the scorned lover of an adulterous married man (Glenn Close and Michael Douglas, respectively) kill and boil the man’s pet rabbit. The encounter with the unfortunate pet rabbit is made by the wife, who approaches a bubbling pan in the kitchen, only to discover that its contents hide their now dead beloved pet. The discovery is presented, technically speaking, in true horror fashion: both sound-mixing and cinematography are arranged to communicate that the cooking pot hides a horrible and petrifying secret. As the wife approaches the bubbling container, images of her child running helplessly toward the empty rabbit hutch in the garden are carefully juxtaposed. The tension builds until the child’s screams at discovering the empty hutch, and the screams of the mother discovering the boiled pet rabbit, merge in a moment of terrifying realisation. The scene is intense and utterly horrifying. The metaphorical uses of consuming the unfortunate animal here are apparent: the rabbit is not only the family’s beloved pet, but it also functions, in a way, as the metaphorical embodiment of the man’s devotion to his wife and children, and concurrent rejection of his adulterous

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lover, who takes revenge by destroying the symbolic epithet of that which she cannot have. At the time when the film was released, the scene gained immediate notoriety and successfully entered the cultural scope of our Western imagination, so much that the term ‘bunny boiler’ is still used today to signify an obsessive and often dangerous woman, who will stop at nothing to gain the attention of, and often enact revenge on, the man who has corned her – who, likely, is also already part of a relationship with someone else (Dalzell and Victor 2007, 104). The horror effect of the bunny-boiling scene derives from a number of notions that are tacitly inscribed within the narrative, and its use of cultural metaphors. Firstly, the act – surrounded as it is by notions of home invasion and domestic disruption – renders quite effectively the obsessive ‘madness’ suggested by Alex, Glenn Close’s character in Fatal Attraction, who fails to accept personal boundaries and the failure of her romantic relationship with a married man. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, the narrative of interrupted intimacy is successfully communicated by the killing of the pet rabbit, an unacceptable act, as far as our Western regulations of conduct are concerned. Arguably, the very notion of ‘pet’ here is what causes the disturbance and the revulsion that derives therein. Truthfully, if the unfortunate animal in the pot had been just any other rabbit – or a chicken, or a duck, for that matter – the scene would not have been quite as horrific as it actually is. Instead, it is Whitey, the family’s pet rabbit – which is even given a proper name, to enhance his higher status within the human–animal structure  – that lies in the bubbling pot, all bloody, limp, and tortured. The horror experienced in having a beloved pet killed and consumed is, even if only in an imagined context, easily relatable, especially in our Western context, where pets are often given superior status in our family and social organisations, and are ‘protected’ by our cultural laws. Pets are cared for in a special manner that is generally utterly unimaginable for other types of animals, such as farmyard and wild animals. In the Western psyche, pets are endowed “with semi-human status” (Fiddes 1991, 133). We care for pets, we tend to them, and we even give them proper names. They are more than just ‘animals’: they are our friends, our companions. They are, more often than not, declared to be members of the family. And when they pass on, we bury them as we would a family member, and grieve for their loss – even if, ritually speaking, a human funeral is generally more elaborate and costly. Pets are able to conceptually breach the boundaries that categorise species, and, in so doing, gain special status in human lives. Pets are, of course, ‘not human’, but they are, in a way, the next best thing. With this comes

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the absolutely unbreakable rule that we do not eat pets. By the laws and norms of society, one would never consume a family member, so that very notion is horrifying and terrifying. In his well-known study Meat: A Natural Symbol, Nick Fiddes suggests that “we treat pets more like individual subjects than the abstract objects as which we officially regard edible animals” (1991, 133). Certain species, of course, enjoy benefits more than others. In our Western society, cats and dogs are deemed as pets at all times, and no alternative notion is allowable: any suggestion of consuming cats and dogs is perceived with horror and disgust, and treated as inconceivable. Other animals, such as horses, belong to a cultural grey area, where typically, even if not understood as ‘pets’, they would not be openly consumed as food. Even this notion, of course, is not universal and endemic to the Western world, as a number of nations are known to consume – or at least have consumed, historically – horses as part of their alimentary regimes (Zeder et al. 2006). At the heart of this distinction lie the physical boundaries and emotional interaction that one constructs with the pet: generally, if the pet lives within the bounds of the home, then its consumption is not even a matter of discussion. Of all animals challenging the boundaries of pet distinction, the rabbit is perhaps the one that occupies the most distinct cultural and culinary grey area. This particular animal holds a dual categorisation, as some view it as a pet, while some still view it as ‘edible’. Subcategories and further grey areas exist even in the rabbit world, as some species of rabbits are particularly categorised as ‘pet rabbits’, with their consumption being an unthinkable act, while other rabbit breeds, of course, have the unfortunate fate of being viewed as ‘farm rabbits’, and therefore appropriately designated as suitable for the dinner table. This differentiation becomes particularly unavoidable in the pet bunny’s common cultural designation as a “cute” animal, which is particularly exhibited by its gained status as a pet (Joy and Robbins 2010, 122). When it comes to the rabbit – and others pets of a similar nature, which have only (relatively) recently made the cultural transition from farmyard to home – the discourse of categorisation is quite clear: every individual rabbit is either a pet or a meal, but it can never be both. The existences of both possibilities breaches the boundaries of our cultural categorisation, and is bound to cause cultural and social indignation – as well as, unfortunately for rabbits, a number of common ‘eating’ jokes, made at the expense of both the pet animal and the pet owner. Once the rabbit is designated as a ‘pet’, the unbreakable rule inexorably applies: eating pets is unthinkable, and any suggestion of it causes repulsion and upset. This is precisely the framework that transforms the killing and cooking of the rabbit in Fatal Attraction into

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the murder of a family pet. Although some may consider rabbits as a food source, this is not the narrative that is implied in the film. Cherished as part of the family, the physical annihilation of Whitey the rabbit represents an attempt to disintegrate the very family unit to which it belongs. The focus on the child’s reaction in the scene, and his despair in finding the beloved pet “gone” – as he terms it – from its hutch, reinforces the legitimacy of the repulsion felt by the viewers, as well as the characters themselves. Its murder also carries dark undertones in that it implies the lover’s murderous abilities. The killing and suggestive cooking of the pet rabbit elicits disgust and horror precisely because of its proximity to the family. In the Western context, there seems to be a very clear knowledge that pets are not fit for being food, but that knowledge rests precisely on their interconnection and liveability with humans. Whether one perceives the rabbit as an inedible animal – that is, falling into a quasi-sacred category that constructively includes it in the realm of human relationship, not consumption – or as a source of food, the narrative that is presented in Fatal Attraction supersedes one’s belief in that it constructs the rabbit as untouchable. Seeing the bunny bubbling in the pot is more than simply just a cause for amused disdain: it makes us cringe precisely because of the emotional narrative that exists around it, because of the emotionally charged reaction to this socially despicable act that is reinforced by the cinematic narrative. As part of the home, the rabbit is also part of the human narrative it solidifies. Abstinence from eating, on the family’s part, is not enforced, but it is presented as normal and obvious instead. This is, of course, the case for all domestic animals, the fortunate pets that are chosen, forever motivated by, as Frederick Simoons already suggested in 1967, “affection for a companion” that exists only within the profoundly circumstantial cultural discourse that allows it (Simoons 1967, 135). Its killing and boiling repulses because it stands for the breaking of boundaries, and the disintegration of certainty, whether the latter signifies the threat to the traditional family unit, or the challenge of the sanctity of the human species as superior. At the bottom of the rationale lies an even greater knowledge: that humans are not food, and all creatures that act as incarnations and receivers of the human connection are, to some extent, human surrogates themselves. Their killing and consumption, especially when done in the violent, forceful, and vindictive way presented in Fatal Attraction, is a negative reflection of the human, an inverted emotional aesthetic of the sanctity of human life. Therein lies the horror of its possibility, and the disturbance of the cultural cliché it causes.

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Indeed, the horror of seeing the rabbit killed and cooked like a ‘common’ animal is particularly felt in view of the emotional connection it maintains to the human members of the family unit. Marshall Sahlins has long argued that pets, as “domestic cohabitants”, cannot be consumed: through a series “structural incantations”, the horrific consumption of a pet causes “the food system” to be “inflected throughout by a principle of metonymy, such that taken as a whole it composes a sustained metaphor on cannibalism” (1976, 174). What Sahlins appears to be suggesting  – in a distinctly convoluted way, which is often characteristic of the structuralist approach to culinary cultures – is that killing and consuming a pet carries with it the metaphorical evocation of cannibalism because it suggests that, once emotional connection is severed between human and animal, then the next step is also inevitable – the severance of the connection between human and human. If the pet in Fatal Attraction works as an honorary human, then its killing and treatment as food causes revulsion because it also recalls the possibility of killing and consuming the human itself: the threat of human annihilation is what hovers in the margins of finding the consumption of a pet horrific. The metaphorical recollection of cannibalism, as associated with the killing and consumption of the pet, finds sustenance in representation because “it affirms the boundary between us and them, between human and non-human, between subject and object, between civilisation and its resources” (Fiddes 1991, 134). In the broader Western psyche, perhaps no other animal has been granted the place of honour as the ‘companion par excellence’ as much as the dog. Regardless of whether an individual would actually select the dog as the ideal pet of choice, there is indeed a tacit yet recognisable narrative that identifies the dog as the closest animal to human: the label of ‘man’s best friend’ is long-standing and established. The dog is also one of the few animals, at least in the Western context, that is able to fit into human situations in a number of ways, as either a working animal – in the field, for example, herding sheep and other livestock – or simply as a companion within the bounds of the home. Historically, Western cultures have identified dogs as useful and valuable for everyday life and commerce, and therefore proceeded to exclude them from the list of ‘edible creatures’, the latter a point of difference that often creates an unbreakable divide from other cultures and countries, where the consumption of dogs is allowable and allowed. The designation of dog as ‘non-edible’ is, of course, circumstantial, and not intrinsic to the animal itself. The same can be said of all living creatures that exist within the realm of human exchanges, from cats to horses, from sheep to parrots.

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With time, the place occupied by dogs within the structures of everyday lives became such that the dog itself was established and re-envisioned as a friend. More often than not, the dog lives close to the family, and is usually described as loyal and affectionate, characteristics that are seen as part of the rationale as to why eating dogs is an unimaginable abomination, and often perceived as a sign of savagery. Familiarity with the dog has led to the rejection of an entire animal group as a source of food, and its visualisation as domestic, in every possible understanding of the term. Simoons suggests that “avoidance of dog flesh in the Western world may have come about because the dog was a friend of the family and eating seemed an act akin to cannibalism” (1967, 114). ‘We’ – whoever that might be – do not eat dogs in the Western world, and that judgment is quite final. Those who do, in turn, are culturally perceived as brutal, subhuman beasts: dog eaters are repulsive, sickening, repellent, and Other. Eating dog equals the collapse of our civilised boundaries, and the forsaking of all rationality which, inevitably, evokes hatred and fear. The consumption of dogs is not even culturally acceptable in the case of extreme hunger, and even though many rational individuals could come to understand the decision to pursue this act in life-threatening circumstances, the very idea of killing and consuming a dog – a beloved pet, a loyal and affectionate friend – continues to be repulsive. This narrative is clearly exploited in a number of contemporary films, with Ravenous (1999) as a notable example. Upon recollecting his experience of extreme hunger in the wilderness, F.W. Colqhoun (Robert Carlyle) confesses that, in order to survive, he lowered himself to killing and eating “even [his] own dog”. The use of the adverb ‘even’ here suggests the incredulity at his own actions, and carries with it the cultural narrative that deems the consumption of a pet dog as an unthinkable and, eventually, abject practice. In light of my previous analysis regarding the consumption of ‘pets’ and its tacit linkage with cannibalism, it does not come as a surprise that the consumption of the pet dog in Ravenous only precedes the pervasive acts of cannibalism that will come to define the film. The dog is deemed inconsumable due to what Fiddes terms the “normal standards of edibility”, which cannot often be transgressed without the evocation of disgust and, ultimately, horror (1991, 134). According to this cultural logic, the dog is saved from inclusion in the edible category by an unacknowledged mixture of perceived affection and socio-genetic confusion. While the notion of eating other working animals  – such as horses  – is abhorrent but at least conceivable in dire circumstances, consuming dogs is unfathomable: “dogs are kinsmen, [and therefore] the

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notion of dogs understandably evokes some of the revulsion of the incest taboo” (Sahlins 1976, 175). The dog is an animal, but we assign onto it characteristics and abilities that are seen as belonging to the human rubric of description, such as friendship and loyalty. The dog  – together with, arguably, other pets like the cat – occupies a liminal state in the structure of human interaction, even if, commonly, that liminality is not clearly perceived. The dog falls “between human and non-human” and, by coming too close to the human, must be “deemed inedible, lest it makes us doubt our certainties” (Fiddes 1991, 135). Too akin to humans in their behaviour, and yet not quite human in themselves, dogs are cultural mirrors of difference: their perceived status as either ‘high’ and ‘inferior’ is tacitly called into question whenever humans, as a cultural and genetic group, wish to re-establish our superiority, and our ability to recognise fellowship and attachment to those that we deem worthy. In a captivating scene from The War of the Roses (1989), the feuding couple Oliver and Barbara Rose are seen consuming a lavish meal together, prepared by Barbara herself. During the meal, they drink fine wine from expensive crystal glasses, and discuss animatedly how their relationship has degenerated over the years. The clever use of lighting in the scene draws attention to the dark corners that loom behind both Barbara and Oliver, Gothicising the meal as a frightful event. The cinematography aids the construction of the scene’s “negative aesthetics” (Botting 2013, 1) by focusing on the glasses filled with burgundy red wine – a beverage whose visual similarity to blood forebodes the sinister events that, to no one’s surprise, will inevitably crystallise. The dialogue also makes references to the food and drink being poisoned, immediately heightening the possibility that death is in the air. When Oliver once again refuses to grant Barbara the divorce she so desperately craves, the atmosphere surrounding the meal changes further. She gets up from her chair and begins to pace around the dinner table, leaving her husband to consume a dish of pâté and crackers on his own. As Barbara paces, the tension builds. After Oliver suggests that a bad person could never make a pâté “this good”, Barbara responds with the suggestive retort, “that depends what the pâté is made of ”. At this point, Barbara’s body language becomes almost predatory and suggestively animalistic. She leans onto the table and, staring at her astonished husband, she utters one single sound: “woof ”. Oliver’s horror is painted on his stricken face and, as enquiries to whether the pâté is indeed made out of his beloved dog Bennie, Barbara simply replies, “A good dog to the last bite”. After the declaration, Oliver’s anger erupts

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and violence ensues. Oliver’s horror is also, undoubtedly, the same horror felt by the audience. It is quite clear that the elimination of the dog is meant to deeply wound Oliver, who, on several occasions throughout the film, professes his love for Bennie the dog, much to the dismay of his wife, who does not share the sentiment. The thought of anyone killing and consuming a beloved family dog, out of spite, is beyond disturbing. It is unthinkable and unforgivable. The scene in the film pivots on evoking disgust and repulsion, Othering responses that immediately construct the scene as culturally transgressive, and mediates the challenge of what we conceptually term human. It will later relieve viewers to learn that Bennie is in fact alive and well, and Barbara was simply fibbing. The outrage felt at the killing and consumption of the pet dog in The War of the Roses rests on the evocation of uncivilised barbarism, on the abandonment of rational human thinking, and the descent into savagery and inhuman behaviour. Consuming the pet dog breaks all the boundaries of propriety and convention. It is even more horrifying that Oliver should be made to eat his pet dog unknowingly, as this also suggests the defiling quality of the act, and its infringement of the boundaries of the proper body, which are established and maintained in consumption. To recall Douglas here, the forced consumption of the pet dog – a category of animal deemed as inedible – upsets the finely tuned structures of all those sociocultural regulations that we rely upon in order to maintain “order” (2003, 35). The dog is not classed as food, and it is therefore ­culturally – if not physically – ‘impure’. Culinary violation is a contravention of the order, and therefore bestows chaos onto our lives. The consumption of the dog in The War of the Roses threatens Oliver’s place as a ‘civilised’ ordered being. The emotional split felt at the death and consumption of the dog is culturally constructed, reflecting the challenge to the superior category of human. The consumption of the pet dog  – either actual or suggested – communicates the simultaneous interruption and evocation of emotional platitudes, and generates a fear that, inevitably, is connected to the collapse of our cultural safeties. The correlation between purity and ordered classification is, naturally, one that is transmitted at a very early age, continually reinforced and perpetrated by the cultural and anthropological structures of our Western context. In spite of their affiliation with the human – which grants them a superior status  – pets like dogs and cats remain ambiguous, and their forced entrance into the ‘edible’ category causes disturbance. To be fed not only an unknown substance – an act that, conceptually, is disturbing in

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itself – but to also discover that substance is classed as ‘inedible’ enhances the characterisation of the experience as defiling. With defilement comes horror, as the sociocultural construction of impurity also continually recalls the notion of abjection. As pets are liminal, so is their consumption. The consumption, however, reflects upon the human eater, either knowingly or unknowingly. Just as the ‘crime’ of eating pets is abject and Other, so is the person who commits it. The threat of taboo physically manifests in consumption via the notion of eating what is ‘most like us’. These acts of ‘pet cannibalism’, as I would like to call it, share with “proper cannibalism”, as Fiddes calls it, the feature that “those accused of transgressing decent norms are usually marginal to mainstream society” (1991, 136). In a contentious suggestion, Jonathan Safran Foer also proposes that one may want to “pet” a pig down at the farm, but one also needs to be prepared for the fact that “two minutes” later, one might have to kill it (2010, 71). And yet, as grisly and as physical as it might be, that killing is not strictly classed as ‘violent’, according to our broad cultural rules: it is just part of our food-production structures, a way of life. It is, as Foer puts it, a matter of establishing our “food chain” (2010, 98). Nonetheless, the conception of violence, and the understanding of it in relation to both physical and emotional encounters, appears to cement whenever the creature under scrutiny does not meet the requirements of our ‘food’ categories. In this, pets are particularly privileged creatures in that they are positioned outside of the food circle, and therefore their treatment is more akin to that of a human being, if not specifically the same. When it comes to consumption, pets are not food, while others animals such as cattle most certainly are. Therefore, the killing of a pet is easily categorisable and categorised as a brutal act, and benefits from the negativisation that discourses of violence bestows on physical subjugation. The narrative here is clear: the killing of a pet, especially as a source of food, is easily conceptualised as violent, as barbaric, and as vicious. It causes distress in the viewer, and it is often rendered as a clear signal of difference and cultural Otherness. This is, of course, regardless of how bloody or gory the act itself actually is. Killing and eating pets is still an act of violence. To illustrate an example of this type of violence, one might think of The Hills Have Eyes (2006). When the mutant cannibals invade the family’s desertstranded caravan, ringleader Lizard focuses his attention on the unfortunate caged canary. He grabs the canary firmly and proceeds to bite its head off, chewing upon its flesh with glee. The audience can only watch horrified as the poor canary is disposed of quickly. This is an important moment in both

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the narrative and the conceptualisation of the mutants as strange and hideous creatures, the anthropological Other. Lizard breaks the cultural codes that designate pets as untouchable, and definitely not as a source of food. It is fitting to notice that Lizard decides to begin consuming the bird while it is still alive, biting its head off in a manner reminiscent of a beast. And the killing is indeed ‘beastly’, as humans commonly kill their prey before consuming it. It is also significant that, in the midst of disposing of an un-disposable pet, Lizard also kills it in a way that is not in keeping with traditional human butchering techniques, opting instead for a very tactile way of killing, deprived of the cultural artefacts reserved for ‘acceptable’ slaughter. The act is openly presented not only as gruesome, but specifically as violent. That violence and lack of empathy – equalled throughout the film with a lack of humanity – will be reiterated as a distinctive characteristic of the cannibal mutant. The discourse of animal violence here is employed to contextualise the mutants as disturbing and horrific creatures, incapable of distinguishing between categories of both food and behaviour. While butchering cows, or pigs or chickens, is not conceptually inadmissible, this might still be very disturbing to watch. Yet, it is very rarely conceptualised as violence in the sociocultural sense. Peter Iadicola and Anson Shupe stress the importance of the “special privilege” bestowed upon pets, as the very designation of the pet status “protects them from acts of violence, including the act of killing them for food” (2013, 254). At the core of this lies, once again, the idealisation of pets as animals not intended for consumption. Once an animal is regarded as a source of food, its treatment changes, and so do the discourses that surround its physical treatment. The consumption of pets, and of dogs in particular, can be perceived as Gothic even when the aesthetics of the narrative do not openly evoke the negative aesthetics of the mode. What makes it Gothic is its evocation of negativity, of the destruction of our edifying narrative of civilisation and superiority. In this sense, eating pets does not only find a conceptual connection to the taboo of cannibalism. The perception of its occurrence as ‘wrong’ and frightening also signals our revulsion at that moral impunity from which we so strive to distance ourselves. The infringement of the inedible law is a return to nature that is not only excessive, but also transgressive.

Yuk! It’s Slimy … and It’s Hungry! Notions of impurity and unacceptable edibility also construct the perception of substances as horrific not only in terms of taste and oral experiences, but also into the realm of touch. Sensorial intersections give us an insight

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into the connection between taste, touch, ingestion and orality, highlighting the part played by tactile experiences in constructing the experiences of disgust. The connection between the visual and tactile dimensions of horror is unmissable, as sensorial memories create the very notion of experience both in terms of ingestion and oral rejection. That is to say, the recollection of what is tactile terms, ‘feels’ weird and strange will be an essential part in the construction of oral horror, long before any notions of ingestion are actually presented. This ability to inspire dread through both touch and taste is highly reminiscent of what Walter Benjamin had already termed “tactile appropriation” (2009, 51), and which, in more recent years, Steven Shaviro had identified as the “violently repulsive” nature of the body’s visceral responses (1993, 260). The sticky, the slimy, and the gooey figure prominently in the Western repertoire of disgusting matters, especially as tactile precursors to the visual and conceptual horror of ingestion. Texture plays an important part in the delineation of that which cannot, culturally speaking, be consumed, and is catalogable as a ‘matter of horror’. In these terms, horror manifests as both a visual and a tactile experience, which causes dread in virtue of its ability to, as Shaviro suggests, “destroy customary meanings and appearances, rupture the surfaces of the flesh, and violate the organic integrity of the body” (1993, 102). When it comes to film, the evocation of touch is essential in presenting and representing the pervasive effect of visual horror, inasmuch as the oral extents of disgust and even fear are concerned. The unpleasantness of touch, when successfully conveyed, also preludes to the dread of both consuming and being consumed, as far as the boundaries of the human being are concerned. Otherness, when it comes to consumption, can be found in touch as much as it exists in taste, at least as far as the representation of impurity and disgust are concerned. The evocation of the sense makes the experiences of both reality and tactility feel, to use a controversial term, extremely ‘real’, highlighting the capacity of the horror narrative – both in terms of genre and in terms of contextualisation – to represent the rendition of the “corporeal threat” as a “basic requisite” for the fearful reaction (Aldana Reyes 2016, 11). It is now not uncommon, if not pervasive, to spot instances in film where the human body is consumed by slimy and gooey substances. The texture changes from gel-like dark goo, as can be seen in Creepshow 2 (1987), The Blob (1958, 1988), and, more recently, Under the Skin (2013), to white and cloudy viscous substances, as presented in The Stuff (1985).

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A common trope that connects these narratives and their presentation of the carnivorous slime appears to be the fact that the slime itself has some form of consciousness, that it can move of its own volition, and even wilfully ‘hunt’ unsuspecting humans. An exception to this is perhaps to be found in Under the Skin, where the slimy substance does not seem to operate out of its own deliberate will, but a suggestion exists that it is somehow connected to the consciousness of the alien female (Scarlett Johansson) and her need to feed. Either way, the slimy substance is continuously portrayed as engulfing, ravenous, and perennial, searching for humans to consume. It is of particular note that the texture of the anthropophagous substances should fall into the broad category of ‘slimy’, whatever nuance and presentation that category may take. Conceptually, there is something deterring about slimy substances, which are often imagined as sticky, and therefore creating unpleasant tactile experiences. This rendition of unpleasantness, although undoubtedly cultural in its conception, is arguably pervasive to the Western understanding of the slimy state, and potentially connected to psycho-social factors, as well as anthropological ones. Jean-Paul Sartre famously provided an analysis of our understanding and interaction with the slimy – or, as it is often reported, the “viscous”. As part of his extended study Being and Nothingness (2003) Sartre scrutinises the nature of sliminess, and how it affects the human experience, suggesting a connection between the creation of the psychic self and tactile horror experiences. In simple terms, Sartre argues that viscosity – or “sliminess” – is a state half-way between solid and liquid. As such, it is a highly unstable substance, which does not flow, but lingers onto the body, sucking and “leeching”. This in-between state lies at the core of its unpleasantness, for the slimy refuses to immediately separate from the surface of the body, while giving the impression that it might. The slimy lingers on the skin, and makes us conspicuously aware of its presence, which in turn highlights the boundaries of our bodies, and the possibility of un-recognition of those boundaries. It is this knowledge that generates that sense of unpleasantness and discomfort that comes from being in contact with the viscous. According to Sartre, the slimy is “a cross-section in a process of change”. The very apprehension of the slimy is “compromising and without stability” (2003, 630). In Sartreian terms, the slimy emerges as a “thickening, dense and viscous liquid: pitch, gum, honey, tar” (Heinämaa 2006, 157). Sartre appears to be covering a number of bases in his conceptualisation of the slimy, going from something as noxious as tar to the sweetly goodness

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of honey. Although something like honey might be pleasant to taste and finally consume, the feeling of honey on one’s fingers  – its sticky properties – make the tactile experience of it unpleasant and uncomfortable. Anecdotally speaking, many will be able to contextualise the experience of stickiness on skin – often caused by a food as commonplace as honey – and the feelings of annoyance and displeasure that this generates, as well as the almost consuming need to clean it off and eliminate the sensation. Sara Heinämaa recalls Sartre in suggesting that the slimy often has a “sugary” gluey-ness associated with it, probably in virtue of its chemical association with sweet foods (Heinämaa 2006; Sartre 2003, 631). The slimy is appealing because of its sugariness, recalling infantile and infantilised notions of sweetness that often predate the establishment of Order, in the psychoanalytical sense. This infantile attraction – irresistible and dangerously pleasurable – is recalled in The Stuff, when consumers of the self-proclaimed “dessert” praise its incredible sweetness, as the narrative openly creates an association to sweetness and being addicted. The consumers ingest it eagerly, uninterested in its provenance. It is particularly surprising to see that the first man who encounters the stuff – as it bubbles ominously out of a hole in the ground – immediately proceeds to taste it. The “stuff ” is slimy and white, but its look and texture are reminiscent of yoghurt and melted ice cream, substances that are appealing and delicious, but which also hide a certain sliminess and eventual stickiness to them. Here, what we could be witnessing is a critique of the uses of sugar in the food industry in order to create addiction and ensure continuous sales. Or, it might be a broader critique of consumer capitalism, providing buyers what they want, which causes an addiction that is sweeter than sugar. The presence of the slimy subject – the irresistible “stuff ” – could be used metaphorically to signal the addictive nature of consumerism, which eventually dissolves buyers into self-destructive cycles. As far as the broader filmic examples are concerned, the slimy maintains its metaphorical association with the notion of ‘horrific consumption’ by virtue of its conceptual connections to engulfing orality, and only gestures towards any true and identifiable connection to the clearly bloody narrative of dismemberment. While the slimy might not be necessarily gory, there is a trend that cannot be denied in all examples, from The Stuff to The Blob: the slimy is hungry. Its desire to consume transcends our notions of consciousness and embodiment, and presents itself in the most visceral and destructive ways, as the viscous mass moves from ‘object’ to ‘subject’. The human bodies ‘consumed’ by viscous substances often simply dissolve into

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sliminess, and I would like to suggest that there is a haunting knowledge in witnessing this occurrence. The process, however, is often more connected to the dread of imagined orality, rather than solely relying on the visual effects of dismemberment as such. Not to mention, of course, a tacit and unspoken recollection of the body liquefying, as it decays within the grave. There is very little blood shown on most occasions and, at times, there is none at all, like in the case of Under the Skin. The blood and gore that are often the calling card of death in horror films is, for the most part, denied. Death happens by a strange and estranging process of osmosis and incorporation, as the human body literally melts away into the mass of the slimy substance. In a way, death is not a resolution, but an intended end, a possibility that lingers in a bloodless horror. One might even suggest that the slimy consumes its victims by changing them, by altering their bodies so that they, too, become part of the slimy. The boundaries of the body are made porous enough to be not necessarily broken, but hauntingly blended. Sartre argues that the slimy holds a “haunting memory of metamorphoses” (2003, 630). While Sartre is evoking notions of the maternal womb and, to some extent, the culturally understood notion of the cocoon, the notion of metamorphoses is represented in Under the Skin as haunted not only in terms of its own ancestral memory, but also as a disrupted future based on the Gothicised notion of change. This process of carnivorous blending – as I like to term it – is made even more unavoidably visible in The Stuff, where the white goo infiltrates the body through the very process of consumption, as unsuspecting victims eagerly ingest great quantities of “the stuff ”, allowing it to slowly eat them from the inside, and “become” them. Part of the horror here comes from not actually knowing where the human ends and the stuff begins. Presented as food, which is supposed to nourish the human body, the stuff breaks all notions of safety and temporality, as the growth of the human body is interrupted by what is ingested. This notion of not only being food but also vanishing into something Other is at the heart of the horror that comes with the slimy, also made noticeable in the portrayal of the slimy masses as perennially hungry. Sartre hauntingly suggests that “to touch the slimy is to risk being dissolved into sliminess” (2003, 630). This notion of dissolving is made tangible in the films as the slimy literally suspends and disperses the human, consuming it as part of its viscosity. The loss of the body, however, is also a loss of consciousness, a primordial return to a state of gooeyness where absent knowledge and culture cannot negotiate the boundaries of the body,

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and its place within the social order. The metaphorical rendition of the viscous in the films suggests that a limbo state of ‘non-being’ is introduced, where the body does not simply disappear in a pool of blood, but it becomes something else, something Other and ungraspable, just like the slimy itself. If it is true, as Sartre argues, that encountering the slimy exposes the possibility of shapeless existence, the clinging of viscosity to the body also entails its pervasive hold on the mind, and within this lies its conceptualisation of horror and unpleasantness. The horrific and inescapable fluidity of the slimy “holds” and “compromises” existence (Sartre 2003, 629). For through the horrific engulfment of incorporation, the human and the slimy momentarily merge, and the threat of being eaten also extends to the ending of the very concept of humanity itself, where the very borders and essence of ‘being’ are challenged and exposed by the lingering and inescapable viscosity. The attractiveness of the slimy substance is evoked in a number of ways in film, often through the presentation of the subject itself, or of the context in which it appears, as completely irresistible. This is conceptually in keeping with the psycho-cultural understanding of the slimy that simultaneously makes it an attractive, yet deceptive substance (Heinämaa, 157). In Under the Skin, the slimy, black substance is associated with the alien female, and presented in conjunction with her male victims’ sexual desires. The female is irresistible. As the men walk towards her in her sensual and sexual display, they also fall inexorably into the slime and black mass that will eventually consume them. The irresistibility of the viscous substance here is equalled with the appeal of the female and the sexual desire it generates in the men. Desire is somehow ‘punished’ by the dark matter, as the slimy is presented not only as a harbinger, but as an irresistible agent of death. The men walk willingly into the dark matter, its sweetness embodied in the female. Like both Sartre’s honey and tar, the dark viscous matter in Under the Skin is both yielding and deceptive, as it breaks the boundaries of both body and self with its syrupiness. It is intrinsic to Sartre’s view of the viscous that its textures threaten to take over our own, blending our bodies with its sliminess, until nothing is left of us. As Heinämaa elucidates, A solid object that falls into slimy substance seems to keep its form for some time, but actually starts to merge or fuse into the soft yielding material. The transformation is slow, all changes inconspicuous, but in the end, no trace or impression of the object is left. (2006, 157)

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This disintegration is a common feature of the presentation of the slimy and its horrors in film, as examples such as The Blob or Under the Skin reiterate the ability of the viscous matter to dissolve the human, and challenge both its material and psychic supremacy in the (un)natural order. Remarkably, underneath the surface of the viscous, the human bodies in Under the Skin appear to be floating in water, rather than a slimy matter. This point evokes what Sartre terms the agony “of water”, which is hidden within the slimy (2013, 629) – a return to a primordial, maternal environment, which is painfully based on a system of consumptive exchange and almost parasitic attachment. It is particularly noteworthy that the men who are engulfed in the dark, viscous matter in Under are Skin are shown slowly dissolving from the inside, until only the skin remains, floating around in the liquid. It is suggested that the body is slowly consumed while the men maintain a level of consciousness, aware of their own slow disintegration into the liquid. This is communicated in a haunting scene where the newest victim who has descended into the slimy matter encounters a previous victim floating in the watery nothingness, a visibly pained expression on his face. Upon being touched, the previous victim quickly implodes and leaves behind nothing but his light and floating skin. Its see-through characteristic disturbingly evokes the gel-like texture of a barely formed foetus in the womb. The maternal connection is further reinforced here by Sartre’s own understanding of the slimy as having a soft surface, one that is as even and supple as “the flattening of the full breasts of a woman who is lying on her back” (2013, 629). The recalling of a woman’s breasts call for the reenvisioning of the consumption relationship in Under the Skin as a reversal of the maternal connection, a fearful subversion of the mother–child narrative, where the over-sexualisation of the pre-oedipal body causes the very existence of the male figure to dissolve. Sartre’s contention that the slimy sucks onto the skin with a “moist and feminine sucking” (Sartre 2003, 630) transforms the already disturbing system of sliminess in Under the Skin into a horror re-elaboration of maternal ingestion.

Maternal Orality

and the Consuming

of Pregnancy

Horrors

Psychoanalytical discourses of orality and hunger have almost inevitably dedicated attention to the exchanges between mother and infant, drawing attention to feeding practices and the uses of the mouth as the focal centre

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for subject identification. The mother, as many psychoanalytical theorists have argued, personifies the subject’s experience of both familiarity and Otherness. For Dorothy Dinnerstein, in particular, the pre-oedipal bond of the nuclear family predisposes children, regardless of sex, to the fear of a “devouring mother”: “the threat of autonomy […] is felt on a less rational, more helpless level, experienced as more primitively dangerous” (cited in Moran 1996, 35). The mother has a presence that, both symbolically and physiologically, overpowers the child, with either a “smothering love that paralyses (the good mother), or with the denial of love, leaving the child ‘hungry for more’” (Moran 1996, 37). Kim Chernin further contends that the inability of children – especially daughters – to either separate or identity with the mother in a “primal feast” causes alienation and rage, and often results in a fraught relationship with all aspects of orality – such as eating food – which, in recalling the body and figure of the mother, are inevitably repulsive (1994, 95). This idea of the dangerous, ‘ravenous’ mother is exacerbated in the work of numerous contemporary theorists. Patricia L. Moran (1996) – following the work of both Kristeva and Chernin – has persuasively argued that women are, broadly speaking, often tacitly envisioned as ‘cultural abjects’, and that notion derives precisely from the absorption of the very concept of femininity into that of maternity. Therefore, simply speaking of the mother – or of the oral exchanges that come to represent the mother – “might instead provoke the effervescent signification of abjection” (Moran 1996, 37). In virtue of the anatomical and physiological properties of the maternal body as a source of nourishment, the abject relationship becomes exemplified in the very notion of feeding: the mother that gives nourishment from her own body, and forcefully becomes the child through the process. Abjection, as Moran paraphrases, “occurs when boundaries fall” (ibid.). Those boundaries are exemplified in the separation from the mother, whose shadow continuously encroaches upon the autonomy of the child as a separate individual. The fear of being incorporated into the mother, and return to a state of non-being, haunts existence, and surfaces through encounters with the abject, as a reminder of maternal, synergetic relationship. While the notion of the mother as a ‘devouring’ presence is well known in scholarship  – and while several narratives, within and outside the world of cinematic production, have drawn attention to the horror of the maternal body as overwhelming and consuming  – this common notion finds a clear subversion in examples such as Grace (2009), where it is the monstrous baby that threatens to consume the body of the mother,

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and destroy its very source. This notion is not new in itself, and previous examples had already gestured towards this re-imagining, with examples such as Rosemary’s Baby (1968) being an apt, pre-1980s reminder. In this narrative, the baby is seen as slowly destroying the mother’s body while still in the womb, the parasitic nature of pregnancy being given clarity of expression, in spite of the cultural and linguistic taboos that prevent the very term from commonly being used. The baby is not only presented as a parasite, but a demonic one at that, constructing a clear metaphorical connection between the seemingly fictional narrative of demonic possession and the unspoken bodily horrors of pregnancy and reproduction that, although rejected by the structures of Western rationality, are clearly evoked in the slowly deteriorating body of the expectant mother. Even more recent examples such as Breaking Dawn (2011–2012)  – the final instalment in the cinematic Twilight Saga  – clearly gesture towards the idea of the foetus as parasitic and inevitably Other: here, the pregnant Bella (Kristen Stewart) sees her body slowly devoured from the inside, as the flesh melts away from her bones, and she literally becomes nourishment for her baby, which slowly consumes her. The cannibalistic and destructive nature of the foetus in this narrative suggests that the mother is “haunted by pregnancy”, as the conceptual threads of “feeding” and “being fed” construct a relationship between mother and infant that is steeped in a curious mixture of overprotection and victimisation (Boswell 2014, 100). The idea of pregnancy as a body horror is clearly evoked through the idea of consumption: Rosemary’s Baby and Breaking Dawn introduce the idea of the monstrous baby as a devouring and consuming presence. This gestured subversion of the maternal cliché is compelling, as it highlights the foetus, and not the mother, as inherently abject, in virtue of its status as a blended and merging entity. The relationship between mother and child – especially in relation to the feeding interactions that morph them together as essentially symbiotic entities – is given renewed, and appropriately twisted and disturbing, attention in Grace (2009). In this film, the child – the eponymous Grace of the title – is portrayed, for lack of a better term, as essentially ‘monstrous’. Originally thought of, or presented as, a stillborn baby, Grace is rescued and lovingly looked after by her mother Madeline (Jordan Ladd). The initial narrative of stillbirth – and the connection to death and dying it reinforces – looms over the mother–child relationship from the very beginning, and continues to present itself tacitly as the baby is soon revealed to be an unusual baby, one that is just ‘not right’. Grace is not only corpse-like in appearance – a

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fact that, alone, would be enough to construct her Otherness – but is also gifted with unusual appetites: continuously hungry and always desperately latching at her mother’s breast. It soon becomes clear that breast milk is simply not enough for the overtly horrific baby, who craves something a bit fleshier, and, unsurprisingly, a bit bloodier. Grace literally consumes her mother’s body, drawing blood as sustenance and recalling the vampiric mantra of nourishment, popularised by Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), that “the blood is the life”. Nonetheless, it is not the vampire’s shadow that haunts baby Grace’s attachment to her mother’s breast. It is, rather, the narrative of maternal abjection that, psychoanalytically speaking, shapes the relationship between mother and child, and transforms it into a haunting and eternally engulfing connection. The idea of connecting the mother–child relationship to both psychological and physiological notions of mergence and (failed) separation is not a new one, and numerous instances from psychoanalytic scholarship have drawn attention to the perilous notions of attachment that seem intrinsic to the maternal experience. Kristeva, for instance, has connected the child’s symbolic separation from the mother’s body as an essential part of gaining an individual sense of subjectivity. Any recollection of the mother’s body – often embodied in the tactility of horrible experiences, such as touching the congealed skin that forms on the surface of milk – becomes abject, a reminder of mergence and the lack of autonomy that dominated when the child still depended on the mother’s body for survival. The separation between child and mother is a fraught process, and the maternal body forever beckons the child into incorporation, a tacit narrative that haunts the adult and manifests through the abject. Separation, according to Kristeva, is at the heart of the abject, for autonomy can only be achieved by rejecting the symbiotic relationship with the body of the mother. That separation, however, is never fully distanced from conflict, and the very act of consumption is a reminder of that fragility. As Kristeva puts it, “when food appears as a polluting object […] orality signifies […] a border between two distinct entities of territories” (1982, 75). Food is about boundaries, an oral object that can exemplify separation as much as it can signal its fragility. A keen observer will be quick in noticing that, in spite of its persuasive and influential nature, the well-known Kristevan concept of the abject mother as ‘engulfing’ is not exactly what is fully conveyed in films such as Grace. As far as the perpetually hungry infant is concerned, what presents itself is a subversion of the very notion of maternal abjection, as the notion

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of engulfment is given a different interpretation through the actualisation of maternal feeding. While the destabilisation of the maternal abject narrative is only gestured towards in examples like Rosemary’s Baby, and, later, Breaking Dawn, in Grace we see the overt designation of the baby as abject, a process that happens precisely through the establishment of a narrative of consumption. That the feeding relationship between mother and child is steeped in aggression and horror is a notion commonly found in psychoanalysis, particularly in the work of Melanie Klein. According to Klein, the oral orifice is the site where aggressive and sadistic impulses arise. Those impulses are generated by and connected to the child’s relation to the mother’s breast. The breast, in these terms, is not only a site of nourishment, but also a site of violence, as is, in turn, the mouth (2002, 302 and 377). As paradoxical as this notion may sound, the breast can also be perceived by the child as a negative presence in view of its ability to cause vexation if it is removed from the infant’s mouth, leaving it empty, wanting, and desperate. As Aspasia Stephanou puts it, “the infant projects its own aggression onto the breast because it hates it: the breast is bad” (2014, 77). And yet, the infant continues to desire the breast  – a metonymic representation of the mother  – in order to own and contain her body, the source of both pleasure and hate. The desire to own and destroy the mother – the alienating fantasy of possession – propels a series of defence mechanisms that can be viewed as the child’s first steps towards separation and entrance into the symbolic realm of language. While Klein’s rubrics are profoundly different from the terminologies to be found in Kristeva’s approach, the work of the latter finds a solid connection to Klein’s understanding of the child’s destructive phase, which she terms “the paranoid schizoid phase” (2002). The narratives of paranoid aggression and abjection find similarities in that they uncover the child’s feeding relationship to the maternal breast as inherently fraught, conflicted, and surrounded by a layer of disgust and unpredictability. Regardless of critical terminologies, the narrative of the mother as an engulfing presence, which is, essentially, an embodiment, or at least reminder, of the abject, remains prominent. One can see the aggressive dynamic of bodily consumption and exchange presented in Grace, where the child’s uncontrollable hunger forces her to feed on her mother’s blood, mediated through the breast, in an exaggerated figuration of the breastfeeding process. The term ‘devouring’ here becomes an apt representation of the child’s relationship to the mother, and, in turn, the mother’s

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desire to eternally possess the child, forever providing nourishment and, metaphorically speaking, love. The child’s aggression is mirrored in its literal consumption and slow destruction of the mother’s breast and, metaphorically, of the mother herself, as Madeline slowly fades away in order to feed her voracious child. At the same time, we see the mother reflecting the terms of Klein’s psychoanalytical interpretation, as Madeline is unable to stop feeding Grace, even though she is conscious of the fact that the baby is slowly destroying her, consuming her both physically and psychologically. The narrative of victimisation continues to echo strongly in the exchange, even as the nature of the relationship between mother and child is revealed as based on a cycle of voracious consumption that will destroy the mother, while simultaneously engulfing the child in its own monstrosity. This simultaneous narrative of both interdependence and separation draws attention to the relationship between mother and child as inherently conflicted, at least in terms of understanding consumption as both a cultural and psychological activity, and outlining the split between linguistic and pre-linguistic stages, in the Lacanian sense. Luce Irigaray has defined the relationship between mother and child as being inherently suffocating, one that is founded in “eating each other” and being reduced to ­“consuming and being consumed” (1981, 62). Irigaray’s metaphorical actualisation of the mother–child relationship as inherently cannibalistic also points us in the direction of understanding consumption as a mutual exchange that relies not only on physical nourishment, but also on a psychic process of destruction and regeneration that is inevitably evoked and re-enacted through the mouth. This horrible orifice lies at the centre of the exchange, as the mutually parasitic and symbiotic relationship of the maternal cycle uncovers feeding as, also, a cycle of eternal hunger, that can only be partially fulfilled by the mother’s uninterrupted “filling up of holes” (Irigaray 1981, 62) – a desire that, in truth, continuously clashes with the child’s voracious desire to consume. Subjectivity, therefore, can only be achieved, as Irigaray would suggest, through the rejection of the mother’s breast and the nourishment it provides. This, however, leaves the child disassociated and paralysed, as she then enters into the realm of language, with its mouth “gaping” for the truth and logic that can only be provided by the language-based world of the father (Green 2008, 100). In the ‘absence’ of the father – who died in the accident – Grace is unable to progress beyond the continuously hungry, oral state, that makes her forever dependent on the mother’s breast and its blood nourishment. One can only wonder if, in a moment of cultural suggestiveness, Grace

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might even be proposing a veiled, retro-conservative critique of unmarried mothers, and the culturally perceived dangers of raising children without an appropriate father figure. While this presents itself, overall, as nothing more than a suggestion, the uses of twisted, maternal consumption to convey, paradoxically, pervasive notions of disintegration are horrifically clear. The cannibalistic nature of breastfeeding is undeniable, even though we are culturally disinclined to view it or term it as such. And yet, the mother literally feeds the baby parts of her own body, constructing a tacit juxtaposition between breastfeeding and the consumption of human flesh. Irigaray suggests that our Western culture is based “upon the murder of the mother”, on the forceful separation from her body, and the severance of the symbolic umbilical cord that “reproduces the social order” (1991, 47). Within this framework, the very notion of subjectivity is rendered by the image of the feeding mouth, an open gateway through which the infant gains not only nourishment, but also linguistic expression and, therefore, its place within culture (Stephanou 2014, 77). The body of the mother is simultaneously part of the process of individualisation, and in direct opposite to it. That is to say, on the one hand, the maternal body is conceived as a pre-linguistic entity of both physical and psychic communion, which stands in the way of the infant’s independence as a separate unit. On the other hand, however, the mother’s body provides the nourishment that opens the psychic gateway into sensorial stimuli, and continuously defines the presence of the infant as a separate living creature. In Grace, however, the cannibalistic subtext is made explicit. The forever hungry child literally devours the body of her mother, beginning with the continuous ingestion of breast milk  – which quickly weakens the body of the mother to a pitiful state – and peaking with the child’s consumption of the mother’s flesh, as the film ends with a haunting image of Madeline’s breast being bitten and eaten by the insatiable baby Grace. The mother’s body literally becomes food. The child openly refuses to gain autonomy from the mother and rejects the construction of symbolic boundaries that will make it an autonomous entity. The infant incorporates the mother into herself, and in so doing becomes the abject. It is the reminder of the engulfing nature of the maternal relationship which, in this case, encroaches not onto the child’s, but rather the mother’s body, as the latter dissolves and disappears into the child’s body and consciousness. This representation only serves to continually construct the mother – and, therefore, the woman – as ‘victim’, where her inevitably sexualised, monstrous body generates more ‘monstrousness’ in virtue of its reproductive

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capabilities (Creed 1993, 7). While the recontextualisation of the feeding child as abject is worthy of note, the victimised and sacrificial nature of the mother’s body reiterates traditional patriarchal discourses of consumption, desire, and reproduction that, eventually, leave us with nothing but disappointment. In these terms, the sacrificial nature of the mother’s portrayal in Grace is difficult to avoid. The mother’s body is literally served up to the child in a conceptually murderous feast. In Totem and Taboo, Freud clearly designates sacrificial rituals as purification rituals, revolving around not only notions of kinship and community, but, more practically, on the killing of a living creature, most commonly an animal (1998, 119). Kristeva developed Freud’s idea of sacrifice as a purifying ritual, claiming that sacrifice can be interpreted as a way to expel the abject from the social order. In opposition to Freud’s father-centred narrative, Kristeva places the mother’s body at the centre of the sacrifice narrative, claiming that the symbolic process of abjection is a continuation of the process of symbolic offering. Kristeva, however, continues to designate the mother’s body as that which must be expelled. Paraphrasing Kristeva, Kelly Oliver remarks that, “in the transition from rituals of sacrifice to rituals of purification, one thing remains the same, the abjection of the maternal body or of animal” (2009, 293). In Grace, the narrative of sacrifice returns the mother’s body to its sacrificial state, serving it up to the parasitic, cannibalistic child. In contrast to the Kristevan narrative of abjection, however, the mother’s body is not expelled and rejected, but it is continuously incorporated and devoured by the infant. The abject, in this case, takes the guise of parasitic consumption, and the true horror lies not only in the reminder of failed separation, but also in the explicit unveiling of dependability, as the sacrificial undertones of motherhood are merged with the engulfing horror of the cannibalistic child. The role of the maternal body as a metaphorical rendition of the sacrificial animal – tacitly rendered in examples like Grace and, earlier, Rosemary’s Baby – is deeply connected, at least conceptually, to what Kristeva terms the “semiotics of biblical abomination” (1982, 90). Here, she traces the understanding of the maternal body as “abominable” to biblical narratives, and connects the horror of the maternal body to the horrors of food prohibitions. In Kristeva’s argument, the fear of the maternal body, its inherent generative power, and its undeniable authority over the bodily functions of children – especially feeding, and even more so in the early, breastfeeding stages – give rise to a number of food taboos involving mixing her body with the body of her children (Oliver 2009, 293). Food prohibitions are, on

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a symbolic level, a rendition of the repulsion felt at the sight (or thought) of the feminine/maternal body, with its leaking, open, and potentially engulfing orifices. In literal terms, that symbolic connection finds actualisation in the dietary prohibitions that stipulate what animal foods can be consumed, and what are regarded as abhorrent, as found in the instructions of the biblical Leviticus. Dietary prohibitions, Kristeva argues, are aimed at distancing the child from the maternal body, as she is the first source of nourishment for the infant, while still in the womb, and later, through milk. Branching out from the constrictions of the biblical text, all dietary regulations can then be interpreted as purification rituals that evoke the narratives of not only sacrifice, but also of purification and distancing from the abominable maternal body. Food taboos, in all their forms, symbolically attempt to fortify the boundaries between the bodies of the mother and the child and distinct, subjective entities, as they are continuously directed towards controlling “intermixture, erasing differences, threats to identity” (Kristeva 1982, 101). Cannibalism here continues this narrative of purification, drawing a connection between aberration and cleansing, and distancing our control regulations – especially in relation to consumption – from the viscerality of the maternal body.

Works Cited Aldana Reyes, Xavier. 2016. Horror Film and Affect: Towards a Corporeal Model of Viewership. London and New York: Routledge. Benjamin, Walter. 2009. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. New York: Classic Books. Boswell, Parley Ann. 2014. Pregnancy in Literature and Film. Jefferson: McFarland. Botting, Fred. 2013. Gothic: The New Critical Idiom. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge. Chernin, Kim. 1994. The Hungry Self: Women, Eating and Identity. New York: Harper Perennial. Classen, Constance, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott. 1994. Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell. London: Routledge. Creed, Barbara. 1993. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. Dalzell, Tom, and Terry Victor. 2007. The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. New York: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 1986. Forward: Fors. In The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy, ed. Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, xi–xxxviii. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Douglas, Mary. 2003. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Routledge. Falk, Pasi. 1994. The Consuming Body. London: SAGE. Fiddes, Nick. 1991. Meat: A Natural Symbol. London: Routledge. Foer, Jonathan Safran. 2010. Eating Animals. London: Hamish Hamilton. Freud, Sigmund. 1998. Totem and Taboo Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics. New York: Dover. Green, Mary. 2008. The Maternal Order Read through Luce Irigaray in the Work of Diamela Eltit. In Luce Irigaray: Teaching, ed. Luce Irigaray and Mary Green, 93–102. London: Continuum. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hankin, Rosie. 2000. The Lemonade Stand. Austin: Steck-Vaughn Company. Heinämaa, Sara. 2006. Through Desire and Love: Simone de Beauvoir on the Possibilities of Sexual Desire. In Sex, Breath, and Force: Sexual Difference in a Post-feminist Era, ed. Ellen Mortensen, 145–166. Lanham: Lexington. Howes, David. 2005. Introduction: Empire of the Senses. In Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, ed. David Howes, 1–20. Oxford: Berg. Howes, David, and Marc Lalonde. 1991. The History of Sensibilities: Of the Standard of Taste in Mid-Eighteenth Century England and the Circulation of Smells in Post-Revolutionary France. Dialectical Anthropology 16(2): 125–135. Iadicola, Peter, and Anson Shupe. 2013. Violence, Inequality, and Human Freedom. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Irigaray, Luce. 1981. And One Does not Stir without the Other. Signs 7(1): 60–72. ———. 1991. Women-Mothers, the Silent Substratum of the Social Order. In The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford, 47–52. Malden: Blackwell. Joy, Melanie, and John Robbins. 2010. Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism. San Francisco: Conari Press. Kitayama, Shinobu, and Dov Cohen, ed. 2010. The Handbook of Cultural Psychology. New York: Guilford Press. Klein, Melanie. 2002. Love, Guilt and Reparation: And Other Works 1921–1945. London: Simon and Schuster. Korsmeyer, Carolyn. 2011. Savouring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1991. Interview. In Women Analyse Women in France, England and the United States, ed. Elaine Brauch and Lucienne Serrano, 129–148. New York: New York University Press. LaBelle, Brandon. 2014. Lexicon of the Mouth: Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary. London: Bloomsbury. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1970. Introduction to a Science of Mythology/The Raw and the Cooked. London: Cape.

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McGinn, Colin. 2011. The Meaning of Disgust. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Méndez-Montoya, Angel F. 2012. The Theology of Food: Eating and the Eucharist. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell. Miller, William Ian. 1998. The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Moran, Patricia L. 1996. Word of Mouth: Body Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Morgan, Jack. 2002. The Biology of Horror: Gothic Literature and Film. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Oliver, Kelly. 2009. Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human. New York: Columbia University Press. Proust, Marcel. 1982. Remembrance of Things Past. Vol. 1. New York: Vintage. Sahlins, Marshall. 1976. Culture and Practical Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2003. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. London: Routledge. Shaviro, Steven. 1993. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Simoons, Frederick. 1967. Eat Not This Flesh: Food Avoidances in the Old World. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Stephanou, Aspasia. 2014. Reading Vampire Gothic through Blood: Bloodlines. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Townsend, Dabney, and Carolyn Korsmeyer. 1998. Taste: Modern and Recent History. In Encyclopaedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly, Vol. IV, 355–362. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zeder, Melinda, Daniel Bradley, and Eve Emshwiller, ed. 2006. Documenting Domestication: New Genetic and Archeological Paradigms. Berkeley: University of California Press.

CHAPTER 3

Consuming Hunger: Body Narratives and the Controversies of Incorporation

An evaluation of hunger is somewhat implicit to any discussion of food and horror. The concept of hunger lends itself to the representation of that which is twisted, alienating, and revulsive precisely by virtue of its physicality. When all cultural constructions are removed from the equation, hunger is an extremely visceral response. It is a sign of the body reacting for itself, divorced from the structures of cultural control. Unsurprisingly, the broader exploration of hunger as a cultural, critical, and physiological concept has been the centre of several films in the past decades – from Se7en (1995) to Feed (2005), from Ravenous (1999) to The Machinist (2004) – especially as the notion of horror surfaces in its various contexts. These examples arrange the narrative – whether in its totality, or simply on important fulcrum moments – on the representation of Othering food experiences, and implicitly propose hunger as an important cultural concern. As a conceptual connecting thread, the representation of hunger transforms the films themselves from seemingly random examples and case studies to a constructed narrative of the connection between food and cultural construction/alienation. I use the term ‘hunger’ here not as a casual evocation of the need for food. ‘Real’ hunger, the extreme requirement of food that can manifest itself through very physiological responses such as pain, is indeed a very overbearing and ever-frightening experience. Hunger is not simply about suffering and “torture”, it is, in broader and only slightly controversial terms, about “instinct” (Heywood 1996, 141). Hunger can completely overtake the thinking processes of even the most rational – or so perceived – individuals, the need for food © The Author(s) 2017 L. Piatti-Farnell, Consuming Gothic, Palgrave Gothic, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-45051-7_3

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overriding any other need, and transforming the civilised being into an extremely feral – and, one might suggest, ‘natural’ – entity. Hunger, after all, “makes a very visceral claim on our attention” (Vernon 2009, 1), and the very concept of rationality, or even appropriateness, pales when confronted with a starving body. Paul Fieldhouse makes a suggestive statement: “our unwillingness to accept just anything as food”, he argues, “betrays the notion that food is consumed for nourishment of the body alone” (1995, 76). At the heart of this conundrum lies the understanding of something as not only edible, but also acceptably so. Inevitably, notions of hunger complicate our cultural understandings of acceptability and edibility. The thought of what one might do if ‘truly hungry’ lies at the centre of any horror narrative of consumption: to what lengths will we go to acquire food, and what would we be prepared to eat to satisfy our hunger and survive? It is this suggestion of horrific possibility that highlights the Gothic potential of hunger as both a physical response and a narrative device. Hunger is a physical response that is steeped in madness, precisely for its potential uncontrollability and the suggestion that, if the circumstances were to be right, hunger would transform us from enlightened individuals to animalistic, ravenous beings. I would like to suggest that the very idea of hunger is what transforms a food experience into a potential horror experience, and that the very idea of hunger as a subverted entity runs throughout contemporary cinematic incarnations of food and horror. In its purest and most physically embodied form, hunger truly is the experience of excess. To be denied food is a haunting prospect, and it is appropriate to see James Vernon refer to the experience as the “spectre of hunger” (2009, 1). Physiologically speaking, hunger, in itself, is not such an ungraspable idea. After all, all living creatures become ‘hungry’ at one point or another. And yet, hunger is far from an uncomplicated concept. It seems only appropriate that when the food horrors of the Gothic world come under scrutiny the form that hunger would take will exceed the boundaries of human acceptability. The very concept of hunger, of course, is also culturally perceived as a matter of control. Or, to be exact, the very notion of hunger signifies a lack of control. The human being can be said to domesticate the body through what Sharman Apt Russell terms “a circle of messages”: the body is a genetic entity, dependant on biology (2008, 1). To dictate how and when one should be hungry is a distinct part of the control exercised by cultural frameworks. To indulge hunger in ways that are considered unacceptable is a rejection of our sociocultural rules. Hunger signals that the body is out of

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bounds, while it should always be controlled and regulated instead. When hunger is indulged in ways that go beyond the control of the Order, horror and fear can easily manifest, and represent the anxiety surrounding the collapse over our logical and civilised control of the body. Hunger is not, of course, the same as appetite. Scholarship has been plentiful in highlighting the differences between the two. Russell argues that appetite can in fact “intertwine with hunger”, but the former is not just necessity, it is “desire, born of biology” (2008, 15). Appetite, therefore, can be viewed as a form of conditioned desire. Hunger, on the other hand, presents itself as a primal need, and is expressed in a much rawer, visceral way. A large number of the horrific food experiences presented in film can be traced back to the subverted representation of hunger. Misplaced hunger, twisted hunger, hunger for the ‘wrong’ foods, uncontrollable hunger, and, in some instances, even the lack of hunger. The hunger for human flesh experienced by the cannibal is abominable and monstrous – and many cinematic narratives have capitalised on this, from The Hills Have Eyes (2006) to The Silence of the Lambs (1991). The consumption of matters such as excrement is perverse and repulsive, whether it happens out of choice, or is forced upon the consumer – The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009) acting as an apt example. Hunger for foods that are culturally deemed as ‘inedible’  – from pets to insects  – is unfathomable and despicable, with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) acting as a sound reminder here, bringing the politics of visceral reaction to the famous ‘snake surprise’ and ‘scarab canapés’ into the foreground. Uncontrollable hunger – which causes large quantities of food to be consumed  – is contemptible, while the lack of hunger that causes the body to slowly shrink and die is pitiable. Narratives such as Feed and The Machinist have greatly emphasised the uses of hunger as both loathsome and wretched. Hunger lies at the core of our cultural constructions of behaviour in relation to food consumption, and understandings of what ‘kinds’ of hunger are appropriate  – as well as in what ways that hunger should be satisfied – form a great part of our regulated physical behaviours. Indeed hunger truly is not a single entity, but an assemblage of multifaceted experiences that collide in our cultural rubric.

The Horrors of True Hunger Without generalising, one might see the concept of ‘true’ hunger as being deeply divorced from Western cultures. ‘True’ hunger – the hunger that signals the extreme lack of food, and that announces the potential

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destruction of the body – is a generally unknown experience in Western cultures. Hunger is, one might argue, a savage experience, one that is, conceptually and physically, far removed from the contexts of civilised society. Because of our inability to truly conceptualise hunger, and because of its failure to manifest in our Western experiences, hunger is both frightening and alien, and has no real place in our everyday lives. In our modern world, as Vernon suggests, “we believe that no one deserves to live with hunger, let alone die from it” (2009, 1). It is no surprise, then, to unveil hunger as an important part in the construction of cinematic food horrors, with all the cultural representations and relevance that that part entails. Nonetheless, because we are aware of the feeling of needing food, hunger is also a scarily tangible potentiality, one that is just ‘real’ enough to be concerning. Of course, it is not being claimed here that ‘hunger’ is a completely absent notion in the Western world. Indeed, many individuals do unfortunately live under the poverty line, where food is often scarce. Although conceptions and representations are likely to change, the core idea that hunger can be equalled to the complete disintegration of both the body and the mind remains strong. This applies not only to physiological and cultural notions of hunger, but also to its cinematic interpretations. At times, hunger is taken to be the physical representation of a psychological state, as in the case of Black Swan (2010) – where Natalie Portman’s thinness and food refusal are reflective of the psychological imbalance of her character  – and The Road (2009)  – where the haunting hopelessness of the post-apocalyptic waste finds an apt representation in the starving bodies of the protagonists, played by Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee. This connection between politicised psychological states and food depravation becomes even more explicit in the appropriately entitled Hunger (2008). Here, the main character Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) chooses hunger as a radical representation of protest, where the performance of a ‘hunger strike’ takes on its notorious politicised characteristic. In this narrative, hunger is, naturally, associated with the slow disintegration of the body. This very visceral and visually striking representation bestows a highly metaphorical usage to a distinctly physiological experience. As Bobby’s body slowly shrinks and takes on a markedly skeletal appearance, hunger comes to signify the complete control of will power over physiology, as the needs of the body are negated. The representation of hunger is, as is often the case, well mediated by the emaciated appearance of the purposely starved body. Indeed, thinness and physical destruction are often a useful and effective way to visualise

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the effects of hunger, at least as far as bodily functions are concerned. The slow destruction of the body is undoubtedly difficult to watch, and horrific in both its physiological and representational sense. Thinness is clearly associated with fatality, and therein lies the horror of hunger in its multifaceted purposes. This politicised use of self-starvation as a demonstrative practice confirms Vernon’s contention that “hunger, that most material of conditions”, is also “the work of culture” (2009, viii). Culturally, the ingestion of food is also controlled by notions of self-­preservation, acceptance, and, ultimately, safeguards the individual as a precious entity. The refusal of food can only ultimately signify the death of the individual. This also calls into question the connection between hunger as a physiological response and its understanding in a sociocultural way. For truly, to willingly deprive the body of food is torture, and the very notion of ‘letting oneself die’ is never more evocative than when hunger is represented. A recurrent and steadfast idea in film, as well as other narratives of food depravation and starvation, is that extreme hunger – or, true hunger – can completely overcome the perceived rationality of an individual. This is particularly evident in instances where hunger is not a personal choice, but imposed by others, as either for punishment, as a result of abandonment and exposure, or as a means towards psychological and physiological torture. The effects of hunger are often associated not only with thinness, but also the collapse of mental faculties. A clear example of this can be found in The Beach (2000), where Richard (Leonardo DiCaprio) is left in the jungle to starve. The lack of food quickly leads to hallucinations – including having entire conversations with the dead – and the failure of fully rational thinking. While in this narrative the effects of hunger are treated in a disturbingly comical fashion – at one point, the starved Richard imagines himself as a character in a jungle-themed video game – one cannot miss the clear critique of the dangers of depriving the body of its necessary fuel, and most importantly, of starvation as a dehumanising practice. And yet, in witnessing Richard’s madness, we as the viewers also inevitably empathise with him, and pity his desolate state. Hunger makes us vulnerable, and affects us deeply, as the mere thought of it makes us “sympathise” with those who are “suffering” from it (Vernon 2009, 2). To understand hunger as a state that should be avoided is, of course, a distinct characteristic of the modern world. We no longer hold the hungry responsible for their hunger, and to live in a hungry state is not a reflection of poor moral fibre or laziness. Hunger – the ‘true hunger’ that makes us lose our mental faculties – is unimaginable, yet connected to our lives

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enough to make us feel helpless and exposed. Richard’s hallucinations in The Beach are the ideal means to convey hunger as, to borrow Vernon’s words, a “horrible experience” (2009, 7), where all that was once solid has literally melted into air, confronting the human being with the loss and fall of all commonly understood human structures, from social and economic processes, to the ability to think rationally. Hunger here is not simply a frame for the loss of human logic, but also the clear representation of it, as the superficiality of simply needing food transforms into the horror of excess as the faculties that make us ‘human’ are mercilessly denied. The idea of ‘consume or die’, and the moral implications that this riddle might have, suggests that matters of survival will have the ability to override the impact of cultural control, which dictates which categories of substances are fine to consume, and which others should be avoided. It is not surprising, nor uncommon, to see the narrative of cannibalism included in films as a last resort, where survival depends on the consumption of flesh, even if that flesh might in fact be human. The connection between ‘true hunger’ and cannibalism seems, as far as the parameters of horror are concerned, an almost expected trope to be explored and exploited. The connection, however, should not be taken for granted, neither in actual instances of non-ritual cannibalism, nor in their fictional filmic counterparts. Cannibalism, as Peggy Reeves Sanday reminds us, “is never just about eating”, and although the practice can be tied to hunger, “hunger is not necessarily tied to cannibalism” (1986, 3). Layers of acceptability for the act exist, culturally speaking, and are surveyed in film. For instance, a sympathetic look on cannibalism is proposed in Ravenous (1999), when the injured soldier Boyd is forced to consume the flesh of his fallen comrade in order to survive. A less sympathetic view, however, is given in Hunger (2009), where human captives turn upon the weakest member of the group and murder him in order to consume his flesh. The violence that accompanies the killing supports the perceived immorality of the act, and intrinsically defines cannibalism as the ultimate horror and crime. Even though the idea of survival remains strong in both films, the portrayal of the acts varies significantly, and it is quite clear that ­cannibalism, in this case, is not quite the issue. The issue is the idea of slaughter, of violence, of murder, and the deliberate subjugation of the human being as ‘prey’, and most of all, the idea that a human being might actually ‘hunger’ for the flesh of another human being, its desire becoming abominable as well as uncontrollable.

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If cannibalism were the true horror, then all depictions of the act would come across as similar. Yet, the sympathetic view of the desperate Boyd in Ravenous adds a layer of complexity to the narrative of anthropophagy. Indeed, the same film portrays the other cannibal of the story, Colonel Ives, as a horrific and despicable creature. The difference between the two is that Ives deliberately hunts and kills his human victims in order to consume them, while Boyd is ‘forced’ to commit the cannibal act in order to survive. Historically and metaphorically speaking, the act of cannibalism has been culturally accepted whenever survival situations were called into question, provided that, of course, the human bodies to be consumed belonged to those who were already dead (Travis-Henikoff 2008; Avramescu 2009). One need only think here of the famous case of plane-crash survivors who, stranded on a mountain top, consumed the bodies of their dead in order to survive. The case captured the cultural imagination so successfully that even a film – Alive (1993) – was made about it. While the act of cannibalism is not forgiven as such, it is to some extent accepted as inevitable. Humans are not food, but, in an evocation of historical narratives, films such as Ravenous clearly represent that they can be, but only if consumption is carried out ‘respectfully’, and definitely without the presence of any slaughter. It is not the act of cannibalism, but the idea of human butchering that constructs the true horror, and the elimination of the ‘safe’ label that our human status usually bestows upon us, as far as the narrative of consumption is concerned. The fear of losing humanity as the hunger takes over our bodies and our minds is made even more explicit in examples such as Hunger (2009). In this film, the dreadful nature of hunger and its consequences are given a tangibly alienating incarnation through the visually striking modalities of the traditional horror genre, where extreme hunger inevitably results in the pursuit of violence and inevitable cannibal practices. The addition of blood and gore is an unavoidable metaphorical representation of the effects of hunger, where the horrors of the experience are translated into the horrors of blood and murder. In the narrative, an expectedly crazed scientist locks five strangers in a well, conducting an experiment on the effects of hunger, and studying the lengths to which human beings will go to survive. The scientist provides his captives with enough drinking water, and two more gifts: an extremely sharp scalpel, designed to cut away flesh and muscle tissue – also referred to as a “human carving knife” – and a note stating that the average human body can only survive 30 days without food. The reality of what will happen slowly dawns on the captives, as they realise that, in order to survive, they will likely need to kill and consume each other.

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As cinematic narratives go, Hunger (2009) is intentionally slow-paced, as the majority of the narrative revolves around the captives being slowly starved to death. The symptoms are listed carefully, as surgeon Jordan (Lori Heuring) recounts to her fellow prisoners the three stages of dying of hunger, which include effects ranging from the obvious disintegration of the body to the loss of mental faculties, including hallucinations and ‘madness’. Jordan eventually concludes that starving to death is the consequence of the body “cannibalising itself ”, as all that made it alive and human melts away, both physiologically and psychologically. The core of this section of the narrative is, unsurprisingly, the conflict experienced by the captives over the knowledge that murder and actual cannibalism will be an unavoidable consequence. As the conflict grows, and the hunger becomes more and more persistent, the audience are also left with the growing question of ‘Will they, or will they not?’, wondering if the film will be brave enough to show human beings murdering each other simply to eat. Inevitably, hunger does overcome the captives, and, with the exclusion of Jordan, they all assault the injured Grant (Linden Ashby), beating him to death and immediately consuming his still-warm body. The scene is, to be expected, appropriately graphic: blood drips off the captives’ mouths and hands, and they consume human flesh in a clearly animalistic way, complete with horrifying squelching noises. The threat of cannibalism is clichéd here, as the film is not the first instance where the extreme is equalised with the loss of all rationality, and the pursuit of murder in order to feed. Hannibal (2001) is also a useful example to recall here, a previous cinematic narrative that showed the lengths that humans will go to in order to eat, going as far as killing and eating vulnerable children, when exposure makes this the only option in order for the strong to survive which categories of substances are fine to consume. An example such as Hannibal is different from films such as Alive, where survivors of a plane crash on the Andes must make the horrifying decision to consume the bodies of the dead in order to continue living. In the latter example, the lack of murder removes the act of cannibalism from the framework of inhumanity and violence, and somehow justifies it as a rational and acceptable action. In both Hannibal and Hunger, however, the murder and consumption of the human being is surrounded by the clear loss of empathy and the disintegration of the social structure. Cannibalism usefully serves to draw attention to hunger as an overpowering experience, capable of interrupting all the cultural regulations that define and control the human being in the anthropological sense.

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Body

Discussing the extents of hunger as connected to not only incorporation, but also bodily projections, Leslie Heywood proposes that the narratives of both overconsumption and restraint are connected not simply to food requirements, but also inevitably to the experience of disgust (1996, 133). Heywood suggests that, as far as consumption is concerned, our Western notions of bodily shape and size  – including the culturally prescribed appropriateness of both – will have a distinct impact on our perception of hunger, even inasmuch as the physiological stimulus is concerned. Control and restriction continue to be at the heart of idealised narratives of consumptive behaviour, especially – and perhaps solely – in situations where food scarcity is not an issue, and other sociocultural narratives of behaviour become the centre of our incorporation narratives. Notions of both ‘too much hunger’ and ‘not enough hunger’ are connected, Heywood suggests, to an internalisation of “civilised restraint”, which lies at the heart of our repulsions and revulsions as far as the eating body is concerned (1996, 133). To witness the break in cultural relations that prescribe the uses of hunger inevitably causes disgust, and its excessive performance brings the horrific controversies of consumption into the foreground. Within the realm of ‘disgusting bodies’, and their connection to the culturally understood perception of hunger, the ‘fat body’ figures prominently as an important example. I use the term ‘fat’ here as a critically informed term, to signal the culturally prescribed environment of the overweight body as improper, as uncontrollable, as elementally ‘disgusting’. The term itself should not be used lightly, as much as it should be acknowledged as being neither “neutral nor insignificant”, but deeply entangled with “cultural development” and “central” to defining what constitutes a “proper” body (Farrell 2011, 5). Artist Jenny Saville, famous for painting female figures which, in the Western sense, are often regarded as ‘fat’, openly exposes the difficulty of conveying the overweight body, especially female, in a way that is neither sensationalist nor activist. “I don’t make paintings for people to say we should look at big bodies again and say they are beautiful.” Saville also asks an important and unavoidable question: “Why do we find bodies like this difficult to look at?” (Drohojowska-Philip 2002). The fat body is a difficult entity, for it recalls the reappropriation of a physical aesthetic by Western politics, particularly when matters of gender, race, and class are concerned. This concern operates both culturally and physically, recalling the visceral reactions to the abject and the polluted,

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which Western cultures have often associated with the overweight body. At the core of the understanding of ‘fat’ as a category that elicits cultural disgust – which can therefore be classified as a ‘cultural horror’ – lies the notion of excess: a body that eats ‘too much’, that consumes quantities of food deemed unacceptable and dangerous. If it is true, as Fred Botting famously declared, that the Gothic is the narrative of “excess” (1996), then the fat body – with its unavoidably inflicted notions of overconsumption – is ideally suited to cinematically convey the hauntings and horrors of our contemporary moment, and enquire into the relationship between food, disgust, corporeality, and culture. In Carnal Appetites, Elspeth Probyn constructs a critical framework for what she comes to term “gut ethics”. In formulating this concept, Probyn does not rely on philosophical notions of conduct in the moral sense, but develops instead a Foucauldian notion of ethics. She puts forward a critical understanding of ethics as caring for oneself, and the “domain of practical advice as to how one should concern oneself with oneself, make oneself the subject of solicitude and attention, conduct oneself in the world of one’s everyday existence” (2000, 4). In this, food consumption figures as an important part of the care of the self, but also, in turn, becomes the centre of ethical judgement from others, in terms of how consumption (or even non-consumption) will impact on the body, and what implications that impact will have. Probyn’s notion of “gut ethics” is useful in evaluating the politics of the ‘fat body’ and how it elicits feelings of horror, recalling cultural notions of impropriety and excess which in turn rely on the identification of the dark side of consumption. Michelle Meagher extends Probyn’s idea of “gut ethics” by viewing it as referring to the process by which one attends to the ethical implication of one’s “gut reactions” (2003, 29). In this, a seemingly immediate and uncontrollable reaction such as disgust tells us not only something about the way in which a person views the world, but also about the world that has normalised the feeling of disgust as ‘natural’. It is possible to notice this visceral narrative at work in a number of films. In examples such as Feed (2005) and Se7en (1995), the fat body is presented precisely in relation to a system of gut ethics where not only disgust is evoked as a normal visceral reaction, but also where a system of implicit ethical judgement controls the visualisation of the overweight individual as improper and repulsive. Meagher also contends that the immediate and “fleeting” bodily experience of aversion is a rarely granted aesthetic privilege, and the immediate response of disgust is often sanitised (2003, 29). This treatment of the fat

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body is clearly present in Se7en, where the encounter with the victim of the gluttony crime is mediated by a number of cleverly employed camera angles and use of mise en scène. The body of the ‘fat man’ is not fully exposed, and only portions of it come into view at a given time: instead, its horrific ‘fatness’ is constantly implied by bulges whose fleshy extent remains unseen to the viewing eye (Fig. 3.1). As a critical side note, it is important to mention that, in contrast to Se7en’s relatively sanitised representation of the overweight subject, other examples do very little to mediate the expected experience of disgust that is conceptually associated with the fat body as both a physical and a conceptual entity. One need only think of Blade (1998), where the obese body of the guardian vampire – who protects and surveys the race’s historical archive – is fully exposed to the viewer. He lies naked on a bed, permanently stationary, surrounded by screens that perpetually display information about a secret prophecy. The narrative of disgust that distinguishes the encounter with the fat body is tacitly reiterated by the suggestion, made by Blade (Wesley Snipes) and his companion, that the guardian ‘smells’. Blade himself is shown contorting his facial features in e­ xpressions of disgust, as a reaction to the fat vampire’s flatulence. The notion of a ‘fat vampire’ goes unaddressed here – for how, truly, does a vampire get fat? – while the critique of the information overload that is said to plague our contemporary, technology-driven, and consumption-obsessed world is made quite clear. To return to Se7en, one cannot help but notice that, in spite of the fact that the fat man’s nakedness is not exposed – at least as far as the first encounter goes – the ‘horror’ of the fat body is sensationalised, and clearly

Fig. 3.1  The body of the ‘fat man’ is approached cautiously in Se7en (1995)

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reminiscent of the cinematography befitting the horror film genre. The glutton is shown with his face stuck into a plate full of spaghetti, on which he suffocated. The punishment was inflicted on purpose by the killer who, to punish the man’s own gluttony and uncontrollable desire to consume, literally made him ‘eat to death’ until his stomach exploded. As film is a constructed medium, and all presentations are representations, so too is the fat body visually and narratively constructed as disgusting through the careful use of cinematographic techniques  – from low camera angles to the pervasive use of low-lighting – which dissect and disembody what is in fact an extremely embodied entity. The camera slowly approaches the sitting and dead fat body from behind, its mountainous mass presented in a haunting and chilling manner. The sound score is haunting in itself, and the interaction between visual and aural clearly communicates that the fat body is something to be feared, to be shocked by, and, ultimately, to be abjected by. The face of the overweight man is not initially shown. The fat body becomes de-territorialised, and presented as almost “inhuman”, to use a term favoured by Jean-François Lyotard (1993). There is an unavoidable suggestion that ‘fat’ has no sense of self associated with it, and that fat individuals have culturally undergone a removal of identity that precludes them from being considered as ‘worthy’ parts of our society, as far as our broader anthropological structures go. Indeed, Marilyn Wann has persuasively argued – albeit in an activist, populist way – that, because of the character traits often culturally associated with fatness, the fat person is often treated as ‘not quite human’, an entity to whom the normal standards of respectful behaviour do not seem to commonly apply (1998). This is a sentiment that is unfortunately echoed in a number of recent films, especially through ill-conceived notions of parody and comedy – such as Death Becomes Her (1992), The Nutty Professor (1996), Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999), Norbit (2007), and Dodgeball (2004) – which inevitably pivot on the ridicule and conceptual dehumanisation of the overweight individual. The feelings of disgust that derive are made implicit in the fatness, and the aversion response we feel is seemingly justified. As far as Se7en is concerned, the implicit disgusting nature of the fat body is further reiterated by the discovery of a bucket filled with vomit under the table, another substance which, Kristeva reminds, causes abject (1982, 3). Throughout the film, numerous verbal expressions uttered by multiple characters forcefully identify the body of the victim as Other: the police captain (R.  Lee Ermey) continuously refers to him as “fat man” and “fat boy”. Upon gazing at the obese dead body lying on the autopsy

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table, Detective Mills asks, “How does anybody let himself go like that?” The “that” here implies the tacit classification of the fat body as source of abject, and sites it outside of the boundaries of propriety. Later on in the narrative, the serial killer John Doe (Kevin Spacey) openly verbalises the abject that is seen as intrinsic to the overweight body, by actually describing the dead man as “disgusting”: a man “who can barely stand up”, a man that “if you saw him while you were eating, you wouldn’t be able to finish your meal”. The conceptual association between ‘fat’ and ‘disgusting’ here is unarguably crystallised. Fat is continuously established and re-established as synonymous with “excess of desire, of bodily urges not controlled”, of “sinful habits” (Farrell 2011, 10). The pervasive narrative of revulsion is prominent in Se7en. Not only is the fat body itself disgusting, but so are the feeding habits  – and overall questionable social conduct  – that made it this way. In similar terms, the film Feed also indulges the connection between uncontrollable hunger and sinfulness, showing the overweight bodies of extremely obese women in detail. Here, the evocation of revulsion is made even more explicit, as the fat women’s uncontrollable eating urges are also juxtaposed to their strange sexual proclivities, their acceptance of their captor’s sexual advances, while they remain helpless and bed-ridden. The fat body is not only presented as “grotesque”, a Bakhtinian entity that is, as Angela Stukator puts it, “multiple, bulging, [and] open” (2001, 202; Bakhtin 1984); indeed, it is also the calling card for depravity and moral corruption, with immorality, as Farrell suggests, being a seemingly culturally established trait of the overeater (2011, 10). In both Se7en and Feed, the horror that derives from witnessing the fat body comes precisely from its lack of sanitisation, and its forceful interruption of all boundaries of cultural propriety: the fat body is exposed, viewed, explored, and, in so doing, forcefully presents itself as the profane embodiment of our overconsumptive nightmares. In her now well-known volume Fat is a Feminist Issue, Susie Orbach points out that any “obsession with food carries with it an enormous amount of self-disgust, loathing and shame” (1989, 26). The aesthetics of disgust, here adopted to equalise the fat body with the repulsive body, operate not only by implicitly evoking the commonly known experience of ‘being disgusted’, but also by recalling ‘the fear of arousing disgust’, the frightful logic by which revulsion signals what is outcast and not belonging. In the Western, contemporary sense, one can see the connection between physiology and sociality being based on acceptability and ideals of beauty

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that rely on ideologies of thinness, and bodily control. Disgust is a safe reaction. The lack of incorporation is a sterilising practice, for as the fat body is expelled from the cultural structure, so is its (perceived) threat on the stability of social relationships. The enforced disgust conveyed by the showcase of the fat body in Feed and Se7en forces us to come to terms not specifically with the notion of disgust, but the effects of the feeling itself, as revulsion is uncovered as the “strange emotion” that “has a firm hold on us” and is “basic to our definition of self ” (W.I. Miller 1998, 250). Whenever the fat body is presented, it is denied its own agency by being represented as frightful, a simultaneously Othered and Othering presence that inspires disgust. Disgust is, indeed, a form of sanitisation towards the fat body itself, a visceral reaction that validates our perceptions about the wrongness and impropriety of fatness. The fat body does not belong in the schemas of rationality or health. It is disgusting, displaced, and displacing. The perpetrator of the gluttony crime in Se7en is represented as an abject entity in a double manner. First, the fat body is approached cautiously, its bulging folds and unbearable size presented as a horrific sight. Second, and importantly, the fat body is also presented as dead. The body of the victim is therefore abject twofold, as it is not only culturally disgusting, but it is also dead matter, the confronting presence of the corpse evoking the fear inspired by the polluted and polluting nature of that which is rotting. The film’s careful capturing of the fat, dead body is steeped in the visceral evocation of disgust. Here, there is a clear suggestion that the emotion itself is grounded in physiology, where the feeling of revulsion is biological, more than it is socially constructed (Rozin et al. 2008). This immediate, visceral, and distinctly Darwinian confrontation with disgust, however, cannot be accepted as intrinsic to fat body – in spite of Se7en’s initial tacit suggestion that it may indeed be so. The cultural foundation of disgust for the body that simply could not stop eating – and which broke all boundaries of cleanliness and conduct – is reiterated in the dialogue, as both Detective Mills, and later John Doe, make derogatory comments over the dead victim’s physique, which also extend to the nature of his character. The metaphorical connection between the disgust elicited by the fat body and the horror of the corpse is firmly established. The gut response to the fat body  – neither circumstantial nor radical in its approach – separates the body itself from the naturality of time and space. The fat body does not belong in the epistemological bounds of approved corporeality. It is an interruption of normality, of propriety, and even, as seems to be an underlying suggestion of the representation, a

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pervasively inhuman form. While gut reactions to the abject fat body are acknowledged and forcefully presented in examples such as Se7en, the lack of sanitisation does not operate to incorporate fatness into the idealised bounds of existence. The lack of visual boundaries is, in fact, a form of purification, not towards the fat body itself, but towards our cultural response. By being presented with the fat body, revulsion sanitises the viewers’ experience of it. In feeling the abject caused by the fleshy mass, we separate ourselves from it, and, in a Kristevan twist, establish our own safe and proper boundaries by acknowledging that we are not the out-of-­bounds body. Western culture has been quick to assign many meanings to fatness that go beyond physical traits, so much that what are considered as commonly applied ‘normal standards’ of judgement are not employed to evaluate the fat person, who is (almost inevitably) always seen as deviant and substandard because of his or her size. In our contemporary moment, one must be conscious of the fact that any stigma attached to fatness is indivisible from cultural anxieties that emerged during the modern period, to later evolve and shape, over ‘consumer excess’ and, as Amy Erdman Farrell suggests, to “prevailing ideas” about “civilisation and evolution” (2011, 5). Fatness is identified as a marker of inferiority within a number of contemporary cultural texts and narratives, either as “prima facie evidence” of an already inferior status, or as a “harbinger of an impending fall” for those presumed to be higher on the scale (Farrell 2011, 19). The horror of being confronted with the fat body spurs from the possibility of also being culturally ‘infected’, of falling into the immoral and despicable circles of overeating. And while the term ‘infected’ might seem overly zealous here, one need only be reminded that the Western condition of fatness is often labelled the ‘obesity epidemic’, signalling the infectious nature of the condition, and constructing grounds for disgust as well as fear. In Se7en, the deadness of the fat body is presented as a cautionary tale, where the uncontrollable nature of the body that (over)eats can only result in annihilation, evoking – in a lateral way – the threat of overconsumption that is often seen as intrinsic to contemporary consumer-capitalism. Mary Douglas famously places social structures at the centre of her theory of contamination, claiming that the very notion of wanting to expel that which is defiling to the human body is the very foundation of our visceral responses of disgust (2003). In this context, both disgust and the disgusting are socially prescribed. Social conduct  – what one does, when, and how, especially in relation to others – is profoundly interconnected to our understanding of the body, and any instances of corporeal

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revulsion which might result. The suggestion that the victim of gluttony in Se7en is a recluse is presented only partially as a result of his extreme weight. Latently, the suggestion is clear that his lack of socialisation and inability to interact and conduct himself in a ‘proper’ manner is what has caused his uncontrollable eating habits. Fatness, therefore, is both the consequence and the signal of an interrupted social narrative, and the subsequent “perception” of the “marginalised, liminal Others” (LeBesco 2004, 26). The revulsion towards the fat body is entangled with the rejection of the lonely, the solitary, the outcast. Fat here is not just about overeating. It is about the inability to fit within the social order. Therein lies the real horror of the dead, fat body: the underbelly of the social world is exposed, and the disgust for fatness conceptually translates into the fear of exclusion, not only for those who suffer it, but also for those who witness it. The grotesque aesthetics of disgust delineate the boundaries of the fat body as threatening and dangerous, and demarcate it as the corporeal sociocultural horror of our Western world, which must be expelled. In Se7en, as well as in Feed, that expulsion takes the form of a corporeal exorcism, as the abjected fatness is continuously punished by death. Indeed, the deadness of the fat body in Se7en is especially significant. Firstly, it signals, in a recurrent cautionary way, the dangers of overeating – which will, in this case rather literally, kill you. Secondly, and perhaps more evocatively, the fat man’s stationary position, suggesting that he is in death as he was  – out of his choice  – in life, communicates a certain amount of laziness, of unwillingness to move away from his space of consumption. The suggestion of stillness is reiterated even more clearly by both Detective Mills and his partner Detective Somerset (Morgan Freeman), who speculate whether a “man like that” would ever even walk out of the house. One can see here a tacit narrative of laziness being introduced and inflicted upon the fat man. While manifestly the suggestion is that a man of such great size would find it difficult to move, the latent implication is that he was lazy and unwilling to move out of his own home, preferring to spend his time on eating instead. The silent suggestion that food was the man’s only interest also lingers in the air. What emerges clearly here is the construction of the overweight person according to cultural narratives that are prominent in the contemporary Western psyche, and which, being derogatory in nature and intent, create a distinct stigma about overeating and being overweight: namely, that the fat person is “lazy, gluttonous, greedy, immoral, uncontrolled, stupid, ugly, and lacking will power”

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(Farrell 2011, 4). The social stigma of fatness shapes the vision of the fat person as one who should, overall, be avoided. In addition, the stigma only constructs the vision of the fat body as out of bounds, unattractive, and, ultimately, disgusting. In Douglas’s work, the experience of disgust is framed by the concept of pollution. The latter encompasses what, as Meagher elaborates, “cannot be controlled”, those things that “refuse to be bounded” (2003, 21 and 32). The lack of boundary, and the ‘chaos’ that results from it, is what causes profound anxiety, and must therefore be expelled. Douglas uses the term “dirt” to signify all matters  – including bodies  – that are unruly and out of control: “dirt is essential disorder” (2003, 2). Douglas is particularly keen to stress that there is no such a thing as ‘natural dirt’. Dirt – so defined, and encapsulating that which is envisioned as polluting to the “clean and proper” body – is the constructed result of an object’s inability to fit into “the abstract structures and ideals of a cultural system” (2003, 32). Dirt is a contextual notion, and therefore exerts its power only in relation to specific situations. Douglas suggests that as a conceptual notion ‘dirt’ exists only extrinsically. Revulsion to dirt, in all its forms, is therefore not a condition inherent to the ‘dirty object’ itself, but as the result of a sociocultural effect. Objects are not dirty or disgusting intrinsically, but only rendered as such through implicit and often tacit situational agreements. In this context, the regulation of bodily contact with ‘dirt’, as well as the very definition of what ‘dirt’ is, is not individual behaviour, but social and cultural, and, therefore, it can never be reduced to “personal preoccupations of individuals with their own bodies” (Douglas 2003, 122). That is to say, all substances that impinge on the perceived cleanliness of the cultural body can be viewed as ‘dirt’. In turn, all bodies that are visualised extrinsically as not fitting the cultural definition of propriety are also tacitly categorised as unclean and, therefore, worthy of disgust as the natural reaction. Fat, in this sense, can be viewed as a category of ‘dirt’. In the contemporary Western psyche, fat bodies are perceived as disorderly, out of control, and unclean. Although Douglas’s work on pollution and cleanliness provides at least some inspiration for later evaluations of disgust, theoretical approaches on the psychoanalytic front add a different layer of interpretation to this particular reaction. Kristeva, in particular, seemingly re-elaborated Douglas’s approach into her own theory of abjection. The two, however similar, are also profoundly different. While Douglas focuses primarily on the establishment and safeguard of culturally created boundaries, and how disgust signals their

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brakeage and simultaneous re-establishment, Kristeva attends more clearly to the ways in which those very boundaries – or, to be more precise, their establishment – which separate the individual from other objects are central to psychic development. Relying on processes of identification that place the child’s development and separation from the mother at the centre – a familiar occurrence within the bounds of psychoanalytical studies – Kristeva maps the stages through which the child gains psychic independence in relation to the abject, a concept that “calls attention to the fundamental instability upon which physic realities are constituted” (Meagher 2003, 33). Kristeva also labels abjection an “extremely strong feeling” having profoundly “violent” visceral and psychic recurrences. It means, she goes on to say, “something disgusting”, which is “above all a revolt of the person against an external menace from which one wants to keep oneself at distance, but of which one has the impression that it is not only an external menace but that it may menace us from the inside” (1991, 135). It is not difficult to see how the very concept of abject can be conceptually connected to the ways in which fat bodies are envisioned within the Western cultural context. Indeed, while the fat body is perceived as Other and to some extent polluted, it is also a reminder of a distinct possibility, of the fact that what challenges the stability of ourselves, psychically and culturally, could become us. The grotesque nature of the fat body, as portrayed in films such as Se7en and Feed, aids the construction of fatness as the polluted and abject Other, where the narrative elicits responses of revulsion and repulsion for bodies and habits that we so painfully recognise as belonging to our cultural context. While Kristeva’s definition of abjection may be appropriately nebulous in its presentation, its basic approach also reveals that the very experience of disgust is not only connected to context – in a way that evokes Douglas’s anthropological take on the subject – but also to the threatening plausibility and possibility of the abject ‘becoming’ us. Abjection, therefore, is a process that carries a certain element of crisis, of the presentation and representation of that which we fear the most, of the encounter with that which is not us, and which poses a threat to our individuality and stability. Disgust towards the fat body, as an alien yet frightfully recognisable entity, is the abjectifying course that keeps the polluted separate from that which is proper. The notion of the overweight body as unhealthy, physically unsound, and in danger of self-destructing, is obviously informed by clinical notions that are commonly perceived to be scientifically based and therefore irrefutable. In the West especially, medicine is viewed as the objective

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science of healing, existing autonomously from social prejudice. Steeped in empirical knowledge, medicine is commonly believed to separate the examination of the body from the self, and from our common perceptions of social relations. Nonetheless, even medical understandings of food consumption, body shape (and size), and ultimately health, while they appear to be logical and objective, are also inevitably framed by the cultural contexts that generates them. The “clinical gaze” of the doctor, so understood, is grounded in observation that is, as Samantha Murray suggests, “never neutral”, but is always “already structured in and through the variety of cultural meanings, specificities and prejudices that provide a kind of lens through which we perceive others and the world” (2007, 362). That is to say, notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ health, and their relationship to food and eating, are also part of a social discourse of perception and evaluation that is never transhistorical. The accepted objectivity of the ‘clinical gaze’ is therefore problematic, as much as it is influential in our perceptions of the body, its shape, its size, and its practices. In the case of eating and, in particular, the fat body, that clinical gaze lives implicitly in the narratives of embodiment that define the twenty-first century, and structures our notions not only of propriety, but also of the bodily horror that derives from improper uses of food, and their consequences. What is often ignored in medical discourse, and particularly undiscussed in our contemporary cultural context where notions of health are a pervasive presence in social relations, is the persistence and irrevocability of “tacit bodily knowledges” that “construct us – every body – within every context”, and accounts for our understandings of “identity and difference, normalcy and pathology” (Murray 2007, 362). The notion of perception here plays an important role in identifying how we perceive bodies ‘in the world’, and how cinematic representations of disturbing and abnormal bodies – bodies that eat too much and, in turn, bodies that do not eat enough  – relay the experience of processes of social and cultural signification that can never be divorced from our understanding of that very experience as being steeped in logic, rationality, and neutrality. Linda Martín Alcoff (2001) investigates the primacy of perception in the construction of what can be termed “body knowledge”: bodies of flesh, social bodies, and the ultimate relationships between them. Clearly drawing on the work of famous predecessors such as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, Alcoff particularly explores the ways in which some bodies are read and subsequently positioned as Other based on their visible markers. Although in her work Alcoff ­actually

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discusses body markers in terms of race, her understanding of bodily ‘Othering’ can be applied productively to the notion of ‘fat’ in relation to the experience of sociality and identity, especially when expressed in cinematic examples. She argues that the way we perceive other bodies is not simply the result of our vision, but of the sedimented knowledge we perpetrate as part of our cultural experience: “The realm of the visible, or what is taken as self-evidently visible […] is recognised as a product of a specific form of perceptual practice, rather than the natural result of human sight” (2001, 269). That is to say, the negative designation of ‘fat’ in relation to the body is not attributable to empirical and detached observation, but is instead reliant on cultural practices of perception that construct categories and groups according to extrinsic regulation. Therefore, the fat body is disturbing, and Other, only in relation to the cultural structures that discursively emerge from our anthropological practices of signification. Fat, to put it simply, is not strictly a biological function, and neither is the disgust and abjection that derives from encountering. Perception is a learned process, and, as such, is always “imbued with value” (Alcoff 2001, 272). According to Susan Bordo’s well-known approach to femininity and body image, as outlined in Unbearable Weight (1993), the contemporary Western ideal of feminine beauty and attractiveness is profoundly entangled with the culturally inscribed notion of the “tightly managed body”. When it comes to identifying the standards of beauty centered around the feminine, slenderness, as such, is not truly connected to a real concern with weight. Indeed, slenderness as a status connected to actual ‘size’ is often erroneously constructed as the core of the feminine beauty ideal. Instead, Bordo argues, slenderness is an ‘issue’ more connected to the identification of the feminine with a contained body profile: the body is the gateway to the idealisation of the feminine, and should therefore be controlled, clearly defined, and aesthetically precise. With this in mind, distended and engorged bulges of flesh convey the idea of the body being out of control. That body is ever-growing, ever expanding and becomes the tangible embodiment of metaphorical constructs of “uncontained desire, unrestrained hunger, uncontrolled impulse” (Bordo 1993, 36). The focus on both desire and the lack of containment and restraint suggests that the fat female body carries a tacitly constructed notion of excess, of the wonton woman who  – in a variety of ways, from food to even sex – is out of control and resides outside of the bounds of the cultural (patriarchal) order.

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This suggestion is communicated clearly in Feed. In this narrative, the physically thin Michael (Alex O’Loughlin) seduces women into lying in bed and being continuously fed by his hand. The women are shown as being at Michael’s mercy, not only physically, but also emotionally. He, for his part, infantilises them by providing for them as if they were children, constantly demanding that they request food from him with the haunting cry of “Feed me … I’m hungry.” The overweight women – particularly Deidre (Gabby Millgate), on whom the narrative particularly focuses – are presented as detached from society, and that that sense of alienation is rendered through both their physical and emotional impulses. Firstly, Deidre is housebound because of her weight, her body literally imprisoning her within the walls of the home, and isolating her from the layers of consumptive restraint that form our Western sociocultural order. Secondly, she is portrayed as constantly willing to eat, incorporate, and expand. Her food consumption transforms her into a creature whose constant hunger is, metaphorically speaking, submerging her, as her body grows around. The acceptance and indulgence of the fat body here is unavoidably reminiscent of Kristeva’s cautionary tale in regards to the abject which, if not expelled from oneself, will engulf the individual’s subjectivity. This prediction is painfully physically tangible for Deidre, as the horror of seeing her body engulf her is only made visible to the film’s viewers, while her character remains painfully unaware of her own engulfment. Deidre is indeed presented as the embodied abject, but that abjection, however, is closely related to Bordo’s contention that slenderness is not an issue with weight. The real horror of witnessing Deidre’s obese and sprawled body lies within the notion of its unrestraint, of its representation as a growing and engulfing mass, which challenges our cultural notions of individuality and, to some extent, freedom. Body image here is not the issue. The frightfulness of the fat female body comes from its uncontrollable nature, the Kristevan horror that menaces from within. Bordo’s suggestion of the relationship between the horror of fatness and its recollection of “uncontained desire” and “uncontrollable impulse” is unveiled in Feed through Deidre’s acceptance and yearning for Michael’s sexual advances, which are manifestly portrayed as perverse and deviant. In an openly repulsive scene, Michael engages with sexual relations with the bed-ridden Deidre. He smears food all over her bulging flesh, and then proceeds to masturbate, while licking the smeared food from her breasts. The scene is steeped in revulsion in a number of ways. Food is transformed into an abject matter by being made to touch parts of the body

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and ­substances – including semen – that, culturally, should not be allowed near food. In addition that structure of pollution is also reiterated by the forceful juxtaposition between consumption and the sexual act. Outside of the film’s own narrative, a subculture exists known as ‘feederism’, in which food exchanges are regarded as part of an erotic interplay, as is the exponential growth of the fat body. Feederism involves one individual, the “feeder”, feeding the partner, the “feedee”, with foods that are high-calorie and commonly classified as “junk” (Richardson 2010, 103). This subcultural exchange brings to the foreground the cultural codings that connect food and sex, from using terms such as ‘luscious’ and ‘orgasmic’ to describing foods and consumption experiences. Niall Richardson aptly identifies the dependant and eroticised relationship in feederism as an actual sexual fetish, as feeders “not only eroticise actual bodyweight/size, but also the act of feeding themselves and the related occurrence of gaining even more bodyweight” (2010, 103). In spite of the subcultural discourses that identify feederism as an actual sensual practice, complete with the same emotional attachments as any other romantic relationship, the hegemonic cultural discourses of our Western sociality still cringe at the thoughts of eroticising the fat body, as well as making the consumption of ‘unhealthy’ foods desirable. The fat body is immoral and deviant, and so is any sexual desire towards it. It is precisely the cultural structure of this discourse – which is as tacit as it is paradoxically overt – that aids the construction of the feeding sexual act in Feed as repulsive and normatively ‘wrong’. Notions of sensuality are lost in the film, as the images of Michael and Deidre’s food-fuelled sexual act are aided by cinematographic elements that communicate a sense of discomfort, from the pervasive use of low-light – bestowing a haunting and suggestively corrupt atmosphere onto the scene  – to the use of a repeatedly sacrificial soundtrack, adding an unavoidable sense of doom to both the feeding and the sex. What heightens the intended repulsive nature of the exchange – clearly a far cry from the intended sensualised practices of cinematic predecessors like 9½ Weeks (1986), which erotically amalgamated eating and sex – is the knowledge that Deidre remains motionless on the bed: mesmerised by the food-ridden depravation of Michael’s sexual act, and visibly wanton for it. The idea that disgust shapes moral judgment has been widely pursued by scholarship, and the approach to the issue has often placed a distinct emphasis on not only representational, but particular bodily disgust (Schnall et al. 2008, 1096). Several critical narratives from a range of disciplines have been particularly keen to stress that disgust in an ‘embodied ­experience’ and that, therefore, the very notion of moral judgment, especially when

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connected to practices such as eating and sexual encounters, is also in itself ‘embodied’. In Feed – where the connection between morality, eating, and judgment takes a particularly aesthetically violent turn – Deidre’s extremely obese body is viewed with aversion, as embodying that which is seen as culturally and socially abject. Not only is the sexualised fat body presented as disgusting, but that disgust is also entangled with the eating practices presented in the film, which are steeped in excess and are, therefore, also contextualised as disgusting. These embodied instances of disgust are clearly combined with the women’s – especially Deidre’s – apparently inconceivable desire to remain obese, stay bedbound, and continue to be fed by the man they claim to ‘love’. Deidre’s stance is portrayed as not only inexplicable, but also clearly unacceptable, and as immoral as the actions of the man who continues to feed her – literally, to death. In the sex scene from Feed, in particular, Deidre’s body is literally transformed into an object. Unable to move because of her uncontrollable body  – a physiological hunger that is truly out of bounds  – she is also overcome by her uncontrollable desires. She allows herself to be treated in the same guises as a consumable. While conceptually regarded as dispensable, she still accepts her fate and continues to lust after Michael. Her flesh is unruly, irregular, without limitations. It is, to use a term evocative of Douglas’s work, “out of order” (2003, 2). And while the overweight body is a confronting sight, what is truly communicated as the real abject is her acceptance of the very deviancy that the world – so understood – would class as unacceptable and, for lack of a better word, horrific. The fat female body here becomes metaphorically entangled with the lecherous and lascivious woman, who is, in a fashion, punished for her ­uncontrollable desires. Indeed Deidre, like the other women who came before her, is destined for death and ridicule at the hands of her lover. Deidre is not only an object, she is in fact the “object that disgusts” (Meagher 2003, 38). Far from agreeing with the ‘celebration of the flesh’ that is often presented as a counter-narrative to our contemporary moment, Feed directly constructs images that are intended to arouse revulsion in order to present the viewers with the extent of bodily disgust, and its impact on the narratives of both viscerality and judgement that become scrutinised under our cultural gaze (Mulvey 1999). Those narratives regulate not only our interaction with food, but, more precisely, the idealised structures of consumption that separate the clean and proper eating body from its abjected and abjecting counterpart, the uncontrollable and unrestrained body.

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The narrative of disgust that emerges from witnessing the emotional, physical, and political dynamics in Feed is reliant on the pre-established existence of an embodied sense of morality. The connection between food, sex, disgust, and moral judgment is important here. Indeed, it draws attention to the complicated dynamic of assuming that, if one displays dubious consumption practices, and, especially, if those practices will cause an effect on the body that is seen as ‘disgusting’, the horror that results from witnessing it will also affect our moral judgements of the individual in question. What lies at the heart of the horror of witnessing the women’s physical and moral deterioration is what Leon Kass famously termed the “wisdom of repugnance” (1997), which, in the case of Feed, alerts viewers to the dangers of overfeeding, and the disregard for our body’s growth and excesses. Disgust is what denotes the boundaries that we should not cross, the very feeling of repulsion signifying the enactments – or, to be precise, re-enactments – of the moral and political laws that control not only consumption, but the limits of our embodied experience. Samantha Murray argues that “when we perceive a body as ‘fat’”, we “constitute it in accordance with the bodily knowledges that provide a backdrop for our perception” (2007, 362). It must be stressed, however, that those knowledges are also unspoken and implicit, hidden from our everyday consciousness. They manifest primarily in reactions that are instigated by our senses: in our sight, in our smell, and, often, in our taste. Reactions, especially when they are acculturised to convey horror and disgust, represent the tangible expression of our tacit bodily knowledge, of our integrated perception of that which is considered ‘normal’, and that which is seen as ‘deviant’. The representation of the fat body as disturbing, in examples such as Se7en and Feed, becomes effective only in virtue of the habitual and deeply embodied perceptions that we carry in relation to our corporeal experiences. Bodily knowledge is tacit, but becomes expressed and expressible through the sensory reactions to the image of the fat body, especially if those reactions are characterised by repulsion and loathing. The fat body is rendered Other by internalised statements about not only shape and size, but also the consequences that come with them, as defined and perpetrated by the social and cultural contexts we live in.

The Thin and Vanishing Body Images of impossibly thin, often starving bodies populate the spectrum of Gothic horror filmography. Examples abound, from Black Swan (2010) to The Road (2009), from The Machinist to Thinner (1996). Perceptions

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of thinness vary, undoubtedly, as context changes, and this also applies inasmuch as the cinematic narrative is concerned. The concept of thinness, inevitably connected to either the conscious refusal of food – as is the case in Black Swan, where the ballerina protagonist becomes obsessed with the dancing capabilities of her body and its slender, expected outlook – or an inability to gain weight – as one can find in both Thinner and The Machinist. Thinner, in particular, is attuned to the cultural interpretation of both image and body size, and portrays the starving body in relation to not only the fat body, but also Western discourses of overconsumption, both in culinary and economic terms. In the narrative, Billy Halleck (Robert John Burke) is a successful, rich lawyer who is also obese. He is not only in love with his high-class commodities, from cars to houses, but he is also portrayed as utterly obsessed with food, claiming that he wants to eat “all the time”. Billy’s food habits are portrayed with an unmissable layer of contempt, as we witness him sneaking high-fat snacks into his daily routine, while he is supposed to be on a diet. When Billy accidentally kills Suzanne Lempke (Irma St Paule), the daughter of the local Gipsy leader Tadzu Lempke (Michael Constantine), Tadzu himself curses Billy by touching his face and uttering the word ‘thinner’ into his face. As a result of the curse, Billy begins to lose weight rapidly, regardless of how much he eats. It soon becomes clear that the aim of the curse is, in fact, to murder Billy. As the days pass, his body shrinks to a skeletal frame, as he clearly starves to death. Close-ups are offered of Billy’s almost fleshless body, and the addition of theatrical facial make up heightens his gaunt appearance, to make him look like a walking corpse. The thin body here becomes fetishised into a representational critique of Western consumption practices – the continuous hunger for not only high-fat and unhealthy foods, but also for material possessions. Billy’s shrinking and starving body in Thinner is clearly evocative of the destructive nature of consumer-capitalism, doomed to destroy itself by its own obsessions. Discussing the observational and critical properties of body image as a cultural entity, Joshua Gunn suggests that, in our Western, media-, and image-obsessed contemporary world, the thin body represents an “impossible” ideal that serves to “further heighten and exacerbate contradictions of identity” (Gunn 2007, 51). Representational encounters with the ideal body, especially in the fictional context of film spectatorship, point us in the direction of a “multiplicity” of viewing experiences, which collectively create “libidinal associations to spur consumption” (Gunn 2007, 51). As far as the thin body is concerned, the term consumption serves not

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only in terms of food ingestion  – or the absence thereof  – but also of the assimilation of thinness as a consumable and heavily mediated concept. Gunn’s suggestion is reminiscent, especially in its focus on media and film, of Laura Mulvey’s discourses of “the gaze” in her well-known text “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1999). The gaze represents a deeply socialised way of seeing people, used to describe “the voyeuristic pleasure experienced by spectators” when they encounter identification images in the media (Mulvey 1999, 837). Although Mulvey’s undoubtedly psychoanalytic approach has been very influential in the development of film theory, it has also been heavily criticised for its focus on the female experience, and its exclusion of certain body categories  – especially the masculine body – as objects of desire (Gaines 1988). All the same, I agree with Gunn in identifying the importance of Mulvey’s work as a framework for building a critical interpretation of not only the thin body in film, but also, and perhaps more essentially so, the place occupied by notions of hunger and consumption in that interpretation. Perceptions of thinness, of course, do not exist in isolation, especially as far as their cultural and aesthetic interpretations go. And neither do notions of hunger and consumption. On the other end of the spectrum, the notion of ‘fat’, and the culturally inscribed experiences of loathing and Otherness that can go with it, are of course connected to historical context, where the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries have tacitly constructed the vision of the slender – but not ‘too thin’ – body as the ideal bodily form for women. Murray argues that “normative thinness” constitutes the universally feminine in the Western context (2007, 364). The term normative here suggests the deviancy of that which does not meet the sociocultural standards imposed on the body. The discourse of power also becomes intrinsically connected to the notion of bodily normativity, as it does to that of gender identification. The normative “slender” body occupies “not only a space of power and influence”, but also acts as an entity “projecting onto our perception” a “backdrop of normalcy that structures our readings of certain bodies as either ‘normative or aberrant’” (Murray 2007, 364). That is to say, the cultural ‘power’ of the ideologically constituted, and normalised, slender body lingers in the margins of our perception as a referent for identification and arbitration of all our bodily encounters. One can see this dichotomous, and relatively immaterial, identification of the fat body as Other in Feed when Deidre’s body is placed in stark contrast to that of Michael’s “thin wife” – so termed in the narrative. In the film, the slender body  – and its empowered status as superior, preferable, and eventually

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‘normal’  – literally hovers above, and simultaneously reinforces, conceptions of fatness and Otherness, as the comparison is clearly drawn between the two women. What we can also grasp here is the veiled suggestion of Michael as the ‘thin’ male identity destroying the corpulent feminine via her own indulgence, reiterating a well-known connection to the globalisation of consumer-capitalism, where discourses of manipulation, domination, and the so-called ‘crisis of masculinity’ lie at the heart of the exchange (May et al. 1996; Greenbaum 1999; Matlak 2014). In Feed, the fat body exists as an abhorrent only in relation to the slender body, where only the latter is read as ideal and acceptable. The thin body, in these terms, becomes a sublimated sex object that is, in its scopophilic affects, deeply connected to the notion of gratification and desire. The sedimented knowledge of propriety that comes with the vision of the slender body also relegates the fat body to the realm of abject and Otherness, in virtue of equally affirmed and tacit medical discourses of health that are pervasive in our cultural context. Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla contend that medical narratives have a simultaneously empowering and disempowering effect on our perceptions of the body, and are instrumental in constructing binaries of acceptability – “proper” and “improper” – that are made to be inseparable in the public consciousness (1995). The authority of medical discourse “legitimises” the marginalisation of “bodies of difference”, and reaffirms the power of the normative – and often conceptually immaterial – slender body. It is precisely this dichotomous logic that constitutes the body of the “Other” – “the fat body” – and validates the repulsion felt for it as an appropriate and expected visceral reaction (Murray 2007, 365). The appeal of extreme thinness lies more in witnessing the disintegration of the cultural Other, which in turn represents the embodiment of social and cultural ideals that are as coveted as they are loathsome. To see an even clearer illustration of the ambiguous nature of the ‘thin body’ as a cultural entity, one need only turn to The Machinist. The film tells the story of Trevor Reznik (Christian Bale), a man whose insomnia, psychological imbalances, and extreme physical deterioration eventually cause him to severely injure a co-worker, only to be then driven insane by paranoia. Trevor’s emaciated body is at the centre of the viewing experience, and is an entity that evokes both repulsion and fascination at the mere sight of it. Trevor is dangerously underweight. His collar bones stick out, his ribs cast shadows over his concave stomach. His arms and legs are so bony that they almost recall the body of a small child, rather than a grown man. His cheekbones stand out in sharp relief, and the hollow

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nature of his cheeks makes his facial features difficult to discern. Christian Bale evidently lost a great deal of weight for the role. Cinematic folklore has circulated rumours of how Bale ignored the medical advice that prescribed the terms of his weight loss, and shed more weight than was regarded as ‘safe’ to his body and health. The debt to the character here is laudable, even if one must wonder about the extent of Bale’s method as characterisation takes place. The effect is visibly and undeniably startling. Trevor’s thinness becomes an almost tangible presence in the film’s narrative, unavoidable and inescapable as scenes that show his naked body are disturbing and difficult to watch. Naturally, one needs to wonder what it is that makes Trevor’s extremely thin body so disturbing, what cultural rules are being tacitly applied in order to designate his presentation as excessive, and what renders any encounters with it uncomfortable (Fig. 3.2). The immediate response to witnessing such a thin and emaciated body is that, for sure, the person must not be eating. Losing weight is a physiological response to the lack of food, and such thinness as Trevor’s can only be caused by the refusal to eat. The tacit subtext of anorexia runs closely with the presentation of Trevor’s thin and emaciated body. Indeed, it could be argued that the film implicitly employs the narrative of anorexia, even though the condition is never explicitly acknowledged or gestured towards. Yet, it is virtually unavoidable. Although one might be tempted to suggest that other causes for Trevor’s bodily status exist – from a number of physiological reasons, to the possibility of diseases such as cancer –

Fig. 3.2  Trevor Reznik (Christian Bale) exposes his hauntingly emaciated body in The Machinist (2004)

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a number of important occurrences connect his emaciated body to the implicit narrative of anorexia. Megan Warin suggests that, in anorexia cases, an affected person is “obsessed” with food and its consequences, constantly thinking about them and perennially taking note of anything that is food-related – this ranges, of course, from the constant counting of calories to the compulsive measuring of one’s own weight to the secret refusal of food in itself (2010, 4). This narrative is evoked in The Machinist as Trevor also compulsively records his own falling weight. Every night he steps on his bathroom scales and makes a note of the number on a sticky note. He then affixes the sticky note on the wall, constructing an obsessive list of numbers that designate his weight as inexorably and slowly fading. The number designating the weight, of course, is not just a meaningful record. Indeed, the more the weight decreases, the more Trevor’s thinness increases, and the more emaciated his body becomes. Trevor holds a disturbing relationship with his slowly disappearing body. As he records the numbers of his falling weight, his compulsive behaviour denotes a mixture of fascination and fear, as he continuously returns to the same actions over and over, while being visibly disturbed by both the experience and the outcome. Trevor’s relationship with his weight loss is ambiguous and confusing, as desire and anxiety merge and blend to characterise his experience of the dangerously thin body. Once again, the tacit narrative of anorexia is evoked, as this mixture of desire and disgust, not only for food and consumption, but also for the body that continues to grow thinner, is what often characterises sufferers from the condition. Warin suggests that anorexic sufferers simultaneously experience “pleasure and disgust” at their own bodies, and their noticeably decreasing size leaves them both “empowered and disempowered” (2010, 4). This mixture of fascination and repulsion takes on a metaphysical streak in The Machinist, as it not only involves Trevor’s worrying relationship with his extreme thinness, but also extends to the viewing experience of the audience presented with it. Trevor’s emaciated body is disturbing as much as it is compelling. It is mesmerising to look at, for thinness feels unreal, ethereal, disassociated. And yet, it causes a certain amount of discomfort: it makes us feel queasy as it is, to put it in simple terms, “not right”. The thin body, as Warin puts it, is “the extreme body”, and one that often surfaces in popular imaginings steeped in both “horror and fascination” (2010, 5). The question remains of what it is that makes the extremely thin and emaciated body so difficult to watch. Why is Trevor’s body repulsive? Why does thinness evoke feelings of anxiety and queasiness? How is the

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increasingly thinner body – the body that necessarily does not eat – part of a ‘horror’ narrative? The answer, I believe, is to be found not only inter-­ narratively  – in Trevor’s inability to establish relationships with others, as his psychosis grows and affects, among other things, his consumption patterns and his own bodily functions – but also extra-narratively, as the extremely thin body recalls social and psychological horrors that define our experiences in the world from a very early age. The experience of food refusal, and the thin body that results from it, finds an unavoidable resonance with Kristeva’s notion of the abjection, the now famous theory of horror in which food figures prominently. According to Kristeva, abjection takes places in the earliest stages of our development. In order for a child to gain independence and become part of the symbolic order, it must separate itself from what Kristeva terms the “nourishing and murderous” maternal body, and recognise its own bodily boundaries (1982, 54). This process relies on the recognition of the clean and proper body, and the rejection of that which is ‘horror’, disgusting, and to some extent, Other. The child must psychologically cast out those experiences that impinge on the body and make it “improper, dirty, and disorderly” (Warin 2010, 4). By disavowing aspects of corporeality, especially those which seemingly threaten bodily boundaries and therefore the sense of ‘self’ that derives therein, the child is able to attain an identity and become an individual. Later in life, experiences that recall this process will continue to be abject, to exist as “imaginary uncanniness and a real threat” (Kristeva 1982, 4) and evoke the fragility of bodily boundaries via notions of repulsion and disgust. In addition to the now well-known categories of the abject – towards bodily waste, towards the signs of sexual difference, and towards (rotten) food and bodily incorporation – Kristeva also identifies another occurrence as being an extreme form of abjection: encounters with the corpse. According to Kristeva, the corpse “is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life” (1982, 4). The corpse not only recalls the fragility of life and the inevitability of death, but also inexorably breaks the boundaries of our social stability. It is ambiguous, unstable, and abject. The corpse is waste and disturbance. It is an un-entity that does not belong. The corpse stands for decay, for disappearance, for the decomposition – both literal and metaphorical – of the human being, of our boundaries of our identities. We do not want to encounter the corpse, for it is itself abject. By casting it out, by deeming it repulsive, we protect ourselves, for if we do not, the abject “ends up engulfing us” (Kristeva 1982, 4).

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One can see an echo of the corpse’s abject narrative in The Machinist as, on multiple occasions, Trevor is told that he is becoming too thin, and that if he gets any thinner he will “disappear”. There is a suggestion that his own thinness is engulfing him, and the eventual outcome is that he will lose himself, not only psychologically, but physically too. The thin body is quickly disintegrating. It is closer to dying, to not existing, to disappearing. The threat of death looms in Trevor’s emaciated body. This, naturally, is a culturally delineated notion, and a figurative rendition of the fear of not existing, of the fear of ceasing to be. Within this almost ancestral tacit knowledge lies the identification of the extremely thin (anorexic) body as abject, and the cause for our repulsion, horror, and discomfort in viewing. The cinematic reinterpretation of the thin and starving body here works as an evocation of “monstrosity”, posing a threat to the identification of stable social and communal identity (Covino 2004, 29). The identification of Trevor’s emaciated thin body as “abject” relies on internalising what is considered abject – from bodily fluids to dead and often rotting matter, to the embodied and often visceral responses to this – the horror, the queasiness, and, inevitably, the fascination that come with it. The extremely thin body culturally recalls the corpse and, in so doing, acts as the contested embodiment of death. The conceptual narrative that connects the extremely thin body to the framework of anorexia in The Machinist further manifests through Trevor’s inability to establish and maintain emotional connections, also known critically as “relatedness”. Once often regarded as a matter of ­biological connection – an understanding that is often perpetrated in populist discourse via the idea of being ‘related’ to someone signifying family – the concept of relatedness has ceased to be seen simply as part of the genetic structures of ‘blood connections’. Belonging to the broader area of what is known as ‘kinship studies’, considerations of relatedness have recently questioned the dichotomous separation of social and biological as terms for connection, as traditionally raised by several scholars (Schneider 1968; Ginsburg and Rapp 1995; Franklin and McKinnon 2002; Carsten 2003). “Relatedness”, as Jeanette Edwards and Marilyn Starthern suggest, should never be thought of as just “one thing”, and, especially, “never either a matter of social or biological connection alone” (2000, 162). The very concept of relatedness extends beyond the presence of perceived “natural”, or at least shared, substance, such as blood and the genetic implications that come with it. Practices and concepts of relatedness, or “connectedness”, are often composed, as Warin argues, “not just of ties created by

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procreation and familial obligation”, but of “multiple elements”’ (2010, 3). Connectedness, the core idea that lies at the basis of relationships – and which has often come to be preferred to the term “relatednes” in recent studies – does not require a ‘genetic link’, and relies on cultural notions to even transform biology into a basis for social interaction. Warin goes on to identify “the exchanging and sharing of food” (2010, 77) as an essential part of human connectedness. Sharing food is a practice that identifies interpersonal parameters within everyday life and that not only stands as the tangible enactment of that connection, but also constructs kinds of behaviour that form the grounds for any psycho-social ability to function as an individual entity, with its own subjectivity. The inability to construct links of relatedness via food, and the social and physiological repercussions that this entails, is one of the definitive characteristics of the anorexic person. Customs that are taken for granted within both the familial and social everyday, such as the “everyday practices of commensality”, represent an insurmountable task for the anorexic, and are often “viewed negatively” and “rejected” (Warin 2010, 59–61). This inability to relate to others through the commensality of food is clearly identified in The Machinist, and a subtle but unavoidable connection is established between Trevor’s inability to connect over the dinner table, and his emaciated and horrifically thin body. One of the very few instances when he is portrayed consuming food, Trevor inevitably eats alone. He consumes an anonymous fast food meal in the sterile and solitary confines of his kitchen. When Trevor is at the café at the airport, he orders a coffee and a slice of pie that he only seems to casually poke with his fork, skilfully avoiding placing the food in his mouth. When the waitress engages him in conversation about his food, he is visibly surprised and completely abandons the task of eating. The most evocative example of Trevor’s inability to construct a socially viable commensal relationship takes place at Stevie’s (Jennifer Jason Leigh) house. After he has consummated the sexual act with her that he has paid for, she offers to cook him breakfast. Trevor is made uncomfortable by the offer and politely refuses. His visible embarrassment and pause suggest that he perhaps perceives the practice of sharing food – of sitting at a table with another individual, within a closed space, engaging in conversation – as far too intimate. It is during the same scene that Stevie comments over his thin body and expresses a concern for his visible weight loss. In response, Trevor theatrically positions his limbs to further accentuate his skeletal frame. His ribs are made painfully visible, as are the pointed

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ends of his clavicles and his hauntingly hollow cheeks. From the viewer’s perspective, the movement is very difficult to watch. Trevor’s body is too thin, too emaciated, too  – potentially and unavoidably  – close to death. The thought that he should have accepted the offer of breakfast lingers in the air, as the narrative draws a connection between his miserable thinness and his refusal of a shared meal with Stevie. His hauntingly thin body is the tangible exemplification of his lack of “relatedness”, as his own relationship with himself “tempers” his relationships with his “everyday worlds” (Warin 2010, 12). The refusal of the commensal offer here reiterates Trevor’s inability to establish a social sense of relatedness with Stevie, as the physical connection established during sex is interrupted by the failure to share such a socially relevant substance such as food. As Trevor is unable to connect with Stevie commensally, he perpetrates the disassociation of behaviour that, it is suggested, lies at the core of his culturally inappropriate thinness. The evocation of the anorexic body here introduces the idea that, in a way, Trevor is ‘consumed’ by his condition, and his inability to connect, to engage, to relate. Unable to connect with Stevie over a seemingly common and commonplace activity such as sharing food, Trevor continues to evoke the horrific narrative of anorexia by creating what Warin terms “new forms of relatedness” (Warin 2010, 77). This re-creation is identified as a regular occurrence for sufferers of the condition. Alternative ways of constructing a connection with the world and themselves inevitably involve constructing a relation with the thin body, and the impact that the lack of food generates. These include “secrecy” over consumption patterns, as well as constantly and obsessively recording one’s weight, and psycho-social concealment of anorexic practices. We see this alternative search for relatedness, and the construction of a self-centred notion of connectedness, in The Machinist as Trevor sublimates his inability to establish relationships in the practice of methodically recording his own weight. The thin body becomes the centre of Trevor’s social narrative, and its presence supersedes other social factors in his life. The lack of interaction with others is displaced in favour of Trevor’s obsessive liaison with his own vanishing body. Instead of disavowing the threat of his own corporeality, Trevor allows himself to be consumed by it. The thin body is an evocation as much as it is a symptom, and the experience of relatedness transforms into a hauntingly obfuscated defamiliarisation with one’s body, as well as the world that surrounds it and, inevitably, the self.

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Consuming the Self, or, the Horror of Self-Cannibalism While eating may be perceived as a solitary activity – and, to some extent, it is, especially when it comes to the physical ingestion of food – its practice is profoundly interconnected with cultural notions. Therefore, it is through consumption that one’s body becomes entangled with the experience of other bodies through both sensorial and anthropological connections that transform the mere feeding act into ‘eating’. Hunger, it would seem, is but the beginning of the eating process, and impulses related to this experience do not fully account for the multifaceted nature of the consumption process. Distinctions between ‘hungry’ and ‘non-hungry’ are non-solitary, as far as the corporeal dimension of being is concerned. The individual body itself, including its mannerisms, movements, and sensorial incitements, is joined with other embodied entities through eating, as the unmistakable communal nature of the act allows us to rework aspects of “our own relations to ourselves” (Probyn 2000, 60). In view of the protean abilities of eating in constructing an embodied consciousness for the individual, and in turn, providing the future grounds for the networking and re-networking of sociocultural relations, the very experience of food can be understood as both a mediated and mediating force in establishing an interrelated and psychically sound connection with the outside world. In eating, the body moves in different directions, yet this movement should not only be perceived as a physical occurrence, but, more precisely, as a psychically and socially endowed act. One could see the experience of eating as inexorably representative of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of embodiment, which proposes a schema based on “lines of articulation, segmentarity, strata and territories”, but also “lines of flight, movement of deterritorialization and destratification” (1988, 3, 4). Food enters through the oral orifice and, by virtue of its inherent externality, it makes us aware of our bodies as separate and intermingling entities that rely on both the internalisation and externalisation of experience. Eating is, in this sense, a paradoxically uniting and segregating activity, for in consumption we simultaneously experience the horror and pleasure of individuality, as well as the de/stabilising knowledge of ‘the outside’. A distinctly disturbing perversion of this multisensorial and multi-­stratified notion of eating is presented in Dans Ma Peau (2002). The narrative follows Esther, a woman who becomes morbidly fascinated with her body, and, over time, proceeds to systematically cut herself in order to consume parts of

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her own skin. The film provides a number of graphic renditions of Esther’s bloody and skinless body, as well as close-up of sharp instruments cutting her skin, as Esther consumes it. For the most part, however, the cinematography and the sound-mix rely on the externalisation of the Gothic imagination, as sounds and angles communicate the horror of the body being tortured, dismembered, and consumed, without actually showing the whole process taking place (Aldana Reyes 2016). As Esther’s fascination with cutting and consuming her own skin grows, her interest in eating ‘actual’ food wanes and deteriorates. The narrative communicates that ‘normal food’ becomes off-putting and alienating for Esther, as a number of close-ups on filled plates are presented with disaffection and discomfort, so to communicate the fraught relationship that is established with eating, and the development of the psychosis that later results in the act of self-cannibalism. Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic interpretation of corporeality becomes useful here in understanding the self-torturing and self-­consuming act as the moment of rupture, where multiple lines of experience mingle and clash (1988). The lines of experience proposed in the cinematic narrative include the growth of professional pressure in Esther’s life, her suffocating and highly sexualised relationship with a boyfriend who constantly and openly labels her as “strange”, and an inability to reconcile the requirements of others with her own. Different ‘lines’ of both bodily and ­psychological experience collide in Esther’s life, which, one might argue, produce phenomena of “relative slowness” and “acceleration” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 4). Esther is portrayed as increasingly numb, not only physically and physiologically – when, for instance, she fails to feel the serious injury on her leg, caused by an accident on a building site, and which gives way to her self-mutilating and cannibalising acts – but also emotionally, as her relationships with friends, colleagues, and loved ones deteriorate because of her inability to ‘connect’. What is noticeable here is also a conceptual connection with The Machinist, where the lack of relatedness recalls a disrupted relationship with food, hunger, and the very experience of incorporation. As the rupture in her relationships takes place, Esther begins to internalise her connection with the world by becoming overly fascinated with her own body, and wanting to ‘experience’ it in ways that break the boundaries of both propriety and physical safety. The sense of disconnection from the world is clearly communicated in the narrative. As Esther becomes more and more engrossed in the limits, limitations, and possibility of her own body, her desire to ‘feel’ transforms into a horrific and highly Gothicised search for corporeal experience.

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Esther’s consumption of her own body is the ultimate act of introjection. She internalises the rhizomatic collision of her bodily experience by rejecting the physical intermingling with the outside world, as her body becomes both the starting point and the destination for her consumptive cycle. This example of body horror draws attention to the ability of the alimentary to be both an alienating and an intermingling force. As Probyn puts it, “the banal, the mundane, the unexpected, and the familiar” all collide “in the corporeal experience of eating, and it is that very experience that connects us with others” (2000, 61). In Esther’s case, however, the ingestion of her own body provides a fracture in the regulating structure and cycles of eating, as she literally internalises herself and rejects influences from the outside. The seemingly banal experience of eating reveals the fraught relationship with corporeal boundaries, as the alimentary frontier becomes mixed with the horror of mutilation and torture. In the process of objectification that comes from the violent subjugation of a victim, especially in instances of rape – where sexual gratification and the illusion of possession lie at the heart of the act  – there exists a distinct paradigm of metaphorical butchering. This paradigm relies on the representation and visualisation of both objects that inevitably create an implicit connection between the violence of the sexual act and the butchering of bodies. One can find the conceptual narrative that crystallises the paradigm of sexual butchering in Dans Ma Peau, as the narrative structure goes on to connect the shock of sexual violence with the horror of self-­ cannibalism. Carol Adams suggests that one of the essential components of the paradigm is, first and foremost, a “knife, real or metaphorical, as the chosen implement of violence” (1990, 59). Here one can see the persistent return of the knife as a metaphorical implement, connecting not only acts of butchering and dismemberment with the seemingly mundane practice of cutting and preparing food, but also introducing the connection to sexual violence, and bringing a distinctly Freudian twist into the metaphorical equation. The knife is indeed Esther’s preferred instrument for cutting herself, and an object that she displays a constant fascination with, even at times where, socially speaking, the presence of the knife induces fantasies of dismemberment. In one instance, when attending an important dinner with her boss and clients, Esther fantasises about cutting herself at the table with a steak knife. Unable to resist the call, she excuses herself awkwardly from the table, and proceeds to find a quiet corner in the cellar of the restaurant, where she can indulge her self-mutilating and self-cannibalising desires.

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The initiation of the sexual butchering paradigm here is particularly disturbing as Esther does not seem to be able to draw either a conceptual or a social disconnection between the violence of eating at the table, and the sexualised and fetishised violence she wishes to carry out upon her own body. One might venture to say that she literally constructs her own body as an appetising and appealing ‘food’, while designating the actual food on the table to the unwanted sphere. The categories of edible and inedible are subverted, and the subversion is reflected theatrically in Esther’s mutilation and consumption of her own skin. It must be said, however, that the act of biting one’s skin alone is not necessarily culturally viewed as horrific – a common propensity does exist for people to nibble on their own cuticles and nails, and, although frowned upon, this is not generally considered alarming. What is disturbing abut Esther’s skin-cutting and eating activities is the act of butchering  – a form of sexualised butchering, to be exact – as Esther seems to draw an abnormal satisfaction from disturbing the limits of her own body with a blade (Levenkron 1998). Indeed, after serendipitously leaving the restaurant, she checks herself into a hotel, where she can continue her self-mutilating activities. The cinematography here becomes more explicit, as clear images of Esther meticulously picking at her own skin and eating it are presented. The connection to sexual violence is reiterated here not only through the presence of the penetrating knife, but also through the choice of a hotel room, a location often perceived, in cultural terms and popular narratives, as the ideal place where illicit sexual liaisons take place. The sexual liaison in Esther’s case is with herself, as she both penetrates and incorporates herself, in an open, defiant, and rather horrific refusal of the traditional sexual narrative that she maintains with her boyfriend. According to Adams, another essential component of the sexual butchering paradigm is to be found in the disconcerting fetishisation of body parts (Adams 1990, 59). This can be identified in practices that range from obsession with a particular body section – from breasts, to legs or gluteus – to the horrific habitual system of ‘trophy keeping’. The latter can involve a variety of expressions, from simply holding on to garments and shoes to, more disturbingly and more rarely, the mutilation of the victim’s body, as to preserve parts of it. The final frontier for trophy keeping is, of course, sexual cannibalism, an idea that is as disturbing as it is interconnected with the fetishisation of the body as both object and subject, where the boundaries between consumer and consumed become blurred. This is clearly visible in Esther’s psychosis, where she becomes obsessed not only

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with cutting bits of the skin off her body and consuming them, but also with preserving them for posterity, in an aim, she declares, to keep them “soft”. If not strictly sexual, Esther’s relationship with both consuming and preserving parts of her own body is at least sexualised, as she clearly draws a sense of satisfied gratification from the act. Within the narrative of Dans Ma Peau, the disappointment that derives from the inability to preserve her skin adequately – once it shrinks and shrivels, as Esther’s amateur attempts at tanning it fail – is visible and akin to the loss of a lover. This is reiterated as, upon discovering a desiccated piece of skin, she holds it close to her breasts and lovingly places it within her bra. Feminist critics have often perceived violence intrinsic to representations that collapse consumption and sexual gratification, and have connected imageries of subjugation and introjection to the systems of patriarchal structures that confine women to subservient status. The nexus between sexuality and consumption has been termed in a variety of ways, which Adams effectively summarises (1990, 60): from “carnivorous arrogance” (Simone de Beauvoir) to “gynocidal cannibalism” (Mary Daly), from ‘sexual cannibalism’ (Kate Millet) to “psychic cannibalism” (Andrea Dworkin) and “metaphysical cannibalism” (Ti-Grace Atkinson). While definitions and rubrics change across the spectrum of scholarship, what seems to be presented as a common pattern is the understanding of the ­metaphorical connection between consuming flesh and the subjugation of women, suggesting that at the heart of sexual intercourse lies the ‘consumption’ of the other’s body and mind. In examples like Dans Ma Peau, we see the non-verbal deconstruction of the paradigm and the inversion of the critique, to show the woman as internalising her status as a psychic and erotic ‘consumable’, so that the perceived sexual desirability of her own body is satirised by her own desire to physically eat it. Esther literally becomes ‘the meat’. Her skin is cut and consumed, her blood flows, until she becomes a caricature of not only the animal victim of slaughter, but also of the sexualised and objectified female body, eaten and consumed in the midst of metaphors and symbols of humiliation and violence. As Esther’s sense of identity grows increasingly more fragmented, so does her body, as its mutilated and bleeding extremities provide a darkly mocking metaphorical rendition of the bloody carcasses of the meat industry, lying at the heart of our contemporary narratives of consumption. Overall, cinematic narratives that depict the practice of self-cannibalism are rare. Cannibalism has received much attention in cinema, and, consequently, in academic scholarship, yet autosarcophagy has not fared well

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as a topic of representation. This might be because, as I would like to suggest, self-cannibalism represents, to some extent, the ultimate frontier when it comes to consumption taboos and prohibitions. An act, indeed, so hideous, socially and culturally, that it seems to elicit not only disgust, but also a journey into the most visceral layers of self-preservation. These dictate a reaction that truly can only be categorised as ‘horror’, even if the horror itself is just imagined. In film, one needs to look hard to find the practice of autophagy represented. As the practice of auto-vampirism  – drinking one’s own blood – is not technically classed as self-cannibalism, the list grows even thinner. With Dans Ma Peau being one of the most evocative and explicit instances, other examples such as Hannibal represent sporadic occurrences even within the wider spectrum of the horror film genre. In Hannibal, Dr Lecter himself (Anthony Hopkins) psychologically manipulated Mason Verger (Gary Oldman) a known paedophile, into eating his own nose. Later on in the film, Dr Lecter also convinces Verger to slice pieces of his own face off, and feed them to a dog. And while the latter cannot be technically catalogued as self-cannibalism, it still pivots on the notion of feeding one’s own body to another creature – human or not – and therefore falls within the same ontological category, even if perhaps the rubric of definition is different. The same film continues to impose the metaphor of self-­cannibalism by proposing possibly one of the more horrific and nightmarish cinematic instances of the practices, when Dr Lecter – in a truly stomach-churning scene – manages to feed FBI agent Paul Krendler (Ray Liotta) pieces of his own brain. The practice of self-cannibalism is also almost as rare in documented history as it is in cinematic representations (Libbon et al. 2015). Medical reports and journal articles have acknowledged the infrequency of the practice, and the potential connection to schizophrenia and other mental disorders, even though clarity on that connection remains to be provided. In medical and psychiatric terms, self-cannibalism falls under the broader category of “selfmutilation”, commonly carried out using an instrument such as a razor blade or a knife, even though it is unclear as to which part of the process – the mutilation or the flesh consumption – is seen as the aim of the self-inflicted cutting (Yilmaz et al. 2014, 701). This sense of unclarity with regard to the practice is also communicated in films where both self-mutilation and self-cannibalism are represented, even if, in the example of Hannibal, the self-inflicted cutting and subsequent consumption of flesh are caused by deceit and psychological manipulation by an external third party. In Dans Ma Peau, however, the connection between self-mutilation and self-cannibalism is evident, as Esther

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begins with instances of simply cutting herself, and this progresses into eating pieces of her own skin. It is worthwhile to mention that, in the rare cases where self-cannibalism has been documented in patients, consuming one’s own skin is possibly one of the more common incarnations of self-mutilation and self-modification where self-consumption plays an important role. A noticeable characteristic of Esther’s acts of self-mutilation and self-­cannibalism is her disturbing separation and detachment, which is crystallised by her being often portrayed as staring into the distance in a semi-catatonic state, even while taking a blade to her own skin. This unresponsive state is indeed, medically speaking, a documented pathology of the self-cannibal, who is often recognised as being “emotionally detached” and unable to “express regret” about either self-mutilation or self-consumption (Libbon et al. 2015, 153). Within the narrative bounds of Dans Ma Peau, part of the horror effect in seeing Esther’s acts of self-cannibalism comes precisely from being forced to witness her detachment, her estrangement from her own body, and her distinctly absent need for self-preservation. In an emotional twist, Esther’s detached objectification of her own body functions as a form of excessive and transgressive social antidote towards the objectification that she succumbs to, particularly at the hands of her controlling boyfriend. The detachment is more frightening as it acts as a conduit into Esther’s dehumanisation and ownership of her body, so that it becomes objectified as unlived and, eventually, as consumable. Numerous medical experts have argued that this behavioural pattern is an effort to “rid oneself of depersonalisation, guilt, rejection, hallucinations, [and] sexual involvements” (Yilmaz et  al. 2014, 701). If one wanted to delve into the pathological representation of self-cannibalism in the film it would also be possible to draw a connection between the presence of a psychic disorder and the act of eating one’s own body. Although medical scholarship fails to pinpoint an exact connection, a recognised hypothesis has been that patients obtain “relief from painful emotions after auto-sarcophagy” (Libbon et  al. 2015, 153). Self-cannibalism is an outlet which, extreme as it might be, is connected to the desire to “free” oneself from the psychological hauntings caused by “sexual, physical or emotional abuse”, from depression to anxiety disorders, these latter causes being generally identified as “underlying factors in the etiology of self-harm behaviour” (Yilmaz et al. 2014, 701). Self-cannibalism in Dans Ma Peau channels the deeply rooted connection between body horror and psychological disturbances, which, although often a common occurrence in the history of Gothic horror narratives, still manages to push the boundaries of acceptability, as far as the categories of edible and inedible are concerned.

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Works Cited Adams, Carol. 1990. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. Cambridge: Polity. Alcoff, Linda Martín. 2001. Towards a Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment. In Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi, 267–283. Malden: Blackwell. Aldana Reyes, Xavier. 2016. Horror Film and Affect: Towards a Corporeal Model of Viewership. London and New York: Routledge. Avramescu, Cătălin. 2009. An Intellectual History of Cannibalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and his World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bordo, Susan. 1993. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press. Botting, Fred. 1996. Gothic: The New Critical Idiom. 1st ed. London and New York: Routledge. Carsten, Janet. 2003. After Kinship: New Departures in Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Covino, Deborah Caslav. 2004. Amending the Abject Body: Aesthetic Makeovers in Medicine and Culture. Albany: State University of New York. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1988. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Athlone Press. Douglas, Mary. 2003. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Routledge. Drohojowska-Philip, Hunter. 2002. Back to Paint – Thanks to Photos. Los Angeles Times, January 13. Edwards, Jeanette, and Marilyn Starthern. 2000. Including Our Own. In Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship, ed. Janet Carsten, 149–166. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Farrell, Amy Erdman. 2011. Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture. New York: New York University Press. Fieldhouse, Paul. 1995. Food and Nutrition: Customs and Culture. London: Chapman & Hall. Franklin, Susan, and Sarah McKinnon. 2002. Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Durham: Duke University Press. Gaines, Jane. 1988. White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory. Screen 29(4): 12–27. Ginsburg, Faye, and Rayna Rapp. 1995. Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction. Berkeley: University of California Press. Greenbaum, Andrea. 1999. Brass Balls: Masculine Communication and the Discourse of Capitalism in David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross. The Journal of Men’s Studies 8(1): 33–43.

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Gunn, Joshua. 2007. Dark Admissions: Gothic Subculture and the Ambivalence of Misogyny and Resistance. In Goth: Undead Subculture, ed. Lauren M.E. Goodlad and Michael Bibby, 41–64. Durham: Duke University Press. Heywood, Leslie. 1996. Dedication to Hunger: The Anorexic Aesthetic in Modern Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kass, Leon. 1997. The Wisdom of Repugnance. The New Republic, 2 June: 17–26. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1991. Interview. In Women Analyse Women in France, England and the United States, ed. Elaine Brauch and Lucienne Serrano, 129–148. New York: New York Univesity Press. LeBesco, Kathleen. 2004. Revolting Bodies? The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. Levenkron, Steven. 1998. Cutting: Understanding and Overcoming Self-­ Mutilation. New York: W.W. Norton. Libbon, Randi, Gareen Hamalian, and Joel Yager. 2015. Self-Cannibalism (Autosarcophagy) in Psychosis: A Case Report. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 203(2): 152–153. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1993. The Inhuman. Cambridge: Polity. Matlak, Malgorzata. 2014. The Crisis of Masculinity in the Economic Crisis Context. Procedia 140(22): 367–370. May, Larry, Robert A. Strikwerda, and Patrick D. Hopkins, ed. 1996. Rethinking Masculinity: Philosophical Explorations in Light of Feminism. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Meagher, Michelle. 2003. Jenny Saville and a Feminist Aesthetics of Disgust. Hypatia 18(4): 23–41. Miller, William Ian. 1998. The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Mulvey, Laura. 1999. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 833–844. New York: Oxford University Press. Murray, Samantha. 2007. Corporeal Knowledges and Deviant Bodies: Perceiving the Fat Body. Social Semiotics 17(3): 361–373. Orbach, Susie. 1989. Fat is a Feminist Issue. London: Arrow. Probyn, Elspeth. 2000. Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities. London: Routledge. Richardson, Niall. 2010. Transgressive Bodies: Representations in Film and Popular Culture. New York and London: Routledge. Rozin, Paul, Jonathan Haidt, and Clark McCauley. 2008. Disgust. In Handbook of Emotions, ed. Michael Lewis, Jeanette Haviland, and Lisa Feldman Barrett, 757–766. New York: Guilford Press. Russell, Sharman. 2008. Hunger: An Unnatural History. New York: Basic Books. Sanday, Peggy Reeves. 1986. Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Schnall, Simone, Jonathan Haidt, Gerald L.  Clore, and Alexander H.  Jordan. 2008. Disgust as Embodied Moral Judgement. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 34(8): 1096–1109. Schneider, David M. 1968. American Kinship: A Cultural Account. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Stukator, Angela. 2001. It’s Not Over Until the Fat Lady Sings: Comedy, the Carnivalesque, and Body Politics. In Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression, ed. Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco, 197–213. Berkeley: University of California Press. Terry, Jennifer, and Jacqueline Urla. 1995. Introduction: Mapping Embodied Deviance. In Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture, ed. Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla, 1–18. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Travis-Henikoff, Carole A. 2008. Dinner with a Cannibal: The Complete History of Mankind’s Oldest Taboo. Santa Monica: Santa Monica Press. Vernon, James. 2009. Hunger: A Modern History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Wann, Marilyn. 1998. FAT!SO? Because You Don’t Have to Apologize for Your Size. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press. Warin, Megan. 2010. Abject Relations: Everyday World of Anorexia. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Yilmaz, Atakan, Emrah Uyanik, Melike C.  Balci Şengül, Serpil Yaylaci, Osgur Karcioglu, and Mustaka Serinken. 2014. Self-Cannibalism: The Man Who Eats Himself. The Western Journal of Emergency Medicine 15(6): 701–702.

CHAPTER 4

A Taste for Butchery: Slaughterhouse Narratives and the Consumable Body

Discussing notions of cultural acceptance in relation to food, Pasi Falk contends that the categories of edible and inedible are a “basic distinction closely related to analytically constructed and more abstract binary oppositions such as us vs. them, same vs. other, inside vs. outside, good vs. bad” (1994, 69). The notion of inedible is not simply associated with what is harmful to the body, pharmacologically or anatomically. Indeed, there is a strong cultural dimension to identifying that which is inedible, and it is neither associated with matters of physical taste, nor with physiological concerns. In reference to inedibility, Falk also suggests that “edible” is something which “may be accepted, taken into our community”, and, as a result, “our bodies” (1994, 69). The focus on community here suggests the importance of social, historical, and even political structures in determining what is acceptable in terms of edibility. Acceptance, of course, is not only a matter of digestibility, but is instead identified by the multiple rules and regulations that define the cultural context of a given group, at a given time. It is clear that the concept of inedible is connected to that which has been rejected – either physically or conceptually – by the community. Food is an ambivalent concept, and so is its place in relation to the dichotomies of consumption. Edible and inedible are dynamic categories, refusing to be tied to one specific context, and regulating not only individual alimentary structures, but also wider collective ones as well. Rules and prohibitions exist on how bodies should behave, and be approached; this includes, of course, what treatments of the body are © The Author(s) 2017 L. Piatti-Farnell, Consuming Gothic, Palgrave Gothic, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-45051-7_4

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allowed and appropriate. The body is permanently tied to a “network of boundaries” ranging from “concrete practices” to “classificatory codes” (Falk 1994, 55). In these terms, the experience of the body, and its corporeal delineation, cannot forego the boundaries of propriety and the definitions of taboo. The body is at the centre of divisions between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, and the regulations of behaviour that go with it. And while most of these regulations are contextual and mainly not transhistorical and transcultural, Western sensibilities are particularly clear on the inadmissibility of human slaughter for consumption. In these terms, eating is an important activity to define the corporeal boundaries of the body: how to eat, who to eat with, what to eat, and in what context. Eating is a corporeal system in itself, for it regulates the practices of the body, and the expression and experience therein. The corporeal experience of the body extends to cataloguing what is food, and how it should be treated. Within the Western psyche, regulations over the binary opposition of edible and inedible are particularly visible when eating meat is concerned, and what animals are allowed to be butchered and be thought of as ‘food’ – such as cows, pigs, and chickens – and which others are excluded from the structures of consumption – such as pets. It goes without saying that human flesh is ‘inedible’ in that its consumption breaks all the rules and regulations of Western culture. Generally speaking, the cultural prohibition regarding the consumption of human flesh is not a ‘natural’ preclusion, but a strictly cultural one. In truth, there is no “bodily wisdom” (Fischler 1988) in the avoidance of human flesh as food, as there is no actual threat in nutritional efficacy in its consumption. It is, more specifically, the result of centuries of religious and social regulation – particularly within Judeo-Christian belief  – that have identified the human being as having a higher status, and therefore being a somewhat sacred figure within the hierarchy of living creatures. The categories of edible and inedible are constituted by what Falk calls the “meta-order”, a system of social and cultural regulation that extends from the communal to the individual, and vice versa. On the collective scale, Falk argues, the metaorder is manifested in the forms of control that transform “repeatable” bodily experiences as either acceptable or unacceptable (1994, 87). The maintenance of boundaries is what separates the subject from the ‘Other’, that which does not belong in the community, and operates as a threat to its stability. The regulations over what foods are allowed, and what foods are prohibited, are instrumental to this. Falk goes on to suggest that, within the

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structures of the meta-order, the binaries of edible and inedible, of the broader “good” and “bad”, are constituted not in the positive dimension of pleasure, but in “the demarcation of the threatening, polluting, and disgusting” (1994, 87). Repulsion is at the core of maintaining the boundaries of the meta-order, and the control that derives from it. As food is so connected to the bodily dimension of human experience, it is not difficult to imagine why it occupies such a conspicuous part in highlighting the very nature of prohibition, an easy target for identifying acceptable behaviour within the social group. In her evaluation of food categories as part of representational structures of behaviour, Deborah Lupton argues that “food habits and preferences” act “symbolically” as “central practices […] directed at self-care via the continuing nourishment of the body with food that are deemed culturally appropriate” (1996, 15). At the core of understanding not only cannibalism, but, most importantly, the slaughter and butchery that often precede it, as a cultural as well as moral abomination, lies the diversification of objects as either ‘edible’ or ‘inedible’, and, to make it even more specific, ‘butcherable’ and ‘non-butcherable’. Indeed, as far as Western alimentary regulation is concerned, human flesh is not even allowed to figure on the list of potential consumables. Although the notion of murder is already culturally reprehensible in the Western paradigm, the represented narrative of butchery adds an even more deplorable dimension to the killing of a human being.

The Slaughterhouse Narrative Spectacles

and its

Violent

The practice and expression of violence is an important part of the construction of the food and horror narrative. In his evaluation of the concept of violence in relation to anthropological structures of behaviour, Larry Ray suggests that violence “presents a paradox” (2011, 3). Anthropological research has been strongly set in outlying violence as a clear “human universal”, a concept that is entangled with our interpersonal relationships – in a number of layered ways – and that has historically been a fulcrum for ensuring our advancement, growth, and success as a species (Ray 2011, 3). Aggression, assault, physical threat, homicide, as well as other forms of conflict, seem to be at the core of the human experience. Simultaneously, however, violence appears and is treated as – socially and culturally speaking – “exceptional, external and threatening us from

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­without” (Ray 2011, 3). In our Western context, the apparent repugnance towards violence can be traced back to the emergence of modernity, and the changes in the understanding of both human nature and relationships that derived from it. In truth, however, the human experience is conceptually violent in a number of ways. When it comes to acquiring food, the annihilation of other living creatures has often been at the centre of our consumption structures. Violence, according to Ray, is “embedded in our social fabric in manifold ways” (Ray 2011, 3). The commercialisation of violence in our contemporary human structures, especially in the West, is difficult to ignore. Commercialisation takes on many guises, especially when we conceptualise its connection to food and consumption in a direct manner. Representations of violence appear in a variety of media outlets, from film to television, from the news to reality programmes. The extenuation of the human body, including its eventual destruction through death, is endemic in our communication systems. Images of war and suffering are consumed, and intersect with the cultural dimensions of food via narratives of depravation and abundance. In a more explicit and direct way, the ‘violence’ of the food industry remains endemic within our Western consumption practices, so much that any discussion of food production, as well as animal welfare discourses, inevitably becomes a way to consume violence and its manifold narratives. Even in our contemporary context, we see media outlets, including the apt representations through film, engaging with what Tom Wolfe described, already in 1976, as “pornoviolence” (cited in Ray 2011, 3). It is bordering on mundane to highlight that, in order for occurrences such as slaughter to manifest, there must be a high level of physical subjugation, commonly and expectedly resulting in the death of the creature in question. Meat comes from animals, and only fools would deny the connection between dead flesh and our meaty foods. Nonetheless, when the slaughter of animals is what is under scrutiny, the term violence is very rarely used, except in a few circumstances. In our Western cultural discourse, and arguably universally in meat-eating societies, the killing of animals for food is not commonly understood as a violent act. Peter Iadicola and Anson Shupe contend that, indeed, violence is “not the term that we use when describing what is done in creating the diet of meat eaters” (2013, 254). Whenever the acquisition of food on the part of humans is concerned, the killing of animals is often denied, politically and socially, as a horrible and despicable violent act. In spite of numerous activist groups that have reinforced the idea of ‘meat is murder’, and the growing vegetarian

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agendas that have developed and solidified concomitantly over the years (if not centuries), the majority of Western thinkers do not willingly associate the slaughter of animals with violence. It is often thought of as a necessary act, one that many are unwilling to acknowledge, perpetrating the sense of both aversion and separation that many consumers have with the source of their own food. While slaughter is irrevocably bloody and off-putting, the killing of animals openly reared for food – such as cows – is the least likely area of physical subjugation to be thought of as violence. This narrative is also tacitly recalled in recent international films such as the South Korean Oldboy (2003), where the protagonist (Choi Min-sik) viscously bites into the head of a still-living octopus, and consumes it while it is still squirming, in a projected ‘savage’, yet accepted manner. Although, sociologically and culturally speaking, we may not be inclined to think of it as ‘violence’, the bloody horror of slaughter is unavoidably steeped in physical destruction, and, as such, exists as a ferocious practice. Scholars and activists have explored the conditions of “slaughterhouse animals” and invested a lot of time and energy in politicising their killing as an act of violence (Grandin 2008). And yet, the Western psyche, generally speaking, still refuses to think of the slaughter of animals as food as violent. The meat industry is clearly complicit in this, determined to hide “the acts of violence” that are performed on the animals we kill as food, and keep them “hidden from the consumers”, who are only presented with the “neatly packaged flesh of animals” (Iadicola and Shupe 2013, 254). There seems to be a latent narrative here that constructs certain animals as ‘for eating’. Their killing, therefore, seems to be justified and even required, in order for the food – the meat in question – to be obtained and consumed. Animals such as cows, pigs, and chickens are particularly unprivileged in their common understanding as food. Their status as absentee living ­creatures in the meat-production industry denies their killing any conceptualisation of violence. And yet, in spite of the desire and efforts not to visualise the commercial slaughter of animals as violence, the inevitable bloodiness of the sequential killing process acts as an unavoidable reminder of what ‘slaughter’ really is, not only in name, but also in concept. There also exists, on the broader cultural scale, an association between violence and the even more nebulous concept of morality. Allan Bäck contends that multiple frames of meaning associate the very idea of violence with behaviour that is, to some extent illicit and evidential of ‘extreme inhumanity’: “to call

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something ‘violent’”, argues Bäck, “is often to give it at least a prima facie reason why it is morally wrong” (2004, 223). This suggestion could go some way in explaining, broadly speaking, why the killing of animals for food is not commonly thought of as an incarnation of violence, at least not as far as the human networks of commercial requirements are concerned. This narrative, however, is fraught with issues, as recent activist campaigns in animal welfare have proved. Indeed, eating meat is often projected as ‘morally wrong’, and as a result, discourses of animal violence have developed and attracted attention (Bramble and Fischer 2015; Visak and Garner 2015). The Western consumer’s paradox is clearly addressed in the film Bitter Feast (2010), where Peter Grey, a gifted but unpopular television chef, gestures towards the killing of animals – from cattle to deer – as a bloody and gruesome process. His comment is instigated by the theatrical demonstration of shock from his show’s co-host and audience when he suggests that he personally hunted and killed the deer that the hunk of venison about to be cooked came from. When gasps of horror come from all around him, the chef angrily accuses everyone of hypocrisy, reminding them of where their supermarket ‘meat’ comes from, as well as the horrors of the slaughterhouse. Inevitably, his suggestion is received poorly, and with further shock from everyone in the studio. As a result, Grey later loses his job on the cooking show. This quick, yet evocative episode highlights several politicised differentiations that surround both the production and consumption of meat. On the one hand, one can see the unwillingness to define the slaughter of commercial animals as ‘violent’ or even ‘murderous’. On the other, we have the identification of hunting for food as a barbaric practice, an idea shrouded in Western hypocrisy. The subtle critique of contemporary cooking shows, advocating the use of ‘organic’ and ‘naturally’ produced meat, is also difficult to miss. Overall, the narrative that designates certain animals as food is clear. All the same, its presentation and representation must remain hidden, and away from the eyes of willing consumers. To be presented with the killing of an animal openly, even though the animal would commonly be thought of as ‘food’, can be disturbing and horrific. Film has often capitalised on this perception. One need only think here of Apocalypse Now (1979), where the feral soldiers, captained by Colonel Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), witness the killing of the unfortunate water buffalo with a machete as part of a tribal ritual. The act is presented as savage, part of the narrative that sees the soldiers ‘going native’ and abandoning

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civilisation for the barbaric practices of the jungles tribes. The buffalo is butchered gruesomely, and the act is openly represented and perceived as ‘violent’. There is an initial suggestion here that the reason why it is conceived as violent lies in the nature of the killing: too bloody, too gruesome, too close, and, inevitably, too ‘hands on’ in human terms, an apt reminder of our latent savagery, and the barbarity of our meat-eating practices. It is fascinating to see slaughter being used as a moniker for savagery, considering that, historically speaking, the consumption of meat in Western societies has often been associated with notions of progress and civilisation (Fiddes 1991, 116). While meat-eating might be ‘civilised’, examples such as Apocalypse Now raise the clear controversies around slaughter, identifying it as a violent and horrific practice whenever the act is removed from its ‘civilised’ surroundings. I would like to suggest that what makes the act violent, in this case, is the presence of blood, the gruesome representation of the animal’s death that designates it as a visually and conceptually violent occurrence. Blood is too evocative, and too difficult to justify in the eye of enlightened Western spectators. It is important to remember that, in general terms, the ‘horrors’ of the slaughterhouse, and the destruction of living creatures in order to create food, are widely considered customary in the Western imagination. Culturally speaking, there is an acceptance of  – or, perhaps, a desire to ignore  – not only the fact that meat comes from animals, but that the process involves the brutal absentification, physical and conceptual, of the living creature from which ‘meat’ comes. Vegetarianism is common and growing, and several activist groups have battled against the inhumane ways of killing animals – especially in high production-number slaughterhouses, where hundreds of animals go to meet their horrific fate on a daily basis – yet meat-eating is still an accepted, even expected, cultural practice. In her evaluation of the politics that surround the very act of slaughtering animals in Western society, Carol J. Adams argues that “through butchering, animals become absent referents” (1990, 40). Adams is referring to the anonymisation of the animal as a living entity, and the creation of a new category for classification: cows becoming ‘beef’, for instance, and pigs becoming ‘pork’. And while this does not apply to all animals that are killed and consumed by humans, it is a noticeable characteristic of the slaughtering process and the sociocultural and socio-economic networks that exist around it. The very notion of ‘meat’ relies on the destruction of animals, and the creation of a new category of food; that destruction is not simply physical, but depends on the re-imagining of living flesh as

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‘dead meat’. “Without animals”, Adams argues, “there would be no meat eating, yet they are absent from the act of eating meat” (1990, 40). The animals’ lives precede and enable the existence of meat, but for the one to exist, the other needs to disappear. As the dead body replaces the living animal, its identity as a separate entity also becomes non-existent. What it was before ceases to exist or be considered, and what remains is its function as a consumable. Humans customarily occupy a higher position in the structure of cultural referents, especially in relation to animals. Humans are the ones who commit the slaughter, annihilate the animal, and consume the meat. In some films, however, that higher position is denied, and humans become meat, activating the presence of one of the most resonant taboos in Western culture. Adams goes on to suggest that, because the structure of the absent referents is “is so deeply rooted in Western culture”, we as individuals “fail to see anything disturbing in the violence” that is “an inextricable part of this structure” (1990, 43). Consequently, we eat meat, while at the same time enjoying petting farm animals and labelling them as ‘cute’. This conceptually odd separation is recalled with a certain amount of irony in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), where both Todd himself (Johnny Depp) and Mrs Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter) are able to engage in pleasant conversations with the customers they are about to kill, treating them almost as ‘equals’ right until the time when they slit their throats. Sweeney Todd provides a veiled critique of the interaction that takes place in and outside of the slaughterhouse, how humans have the ability to willingly separate the animals from the meat – figuratively and physically – whenever it suits their purposes. In a way, Sweeney Todd desensitises the audience to the politics of the slaughterhouse, instigating an almost overbearing narrative of sympathy and revenge that allows the slaughter, and later consumption, of humans to emerge in not only a parodic but also decidedly justified manner. In other films, however – from American Psycho (2000) to the infamous The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) – the killing and slaughter of living entities to create ‘meat’ is primarily presented as shocking and horrific, and this change is brought upon precisely because those killed are human and not animals, in the strictest sense. The shock, of course, is heightened not just by making humans into meat, but by the knowledge that other humans are committing the slaughter. The absent referent, in this case, is made unavoidably present. The slaughter of humans draws attention to the callousness and violence of the act, and makes the differentiation between alive and dead, human and

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non-human, food and consumer, very difficult to discern. Adams suggests that “the interaction between physical oppression and the dependence on metaphors that rely on the absent referent indicates that we distance ourselves” from it, and build our superiority on the destruction of that “which we have already objectified” (1990, 44). Objectification implies not only separation, but also the justification of actions that break our own boundaries of propriety and conduct. At the core of it all lies the presence of uncontrollable and rampant desires, of a hunger that is continuous and can never be satisfied. While the represented slaughter of animals on film would be, at best, horrific because of its graphic nature, the slaughter of humans is a loud reminder that our own cultural structures rely on thinly veiled and precarious regulations that are fleeting as much as they are oppressive. With the exception of pets, the killing and eating of animals is rarely conceived as an act of violence. When it come to humans, however, killing, especially as murder, is commonly characterised and institutionalised as violence. A number of films make this conceptual narrative very clear, and the violence is made even more unacceptable when it is coupled with the ideas of butchery, and the cannibal consumption that often derives thereafter. The murder of humans for consumption is abominable enough, but their treatment and slaughter ‘as cattle’ is utterly unthinkable. Examples such as Hunger (2009) clearly communicate the slaughter of humans for food as an unthinkable violent act. The narrative of violence itself is pushed into the foreground when the captives begin to attack each other, driven literally mad – or so it is implied – with hunger. The killing of Grant in the film is particularly presented as violent. He is cornered by the ravenous others, and forcefully subjugated. He is then wildly and horrifically beaten with an old human bone – the remains of one of the victims of a previous experiment – until he finally dies. There is no denying that the ‘slaughter’ of Grant is projected as a violent act. The directness of the killing identifies it as what Slavoj Žižek terms “subjective violence”. This is a type of violence that is “directly visible”, and performed by a clearly “identifiable agent” with a clearly identifiable agenda (2008, 1). Žižek goes on to say that subjective violence is precisely the violence that is seen as “a perturbation of the normal and peaceful state of things” (2008, 2). It is important here to identify the conception of ‘normal’ in relation to violence, and accept that the conceptualisation of normality continues to be relative and reconstructed according to the cultural narrative in question. While the situation put forward in Hunger could hardly be defined as completely ‘normal’ in the general sense – for in reality not many people

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are captured and forced to eat other human beings out of desperation – I would like to suggest that the normality to be identified would be the relationship between human and food, or, to be more specific, what is to be considered food in relation to human consumption. This, naturally, includes animals, and how ‘normal’ it is, culturally speaking, to consume certain animals as food. In Hunger, the normality that is broken is precisely that of the consumption narrative, where humans are removed from their culturally understood superior status, which designates them as the hunter, and not the hunted. The break in this ‘normal’ relationship of consumption is signalled unavoidably in Hunger by the act of violence, the murder that is graphically conceived and portrayed in order to communicate the failure of cultural regulation. Subjective violence – what many commonly regard simply as violence, usually associated with physical beatings, more often than not of a bloody nature – is regarded, Žižek argues, as the result of “irrational” behaviour, which therefore also designates the physical and embodied explosions of brutality as unpredictable and abnormal in turn (2008, 2). It is quite clear that Hunger presents a situation where humans are ‘driven mad’ by hunger, their visceral requirement leading to irrational and uncontrollable behaviour, where the urge to feed supersedes their rationality. The violence of killing, aimed at acquiring matters to be consumed, is projected as only part of the violence within the narrative. We also witness an instance of what Žižek terms “objective violence”, the “invisible” narrative of violence that is inherent in psychological abuse, and is embodied in Hunger in the construction of forced starvation as a violent narrative (2008, 2). The typologies of violence projected in the film are connected and interconnected with the idea of both materialisation and consumption, or, to be specific, of the problem of consumption – of the exploitations that lie at the bottom of our Western consumption practices, where the production of food, especially meat, is entangled with the idea of violence, and violence itself produces a narrative of both humanity and inhumanity that can only be addressed and dissected in the medium of blood. The most evocative part of the killing and feeding frenzies in Hunger is not the act of cannibalism itself. While not necessarily commonplace, the act is expected and seemingly presented as an inevitable presence in the narrative. What strikes the viewer is the ways in which the captives kill the weak Grant, and then proceed to feed on his flesh. Firstly, the captives literally ‘hunt’ Grant. They surround him in the same fashion as a pack of wolves would, and subdue him violently. Then, the captives consume the

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flesh – now understood as ‘meat’ – immediately, and in its obviously raw state. They revel in its bloodiness, and do not seem fazed by its rawness, overcome as they are by hunger. It is no surprise to see Jordan, who does not partake in the feast, refer to her fellow captives as “savages”. The consumption of raw meat here serves to establish their savagery, this visual performance recalling the well-established anthropological concept that we as humans “distinguish ourselves from barbarity by the cooking of meat” (Fiddes 1991, 87). The captives’ behaviour cannot even be described as prehistoric, as the practice of cooking is an established presence in the development of human organisation, as is the preference for cooked meat that distinguishes humans from animals (Dando 1980, 3). That the meat in question here is human flesh is almost of secondary importance, as the return to a ‘savage’, animalistic way of feeding negates the presence of the cultural laws that construct us conceptually as human. The consumption of human flesh is, therefore, but an emphasising addition to this perceived loss of humanity. The most evocative instance of dehumanising here lies not only in the violence, but in the consumption of the ‘carcass’ in a beastly fashion, whatever provenance that carcass may have. As far the killing in Hunger is concerned, the violent undertones are clearly those of a slaughterhouse, where Grant – conceptualised and identified as ‘cattle’  – is knocked unconscious, beaten, and bled until dead. One might even be tempted to suggest that the film openly constructs a critique of the meat-production industry, and the violence that cattle are subjected to in commercial slaughterhouses, even if the majority of consumers are not often willing to address the issue, or identify the treatment as violence as such. The deplorable conditions of the slaughterhouse are also recalled in the idea of captivity and entrapment that is forcefully projected in Hunger, as a number of humans among the captured are slowly reconceptualised as cattle by their peers. The horror of the violent act derives not only from witnessing the cultural regression of the human being, but also from the tacit recollection of the abattoir narrative. Cannibalistic slaughter, however, is conceptually rather different from the simple (so to speak) notion of murder, even as brutal as any murder might actually be. Cannibalism adds a layer of cultural significance that operates even further into the objectification of the Other, even if that Other is apparently part of the same species as the killer. As Adams suggests, “consumption is the fulfilment of oppression, the annihilation of will, of separate identity” (1990, 47). Consumption is the ultimate act of fragmentation, for it fully separates that which is about to be consumed

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from its own network of boundaries, and places it within the structures of domination that belong solely to the eater. In these terms, consumption is also the ultimate act of oppression, for the absentification of the referent reiterates its annihilation as a subject and its importance – or lack thereof – in sociocultural structures. Consumption consolidates the subject into an object, and makes it fully expendable. While aggression seeks to control the victim – a control that finds its ultimate fulfilment in the dehumanising act of slaughter – consumption also defiles the body by depriving it of its humanity. The body is not the only thing that is butchered. With cannibalistic butchery and consumption, what is slayed is also the image of the superior, and culturally untouchable, human being. It is worth recalling here that the anonymity and objectification implied within the limits of cannibal slaughter and consumption also bear a conceptual affinity with popularised images of how consumers in capitalist structures are often viewed. Deprived of an agency via their insatiable desires for purchasing and owning objects, consumers are objectified as cogs in the capitalist machine. Deprived of a single and individual identity, consumers become part of an objectified multitude, driven by capitalism as an oppressive, yet irresistible force. To illustrate this, one can turn to the example of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), where the victims are all consumers themselves, paying for services at the barbershop. Similarly, those who are made to consume the cannibal pies are also consumers in turn, paying for goods with avid fervour. Mrs Lovett’s pies are portrayed as delicious and utterly resistible. The customers consume them, but in so doing they are complicit in depriving their butchered fellow man of agency. The image of the slaughtered human is removed, and all that remains is the desire for the product. Without the referent point of the “slaughtered, bleeding, butchered” carcass, “meat” is taken to be an anonymous concept, an unhistoricised idea in an unhistoricised context (Adams 1990, 48). In this sense, Mrs Lovett’s customers are also positioning themselves as prime targets for the intellectual fragmentation, defilement, and future annihilation that their tastes and preferences instigate. Adams reminds us that “through fragmentation, the object is severed from its ontological meaning”, and exists only “through what it represents” (1990, 47). Consumers are, therefore, their own absent referents. They remove themselves from the production line, without realising that they are, in some form, the ‘meat’ of the production itself.

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Leatherface’s (Slaughter)House of Horrors In his famous and text-spanning analysis of discourses of power and our worldly experiences, Foucault discusses “techniques of domination” in relation to the societal control that is imposed on the body and the experience of corporeality (Martin et  al. 1988). Foucault primarily discusses these techniques, such as ascetic fasting and other forms of bodily denial, in relation to religious belief and the renunciation of “sins”. Nonetheless, his ideas concerning bodily control and the exploitation of corporeality can be transported to seeing the relationship between the human body and its unfathomable slaughter as a form of “technology of domination”. And while, in this case, the control over the body is external and mostly not self-imposed, the concept of placing the body at the physical and conceptual centre of a system of power and domination remains valid. In this context, it seems almost obvious to suggest that any breakage of the cultural boundaries on which our experience of corporeality relies will challenge the stability of the system in which the body resides. Falk develops the Foucauldian logic of domination by claiming that a body “becomes” a “human body” only when it is constructed as part of “an Order” that encompasses both socio-practical structures and cultural meaning structures (1994, 45). In this context, the butchery and consumption of a human body, within the non-ritualised context of the Western psyche, highlights the split. That is to say, when the confined boundaries that define the human body as outside of food categories are broken, and when another body, in turn, is the cause of that breakage via torture, slaughter, and consumption, the structures of rationality and order that protected them also collapse. In that, the slaughter and consumption of the human body finds its true conceptual inadmissibility, for in breaking the corporeal boundaries of the body, it also collapses the stability of the social self. As far as human beings are concerned, the objectification – especially within the context of slaughter – of the human body implies the inevitable annihilation of the identity that goes with it, a depravation of the higher status as an intelligent being, and a denial of the empathy and respect that we expect from our fellow human. In an echo of Foucault’s ideas, but much more attuned to the cultural dynamics that designate certain living creatures as ‘edible’, Carol Adams suggests that “objectification permits an oppressor to view another being as an object” (1990, 47). Objectification, or the equalisation of the living creature – whether human or animal – into an entity without agency lies at the core of any understanding of violence,

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especially when the horrific layers of cannibal slaughter are added to the equation. Adams goes on to claim that it is “a cycle of objectification, fragmentation, and consumption” that links butchering and violence in our culture (1990, 47). This cycle is visible in a number of examples where the notion of ‘human slaughter’ is presented, from the now infamous The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to more recent examples such as Sweeney Todd. I would like to particularly focus on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as both a reference and a starting point for identifying the narrative of human slaughter in the context of contemporary film. The human victims are deprived of agency via a process of fragmentation that makes both their killing and the consumption of their bodies permissible. The transformation from ‘living human body’ to ‘meat’ relies on a process of intellectual fragmentation, which results in brutal killing and dismemberment first, followed by consumption. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre tells the story of Sally Hardesty and her brother Franklin (Marilyn Burns and Paul Partain), who take a road trip to visit the remote site of their grandfather’s grave. The siblings are accompanied by their three friends, Kirk (William Vail), Pam (Teri McMinn), and Jerry (Allen Danziger). After their stop at the graveyard, the group decide to go on and visit the old Hardesty homestead, now in disrepair. In search of gas and other necessities, the friends head out into the country and unluckily come across another semi-abandoned property inhabited by Leatherface, a clearly psychopathic and homicidal man who proceeds to butcher and eliminate every member of the group, in ways that clearly recall the set-up of the slaughterhouse, complete with meat hooks. The aim of the slaughter, it is quickly revealed, is for Leatherface and his family to consume the flesh of the victims, in an instance of cinematic cannibalism that has helped to establish it as a tropic reoccurrence even in contemporary cinema. Excluded from the collective slaughter is Sally, who manages to flee the murder house by jumping onto a nearby truck at the end of the film. This is much to Leatherface’s dismay, who pursues Sally until the very end, brandishing his chainsaw in the air, and cementing arguably one of the most iconic images in horror film history. Of course, various parts of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre have become infamously recognisable over the years, including Leatherface’s own facial mask, which is suggestively made of skin and obscures his features completely – with the suggestion that he is horribly disfigured. One can see here the re-establishment of the “trope of physical deformity” as a very evocative denotation of “the character’s evil inner nature” (Nelson 2010, 113). The evil here is, of course,

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not only connected to Leatherface’s maniacal uses of butcher-shop violence, but also his cannibalistic proclivities. Over the years, the fame of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has been such that, like a number of other slasher films, it has warranted a number of rethinkings and re-elaborations, including a prequel, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006), and a remake, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003). The evocative narrative of the slaughterhouse clearly runs throughout The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, even if, instead of cattle, what is being butchered are human beings. This is suggestively communicated in the haunting image of Leatherface hanging Pam’s body on a meat hook, even placing a metal bucket under her feet, so that her blood can be drained and collected efficiently. This is clearly a common practice in butcher shops, or a slaughterhouse, usually reserved for larger animal carcasses, such as cows and pigs. The exsanguination of Pam’s body, however, is not the only signal of her dehumanisation. Pam is left to hang on the meat hook and made to watch as Leatherface butchers Kirk’s body to pieces with a chainsaw, a gruesome evocation of the practices of an actual slaughterhouse, when cows are often made to stand in line, waiting and watching their fellow animals being killed. The human body is unavoidably aligned with that of an animal, with cattle waiting for the slaughter. In a darkly comical twist, Leatherface is even shown wearing a white apron, clearly impersonating the figure of a butcher, in both practical and conceptual terms. The horror that derives from the scene comes from the knowledge that Pam will also soon be butchered and likely consumed, and even though Leatherface and his family are never explicitly shown consuming the flesh of their victims, several unavoidable hints and phrases – especially the haunting conversations about ‘cooking’ their victims – make this a safe assumption throughout the film. The treatment of the human body here as ‘meat’ devoids it of its social agency. Deprived of the cultural structures that identify the human as superior and separate from other creatures within the animal kingdom, the body is reduced to flesh and, even more horrifically, to food. The fates of the slaughtered victims in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre echo the conceptualisation of animals as absent referents in that the killing of humans in these examples is highly organised and rationalised, just as it would be in a slaughterhouse, where matters of production become the most important value to be pursued. Here there is a conceptual connection between the continuous and high-number killing of animals in the capitalist slaughterhouse, and the callous, merciless, and coldblooded way in which human beings are killed and butchered in the films. Adams argues that, in our

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Western culture, “the structure of the ‘absent referent’ strengthens oppression by always recalling other oppressed groups” (1990, 43). And while the humans are unfortunately transformed into absent referents – deprived as they are of their usual and common position as the meat eaters, and transformed into meat themselves – the critique of the rampant desires of the capitalist is almost unavoidable (Fig. 4.1). The Foucauldian framework of domination becomes particularly relevant if one views the act of butchering and slaughtering as a form of ideological punishment. Connected as it is to a conceptualised vision of discipline and restraint – as perverse and as incredible a notion as it may seem  – holding someone prisoner, with the intention of slaughtering them for food, could be catalogued as a technique of domination, in the wider discourses of discipline and punishment. Again, Foucault intended his considerations on punishment to be confined to public establishments such as prisons and hospitals, but while the contextual visualisation is different in the case of body and slaughter, the conceptual framework continues to ring true. Foucault suggests that all disciplinary techniques develop, for the most part, in a world marked by the “absence of freedom” (the subject and power, 221). This is the suggestion that runs through the slaughter scenes in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Confinement, in the

Fig. 4.1  A meat hook awaits the unfortunate Pam (Teri McMinn) in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

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Foucauldian sense, is at the core of Leatherface’s treatment of his victims. After impaling Pam on a meat hook, and rendering both her movements and escape impossible, he then traps her in the freezer, while she is still (barely) alive. The butcher, however, interrupts the Foucauldian logic by negating the victims’ diversification and realisation of ‘freedom’, mental or physical. There is no correction for the butchers, and there is no redemption for the eaten. There is only slaughter, and the end of reason. The slaughter and subsequent consumption of the human being is the ultimate expression of power. Indeed, the recollection of a physical and actual slaughterhouse is the topic of conversation both in and outside the confined space of Leatherface’s house of horrors. We are told multiple times that all the members of Leatherface’s family worked at the local slaughterhouse for generations, and that Grandpa – now barely more than a corpse – used to be the “best killer in the old slaughterhouse”. When, in the later stages of the narrative, the apogee of Sally’s torture is reached, it is announced by Leatherface and his family that the method chosen to kill her is the same as the one used for the cows in the local slaughterhouse: a hard blow on the head is intended to accomplish the deed, an extremely brutal way of killing that draws even further attention to the extreme physicality of the act, and her unavoidable objectification. It is clear from the recollections of the dialogue, and a furtive shot of the building that was captured when the group of friends were still travelling by car, that the slaughterhouse is a large establishment, providing great amounts of meat for the area, and therefore not operating as a small economic establishment. It is conceptually possible here to interpret the slaughterhouse as a symbol of capitalism. In his highly polemic critique of the workings of contemporary socio-­economics, Jerry Phillips contends that the system of greed, corporate violence, and accumulation – which he sees as the core of capitalism – is “the ultimate statement of the savagery of history […] whose proper moral is a cannibalistic idolatry” (1998, 185). He also persuasively suggests that reimagining capitalism as cannibalism emphasises “the profound irritability of a system that must perforce devour itself ” (1998, 185). If one were to extend Phillips’s connection between capitalism and cannibalism to the interlaced metaphor of the slaughterhouse and Leatherface’s needs for both violence and abominable consumption, two clear ideas would begin to surface. First, capitalism reduces people to cattle, a multitude of consumers passively waiting in line. Second, capitalism is a cannibalising force, destroying itself as it grows. Through this notion, the two sides of ‘cannibal slaughter’ become tangible.

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Cultural historian Keith Thomas argues that the historical subjugation of other human beings – both socially and economically – has been dependent on the dehumanisation of the cultural Other, or, at least, on the understanding of the Other as ‘less human’. As he proposes, “once perceived as beasts, people were liable to be treated accordingly” (1983, 44). Although Thomas is clearly alluding to colonial politics of conquest, as well as the pseudo-religious mentality connected to despicable acts of genocide, the idea of perceiving people as less than human, equal to beasts, is clearly at the centre of the acts of cannibal slaughter presented in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Indeed, cannibalism has often been used as metaphorical evidence for labelling the colonial ‘other’, defining them as inferior and overall uncivilised. In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the dehumanisation of the victims presents itself in the form of a lack of empathy, an inability to connect so as to create an emotional relationship with fellow human beings that would warrant respect. Thomas contends that the “ethic” of domination legitimises “the ill-treatment of those humans” who are “in supposedly animal condition” (1983, 44). Indeed, there is very little sense of compassion in the actions and reactions of Leatherface and his family members, implying that all cultural notions of humanity have been far removed from their context. This narrative is also recalled in Sweeney Todd, but here, it is manifestly the victims that are brutally slaughtered on the barber chair, punished for their perceived lack of humanity. In his rage and thirst for vengeance, Todd fails to establish an empathetic connection with others, and this results in the dehumanisation and demotion of his patrons to greedy and senseless ‘beasts’. Once the victims are viewed as such, their killing comes easy and it is, somehow, justified. The enacted or intended slaughter, as presented in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, highlights the imbalance in the experience of the body and its limits. In a useful approach to dissecting the simultaneously subjective and objective experience of our bodies in context, Falk suggests that corporeality can be looked at as having two dimensions: expressive and experiential. These two dimensions, as Falk understands them, may be described by numerous and veiled pairs of attributes, from “active/passive” to “externalising/internalising” (Falk 1994, 62). Slaughter and consumption, as well as the unfortunate receivership of both on the victim’s side, highlight both the expressive and experiential aspects of corporeality. In view of Falk’s dichotomous understanding of corporeality, one might want to suggest that, in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Leatherface and his family members are situated in the expressive aspect of corporeality: the side

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that relies on the physical manifestation of uncontrollable pleasure, and is active in pursuing the breaking down of bodily and cultural boundaries. Leatherface and his family are often shown taunting the victims, almost carnivalising the butchering affair and transforming it into a frenzied manifestation of group identity. Here, both slaughter and the cannibalism that follows are presented as naturalised practices, clear and unavoidable outcomes of the perceived ‘madness’ that haunts the family in their physically remote lifestyle. Their victims, on the other hand, especially Pam and Sally, experience their corporeality in a passive way. Awaiting their fate – to be butchered and eaten – they are made aware of their own senses in an internalising way, and experience the fear that comes with the knowledge of inevitability. It will be worth recalling that the experience of corporeality can be interpreted, to use a term favoured by Georges Bataille, as a form of “transgression”. Bataille uses this term to differentiate between the normal and the celebratory, the everyday and the fête. Culture, Bataille contends, imposes boundaries, and transgressive behaviour  – extreme pleasure or extreme distress – crosses the borders of those boundaries. Bataille identifies transgression as a “longing” for a “natural state”, away from the oppressive hold of culture (1962; Falk 1994, 59). All ritual performances that involve the body in any form are transgressive, for they draw attention to the experience of the physical in ways that often exceed the boundaries of propriety. I would like to suggest that the slaughter and consumption of the human body is, in fact, the ultimate transgression. Bataille suggests that, in ritual behaviour, human beings strive for transgression, as it points to the dynamics where the order of the secular and the order of the scared merge and shatter (1962). In view of his dichotomous approach to the festive and the everyday, Bataille only discusses transgression as an occasional and highly ritualised practice, even including the consumption of human flesh within the pleasures of tribal (non-Western) honorification and remembrance. This interaction is clearly evoked in cinematic examples such as Cannibal Holocaust (1980), where the butchering and consumption of the human is still proposed in a ritualised fashion. What if, however, corporeal transgression were to take on a less-ritualised vestige, and insinuate itself into the seemingly normal everyday? This question drives the understanding of ‘human slaughter’ as a culturally transgressive practice. Both the ‘butchering’ and the ‘butchered’ states exist away from cultural notions of Western normality. The transgressive experience of the body – as crystallised in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre – produces, I would

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like to suggest, a hyper-state of corporeality. The extreme actualisation of corporeality – the experience of the body, so to speak – is granted a special place in the dual conceptualisation of the “cultural dynamics” that highlight the foundations of social interaction (Falk, 59). This idea of being separate from the culturally normal is often made explicit by the fact that these acts of slaughter usually take place in remote or concealed places – as in the case of the butcher shop of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or the horrible underground chambers in Sweeney Todd – or are presented as normal to begin with, and are then revealed to have hidden passageways or rooms – as is the case in Bitter Feast. The corporeal manifestations in these narratives, whether active or passive, signal the breaking of boundaries, the crossing of borders, the disintegration of the known and the proper, and, in turn, the destruction of the social order. The slaughter, whether enacted or suggested, is shocking because it highlights the moment of transgression, where the body is taken from the normal state to a hyper and horrific state: that of simply being meat, devoid of actual agency. In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, transgression manifests itself, in a Burkian way, as both pleasure and fear. While a number of killings are performed by Leatherface in a matter-of-fact sort of way, there is a certain rituality to his family’s murderous activities. The same can be said for Sweeney Todd, where victims are slaughtered in a recurrent manner, exposing elements of ritual. That ritual, however, exists only within the bounds of the butcher’s narrative. Outside of it, it is horrific and unacceptable. Human slaughter takes on a naturalised quality. Transgression turns into a form of regression, the extreme experience of the bodily, and the clash of active and passive corporeality removes both the butcher and the victim from the limitations of the Order. The term “regression”, of course, takes many nuances, from Freud’s psychoanalytic view of a return to an early state of psychosexual development, to Lévi-Strauss’s anthropological conceptualisation as regression to a natural state, before cultural rules were established. The slaughter reverts the killers to an almost infantile state – to recall the Freudian term. This is visible in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre when, in the midst of the excitement and transgressive anticipation of the slaughter of Sally, Leatherface and his brother feed her blood to their quasi-mummified, yet still living grandfather. As the grandfather suckles at her bloody fingers, he begins to behave like an infant, making baby noises and movements of pleasure, while his grandsons incite the act with screams of transgressive hedonism. As the corporeal boundaries are

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broken – and the grandfather ‘feeds’ off Sally’s blood – the regression is complete. In Lévi-Strauss’s account, all transgressive rituals, breaking away from notions of social control, “strive to get back to the continuous” – the natural, the unprescribed, the unruled (1981, 679). Butchering and consuming humans is a return to a frighteningly ‘natural’ state, deprived of human control and laws. It is particularly terrifying when those who commit the act are seemingly ‘normal’ individuals, a situation that presents itself in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in the figure of the gas station proprietor, who will later reveal himself to be Leatherface’s father, and an avid cook of human bodies. The fear lies in knowing that it could be anybody, the transgressive butcher in search of a victim. For the body to be understood as a corporeal unit  – that is, a categorisable entity that is regulated by cultural, social, and even historical forces  – there must be defined borders that dictate both its limitations and its possibilities. Falk argues that “corporeality demands the existence of limits confining, restricting and defining the human body” (1994, 61). These limits refer not only to how the single body moves and operates in itself, but also what practices are allowed unto the body, and by the body, in sociocultural contexts. That is to say, how the body should be treated in order to be recognised and recognisable as an independent entity, and what activities are seen as the corporeal dimension of what is understood as humanity. The expression of corporeality is reflected in its externalising functions, the actions that make the body break its own containment and reach out in the world. Common expressions of the breakage in corporeal boundaries are convulsive laughter, violent coughing, and even the signs of sexual stimulation (Falk 1994, 64). In this context, any activities that extend the reach of the corporeal boundary are seen as transgressive, an externalising force that translates emotion into corporeal expression. The externalising forces of corporeality are visible in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, even before the butchering of human bodies actualises onto the scene. When the unfortunate Sally is tied onto a chair and made to watch as Leatherface and his family consume a meal – presumably comprised of several human parts – her killers’ excitement levels grow as much as her fear rises, and the moment of slaughter approaches. In this externalising state, before the slaughter begins, the transgression of corporeal boundaries, both conceptually and behaviourally, causes that “modern individual” to dissolve “the boundaries of the self ” (Falk 1994, 64). Leatherface and his brother, the self-confessed butchers of the family, begin to howl, scream, and loudly taunt their soon-to-be victim. They find it difficult to

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sit still, and begin to hop, gesticulate theatrically, and laugh maniacally. Their father even reprimands their behaviour, accusing them of acting like “howling dogs”. This simple accusation also suggests that Leatherface and his brother have broken the psychic boundaries of the human, and have somehow regressed into an animal-like, predatory state. The convulsive expression of corporeality here is visible as the “alien force” that displaces the human being and repositions it outside of the cultural order (Bataille 1962). The frenzy is an externalisation of pleasure and expectation. The boundaries of the composed body are broken by convulsive and uncontrolled movements, which remove Leatherface and his brother even further from the cultural system of human behaviour. The idea of ‘losing the self’ through the breaking of corporeal boundaries is also visible, as far as butchering and the cannibal consumption that derives are concerned, not only in the killers, but also in the victims. It is this disintegration of boundary that causes horror, fear, and the feeling of disassociation from the rational and the proper. The experiential dimension of corporeality becomes apparent in the victims’ internalisation of the cultural interruption, as the knowledge of what is soon to happen is crystallised. In Sally’s case, the internalisation of slaughter is clearly visible in her heightened sensorial experiences. We see extreme close-ups of her eyes as they frantically move around the room, absorbing the situation and her approaching demise. The corporeality of the victim is, as Falk puts it, “devoid of any cognitive self-agencies” (1994, 64). As Sally’s killers discuss how she will be butchered, the close-ups on her eyes become more frantic and more detailed, indicating the unmediated representation of corporeality. There are no cultural rules protecting Sally, her body exposed to the unguarded and uncontrolled actions of the transgressive and the regressed. Although no physical contact is experienced at this stage, Sally’s status highlights the importance and uses of the distant senses  – hearing and sight – in emphasising the breaking of the rational boundaries of existence. Slaughter, in this sense, is not simply about the concrete annihilation of the body, but can also be understood as the disintegration of sensorial experience. The field of corporeal experience here is both immediate and latent, expanded as the idea of torture extends to the conscious human mind. As her fate is discussed, Sally is made to be both listener and spectator to the failure of cultural control. Falk suggests that, in our modern Western era, the increase in density of the norms related to corporeality “produces a multiplicity and diversification of transgressions”, which exist in “complimentary opposition” (1994, 65). As a result, the individual

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body is exposed to a number of potentially transgressive practices: from pleasure to fear, from killing to being the object of torture. All these experiences are, of course, only understood as such once the culturally derived sensorial boundaries of the body are defined, and the human becomes a cultural territory, as much as an agent. In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, however, the conceptualisation of slaughter as transgression points us in the direction of identifying the falling of rational boundaries at the centre of what transforms the human into a deterritorialised entity. The pleasure of Sally’s killers is fed by her internalised fear, and the sensorial experience that derives therein. The breaking of the culturally established world of signs and symbols – the primacy of language, which, in this case, also stands for the world of progress and reason – causes a return to a primordial state. The mouth is central in outlining the extent of corporeality – that is, the cultural conventions surrounding the limits and limitations of the human body – not only as the primal organ in consumption but also due to its expressive function. Falk suggests that “modern consumption is thematised as the primary realm of self-construction, offering material for both its social and personal dimensions”, and for “individuation” and “self-completion” (1994, 10). It is important to note that Leatherface, clearly the most uncontrolled and uncontrollable killer in the family, is also denied the faculty of speech. Displaying a deeply infantile behaviour, he is unable to communicate with words, and limits himself to grunts and high-pitched squeals, which grow louder and more frantic whenever he encounters one of his victims. Our attention is drawn to the butcher’s inability to operate in the culturally constructed world of signs, to use a term borrowed from semiotics. If it is true that consumption, and the mastering of oral stimuli – not only in terms of taste and eating, but also in terms of speech – are to be regarded as evidence of the individual’s progress as a socially stable entity, then Leatherface’s failure to communicate via speech, and his practices of cannibal slaughter, finds a conceptual connection. As far as sensorial associations go, the rationalisation of sight as a guiding sense, and the establishment of speech, has often been seen as a civilising process, a way of refining the response to external stimuli and realising the individual (Ginzburg 1990, 11). The primacy of sight, in this context, is also established, and sight itself understood as the highest and most refined of all senses. In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, however, the understanding of sight as a ‘rational’ sense is challenged, and coupled with the absence of speech in Leatherface. This communicates the breaking of

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boundaries in relation not only to the individual, but also the culture in which it is placed. Indeed, while Leatherface is denied speech, he finds a means of communication, together with the rest of his family, in closely observing and taunting his victims before he butchers them. This is particularly evident during the horrifying dinner table scene, when Sally’s frightened reactions are watched closely. In a way, one could suggest that Leatherface and his family are consuming her suffering, before they actually get to eat her body. Discussing the relationship between sensorial stimuli and desire, psychologist Otto Fenichel suggests that during moments of extreme pleasure (in particular), the eyes gain “mouth-like” functions, turning into truly voracious organs (1982, 37). There is nothing new in suggesting that people can ‘eat’ with their eyes, as the part played by the eyes in the process of consumption, and the importance of generating a succession of cultural images to go with it, is long-established. And while there is a clear physiological difference in sensorial stimuli between the material incorporation of eating and the optical reception of food images, the two dimensions share the common ground of social and cultural formation. Nonetheless, the visual consumption of suffering in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre subverts the uses of pleasure, to use a Foucauldian term, and destabilises both the construction of acceptable images and the act of eating itself. There is no denying that, as the moment of Sally’s demise finally approaches, and Leatherface and his family wait for Grandpa to strike the killing blow to her head, their grunts and screams grow louder, just as their eyes fixate on the victim, in an almost hypnotic way. The pleasure of the cannibal slaughter is not simply achieved through the ultimate consumption, but is fetishised through what Gert Mattenklott calls “iconophagy”, the consumption of images in a hedonic and furious manner (cited in Falk 1994, 11). The distinction between inside and outside here – an apt metaphorical rendering of the act of eating itself – disintegrates just as the boundaries between Western notions of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ collapse. Both images and human flesh are consumed via the act of butchering, the violence that lies at the centre of it testifying to the repulsion that the act causes in view of the cultural interventions that regulate our lives. In her study Carnal Appetites, cultural sociologist Elspeth Probyn attempts to explain the perverse charisma of the cannibal as a figure who emphasises the most human of attributes, as well as designating the limit beyond which humanity is thought to cease [… Cannibalism] brings

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together competing aspects underlying western identity: its analogy with capital and consumer society is congruent with fears that our appetites have no end. (2000, 80–81)

Consuming the victim visually adds not only to the pleasure, but also to the expectation of consuming the victim physically. Clearly, in-between the two stages, what constructs the apogee of the pleasure is actually the butchering itself, the moment of killing, which incorporates the varied layers of voraciousness through the concrete and tangible act. And while Sally in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre makes a miraculous escape  – not meeting the same butchered fate as her friends and brother  – what we witness in the midst of the intended act is the anticipation and spectacle of carnage, the voraciousness of perversion, transgression, and regression as Leatherface and his family break not only the boundaries of the body, but also those of societal and cultural control. This is a scenario that is also made very clear in other examples such as Bitter Feast and The Perfect Host (2010), where enjoyment is derived from scopophilia as much as it is from the act of killing. As far as the cannibal is concerned, that ‘act’ is also perceived as violent, and therefore becomes idiosyncratically meaningful in itself, echoing the Žižekian term of the oppositional “subjective violence” (Žižek 2008, 2). Cannibalistic slaughter is not simply portrayed as a physical practice, but as a complex network of boundaries and failures, where the pleasure externalised by the butchers, the fear experienced by the victim, and the disintegration of order and control all merge to communicate the ultimate consuming horror.

The Call of the Raw The idea that cooking is an important part of our broader human identity, especially when meat is concerned, is reiterated in multiple cinematic narratives, belonging to various and disparate genres. The purpose it serves always appears to be the same. The correlation between raw, bloody meat and inhumanity is clear, and is called upon when a sense of Otherness needs to be communicated to the viewer about a particular character and its actions. In his famous essay “The Raw and the Cooked”, Claude Lévi-­ Strauss suggests that the domain of cooking is “a truly universal form of human activity” (1997, 28). All humans cook, Levi-Strauss seems to ­suggest: cooking is a very cultural activity, as the manner of cooking  – as well as the food being cooked – defines and distinguishes groups and

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affiliations. Using meat as an important working example – and reaching far into the evolutionary strands of the human race, going back to its development in the hunter-gatherer organisation – Lévi-Strauss identifies categories of “roasting” and “boiling” as being on two opposing points of the semantic field he calls the “culinary” triangle. To put it simply, “roasting” is a cooking method that is more akin to nature, for it involved the direct exposure of the food to fire. Boiling, on the other hand, is a more elaborate method of cooking, one that requires the mediated use of a receptacle, and therefore belongs to the realm of culture (1997, 29). These two categories have several subcategories of method and preparation, grouped together according to whether the use of receptacles and utensils is required in the cooking. In Lévi-Strauss’s culinary triangle, however, the raw is a conspicuous category, one that “constitutes the unmarked pole” of the triangle, untouched by human intervention (1997, 29). The raw lies not only outside of the bounds of human culture, but it also is, strictly speaking, a category that does not truly exist within human consumption. While it might be easy to spot the flaw in this argument – for there are, indeed, a number of foods that can be eaten raw, from fruits to vegetables, to examples such as carpaccio or sashimi  – Lévi-Strauss provides a contextualised rationale for his suggestion. There is no “condition of pure rawness […] only certain foods can really be eaten raw, and then only if they have been selected, washed, pared or cut, or even seasoned” (1997, 29). The very act of consuming meat uncooked is safely compartmentalised to special circumstances where the practice itself has evolved to be accepted and allowed. Even in those circumstances, however, the consumption of raw meat is treated with relative mistrust and apprehension, and the very idea of consuming is known to turn the stomach of many an experienced eater. On occasions when the consumption of raw meat is tolerated, it is still confined to certain examples of cuts and provenance, and only if prepared with certain ingredients which, to some extent, civilise it. In this context, rawness is not the state of whether a food has been cooked or not. It represents, instead, that food’s place within the structures of human consumption, where it can be found, how it is grown and fostered, and, of course, how it is prepared for consumption, whatever that preparation might entail, even if it is not strictly a form of cooking. In Western organisation, this rule seemingly applies to both animals’ flesh and organs, as it is culturally unthinkable to present these matters in their unprepared,

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‘raw’ state. A tacit narrative exists dictating that in their actual ‘raw’ state, animal tissues are not considered ‘food’ until they are appropriately prepared, so they will be fit for human consumption. It would seem that, anthropologically speaking, no human is conceptually allowed to eat raw meat. One must resist here to simply see the avoidance in health terms where the consumption of meat is unadvisable as it may be conductive to salmonella and other nasty diseases – a notion which, of course, is biologically salient in connection to meats such as chicken. When it coms to red meat, one must allow that something more culturally defined might be at play. This idea particularly presents itself if one considers the look and texture of red meat in particular, as well as vital organs such as livers and hearts. Raw red meat, and especially, raw organs, are just too bloody, too fleshy, and too slimy to be considered – broadly speaking – as an appropriate source of food. Even in their eviscerated and butchered state, make us too aware of the absent referential narratives that are intrinsically reliant on acts of violence and killing. Raw meat and raw organs are simply too ‘uncivilised’, and too unashamedly reminiscent of the live animal they came from, to be consumed without a hint of horror and disgust. And while this cultural rule is not applicable as a blanket notion – for, surely, many people, even in Western contexts, will have consumed both red meat and organs in their unprepared, raw state – its validity and resonance remain constantly visible in our representational narratives, of which film is a clear example. When thinking about the very concept of raw flesh, it is difficult not to think about blood, in one fashion or the other. Fiddes reiterates this idea by claiming that “the motif of blood is central to the meat system” (1991, 68). Blood is, of course, fundamental to our discourses of not only life, but also humanity itself. It is not a surprise to see a traditional association between blood and the idea of ‘life force’, a connection that has been exploited very successfully by vampire narratives for centuries. The conception that blood is life-giving continues to remain strong, in virtue of blood’s own properties, not only culturally, but also physiologically. There is no life without blood, and yet, to actually witness blood brings with it an array of negative connotations. ‘Spilled blood’ is often a metaphor for violence, and a foretelling of the approach of death. Although living creatures are made of blood, and mammals are particularly privileged in possessing large amounts of it, to see or touch flowing blood can be a profoundly alienating experience. The idea of bloody carcass can be ­disturbing, especially if that carcass is to become food.

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Many enthusiastic meat-eaters will be put off by the sight of a bloody animal carcasses hanging at a butcher’s shop, but they will be happy – for the most part – to buy a neatly package hunk of meat from the supermarket, displayed and presented in a sanitised cellophane container. And although many like to consume their steaks ‘rare’, those steaks are still, overall, cooked. They are never truly ‘bloody’. Blood is off-putting and an appetite-killer, especially if fresh and still flowing. The suggestion that bloody meat recalls animalistic feeding instincts also taps into our ancestral fears  – mainly in a Western sense  – of savagery. Raw meat is necessarily bloody, and eating the flesh of an animal straight from its freshly killed carcass is often unthinkable. Meat-eating continues to possess – for the most part, and in spite of persuasive vegetarian arguments  – an aura of potency and power, yet raw and bloody meat is an Othering substance. It is too real, too close, too animalistic. To put it simply, blood can only drip off the mouths of beasts, not off the lips of humans. This use of blood, especially in connection to feeding, is employed in a number of contemporary cinematic narratives to communicate alienation, social disintegration, and the break of civility within a human group. One need only think of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. In order to escape from his confinement, Lecter tricks one of the policemen to approach. Lecter savagely bites off the policeman’s nose, and as a result blood drips from Lecter’s mouth, the proof of his beastly orality. Although Lecter is not technically feeding off the policeman, his bloody mouth is an unavoidable reminder of not only his known cannibal practices, but also of his uncontrollable and dehumanising animality. As Lecter proceeds to beat a second policeman to death, the victim’s blood also shoots onto Lecter, drenching his overly sanitised white clothing, and spilling on his unnaturally pale face. The cinematography here is effective in communicating the contrast between Lecter and his now dehumanised victim, as the policeman’s body is deprived of agency and denied a direct close-up, communicating its treatment and regression to a piece of meat by Lecter’s actions. During the beating, Lecter’s facial expressions also communicate pleasure and enjoyment, his mouth stretching and contorting, emphasising, in a Freudian manner, the quasi-sexual oral pleasure that he drives from the act. Blood here is essential in rendering the deadness of flesh, and in constructing a connection between the beastly consumption of raw flesh and the lack of humanity. The figure of Lecter as possessing a beastly orality, as well as an unbearable cannibal appetite, continues to haunt later narratives, such as Hannibal

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(2001). In this, Lecter is shown biting the nose off an unsuspecting nurse, an incident captured on a security camera. The episode comes early in Hannibal ’s narrative, and makes a connection to Lecter’s imprisonment for his crime. Avid watchers would recognise it as the incident that had been previously gestured to in The Silence of the Lambs, when it was presented to Clarice Starling as evidence of Lecter’s inescapable Otherness and monstrosity. While the incident was negated as a visualisation in The Silence of the Lambs, it is given full embodiment in Hannibal, even if the notion of ‘captured footage’ still provides a sense of mediation for the audience, almost suggesting that, so early in the film’s narrative, it is too gruesome, too horrific, and too bloody to be given the benefit of direct rendition. The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal are not, of course, the only films to construct a connection between animalistic orality, the horror of blood, and the consuming Other. American Psycho (2000), for instance, serves as a clear example of this connection. Even though, in the film version of the narrative, Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) is not actually shown eating the flesh of his victims, a latent connection to violence, butchery, and blood recalls the presence of an animalistic and dehumanising hunger, acting here as the source of horror and alienation on which the narrative pivots. The connection between blood, raw flesh, orality, and dehumanisation is made explicit in examples such as Hunger (2009), where the bloody mouths of the starved captives are put in the foreground, after they have savagely hunted, killed, and consumed their fellow man. The imagery is striking and confronting, as the cannibal captives are often portrayed as catatonic and staring into space, the barbarity of their uncontrollable hunger completely engulfing their sense of self, as well as their rational thought. The pictorial imagination of “bloody flesh”, regardless of provenance, continues to act as a metaphor for “degenerate individuals” (Fiddes 1991, 90) and crystallises a cultural connection that the horror genre, in particular, is known to capitalise upon in order to evoke fear and revulsion. Indeed, it is an often-unaddressed narrative of meat – or, to be more specific, raw meat – that defines the horror moments that emerge connected to the consumption of certain dishes and substances in the construction of cinematic reality. Examples like Hannibal and Hunger are not alone in presenting the narrative of rawness, as far as animal flesh is concerned, as an abominable occurrence. Blood, however, is not the only evoking factor in the construction of revulsion in relation to consuming raw meat. As far as flesh is concerned, ‘rawness’ also conceptually connects to the break in relationship between the very notion of humanity, and

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what is marked as alien and Other. A haunting and frightening instance of this aversion of the raw and the bloody is to be found in the earlier, and now distinctly iconic, example of Rosemary’s Baby (1968) when the pregnant Rosemary – who is unknowingly expecting the ‘devil’s’ child – finds herself unable to resist a platter of chicken livers and hearts, and begins to nibble upon them with ravenous hunger and intent. The film constructs a narrative of horror for the scene, even though, aesthetically speaking, no clear tropic structures belonging to the horror genre are in place. Rosemary is in her well-lit kitchen, surrounded by cheerfully coloured cooking utensils. No shadows lurk in the background, and an appetising roast chicken sits on the kitchen countertop. Nonetheless, the scene undeniably makes for uncomfortable viewing, which is created precisely by Rosemary’s indulgence in the consumption of a food that is deemed unacceptable and, in itself, horrific. Unable to control herself, she sucks on the flesh of the chicken liver, as squelching sounds make the act clearly reminiscent of a wild animal feeding. In the midst of the raw feast, however, Rosemary catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror surface of the toaster, and is just as horrified as the audience at witnessing her behaviour. What communicates the horror here is the breach in boundaries that designate the human from the beast, for humans do not consume flesh and organs raw, the cooking of these matters clearly acting as a ‘civilising’ process of which anthropologists such as Carlton S. Coon (1967) and Lévi-Strauss have amply made us very aware. Consuming the chicken livers raw challenges Rosemary’s human status, and transforms her into a liminal entity. The use of raw flesh here acts as an evocation of Otherness that connects Rosemary’s pregnancy to the demonic, a fact of which, of course, Rosemary is at this stage unaware. As the audience, we recognise the feeding act as a conceptual suggestion that something is ‘wrong’ with Rosemary herself, that something that is designating her as ‘Other’ is at work, and the consumption of the bloody, raw flesh confirms the horror effect of the suspicion. The craving for raw, bloody flesh is indeed the calling card for that which is not fully human, and haunts the narrative with its Otherness. Naturally, the evocation of the demonic is not at all necessary for constructing an alienating connection between the consumption of raw flesh and the experience of horror, especially in relation to pervasive notions of Otherness and animality. A number of cultural narratives would tell us that raw meat is the domain of animals, the creatures that are inevitably not-human, and therefore profoundly divorced from human cultural

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structures of behaviour. Any encounters with unacceptable notions of rawness are cause for revulsion, alienation, and mistrust. Coon suggests that cooking was the “decisive factor in leading man from a primarily animal existence into one that was more fully human” (1967, 63). The shunning of raw food, in particular, is to be seen, to some extent, as an emancipating practice. In a general, and more contemporary understanding, we can see the idea of cooking as applying to all forms of human intervention in terms of preparation and presentation. Coon’s use of the expression “fully human”, however, lends a distinctly Gothicised notion to the idea of consuming raw meat, instigating the thought that desiring bloody flesh, with its cadaveric stiffness and slimy texture, is in itself not properly human. An example that aptly illustrates this interaction can be found in the character of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. On numerous occasions, Gollum is portrayed consuming the flesh of animals raw, from fish to rabbits. His penchant for raw meat is made clear in The Two Towers (2002) – the second instalment in the trilogy – when Gollum finds himself consuming a meal with the two travelling hobbits Frodo (Elijah Wood) and Sam (Sean Austin). Gollum has previously hunted for rabbits, and returns to the hobbits’ camp with his bounty, excited at the prospect of devouring them. When Sam proceeds to prepare the rabbits for cooking, Gollum is visibly astounded by the suggestion. “Give them to me raw!” he exclaims, as his facial expressions contort and he begins to salivate at the prospect of sinking his teeth into the raw and bloody flesh. The suggestion is received with disgust by Sam, and is openly interpreted as a further confirmation of Gollum’s profound and alienating ‘Otherness’. This episode, short as it may be, is an important conceptualisation as far as the portrayal of Gollum’s inhumanity goes. I use the term ‘humanity’ here not necessarily in terms of species – indeed, there are many species in The Lord of the Rings that are not strictly ‘human’, including the hobbits. I use the term instead to signify the emotional and empathetic definition of an individual as ‘civilised’ – in the sociocultural sense – and in tune with the regulations of conduct that distinguish us from beasts. Cooking in The Two Towers is equaled with civilisation, with culture, with emotional superiority, and, in the broader sense, with goodness. Cooking is, as Fiddes points out, “the most profound and privileged expression of the transformation from nature to culture”, and cooking meat is, in particular, a metamorphosing practice that transforms flesh from a “corporeal substance” to “an artefact of our culinary culture” (1991, 88). Cooking meat – or, in general terms, preparing it for consumption via a number of

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transformative techniques – is an essential part of how humans conceive themselves as different from the rest of the animal world, as the superior beings who have mastered the techniques of culture and science. Eating raw meat straight from the carcass of the animal is horrific in the cultural sense, even before the physiological preoccupations with health are called into question. In these terms, The Two Towers is clear on its representation of goodness and rightness through the uses of raw meat. Gollum fails to qualify as, at least culturally speaking, a ‘human’ being. His disassociation from empathy is reiterated throughout the narrative, and his inability to abandon the seemingly savage behaviour, which goes with eating raw meat, is a tangible expression of that disassociation. Gollum  – to use a critical framework proposed by Lyotard  – “lacks that sense of ‘civilisation’ that is culturally and morally found in appropriate behaviours of consumption” (1993, 3). As part of a broader critical commentary, it might be worth recalling that this narrative of revulsion and disgust in relation to consuming raw flesh can be treated humorously in film, in an attempt perhaps to distance it from its inevitably horrifying nature. A very grounded and almost parodic demonstration of this is found in Heartbreakers (2001). In this film, Max Conners (Sigourney Weaver) unwittingly orders steak tartare at a Russian restaurant. Upon discovering her meat-related faux pas, her reaction is clearly indicative of her disgust and horror at the thought of having to consume a plate of raw meat. Her facial expressions morph and become akin to fear, as if she were witnessing or at least contemplating a truly terrifying sight. The horror moment of the scene is mitigated by her dining companion’s gleeful declaration, “I love a woman who eats raw meat!” unaware of Max’s increasingly terrified nausea. Upon the dish’s arrival, she slowly lifts a forkful of the unmistakeably red steak tartare to her mouth, as her lips quiver and she is brought close to tears by the experience. The humorous nature of the scene is obvious, but what is also unmistakable is Max’s tormented status, her expressions and physical movements clearly communicating the breakage of those culinary boundaries that preserve the sanctity of the body and the mind, a whole system of anthropological regulation destroyed and tortured by a platter of horrifying raw meat. The Gothic parody of consuming unacceptable and liminal flesh conveys perfectly the ability of food to challenge and breach our notions of propriety, where the seemingly simple nature of a meat dish is able to uncover the deepest and often most concealed extents of our cultural excesses.

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Primitive Butchers In terms of meaning generation, the body is at the centre of a network of mediation that constructs it as a representative and representable entity. The distinction between inside and outside  – in this case, the differentiation between what is outside of the body and inside of it, in terms of food  – relies on a system of cultural mediation that is intrinsically connected to the environment that dictates what is ‘proper’ and what is not. This system can be conceptualised as the ‘Order’: the cultural structures that not only regulate but also dictate the consumption practices of the individual, as well as the group. This notion is reliant on a mixed methodological understanding of the eating body as a location for structures of behaviour, both culturally and sociologically (Lévi-Strauss 1981; Foucault 1991; M. Douglas 2003; Bourdieu 1984; Lupton 1996; Shilling 2005). Falk suggests that, when it comes to consumption, the interaction between inside and outside is the “first bridge” towards unravelling the connection between body and self, revealing the “complicated character” of the connection between the body/self and culture (1994, 12). What food goes into the body – how it is processed metaphorically, and to what affect – is all connected to the actualisation of the cultural milieu, understood here as the wider cultural context that regulates behaviour. In this sense, food prohibitions and taboos are at the centre of the inside–outside distinctions that define and regulate the body as a cultural entity. Falk further argues that “the stronger the cultural Order and the community bonds in which the subject is constituted, the more ‘open’ is the body both to outside intervention and the reciprocal relationship with its cultural/social context” (1994, 12). This is the fundament of what Falk defines as a “primitive society”: a group that lives closely and operates by regulating the consumption behaviours of its members, and the rituals that derive from them. In this context, there is less of a sense of the individual, and more of group identity. To see the tripartite interaction between the collective persuasion of the Order, the representation of the primitive community, and the notions of both human slaughter and consumption as part of a dichotomous distinction between the culturally proper and the culturally improper, one need only turn to The Hills Have Eyes (2006) as an apt example. In this film, Doug Bukowski (Aaron Standford) and Lynn Carter-Bukowski (Vinessa Shaw) are seen venturing in the New Mexico desert as part of a vacation with Lynn’s

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family, the Carters, comprised of her father Bob (Ted Levine), her mother Ethel (Kathleen Quinlan), and her teenage siblings Bobby (Dan Byrd) and Brenda (Emilie de Ravin). As the group’s trailer and car mysteriously break down, they are left to look for help, and before long encounter a group of mutants who attack them multiple times and eventually brutally murder Bob and Lynn. From the very beginning, the encounters with the mutants in The Hills Have Eyes communicate that something not quite right is at play. There is a general feeling that surrounds the mutants, constructed by the use of an unsettling cinematography  – based on an interaction of establishing shots and extreme close-ups that skilfully do not reveal the actual physical presence of the mutants for a number of sequences  – and a sound mix that relies on haunting whispers and heavy breathing on the mutants’ part. Director Wes Craven also constructs a sense of anxiety by placing the narrative in a “land-before-time” setting, with shots of “dusty roads stretching as far as the see can see” and “eerie vast expanses of rock, sand, and shrub” (Brown 2012, 130). Already, this suggests that the mutants’ behaviour will be erratic and uncontrolled, a suggestion made explicit by previous examples of the genre such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The organisation The Hills Have Eyes appears uncannily familiar not only because it evokes the narrative structure of its predecessor  – The Hills Have Eyes (1977) – but also because, as Jennifer Brown points out, there is a sense of “human decay” and “lack of progress” that characterises the Gothic narrative (2012, 130). The suspicion of cannibalism is communicated via the use of a standard set-up for horror film, which has traditionally been associated with the behaviour of the murderous monster, who lies far removed from the grip of civilisation. The general use of mise en scène elements hints at the fact that the mutants are cannibals. Multiple uses of gruesome food imagery are scattered through the narrative – from animal carcasses to decaying matters – indicating the presence of foul consumption practices that are strongly connected to cannibalism. The horror of anthropophagy is hinted at numerous times, even before any actual evidence of the fact is presented to the audience. It is indeed made clear that the mutants live an isolated lifestyle, and that they are, for the most part, disconnected from even the local community. We never see the mutants successfully interact with anyone other than each other. Hints that the mutants maintain a secretive relationship with the local gas station owner are upheld throughout, but even that contact is based mostly on failure. Continuously perpetrating a form of relationship

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that relies on the gas station owner ‘providing’ unsuspecting tourists for the mutants to consume, the mutants are shown as unable to construct an emotional connection with other human beings outside of their isolated community. The lack of outward socialisation is tacitly implied to be the cause of their unacceptable behaviour, recalling Chris Shilling’s notion that “sociable relations constitute a realisation of what it means to be a human being” (2005, 150). The apogee of the mutants’ social failure is of course seen in their torture and eventual consumption of Doug and his family, as these occurrences continue to mark them as the social and cultural incarnations of the violent and the monstrous. It could be argued here that the mutants have constructed their own localised sociocultural structure, where their cannibalistic behaviour of murder and slaughter is not only allowed, but also sought after. Within the bounds of the mutants’ family circle in The Hills Have Eyes, the distinction between ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ have been revisited and reconstructed and, as a result, so has the difference between what is allowed inside and outside of the body, in food terms. This arrangement echoes Georg Simmel’s now well-known claim that food lies at the centre of sociality, as far as the “nature vs culture” debate is concerned. By linking food consumption to the very notion of sociality, embodied subjects achieve a “triumph over naturalism” (2000, 131–132). That notion of ‘naturalism’ is clearly exploited in The Hills Have Eyes, with the intention of grouping solitary existence and solitary consumptive rituals with social, moral, and cultural unacceptability. The presence of a secluded community inevitably leads the audience to assume that the members of the group will perform multiple acts that are considered taboo in Western culture. Inevitably, incest and cannibalism are at the top of the list, and we do not have to wait long in The Hills Have Eyes to discover that the mutants likely perform both. But while the incest is kept a latent idea within the film, the manifest imagery presented confirms the mutants as cannibals. The discovery that the mutants are cannibals is conceptually and visually entangled with the notion of butchery, and takes place as Doug ventures into their community in search of his baby daughter Catherine, whom the mutants had previously kidnapped. When Doug is inevitably attacked in the town and knocked unconscious, he wakes to discover that he is trapped in a locked container, in the company of several butchered body parts. His horror, and the horror of the audience, are heightened when it is discovered that the container in which Doug and the butchered body parts are locked is in fact an old freezer. Indeed, the very

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presence of the freezer implies that the parts kept in it are understood as ‘meat’, set aside to be consumed at a later date. Even if no mention of Doug’s future is made clear, the imagery of the freezer suggests that, together with the butchered body parts, he is somehow being treated as food. This image is clearly reminiscent of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, evoking the moment when Pam is locked in the freezer by Leatherface, and although in the case of Doug, the freezer is not actually plugged in, the horror of the scene is heightened by the perceived feeling of claustrophobia, and the fact that both Doug and the body parts lie in a pool of blood. The scene is clearly denied the sanitised vision of meat displayed in a commercial freezer at any supermarket, the blood acting as a reminder of the horrors of slaughter, and intensifying the dread in the threat of cannibalism. After Doug escapes from the horrible freezer, the cannibal imagery becomes more explicit. The audience is presented with a horrific room where butchered body parts hang on meat hooks. The suggestion that the body parts are human is clear and truly unmissable. Racks of human ribs, as well as slices from arms and legs, hang from the ceiling, disturbingly reminiscent of both a slaughterhouse and a butcher shop. At this stage, the fear of the fate that awaits Doug and the rest of his family is clear. The mutants are indeed cannibals, although this does not come as a surprise, as isolation and the lack of ‘civilisation’ are easily equalled with cannibal conduct. Discussing the uses of the cannibalism trope within fictional narratives, Maggie Kilgour suggests that cannibalism itself has the ability to “become an image of the forces generated by society that are tearing apart, especially an ideology of individualism which defines us as isolated consumers and so dismembers the body politic as well as the individual bodies of its members” (1998, 258). Consumer alienation here equals not only the physical notion of butchery, but also the deconstruction of those social paradigms that identify the human being as part of an acceptable sociopolitical structure. Considering that The Hills Have Eyes portrays a failed nuclear testing experiment by the United States government as the source of the mutants’ exposure to radiation, and their subsequent abandonment and isolation into the desert, one would not struggle here to construct a critical connection between American politics, violence, and the notions of cannibalism as a clear metaphorical marker for greed and social failure. Although no legitimisation is offered for the mutants’ own consumptive practices, the concept of slaughter takes on multifaceted meanings, as the ‘innocent’ mutants are served up as animals for slaughter by the

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United States government, and, in turn, enact violence and slaughter of their own on Doug and his family, seen here as the quintessential American unit (Fig. 4.2). While the wider Order does not apply to the mutants’ system of behaviour and consumption in The Hills Have Eyes, we can see the regulation of an indicative and localised ‘order’ still at work. Within the family circle – small as it may seem – both social rules and cultural rules are established and upheld, where cannibalism is the norm, as is the violent slaughter of human beings and the pleasure that derives from it. There is a clear suggestion that all mutants are part of the same ‘family’, and that this is obviously a tightknit group. This is indicated not only by the suggestion of incest, but also in the group’s open rejection of any intervention from the outside world, and their pursuit of independent social structures and conducts. The family members’ embrace of cannibal slaughter signals the openness and mergence that Falk discusses. As a group, they are one, with the same ideas, the same behaviours, and the same beliefs over what is categorisable as food. The practices of cannibal slaughter, as conducted by such a close family group, expose the presence of a ‘group ego’, a representation of a primitive society, not in terms of progress, but in terms of the collective organisation of behaviour that exists within itself and for itself. The distinction between inside and outside here plays an important

Fig. 4.2  Doug Bukowski (Aaron Stanford) is locked in a freezer filled with human body parts in The Hills Have Eyes (2006)

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part, as ingestion takes on an essential role in building the individual body as part of the group. The “mouth of the community”, as Falk labels it (1994, 70), is what constructs the boundaries of prohibition, regardless of how big or small the community is, and how localised the corporeal bounds of the group are. The cultural order always defines the alimentary codes within it, from pleasure to food taboos. Disgust, shock, and fear at encountering those codes are only experienced by those outside of the community. This is clearly illustrated in The Hills Have Eyes, as Doug and his family enter the contexts of the mutants’ cannibalistic community, where multiple cultural taboos  – from consumption to sex  – define the structures of behaviour.

The Pleasures of Slaughter Violence is not a straightforward concept, and its ability to evade an allencompassing definition is precisely what makes the ideal background for understanding the extenuating narratives of consumption in the media, including – and perhaps more importantly so – within the world of cinematic representation. Violence often takes on “ritual properties”, and is subject to cultural definitions that are intimately bound up with “pain, security, transgression, and concepts of the body” (Ray 2011, 6). Not all violence is blood and gore, even if the viscerality of physical abuse makes it a recognisable starting point for the food/violence deconstruction to begin. Who eats food and when, and what needs to be killed in order for someone to eat, remains a matter of culture, as well as a socio-economic performance of control. It is with no surprise that one can find so many cinematic narratives echoing these tacit connections and materialisations between food, violence, and control, extending the reach of politicised notions of consumption from the micro to the macro level, and vice versa. From Misery to American Psycho, from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to Hannibal, the connection between eating, power, and the bestial nature of our Western post-industrial organisation is addressed, both implicitly and explicitly. The ‘slaughterhouse narrative’ is clearly established in American Psycho, long before any acts of murder and violence are actually committed by Patrick Bateman. The opening images of the violence are culturally and aesthetically suggestive in this respect: drops of a red substance are seen

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falling on a pristine white surface. The cinematography here is effective in eliminating all terms of reference for the substance, as the extreme close­up leaves the source of the red drops open to the viewer’s interpretation. And while there is no visualised aesthetic reference, the cultural framework is clearly at work, as it is easy to assume that the ‘red substance’ presented is blood. This is primarily due to the unavoidable association between ‘red’ and ‘blood’, and the cultural narratives that derive therein. Possibly because of its associations with spilled blood, red is often interpreted, culturally speaking, as the colour “of aggression” and “of danger” (Fiddes 1991, 68). Red is evocatively suggestive of violence and death, and its chromatic contrast to colours such as the sanitised white also has the power to signify a metaphorical break in rationality and cultural control. Fiddes helpfully simplifies the connection between blood and red by going beyond the visual, and claiming that, because of the evocation of both danger and violence, the very association between the two is “fundamental to much human thought” (1991, 68). Therefore, to think of blood when one sees ‘red drops’ in American Psycho is expected, almost inevitable. It is, as far as our cultural framework is concerned, controversially ‘natural’. The film effectively plays with this expectation, and also seemingly shatters it as it is revealed that the red drops are in fact, as far as the film’s narrative is concerned, are in fact drops of red sauce being carefully arranged on a plate, to complement the food being served at an expensive restaurant. Nonetheless, while the pictorial narrative of red seemingly suggests nothing more that the mundane arrangement of food on a plate, the metaphorical narrative – which finds strength in the association to blood  – perpetrates the idea of slaughter and death. The use of a fine-dining setting to actually evoke something as visceral as blood, and as culturally repulsive as murder, is tacitly reminiscent of what Leon Kass terms the “humanising use of tools”, which is aimed at disguising the “underlying animal necessity of consumption” (1999, 138). The humanising effect of tools such as plates and cutlery is particularly visible whenever the food to be consumed is meat, as images of slaughterhouse, violence, and spilled blood rest uneasy behind not only the food, but also our human preconceptions of civility and superiority. The evocation of violence, and the measures taken to present it as something different  – something more socially acceptable  – announces itself clearly in American Psycho, and maintains its hold on the narrative through ideas of consumption, or, to be more specific, the horrors of

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consumption. It will soon become clear that the yuppie environment that is being presented in the film is a ruthless and metaphorically cutthroat one, where the dangers of society are clear and manifest in a variety of ways. In the case of Patrick Bateman, they will manifest in the form of both his murders and his psychosis, even if the actuality of both is left unclear. So while the aesthetic interaction between food and blood in the opening scene of American Psycho may look like nothing more than a clever play on imagery, one can see how it is actually a foreboding establishment of the social horrors that will be exposed as the narrative progresses, where the interchanging metaphors of ‘spilled blood’ and ‘consumption’ construct both the basis and the development of the slaughterhouse narrative, with all its violent and disturbingly ‘hungry’ undertones. In his evaluation of the conceptual similarities between cannibalism and capitalism, Phillips suggests that the trope of cannibalism affords us a prime example of “the moral-metaphorical vision of accumulation” (1998, 183). As capitalism “can never abolish its propensity to dehumanise the quotidian world”, then the metaphor of cannibalism – of the human “consuming” the human  – takes on the perceived usage as a conceptual elaboration of “capitalist hunger” (1998, 185). There is no denying that the critical representation of the hungry and violent nature of consumer-capitalism is made clear in American Psycho, perhaps too overtly so. Patrick Bateman is as obsessed with ‘consumption’ – not only of food, but also of other commodities such as clothes and even fancy business cards – as he is with killing. It is fascinating to see, as the narrative progresses, a noticeable association between Bateman’s obsession with fine dining, and the performance of gruesome torture and murder, clearly constructing a connection between the frustration caused by the former, and the emotional release sought in the other. Bateman is consumed by his desire to kill, as much as he is by his obsession with showing off and eating only at the finest restaurants. Particularly worthy of note is his inability to secure a reservation at Dorsia, a famed restaurant that soon becomes the metaphorical embodiment of Bateman’s social frustrations and madness. Consumption here takes on multifaceted meanings, not only in the well-known, and often intersecting, connotations connected to eating and capitalism, but also in the overthrown identification with ‘being consumed’. The hedonistic ­culture that dominantly controls the lives of characters in the film is also what pushes Bateman to the extreme, as his desire to consume the finest foods, and to own the finest commodities, peaks in his emotive

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withdrawal, as his psychopathic activities take place, uncovering the horrific depths of the representational layers of consumption that construct his socio-economic condition. The slaughterhouse metaphor, however, is not only latently connected to restaurant dining in American Psycho, it actually becomes explicitly addressed in several parts of the film. An event that illustrates this is the murder of Paul Allen, where Bateman brutally attacks him with an axe, but not before covering the floor of his apartment with plastic, and even going as far as wearing a plastic, see-through coat, in order to protect his designer clothing from all the blood. Those who have visited slaughterhouses in the past will know of the use of plastic coats, as well as other forms of plastic protection, on the workers’ part, not to mention the fact that plastic is also used as an insulator for door openings into meat-preserving areas. There is a suggestive visual similarity between the physical organisation of the slaughterhouse, and Bateman’s preferred murdering practices. Worthy of note is the fact that the consumption of food and drink remains a constant throughout the ritualised murder of Paul Allen, as Bateman dines with the man beforehand, and buys him many alcoholic drinks, which will inevitably cause high levels of intoxication. Allen is, simply put, metaphorically presented as an animal reared for slaughter. Capitalist consumption is at the core of the whole horrific exchange. Peter Hulme suggests that “as much as the capitalist may long for absolute consumption, he cannot satisfy this desire” (1998, 36). This constant externalisation of desire, and the impossibility of fulfilment, finds an apt metaphorical concretisation in Bateman’s slaughterhouse-like killing of Paul Allen in American Psycho. Allen is considered by Bateman to be socially and economically superior, possessing the job that Bateman covets and being lauded by all for his ‘good taste’ and possessions. The consumer-capitalist narrative here constructs Allen as the object of obsessive desire, but also, in a perverse manner, as the ‘food’ needed to satiate Bateman’s incensed consumerist and violent hunger. Even though the film does not clearly suggest cannibalistic activities, Bateman can be seen as metaphorically ‘consuming’ his victims, from the high-flying Paul Allen to the expensive call girls that he systematically murders. The violence enacted by Bateman is in itself a consumable act, a commodity of capitalism that is as much a necessity to Bateman as food. Violence and hunger continue to intersect in the act of slaughter, interconnected as they are to the polygonal cultural representations of “the body, pain, and vulnerability” (Ray 2011, 7). The slaughterhouse narrative of American Psycho plays

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with the identification of violence not only in the actual act of murder, but also in the consuming nature of fine possessions – with their inevitable elements of display and perceived inauthenticity – and the wider capitalist scope overall. There also exists another dimension to the idea of gaining ‘pleasure’ out of cannibal slaughter, and this is distinctly connected to the realm of sexual gratification. This is suggestively put forward in American Psycho through Bateman’s obsession with prostitutes, as images of his killings and his unavoidably abusive sexual acts intersect within the narrative of the film. Scholars such as Adams (1990) and Fiddes (1991) have amply explored the linguistic and cultural connection between meat consumption and sexual violence, identifying both as a male prerogative in patriarchal societies. The expression of being treated ‘like a piece of meat’ is disturbingly referential for rape, and constructs a common ground for bringing together sexual violence and meat consumption. Behind both lies the victim who is denied meaning and undercut. As Adams puts it, “sexual violence and meat eating, which appear to be discrete forms of violence, find a point of intersection”, as “an essential component of androcentric culture has been built on […] viewing the sexually desired object as consumable” (1990, 47, 49). In American Psycho, Bateman treats people as ‘meat’ in a number of ways, from the physical treatment of human beings as animals for the slaughter to the metaphorical associations of sexual violence and slaughter. Ordinarily, of course, a sexual object is not physically consumed. The connection between sexual violence, slaughter, and meat is sited primarily in the realms of language, and the expressions of cultural objectification that derive therein. Fiddes argues that “distinct parallels exist between the language of the meat system and the terminology that men use to described women […] in mainstream discourse” (1991, 148). The metaphorical uses of the concept of meat are primarily connected to notions of power and the structures of control that derive from it. The idea of the c­ annibal, however, breaks the barrier between sexual violence and slaughter, and allows both the rape and the consumption of human flesh to be perceived as culturally disjointed yet interconnected practices, where oppression and repression fuse in the idiom of ‘meat’. As far as American Psycho goes, this film does not make the connection between sexual ­violence and cannibalism explicit. This is kept latent and only suggestively communicated. To see a more explicit c­ ontextualisation of the abomination of cannibalism, the horrors of butchery, and the fear

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of sexual abuse, we must turn to examples such as The Hills Have Eyes (2006). Here, the male cannibal mutants are shown as possessing outrageous sexual appetites, and being prone to violence on a number of levels. The two male mutants Lizard and Pluto (Robert Joy and Michael Bailey Smith) display a sexual interest in the women they find in the trailer, particularly the teenaged Brenda, adding both a physical and a psychological dimension to the cannibal that is conspicuously absent in examples such as American Psycho and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In the latter film, Leatherface, in particular, seems to linger in a permanently infantile, pre-oedipal stage, gaining pleasure only from the oral stimuli of consumption and the tactile experiences of slaughter. While this is also visible in The Hills Have Eyes, both Lizard and Pluto progress further into pleasure by showing sexual urges. The (male) cannibal is exposed as a rapist, as Lizard abuses Brenda, while Pluto keeps the rest of her family at gunpoint and takes pleasure in feeling the skin of baby Catherine. Further on in the narrative, Lizard forces Lynn to let him drink milk directly from her breast, a first act of actually consuming and incorporating parts of her into his body. While the rape is not dwelled upon – an oddly confusing omission in the manifest structure of the narrative – it lingers in the margins as we, the spectators, come to terms with the realisation that Lizard and his family are in fact cannibals. Throughout The Hills Have Eyes, the ‘consumption’ of women is clearly shown threefold. Firstly, Brenda is raped and ‘consumed’ as a sexual object. Then, Lynn is ‘consumed’ by Lizard as he forcefully drinks her breast milk. Finally, Papa Jupiter – another male cannibal played by Billy Drago – is seen eating the flesh off Ethel’s body, as the consumption reaches it final stage in the cannibal act. The idea of consumption here is strongly connected to conceptualised ideas of overpowering and owning flesh, as ‘meat’ also crystallises itself for physical, and more pointedly patriarchal, oppression. In 1968, J.Z.  Young already argued that “food is about the most important influence in determining the organisation of the brain and the behaviour that the brain dictates” (cited in Fiddes 1991, 2). The suggestion that cannibalism is a form of regression to an almost prehuman – or more aptly, beastly – state is clear. In The Hills Have Eyes, at the moment when Lizard and Papa Jupiter descend into cannibal slaughter and cannibal consumption, they abandon any façade of human propriety, and, it is made clear, all expectations of civilised conduct. In a way, the act of cannibalism is equated with the failure of human organisation, for no greater break in human regulation can exist. In this context, food

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selection and consumption are not simply perceived as circumstantial, or even connected to matters of availability and adaptability. An element of enjoyment is added to the mutants’ behaviour and their pursuit and consumption of human flesh. The mutants, it is made clear, are not ‘normal’. Their abnormality is projected not only in their deformed appearance, but also in their behaviours, their murderous acts, and, naturally, their consumption choices. Matters of taste can never be separated from the cultural structures in which they are placed, and the hunger for human flesh is a tangible evocation of the separation from that which is proper. In this regard, the idea of cannibalism embodies, as Probyn points out, “the appeal of the unthinkable” (2000, 8). The cannibal act is taken as the wider metaphorical representation for violence, animalistic behaviour, and the loss of humanity overall.

Works Cited Adams, Carol. 1990. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. Cambridge: Polity. Bäck, Allan. 2004. Thinking Clearly about Violence. Philosophical Studies 117(1): 219–230. Bataille, Georges. 1962. Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo. New York: Walker & Co.. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bramble, Ben, and Bob Fischer, ed. 2015. The Moral Complexities of Eating Meat. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, Jennifer. 2012. Cannibalism in Literature and Film. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Coon, Carlton S. 1967. The History of Man. London: Penguin. Dando, William. 1980. The Geography of Famine. London: Arnold. Douglas, Mary. 1972. Deciphering a Meal. Daedalus 101(1): 61–81. ———. 2003. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Routledge. Falk, Pasi. 1994. The Consuming Body. London: SAGE. Fenichel, Otto. 1982. The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis. London: Routledge & Keegan Paul. Fiddes, Nick. 1991. Meat: A Natural Symbol. London: Routledge. Fischler, Claude. 1988. Food, Self and Identity. Social Science Information 27: 275–292. Foucault, Michel. 1991. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin. Ginzburg, Carlo. 1990. Myths, Emblems, Clues. Santa Fe: Radius Books.

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Grandin, Temple. 2008. Humane Livestock Handling: Understanding Livestock Behavior and Building Facilities for Healthier Animals. North Adams: Storey. Hulme, Peter. 1998. Introduction: The Cannibal Scene. In Cannibalism and the Colonial World, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen, 1–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Iadicola, Peter, and Anson Shupe. 2013. Violence, Inequality, and Human Freedom. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Kass, Leon. 1999. The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kilgour, Maggie. 1998. The Function of Cannibalism at the Present Time. In Cannibalism and the Colonial World, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1970. Introduction to a Science of Mythology/The Raw and The Cooked. London: Cape. ———. 1981. The Naked Man. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1997. The Culinary Triangle. In Food and Culture: A Reader, ed. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, 28–35. London: Routledge. Lupton, Deborah. 1996. Food, the Body and the Self. London: SAGE. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1993. The Inhuman. Cambridge: Polity. Martin, Luther H., Huck Gutman, and Patrcik H. Hutton. 1988. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Cambrdige, MA: University of Massachssets Press. Nelson, Andrew Patrick. 2010. Traumatic Childhood Now Included: Todorov’s Uncanny Slasher Remake. In American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium, ed. Steffen Hantke, 103–118. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Phillips, Jerry. 1998. Cannibalism Qua Capitalism: The Metaphorics of Accumu­ lation in Marx, Conrad, Shakespeare and Marlowe. In Cannibalism and the Colonial World, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Probyn, Elspeth. 2000. Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities. London: Routledge. Ray, Larry. 2011. Violence and Society. London: SAGE. Shilling, Chris. 2005. The Body in Culture, Technology and Society. London: SAGE. Simmel, Georg. 2000. The Sociology of the Meal. In Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone, 130–136. London: SAGE. Thomas, Keith. 1983. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800. London: Allen Lane. Visak, Tatiana, and Robert Garner, ed. 2015. The Ethics of Killing Animals. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. Violence. New York: Picador.

CHAPTER 5

Feeding Nightmares: Madness, Hauntings, and the Kitchen of Horrors

In a now iconic scene from Ghostbusters (1984), Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver) begins her encounters with the paranormal – which later will take the shape of bodily possession and the materialisation of an ancient occult prophecy  – in a relatively unlikely location: the kitchen. Upon returning home from work, Dana enters the kitchen in her high-rise New York apartment and begins putting away groceries, while humming to herself. Although the visual set-up is anything but threatening, the sound score – played softly in the background – carries a foreboding sense of unease, as high-pitched notes provide an emotionally unmatched commentary on Dana’s seemingly common and ordinary kitchen activities. What we see here is the use of a musical element to ‘heighten’ our senses – a common feature of the soundtrack in horror films, entrusted with the “responsibility” to trigger “fear and rage” (Lerner 2010, viii) – and instil a sense of doubt in a scene that otherwise looks, for the most part, deceptively ordinary. Before long, the suggestively spectral sound score also finds a concrete manifestation in the visual: a carton of eggs, casually placed on Dana’s kitchen counter with a number of other groceries, flips open, as the eggs themselves are shown quivering menacingly in their spots. Predictably, but still surprisingly for the viewer, the eggs begin to not only explode, but also to fry and cook on what now looks like a hot kitchen surface. Meanwhile, the unfortunate Dana watches in shock and growing fear as the eggs bubble on the counter. While Dana stares at the clearly possessed eggs, a growling noise begins to emanate from the fridge. As she approaches the appliance, we watch in trepidation, wondering what could © The Author(s) 2017 L. Piatti-Farnell, Consuming Gothic, Palgrave Gothic, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-45051-7_5

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possibly be generating the growl and already knowing that, inevitably, it is something not of this world. As Dana opens the fridge, we – together with her  – are presented not with the expected area containing groceries, but with what looks like a cross-dimensional portal, complete with a ritual altar, and with the demonic creature that, famously, utters its own name: “Zuul!” Unsurprisingly, Dana screams and quickly shuts the door to the haunted fridge and its spectral contents. The power of this scene in Ghostbusters lies precisely in its horrific pairing of the perceived ordinary with the extraordinary (Weiss 2008). The kitchen, a seemingly common and profoundly mundane area, is unveiled as the site where paranormal occurrences take place. The use of the fridge as a site of spectrality in Ghostbusters is particularly of note. As kitchen appliances go, the fridge has often come to represent the very notion of progress. Domestic refrigeration completely revolutionised our culinary and consumption practices, constructing an ability for the kitchen – as far as the Western context is concerned – to meaningfully evoke the technological advantages of modern life, as well as the shifting cultural understandings of both family and home economics. While home refrigeration techniques might seem like a banal practice, they are also, as Roberta Sassatelli puts it, “fully social” and “continuously accomplished” as part of our cultural narratives. The appliances involved  – namely the fridge freezer – are evocative of “how our material context” is “thick with historically specific meanings”, and associated with “visions of comfort and convenience”, but also distinctly representative of our tacit views on “identity and the body” (2007, 144). To see the fridge used as a conduit for monstrosity in Ghostbusters is therefore profoundly suggestive. A tacit critique of material culture is hidden within the representation of not only the fridge, but the kitchen overall, as a spectral and horrific site. The recollection of contemporary consumer practices as ‘horrific’ is made even more explicit later on in the film, when Dr Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) visits Dana’s apartment to assess its ‘spectral value’. Indeed, he is horrified by what he actually finds in the haunted fridge: not the cross-dimensional Zuul, but a succession of pre-packaged convenience foods, to which he has a theatrical disgusted reaction. The ‘monstrosity’ of our contemporary consumer practices – from convenience foods to convenient lifestyles, and the critique of consumer-capitalism that lies therein – becomes unmissable if one considers the hinted conceptual connection between overbearing consumptions and the kitchen as the location for both actual and social horrors (Fig. 5.1).

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Fig. 5.1  Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver) discovers the ‘haunted eggs’ exploding on her kitchen counter in Ghostbusters (1984)

Beyond the narrative of haunted fridges and possessed groceries in Ghostbusters, there are several instances in film where manifestations of food horror – to various degrees of shockability – take place in the kitchen. One need only think of the hallucinatory kitchen experiences in Poltergeist (1982) where common foods – like a seemingly ‘safe’ chicken drumstick – turn into unspeakable matters. In The Shining (1980), the kitchen is at the centre of unnerving exchanges that clearly point towards the violent and now iconic climax when Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) will attempt to murder his family. Similarly, The Stuff proposes the kitchen as not only the centre of American family life, but also the locus where the parasitic and flesh-eating eponymous substance of the title finds its home – kept lovingly in the fridge – and where its sentient Otherness first manifests, constructing a multilayered critique of our commodity-driven existence. Abandoned and commonly ‘dirty’ and unkempt kitchens – complete with discarded unwashed dishes and pans filled with abjectifying food remnants, often of a hauntingly unidentified meaty texture – are employed to signal narratives of torture, murder, and at times, even perversion, as is the case in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Feed (2005), and The Road (2009). The polluted and ‘uncivilised’ kitchen clearly echoes the disintegration of those cultural regulations that dictate normative behaviour, not only in terms of food, but also in the broader terms of desire as well (Douglas 2003). Even Jurassic Park (1993) – a film not commonly classed under the rubric of horror  – capitalises on the culturally transgressive appeal of the kitchen as an unnerving location, by setting the now famous and

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utterly ­terrifying Velociraptor scene in the restaurant’s kitchen. These are but a few instances where the kitchen operates as a site of horror, both in terms of food preparation and consumption, and establishes a distinct connection with our Western cultural revulsion, from disgust to the idea of being both hunted and haunted. One should not be surprised by the Gothic potential of the kitchen as a site of horror, hauntings, and monstrosity, for the kitchen is, in truth, already a site of remarkable transformation. It is the place where a variety of foodstuffs are subtly, yet forcefully changed from one state to the other. This involves not only the common and physiological transformations from ‘raw’ to ‘cooked’, but also the cultural conversion that designates the difference between ‘ingredients’ to ‘dish’. Claude Fischler points out that the alimentary incorporation of a “dubious substance” may lead to “contamination”  – or a “transformation from within”  – and therefore, an overall “dispossession of the self ” (1988, 281). Fischler’s focus on contamination is of note here, as it suggests the possibility of seeing food as an inescapably Othering substance. The conceptual coupling of transformation and dispossession also points us in the direction of constructing consumption as a culturally liminal practice. If eating is an inherently transformative and ‘changing’ process, however, then so is the process of food preparation that precedes it. For when it comes to food, the notion of transformation is not only connected to consumption, but to preparation as well. Although uncommonly addressed as such, cooking is a profoundly aggressive practice. In cooking, molecular fluctuations and aesthetic mutations are strangely reminiscent of the distinctly paranormal processes that, in another set of thinking, give us pervasive notions of monstrosity that often construct – among other things – our visions of zombies, vampires, and even ghosts (Picart and Browning 2012). At the heart of our cooking processes lies the kitchen, and it is not difficult to reimagine this site as the precise locus from where notions of not only transformation, but also cultural Otherness and difference originate. The kitchen’s function as a site of spectrality and horror is inevitably entangled with notions of safety, not only in connection to the foods themselves – we don’t expect to be poisoned or stabbed in the kitchen – but also in relation to our position as the consumers of the food. That is to say, our conceptual construction of the human place in the world dictates that, when we enter the kitchen, we do so to prepare food in a way that is deemed appropriate and fitting with our cultural structures of acceptability. Kitchens function as metaphorical renderings of our culinary

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organisation and are, broadly speaking, far removed from any notion of unnaturality, Otherness, and monstrosity. Therefore, when the kitchen becomes reimagined as a site of violence, hallucination, and murder, its role as an agent of horror functions twofold, by not only breaking our notions of safety in connection to both our bodies and our food, but also by suggesting the breakage of our cultural regulations, which also dictate the existence of that which is right and proper. And yet, the kitchen is full of instruments of ‘violence’, aimed at chopping, cutting, mashing, and, overall, the complete physical disintegration of matter, often to create something different, something ‘Other’  – at least as far as the original physical notion of the food was concerned. To illustrate this, one need only think of a humorous, but unnerving scene in Gremlins (1984), when Lynn Peltzer (Frances Lee McCain) catches a group of the horrid creatures wreaking havoc in the kitchen. Scared, but clearly not quite petrified, the woman quickly disposes of the creatures by making use of the appliances in the room. First, she stabs a gremlin with a sizeable kitchen knife. Then, she proceeds to kill one by chopping it up in the blender, and then another by trapping it in the microwave. The visual rendition of the latter is particularly haunting and disgusting. The gremlin is seen trapped in the microwave, as we wait for the mushy explosion of monster flesh that eventually comes, covering the glass door of the appliance in green, gooey matter. In this scene, the ordinary nature of kitchen appliances is transformed into a conduit for physical destruction. This re-­ imagination of appliances as dangerous and Other is a fitting counterpart to the monstrosity of the gremlins themselves, as notions of violence, miscreation, and death mix and mingle in the kitchen. The known becomes unknown, as the culinary unheimlich manifests in the most unexpected, yet haunting of ways. To further address the connection between kitchens, violence, and a sense of Otherness, one need only think of the film Maggie (2015), an interesting take on the cinematic zombie narrative, with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the surprisingly moving role of the title character’s father. Here, a number of heated arguments and exchanges actually take place in the kitchen. The kitchen acts as the focal point where important events unfold, from teenager Maggie’s (Abigail Breslin) growing and unavoidable desire to consume living flesh – as a result of her “necroambulist” condition – to her inability to fit in with her family because of her changing nature. Simultaneously, the kitchen often brings members of the family together in ways that appear disturbingly normal, as they go about their daily lives,

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cooking and eating, in spite of the horrific occurrences around them. Just as the lack of a ‘normal’ appetite signals Maggie’s worsening condition, so does the kitchen recall the place played by both cooking and eating in constructing cultural notions of normality, time, and the everyday (Shove et al. 2012). In an inevitably graphic episode, the kitchen also acts as the theatre for Maggie’s act of self-mutilation, which takes place as her stepmother (Joely Richardson) is busy preparing a meal. While Maggie is outside on a swing, her stepmother is in the kitchen. She keeps a watchful eye on her stepdaughter through the window, but, at the same time, continues about her daily tasks, chopping tomatoes on a wooden board, using what looks like a sharp knife. The cinematography here draws attention to the knife and its cutting function, as close-ups of the tomatoes being sliced indicate the prevalence of the action and add an element of foreboding as well. Moments later, Maggie runs into the kitchen with a broken finger, and a disturbing black liquid spills out of her wound. Horrified, she runs over to the momentarily abandoned knife and chopping board, and gruesomely cuts off her now deformed finger, as black blood spills over the tomatoes. The scene pivots on the mergence of bodily horror, violence, and the subversion of the culinary narrative, where kitchen instruments are used for mutilating bodies, rather than preparing food. Taking Maggie as an initial point of reference, it might be necessary to engage in a quick critical diversion on the representation and subsequent relevance of the knife, a far too common kitchen utensil that also finds a recognisable connection to the pervasive narrative of film, especially when the specific connotations of horror are concerned. In truth, one should not be surprised by seeing a kitchen knife used for violent aims, as this is not only a trope commonly reinforced by a number of now iconic cinematic narratives – from Psycho (1960) to Halloween (1978), The Shining (1980), and Misery (1990) – but also a tacit characteristic that runs through the cultural properties of the instrument. Leon Kass labels the knife “an instrument of violence”, paradoxically used for “killing and severing”, as well as cutting and serving food (1999, 143). The knife is a commonplace instrument in kitchens across the world. Yet, knives also proliferate in butcher shops, abattoirs, and are a known piece of military gear, used in warfare. The knife occupies a liminal space in human organisation. Indispensable to prepare and consume food – a necessity of life – it is also part of the narrative of violence and butchering. A keen observer would notice that the evolutionary history of the knife as a “commensal artefact” – as food anthropologist Nadia Seremetakis terms it, highlighting it as part of our

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ritualised culinary structures (1996, 14) – provides details on the multiple changes undergone by the instrument, altering its shape and sharpness, to render it less dangerous. This, Kass insists, was caused by the many instances where arguments erupted during dinner, and the knife was quickly used as a weapon (1999, 143). Culturally speaking, the very presence of the knife in the kitchen acts as a constant reminder of the potentially violent nature of eating, in both physiological and interpersonal terms. There is something particularly horrific about the sight of seeing someone using a kitchen knife on themselves, even if the action stops at pointing and does not descend into actual cutting. This is especially disturbing if the act takes place in the kitchen or at the dinner table, for, in spite of the tacit violent uses of the knife in other situations, that use must remain unspoken, and one use should never encroach upon the other. Although the knife is a liminal instrument, its various and often conflicting uses must remain separate, and never break the cultural boundaries that construct notions of safety and propriety. The caution required in using a knife in a kitchen or dining situation is the result of the emotions aroused by the general memory and association with death and danger. This caution renders, as Norbert Elias puts it, a “symbolic meaning”, hidden within the knife as an instrument, which inevitably “leads to the preponderance of feelings of displeasure” at the sight of its misuse (1979, 123). It is precisely this unspoken cultural rule – solidified in displeasure and even fear – that is made manifest in Maggie. This, of course, highlights the importance of the kitchen-knife narrative in the film, and what makes the use of the kitchen knife as a mutilating device so disturbing. A temporal breakage separates the normality of the knife’s use in food preparation – the slicing of the tomatoes – and the abnormal representation of Maggie’s physical and mental change, signalled by the usage of the knife as an instrument of bodily violence. It is even more evocative that she should cut her finger off right there on the chopping board itself, completely breaking the cultural boundaries that regulate both eating and cooking as practices belonging to the everyday. As the blood spills over the tomatoes, and the knife severs Maggie’s finger from her hand, the cultural narrative that places the human in a hierarchically safe position is suspended and disrupted. The kitchen knife, common and forcibly unthreatening within the bounds of culinary regulation, is rendered as a disjunctive and unsettling presence, its infliction upon the human body uncovering the lightly disguised cultural underpinnings of the ‘violence vs cooking’ dichotomy. The act signals not only, metaphorically speaking, the falling of the fabricated barriers that expunge any notions of violence

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from the act of cooking, but also foreshadows Maggie’s loss of humanity in removing her body from the safety of the cultural narrative, and conspicuously pinpoints it as separate and, to some extent, inevitably Other.

Cooking Madness and the Hallucinatory Kitchen The food that one prepares constructs a connection between the individual and the social world, and builds a bridge between the psychic aspects of life – feelings, reactions, and intentions – and the physical ones – from hunger to taste. Sociologist Per Otnes argues that any meal that one prepares  – especially for others  – is “a meeting of the individual, the would-be unique” and her “combined efforts”, the “common, shared, and social” aspects of life (1991, 101). As such, cooking transforms a necessity (eating) into a social situation (conviviality and sharing). At the heart of this process lies, of course, the kitchen, interpreted here as the organised and structured location where food is prepared for consumption. The idea of understanding a meal as an important part in constructing both personal relationships and cultural structures is not completely unexpected. Anthropologist Johanna Makëla, for instance, contends that “eating meals does not only amount to eating certain ingredients cooked in a certain way, in a certain order. With whom and under what conditions we eat is also important” (1991, 90). The focus on combining the right ingredients, and producing the dish in an acceptable manner, is only a part of what constructs the dining experience. The set-up of the table, the circumstances in which the food is consumed, the people with whom one dines, and the reaction that diners have to the cook’s effort are all important parts of constructing what we define culturally  – as Mary Douglas has long argued  – as “a meal” (1972). In these terms, the kitchen can also be understood as a very liminal locus, as the place where ingredients are not yet dishes, where the future meal only holds the promises of being consumed, and where the cook functions as a link between the embodied nature of food and the viscerality of the eating experience. It is not difficult to imagine how that sense of viscerality could easily become too confronting, should the regulations that hold the regimented nature of cooking collapse, together with the psychosocial consequences that this entails. There is no denying that there is a very tactile dimension associated with food. This is particularly true for the food preparation stages, where the cook handles the ingredients in a variety of ways to assemble the

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dishes. Parts of the eating process are also heavily connected to the sensorial dimension of touch. This manifests not only in relation to the tongue and lips, but, in a variety of occasions, also hands, as some foods dispense with the mediation of commensal artefacts  – namely, the cutlery  – and call for a more direct physical interaction on the eater’s part. A number of films in recent times have capitalised on this relation – from Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) to Chocolat (2000) – highlighting the tactile dimension of food preparation. Very few, however, have drawn attention to the possibly haunted and Othering nature of encountering food, the foreign matter that continuously dictates our survival. Similarly, not many films have employed the use of Gothic tropes – from alienation to madness, confinement, and potential inhumanity (Bloom 2010, 63) – to render the disjointed nature of cooking, and to construe the kitchen as a haunted and haunting space. The Stepford Wives (2004) is a good example where the kitchen is portrayed as a site of alienation and Otherness, as the robot machine wives of the title slowly replace the ‘real’ women of a small American town. The kitchen is at the heart of the transformation, in that skilled cooking and food preparation are envisioned as some of the main indicators of a ‘perfect housewife’. As the opening credits of the film roll, we are presented with historical footage of 1950s domestic advertisements, portraying kitchen appliances as amazing pieces of machinery, and relaying the delight of housewives in engaging with shiny ovens and fridges. The connection between kitchen appliances and the figure of the housewife is not, of course, surprising. Design historian Klaus Spechtenhauser reminds us that in the 1950s, the form of the kitchen was being “dictated by the modernisation, mechanisation, and rationalisation of the household”, accompanied by “a fundamental re-evaluation of the role and responsibilities of the housewife” (2006, 45). In spite of the intended – at least originally – pleasant nature of the opening images in The Stepford Wives, there is something too pristine about the ways in which kitchens are presented. They are too sterile, too untouched, and not quite ‘lived in’ enough. This goes hand in hand with the image of the housewives that is put forward. Although they are constantly smiling in delight, their robotic movements make them seem disconnected, “unnatural”, and, therefore, almost not human (Royle 2003, 1). This is, unsurprisingly, part of the narrative that will be pursued later on in the film. The Stepford Wives constructs a ­veritable vision of what can be termed the domestic uncanny, where the familiarity of the kitchen is just, paradoxically, too familiar, too pristine, too unscathed, and eventually transforms itself into an unfamiliar and inevitably unnerving presence.

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The development and impact of the culinary uncanny  – and what Melanie Waters terms, connecting the notion of domesticity to the unheimlich, “uncanny femininity” (2011, 60)  – is made even more visible in Compulsion (2013), a film where the clean lines of the kitchen space, the overindulgent nature of taste, and the liminal interactions between love, obsession, and madness collide. Here we see Amy (Heather Graham), a fanatical, but yet unfamed chef, whose compulsive behaviours in the kitchen and obsessive attachment to food and cooking alienate her from those around her, and make interpersonal relationships an impossibility. There are multiple suggestions throughout the film that challenge the integrity of Amy’s mental state, as the audience witness kitchen hallucinations and overblown food dreams completely overtaking the young woman’s consciousness. While there is no hint at blood and gore – without counting, of course, the suggestion that Amy may have killed her neighbour Saffron (Carrie-Anne Moss), and destroyed her body using the disposal unit in her own kitchen sink – witnessing Amy’s descent into her ‘kitchen madness’ is a very unnerving experience. So too, of course, is the chilling realisation of her infantilised personality and social ineptitude. Because of this, Compulsion makes for an evocative example of ‘kitchen horror’, even if the horror relates more to social alienation than it does to actual physical affect. As an overactive cook, who spends far too much time in her pristine and high-design kitchen, Amy is obsessed with acquiring information on how her food tastes, on how it feels, and how perfectly it is prepared. She is meticulous in her questioning, as much as in her cooking. She routinely asks her fiancé Fred (Kevin Dillon) to clearly define the qualities of her dishes, testing for gaps and faults, and searching for constant approval: Amy How were the truffles? They were perigord. Fred The best. Amy Did they overpower the partridge? Fred Definitely not.

The use of the term “overpower” is common when discussing flavours. And yet there is a certain hidden sense of violence behind it – of abuse and forcefulness – that cannot be avoided. Flavours do have an intrinsic ability to impose themselves, to ‘take over’. While manifestly Amy’s interest in her own culinary craft is presented as an expression of love – as she insists on multiple occasions – there is something sinister about her exchanges with other individuals, something not quite right that makes the viewer

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feel uneasy. Perhaps it is the negation of any form of relaxation that may come with eating. Or, perhaps, it is Amy’s compulsive layer of scrutiny, which makes the diners feel watched, and insinuates the suspicion that she is emotionally very fragile and might indeed lash out violently at any moment. There is also an underlying suggestion that a flavour might subdue you, make you helpless, and that food, in truth, might just kill you. The experience of flavour is an intimate one, one that is reliant on physical contact between tongue and foreign matter, and that can only truly be achieved by fully engaging with the food, through ingestion. While tastes can be familiar, tasting is a paradoxically unfamiliar process, for no flavour can truly be accessed until contact is made. As such, the very notion of flavour is fraught with unpredictability. Discussing the experience of taste in relation to pleasure, Lisa Heldke argues that the power of flavour derives “from the intimacy of the senses” and the “concomitant feelings of vulnerability such intimacy inspires” (2005, 387). Tasting is a risky business. Compulsion makes it clear that the experience of flavour is a privilege that, if refused, might have dire consequences. Amy perceives food as not only an outlet of her creativity, but also an expression of her love, affection, and devotion for the receivers of the food itself. This approach to food echoes the traditional and long-standing mantra that food is an expression of love – a phrase often associated with ideas of motherhood and femininity, not only within critical scholarship, but in the wider cultural scope as well. Food is never ‘just food’ in Compulsion. Every meal that Amy prepares is projected as an important event, an expression of her inner self that is projected onto the current relationship in which she is engaging. There is no denying that Amy establishes a very direct, palpable experience with the foods she prepares. From cutting to chopping, from mashing to pounding, Compulsion’s cinematography provides close-ups of Amy’s hands as she prepares the food. Amy often uses her fingers to eat, her tactile connection to both raw ingredients and finished product made clear and unavoidable. She scoops whipped cream out of bowls with her fingers, and moans as she inhales the smells of desserts cooking in the oven. She also acts in a sexualised manner whenever she is discussing her food creations, with the intention that food eating will lead to sex. This is shown on a number of occasions, as dinner is often accompanied by the promise of sex with her fiancé. Elspeth Probyn contends that cooking, especially when associated with notions of love and affection, “is the point where knowing the self and caring for the other merge, where food

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and sex intersect” (2000, 70). That intersection, however, is never fully concretised in Compulsion. Strangely, the promise of sex associated with food remains just that, and no sexual act between Amy and her fiancé ever fully materialises. Amy’s attention is far too focused on the food, as well as the commensal artefacts on the table – from the serving china to the expensive cutlery – and her obsessive behaviour eventually causes her fiancé to reject her sexual advances. In a memorable scene, after Fred has refused to entertain a discussion about the quality of her profiteroles – promptly leaving her house in the midst of dinner – Amy is shown sitting alone on the floor. She begins to pick profiteroles from the plate, putting several in her mouth in quick succession. Her behaviour is, indeed, compulsive, as her sadness at her argument with Fred is displaced onto the consumption of her food. As her food is rejected, so is her love, and she consumes it herself in an effort to feel appreciated. The effort, however, is clearly a failure, and Amy is portrayed as permanently dissatisfied, with the rejected profiteroles acting as a metonymic signifier, as Amy’s desires are inevitably left without satisfaction. Following this episode of culinary rejection, the suspicion that Amy hides a violent nature is confirmed when, upon discovering her fiancé’s culinary infidelity  – her horror at discovering he prefers to dine out at a restaurant, rather than consuming the food she has prepared, is successfully communicated via a mixture of rage and sadness  – she decides to punish him by killing and cooking his beloved pet bird, and then serving it to him in the guise of, once again, a partridge. Indeed, Amy’s behaviour regularly exceeds the limits of what is considered to be acceptable in a meal-set situation. She is obsessive with requesting details, desperate to receive praise for her dishes, uncomfortably observant of the diners’ reactions, militant in her feeding intents, and, overall, completely unable to handle any rejection of her food, which she naturally perceives as a rejection of herself. In yet another disturbing scene, Amy catches Saffron discarding the dishes she had prepared into the trash. Enraged by the discovery, Amy drags Saffron back to the table and forces her to eat the foods that had been lovingly prepared for her. In her fury, Amy accuses Saffron of not appreciating her ‘creation’. “You will not reject me, too”, she screams, as the frightened Saffron quivers on the dining chair, having previously spat out the food that Amy herself had prepared. In a Kleinian shift, Saffron clearly rejects Amy’s overly embodied experience of ‘love’, as a signal to her own fragile mental state.

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Amy’s connection to her food is more than simply a construction of situation and social development. It is, above all, the fulcrum of ­internalisation in a process that lies at the cusp between the perception of love and the clear delineation of self-loathing. If it is true, as Otnes suggests, that the consumption of food “is characterised by being the prototypical relation of internalisation: of becoming one” (1991, 101), then we see that this process becomes defamiliarised in Amy’s obsessive relationship to both cooking and those for whom she is cooking. The process of ‘becoming’ that is usually understood as part of eating – that is, food becoming part of one’s body and therefore providing nourishment  – is subverted by Amy’s internalisation of the feeding process as psychic-making. Food sociologist Tahire Koctürk-Runefors even suggests that “the dishes we prepare give intimate clues about the person we are”, so that the positive assertion of identity very often “begins with food” (1991, 188). In Amy’s case, however, her obsession with love and being accepted signals the destabilisation of the psychic processes that bestow upon food its (perceived) cultural significance, and its place in community relations. She subverts the idea of becoming by transforming the food into an extension of herself, but that is not what is truly disturbing about her behaviour. What we see in Amy is a twisted echo the Freudian introjection, where the food almost transubstantiates into Amy herself. She wishes to be taken in by those she cooks for, to be consumed, to be made whole by the process of assimilation (Freud 1961, 36). Compulsion presents food as a heavily mediated culinary artefact, a literal raw ingredient in the construction of Amy’s reality, even if that reality is estranged from the bounds of commonality and, perhaps, even rationality. In her discussion of the mnemonic properties of eating and cooking, Seremetakis argues that the food artefact, especially when handled directly, acts as “the bearer of sensory multiplicity” and the “catchment zone of perceptions” (1996, 11). The focus of “multiplicity” here is intended to convey the multilayered and multifaceted aspects of the culinary experience, as it engages not with just the physical, but the social and psychological aspects of human experience. In Compulsion, however, we see how that sense of multiplicity extends beyond the relationship between eater, food, memory, and fellow humans, but, in a conceptual twist, inverts the sensorial perception towards the individual. The meaning attached to the sensorial experience of food splits the perception of reality in such a way that, in an almost oxymoronic way, tactile translates into ephemeral, and the tangibility and viscerality of food transform into an intangible

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and introspective experience. Although the sensorial engagement with food – from taste to touch – is often taken for granted in our everyday life, Compulsion highlights and heightens its perception so much that the focus is unnerving and frustrating. In her tenacious focus on the sensuality of food – from the preparation process to the tasting moment – Amy is incensed, neurotic, and often crazed. The culinary experiences and cooking sequences that are portrayed in Compulsion are often accompanied by Amy’s imaginary commentary, which blurs the boundary between diegetic and non-diegetic. She takes on an imaginary role as a food show host, often standing strangely in kitchen, imagining it to be a television studio, complete with fabricated producer voices and live audience responses. The film’s audience are left to wonder whether her voice is part of her theatrical private performance as a food show host, or whether it exists purely in her head. In spite of the fact that Amy’s kitchen is forcefully presented as a ‘happy place’, using colours and iconographies that are culturally perceived as pleasant – the glossy surfaces and high-lit ceilings recalling the marketed freshness of culinary catalogues and cookery book kitchens – there is something inevitably distressing about the space. The panoptic view of Amy’s fantasies communicates a sense of oppression, as we watch her talk to an imaginary audience: “Now one of you lucky audience members is gonna join me for a meal that will inspire you to orgasm. Because that’s what we do on Amy’s Food For Love.” The cinematography here  – openly portraying Amy as the show host, who regularly looks straight into the camera at her viewers – continues to aid the visualisation of Amy as not only the centre of attention, but also as a lonely and constricted figure, stuck within the culinary space. Indeed, a tacit narrative exists in this representation where Amy is ‘trapped’ in the kitchen, if not physically, at least psychologically. In rendering the kitchen as an oppressive space, the film constructs a cultural critique of “kitchen culture” in the Western context, as Sherrie A. Inness terms it: “the various discourses about food, cooking, and gender […] that stem from the kitchen but that pervade out society on many levels” (2001, 3), and see women tied to the oppression of gender roles, and their own designation as cooks for the family. Discussing the hold of memory on the present, Seremetakis goes on to say that “mnemonic processes are intertwined in the sensory order in such a ­manner as to render each perception a re-perception” (1996, 12). This process of ‘re-­perception’ is essential for the creation of meaning, through the “interplay, witnessing, and cross-metaphorisation of complicated

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sensory spheres” (1996, 9). What Seremetakis is suggesting here is that every memory, especially when food-related, relies on the transformation of a sensual experience into a contextualised situation, where the process of recollection itself merges the experience of past and present into one. “Memory”, Seremetakis argues, “is the horizon of sensory experiences, storing and restoring the experience of each sensory dimension in another, as well as dispersing and finding sensory records outside of the body in a surround of entangling objects and places” (1996, 9). This understanding of food memory, however, opens the way to the possibility that, as the sensualisation of the food experience takes place, there emerges a risk of not being able to determine the difference between what is ‘real’ and what is ‘remembered’. In that case, only the psychological structures of everyday recognition will tell the difference between the present experience of food and the memory of it. If, however, that differentiation does not fully take place, the memory of food becomes a historically warped entity, giving way to the psychic re-­elaboration of the memory itself as a constant and intangible entity. This distortion of the sensual experience, I would like to suggest, can transform eating into a psychically alienating process, one in which the individual is unable to differentiate between the layers of gusto-olfactory stimuli, and the feelings that they generate at a given moment in time. They become, to put it simply, one. This alienating experience is communicated in Compulsion, and is the grounds for the uncomfortable feelings that derive from witnessing Amy’s food obsession. The “horizon” of mnemonic experience in relation to the senses is absent in Amy’s own experience of food, and past and present merge in her often hallucinogenic states. Amy is almost stuck in a loop, a recurring circle of culinary remembrance and re-­enactment that entraps both her senses and her logic. Her re-enactment obsession is also visible in her continuous watching and rewatching of her favourite movies, the only other apparent pleasure in her life aside from food. Both recipes and the cooking instructions that derive serve as ways to regiment actions and relationships. Whether they are enforcing social norms, or “provid[ing] an arena for individual expression”, cooking instructions “participate in a social world in which meals are highly significant rituals” (Floyd and Forster 2003, 6). There is indeed no denying the rituality of Amy’s actions in the kitchen. Even when she does not succumb to her hallucinatory re-imaginations of herself as a food show host, she is anally strict on how the kitchen – which she refers to as her

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“temple” – must be organised. This ranges from the position of the ceiling lights, to the height of her working surfaces. Repetition seems to be key to Amy’s approach. This intent, however, also suggests the possibility of a dangerous temporal mergence, where Amy is unable to compartmentalise every cooking act as individual, and they all blur together in a psychically unstable collection of memories. This break in temporal development is something that, strangely, is recognised as being part of the recipe itself, as well as the repeated process of cooking instructions and performances. Anthropologists Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster suggest that, within recipes and cooking instructions, “patterns of behaviour stretching back into the past are illustrated and re-illustrated” (2003, 6). And although this understanding of cooking was not originally meant to convey the performance of the recipe as a spectral presence, one cannot deny that the return of the past, and the encroaching function it performs on the present, makes the idea of repeating cooking instructions inevitably uncanny. In Compulsion, we see how Amy becomes lost in the continuous illustrations of her cooking, and struggles to move forward into relationships and her everyday life. Amy’s engagement with her own culinary memories prompts her to estrange herself from anything, or anyone, that she regards as unsynchronised with what she considers her passion. Her fixated attachment to the kitchen as a locus of existence – as well as her heightened perception of food consumption as an almost extrasensorial experience – marks her as strange, odd, and an outsider. Amy’s own life only seems to exist in the kitchen, stuck in the repetition of cooking instructions, which inevitably generate a distorted vision of the present, and the sense of self that derives therein. In spite of the fact that eating and cooking are universal human activities, Amy is unable to establish an empathetic connection with her fellow human being, as he feels their lack of continuous desire and appreciation for her are a direct commentary on herself as an individual. Whenever Amy recalls both preparing and eating her own food, she becomes dreamy and gets lost in the recollection of taste that every dish provides. The sensual experience of food is given a lot of attention. We are told carefully what sauces taste like, what meats ‘feel’ like in the mouth, and what every careful combination of spices represents. Amy’s approach, of course, is also reminiscent of the culinary philosophy proposed by a number of celebrity chefs, captained by British personality Nigella Lawson, the ‘domestic goddess’ herself, whose sultry

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and sensualised descriptions of food and cooking have made her famous on the culinary scale. And while Compulsion, as a film, was the creation of a US production team, Nigella’s fame is indeed international, and one cannot fail to spot the awkward similarities between Amy and Nigella herself. As she imagines herself recounting recipes and food experiences on her own illusory cooking show, Amy continuously creates and recreates memories, as her experience of the kitchen and her life outside of it collide and blend. Although there is a suggestion that Amy’s kitchen recollections may be based in previous factual experiences, the memory of food continues to appear forced and invented. Seremetakis suggests that both memory and the senses are “involuntary experiences”, and it is precisely their involuntary dimension that “points to their encompassment by a trans-individual social and somatic landscape” (1996, 9). Amy’s kitchen experiences, however, as well as her forced memories of food, are not fully proposed as involuntary and therefore exceed their value as mnemonic responses to sensorial stimuli. The trans-­individuality of the food experience is negated as Amy constructs a framework for her culinary landscape which is inaccessible by others. The universality of food, as well as the pleasure that people can gain in consuming it, is also negated. Food articles, in this context, are portrayed as “non-synchronous”, existing “out of the immediate continuum of socially constructed material presence and value” (Seremetakis 1996,  12). Amy removes herself from the tangibility of the historical present, and transports herself into an apparently ahistorical dimension where the food experience exists outside of the constraints of the space-time continuum. Her kitchen is disaffectingly sanitised, removing the scenes from the physicality of cooking. It exists as an ahistorical island, an entity removed from the meta-narrative of the cultural everyday, existing as its own psychic entity in Amy’s perception, as memories of food and unfulfilled desire construct their own narrative, as disjointed, incongruous, and disorderly as it is. The kitchen environment here constructs a clear conceptual connection to other examples such as The Stepford Wives. Compulsion continues the evocation of the 1950s housewife narrative, which makes several appearances in contemporary film in connection to a sense of domestic alienation and potential sense of entrapment and ‘madness’. This sociocultural and sociohistorical critique is crystallised by a suggestive evocation of the textual properties of the Gothic. We see the kitchen reimagined as part of the Gothic narrative, where a culinary rendition

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of the well-known narrative of female entrapment is portrayed. Susanne Becker has traced the narrative trajectory of the female space in Gothic horror narratives as being dependent on the intersecting dimension of “excess” and “escape” (1999, 18). As far as the female narrative is concerned, the Gothic has “always confronted forms of enclosure”, where notions of “ideological containment” characterise the “thematic confinement of the female subject within the house” (Becker 1999, 19). One can see how Compulsion plays with this intersecting narrative of enclosure and excess, leaving the notion of escape, however, quite removed from the equation. Amy is trapped in her ‘horror kitchen’, even if that entrapment is connected more to her hallucinatory states, rather than her physical confinement. The horror of the narrative derives from watching Amy’s psychic state as it degenerates, her consciousness imprisoned in the fantasy of culinary bliss that she perceives as her own reality. In this, Compulsion deviates from traditional narrative of domestic Gothic horror as it does not provide, as Becker puts it, “liberation” for the female character (1999, 19), but suggestively constructs a succession of events that correlate only inasmuch as the hallucinatory emphasis on the kitchen as a psychically haunted space is concerned. Even though Amy’s hallucinatory narrative peaks in the murder and body disposal of her neighbour Saffron – a fact that transforms the kitchen from a psychologically horrific space to a physically horrific one – there is very little closure left for Amy, as the madness of the oppressive kitchen continues to dictate her uncontrollable existence, stuck in a cycle of Gothicised domestic excess.

Feeding Otherness

and Murderous

Love

The conceptual relationship between food and womanhood has been a topic amply explored and discussed within the broader field of food studies (Cline 1990; T.M. Kelly 2001; Theophano 2002; Sceats 2004). In the Western context, the connection resounds as particularly relevant whenever notions of motherhood are called into question. Scholarship has not been remiss in investigating the different layers of the connection between food and motherhood, the biological notions of growing and ‘feeding’ a foetus – and later, breastfeeding – being but a mere starting point for a long-standing cultural narrative that goes way beyond the physical act of nourishment (Charles and Kerr 1988; Warde and Hetherington 1994). Deborah Lupton suggests that any discussion of the role of food and eating in the context of the family must incorporate an analysis of the meanings

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and norms around “motherhood and femininity”, for in “most households in Western societies”, the preparation of food is “the major responsibility of women” (1996, 39). On a woman’s part, the act of preparing food – especially when aimed at children – has often been regarded as the cornerstone of the cultural identification of what a ‘woman’s job’ is. Developing on this notion of labour subdivision within the nuclear family narrative, Rosalind Coward contends that “cooking food and presenting it beautifully” can be “an act of servitude” (1984, 103). In spite of the suggestively servile notions of cooking and presenting food as a ‘job’, it is also quite clear that the expectation that women will feed the family is not simply connected only to gender categories, domesticity, and the – often inequitable – division of labour within the home. Indeed, a distinct narrative exists and persists linking a woman’s desire to feed others to notions of love and love-giving. The expectation that women will prepare and serve food because they love their families is strong in Western contexts, and, often, a woman’s failure to properly provide wholesome meals for her partner and children is taken to be proof of her less than amiable character. The old mantra that ‘food equals love’ – as previously suggested through Compulsion – proves resilient in the Western psyche, and mothers are, more often than not, at the centre of the cultural narrative that lives therein. The notion is also perpetrated by other expressions that pepper the English language (in particular), such as ‘the kitchen is the heart of the home’. At least three important meanings can be extrapolated from this seemingly harmless expression. Firstly, food is literally what pumps life into people, and we all must eat to survive. Secondly, the kitchen, where most family meals are shared, provides the founding grounds for constructing the ‘home’ in the social and emotional sense, therefore reinforcing the idea that sharing food represents an essential part of kinship. Thirdly, if one considers the cultural association between cooking and women – as well as the fact that the ‘heart’ is a common metaphorical image for love – then it is not too far-fetched to see women literally at the centre of the emotional network on which the foundations of the home are built. In this respect, the woman’s role as wife and mother would be, as Lupton puts it, “to keep the household harmonious, provide emotional stability for the family and acculturate children into appropriate terms of behaviour, including conventions of emotional management and eating habits” (1996, 39). The perceived connection between food, motherhood, and love is exploited in the film Mama (2013), a film where a spectral female entity – fondly known as ‘Mama’ – fosters two abandoned children, Victoria and

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Lily (Megan Charpentier and Isabelle Nélisse) in a forest cabin for five years, and eventually follows them into a suburban area when the children’s Uncle Lucas (Nicolaj Coster-Waldau) finally takes guardianship of them. Indeed, food plays an important role in establishing the inter-­ narrative between characters. Long before the viewers have an opportunity to be visually presented with the spirit of Mama, or even understand what she truly is, an important scene sees her making contact with the little girls through food. A lonely cherry, coming from a darkened area in the corner of the cabin, is seen rolling on the floor towards the hungry and lonely girls. This immediately captures their attention – especially that of the eldest, Victoria  – and sets the ground for the mother–child relationship that will be established. Although Mama herself is not in view, the assumption that she is the one ‘feeding’ the girls is made clear, her maternal instincts towards the little ones openly communicated into the narrative. In spite of the evocation of love, however, there is something unavoidably disturbing about the encounter. While the presentation of the cherry would otherwise be interpreted as a warming act – the expression of maternal love as understood in the Western sense  – the effect is not quite as encouraging to the viewers as it could be. First, Mama’s concealment immediately bestows a sense of horrific foreboding to the moment. The film’s narrative had previously told us not only that she floated with no feet – clearly the calling card of a spectre at play – but also that she killed the girls’ father in order to gain control over the children. And while the father himself was about to kill his own daughters before Mama stopped him, her maternal interests are unavoidably put forward as obsessive, warped, and haunting. To see this use of the maternal trope used in a horror film is in itself not surprising, considering, as Sarah Arnold reminds us, that horror narratives often draw upon “mythical, historical, and symbolisation of motherhood and the maternal” in order to evoke a “disruption of the ordinary” and the “provocation of anxiety” (2013, 2). In Mama, the already fraught dimension of textual motherhood, implied as a site of anxiety within the narrative confines of horror, is given an enhanced sense of dislocation through the addition of the feeding element. The fact that Mama herself approaches the girls – and gains their trust – via food is a warped instrumentalisation of the conception of maternal love, where feeding is at the centre of bonding structures. The cherry implies trust, but the set-up of the cinematic narrative communicates a sense of negative foreboding. The darkened corners, the absence of speech, and the horrific moans made by Mama throughout merge to signify an

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interruption of the stereotypically positive mother cliché. The provision of food, while commonly and culturally perceived as the expression of a mother’s love, comes to signify an unhealthy and disturbing attachment from the very beginning. This use of food as ‘offering’ draws attention to the archetypical understanding of motherhood as both a “good” and a “bad” figure, where “primal fears” always exist in conjunction with a “corresponding pleasure” (Arnold 2013, 4). And while a moment of grace comes with the presentation of the cherry – for we see a glimpse of what we would like to interpret as ‘caring’  – the Gothic effect of the scene constructs the offering as an Othering and disjointing moment, where the girls are perceived to figuratively abandon the civilised and tangible world of the living, and join the haunted chronicles of Mama’s own narrative. Indeed, it soon becomes clear that, although seemingly looked after by Mama in the cabin, the girls grew up alone and semi-feral, left to primarily fend for themselves in the woods. When their presence in the cabin is finally discovered by a search party, the girls are found to be living in squalor. Thin, dirty, and suggestively covered in waste, the girls appear to have regressed to a prelinguistic state, and are unable to communicate with people from the outside. As the girls are discovered, so is a rotting pile of cherry stones, suggesting that the girls fed primarily on cherries for the duration of their stay with Mama. We see here an inversion of many prominent psychoanalytical theories that would suggest the detachment from the maternal body as an important part of the infant’s individualisation and growth (Kristeva 1991; Klein 2002). The girls have been, literally and figuratively, inseparable from Mama, and have seemingly merged their consciousness with hers. Lupton pointedly argues that, in the Western psyche, “mothers domesticate children, propelling them from the creature of pure instinct and uncontrolled wildness of infancy into the civility and self-regulation of adulthood” (1996, 39). At the centre of this process of ‘domestication’ lies the act of consuming food, through which children learn appropriate manners of behaviour and social conduct. In Mama, however, the process of ‘domestication’ is subverted and negated. The sharing of cherries as the only food is not only seen as inappropriate and disturbingly unbelievable – for who, truly, could survive only on cherries for over five years? – but also a metaphorical return to wildness which is instigated by Mama in her bid to ‘own’ the girls. It is a well-known and explored idea in the intersecting fields of social anthropology and psychoanalysis that the child “does not start to become fully human until it is able to control its own bodily orifices and engage in ‘civilised behaviour’”

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(Lupton, 40). Until then, the mother  – or mother-figure, often as the primary caregiver – must maintain vigilance in order to surround children with a cordon sanitaire, protecting their “essential purity” from the “dirt and pollutants that threaten their health”, including “contaminants such as vomit, urine, and faeces” (Lupton, 40). The provision of nourishing and ‘clean’ food is also part of this cultural differentiation between purity and impurity, and constructs the bounds of appropriate behaviour, as far as the idea of motherhood is concerned (Murcott 2005). The provision of food in Mama, however, becomes the catalyst for the physical and, to some extent, psychic pollution of the two girls. Rather than providing the metaphorical incarnation of a mother’s ‘pure’ love, Mama’s cherries render visible the extent of her horrific uncleanliness, even if, in her case, that status is primarily connected to the haunted and haunting nature of her spirit, which reflects and engulfs the girls through a process of undomestication and psychic dissolution. Conceptually speaking, the maternal body is often perceived as a liminal and potentially polluting entity. The mother’s body emits fluids  – from menstrual blood to breast milk – that are often viewed as polluting substances (Douglas 2003, 122). Set deeply in contrast to the mother’s function, the mother’s body is potentially contaminating. It is an entity of nature and a symbol of animality (Oliver 1992, 74). Women’s bodies are, as such, a threat to cultural self-identity, and often the centre of debates over individuality and physical autonomy. In Western contexts, where self-control and individuality are considered to be essential to maintaining independence, the fluidity of the mother’s body creates ambivalence. The female body, as maternal object, is the source of nourishment and protection but, at the same time, it is also understood as, to borrow Lupton’s words, “dark, threatening, a source of contagion, pollution and engulfment” (1996, 45). The relationship between foetus and mother stands as a particularly ambiguous category of being. After birth, the ambiguity continues as a liminal stage presents itself, linking the maternal body to the infant, where the mother literally becomes part of the child’s body via breastfeeding. The mother’s body is, as Jane Flax puts it, both “inner and outer”, both familiar and unfamiliar, both self and “other” (1993, 148). This liminality arouses anxieties as the child’s life progresses, and calls for the construction of boundaries not only between ‘self’ and ‘Other’, but also between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. When the blurring of boundaries between the maternal and the infant’s body is perceived, this causes extreme disconnection, disjointment, fear, and, ultimately, to echo

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Kristeva’s choice term, abjection. The abject disturbs boundaries, and lies in the in-between stage of existence that separates humanity from the animals (Kristeva 1982, 12). This fragile identification of the independent self, and its precariousness as a separate human entity, is what is evoked in Mama through the ambiguous exchange of food matters, and the liminal relationship between the perceived mother and the child. I would like to suggest that this is precisely what makes the connection between Mama and the girls disturbing to watch, especially when the discovery of the girls’ feral existence is made. The filth, the isolation, the animality – as well as the perversion of the Western ideals of ‘maternal love’ via feeding  – are evocative of the liminal and abject state that recalls the unthinkable and unconscious crossing of boundaries between self and Other. The cherries, as the only apparent food consumed by the girls and provided by Mama at the cabin, are the fulcrum on which the repugnant and disquieting relationship of interdependence rests. Indeed Mama’s love is suffocating, stifling, overbearing. The more she loves, the less nourishment she provides. The choice of the cherry here as the ominous food is also significant, its fleshy and plump redness disturbingly evoking the cocoon-like fleshiness of the maternal body, within which the seed grows and matures. The destabilisation of the intersecting Western narratives of motherhood and civilisation lies at the core of constructing the feeding relationship in Mama as disturbing, the filth and savagery of the girls clearly communicating the horror of abandonment and, to some extent, madness. The very fear evoked by Mama is entangled with her subverted materiality, as well as her challenging maternality. She feeds her children, but her affection, as well as her absent body, is “murderous” as much as it is “nourishing” (Kristeva 1982, 54). Both social and psychological disconnection from the mother’s body are denied, and this is even more disconcerting as Mama’s body is but an illusion, a perversion of the embodied nature of the nourishment-giving, maternal body but, paradoxically, deeply evocative of its fluidity and lack of boundaries. In his evaluation of consumer culture, and the place occupied by commodities within it, Martyn J. Lee suggests that material objects often function as the “dynamic elements of an extended self ” (1993, 26). Within the group of material objects mentioned by Lee, food figures prominently as an expression of identity. That expression, of course, includes not only the sociocultural and psychological effects that food will have on the eater, but also extends to the identity-creation process of those who prepare the food. An offer of food is a tacit form of gift that symbolises “close relations

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between loved ones”, and, as such, contains a certain amount of “psychic energy” that serves as a symbolic commitment to the relationship itself (Lee 1993, 27). This understanding of food as a relationship regulator – particularly relevant within the constraints of the family context – is of course not new in itself, and had been famously surveyed by Marcel Mauss in The Gift, where Mauss understands the exchange of goods as a socio-economic system organised not around selling goods – in the capitalist sense – but around gift-giving. Mauss focuses on the reciprocal food exchanges that bind members of a group together in relations of mutual participation and, to some extent, unity. What permeates the exchange, according to Mauss, is the idea that some of the “self ” of the person is given away in the food gift, and thus, to give a gift is to give some of oneself (Mauss 1990; Meigs 1997, 102). Because of this exchange, food giving is deeply characterised by a sense of obligation, a need to return the “spiritual essence” that was given, and reciprocate the offer (Mauss 1990, 10). This notion of spiritual exchange inevitably carries with it a more sinister dimension, as it implies that a relationship of not only servility, but also of moral, even mystical obligation is hidden in the provision of food. One can only wonder how far this connection could actually be taken, both physically and conceptually, and with what consequences. As film is such an evocative medium, we do not need to wonder for long, as the menacing side of food ‘as gift’ is clearly explored in Coraline (2009). This example perfectly illustrates the threatening nature of providing food to others, even if, generally speaking, this is not an occurrence of which we are fully conscious. Indeed, not many would think of sharing food as an act of spiritual obligation. All the same, one cannot deny that a cultural narrative of responsibility about having to reciprocate a dinner invitation exists in our Western culture (Gilbert 2000). The plot of Coraline, a film entirely composed of stop-motion 3D animation, centres on the adventures of a curious 11-year-old girl – the eponymous Coraline of the title – as she discovers a portal to a different dimension, inhabited by a creature who calls herself the ‘Other Mother’, and who appears as almost an exact replica of the girl’s ‘real mother’, except for displaying large buttons instead of eyes. It does not take long for Coraline to discover that the Other Mother harbours a dark secret, as the latter’s true nature is exposed. She is in fact a witch – known later as ‘the Bedlam’ – who intends to sew button’s into Coraline’s own eyes in order to drain her energy and life force away. Even at this embryonic stage, one can easily note, in a distinctly Gothicised incarnation, the tropic presence of that ‘spiritual essence’ that Mauss sees at heart of any gift exchange, especially food (Fig. 5.2).

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Fig. 5.2  The Other Mother prepares breakfast in Coraline (2009)

Beyond the unavoidable presence of ‘button eyes’, the most evocative evidence of the Other Mother’s difference is sited in her relationship to food, feeding, and cooking as both a family and a cultural practice. In the ‘real’ world – to use a distinctly contested and contestable term – the kitchen in Coraline’s house is a sterile and anonymous place. The décor is minimal and the colours are bland and uninspiring, with shades of grey and beige suggesting an uninviting space. Here, we see an evocation of the cultural construction of colours, mostly based on general “assumptions” (Maund 1995, 78), where both grey and beige are not perceived to be lively or vivacious. The kitchen in Coraline’s house is not a ‘lived in’ space, and this is in spite of the fact that the family are seen consuming their meals at the kitchen table on multiple occasions. The lack of vivacity mirrors the interrupted social relationship between Coraline and her parents. They are unable to communicate effectively, and often bicker at the table. This interruption is, unsurprisingly, mirrored in the food that is served, portrayed as slimy, and off-putting. Here, the cultural notion of ‘healthy’ is equalled with ‘unappetising’. Coraline’s reception of the food is shrouded in disgust and aversion, for she sees the healthy dishes that her father produces as inherently boring. Her complaints about the food are met with uninterested responses by her parents, who seemingly show very little interests in the girl’s opinions.

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The uninviting nature of the kitchen as a family and culinary space is complicated further by the fact that Coraline’s mother is not in charge of the cooking, always leaving the task to the father, and claiming that “cleaning” is her only job, as per a usually unspoken family agreement. This is clearly portrayed in negative terms by the narrative, as it not only conforms to Coraline’s perception, but also falls into old cultural stereotypes that successfully alienate the viewers from Coraline’s mother. One can see here how the narrative recalls the old adage in Western family organisation that sees the mother in charge of preparing meals, recalling the activity as an expression of love for her husband and children (Charles and Kerr 1988), as previously illustrated in Mama. Cooking, of course, has also been perceived as a woman’s duty, cementing the boundaries of gender roles and relationships in relation to food preparation. This is part of what sociologist Jennifer Craik would term “the making of the mother”, a process in which the “role of the kitchen” and food as a metaphor for love remains culturally undisputed (1989, 54). The fact that Coraline’s mother does not do the cooking is presented as further evidence to her inability to perform her role properly, as well as her perceived lack of love and interest in her daughter. Indeed, both the sterile kitchen and uninspiring food are employed to communicate the sense of estrangement that is pervasive in the initial representation of Coraline’s family life. A sterile kitchen equals a disaffecting family life, and unappetising, disgusting food becomes synonymous with the inability to construct empathetic and effective relationships between family members. In contrast, the world of the Other Mother is constructed on top of exciting and inviting food events. The Other Mother’s kitchen is decorated in bright shades of orange and yellow, the cultural understanding of colours being once again called into action to render the kitchen as a warm and inviting space. When Coraline encounters her for the first time, the Other Mother is hard at work preparing dinner for the family. Here, her performance of the gender role equals cooking with love, a connection that is forcefully made upon the narrative. The Other Mother clearly recalls images of 1950s American housewives, busy in the kitchen, preparing food for their husbands and children that is steeped in love and devotion – and distinctly reminiscent of the constructions also put forward by other examples such as The Stepford Wives and Compulsion. The food that the Other Mother prepares is also reflective of the time she spends preparing it. She assembles meals with multiple courses, from a roast turkey to mashed potatoes, corn on the cob, and pie for dessert. Food preparation

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is channelled as an evocation of the Other Mother’s place not only in the kitchen, but also in Coraline’s life. By presenting herself as the perfect cook, she also sets herself up as the ideal carer. It seems that the image of the ever-competent 1950s housewives haunts the kitchen narratives of contemporary Anglo-American films, a lingering presence that feels both natural and unnatural, and successfully and continuously conveys the representation of the culinary uncanny. One must not forget that the 1950s, especially in the United States, was an era of constant consumption where both men and women were encouraged, as cultural historian Linda Civitello suggests, to do everything “in record numbers” (2007, 329). The 1950s housewife is not only an image of feminine and motherly perfection – so perceived – but is also profoundly entangled with an era where production and consumption levels were growing exponentially, in tandem with aggressive advertising practices that constructed the golden age of domestic shopping, especially in connection to food. Of course, there are a number of historical questions as to the validity of this constructed and highly idealised image of the kitchen-savvy and laborious 1950s housewife, and whether this cultural figure ever truly existed in the guise in which she is often represented (Nicholson 2015). All the same, the cultural repercussions of the 1950s housewife’s spectral reoccurrence in contemporary film are clear, as our contemporary Western culture inhabits its own historical mystification, as far as both gender roles and food consumption are concerned, constructing a sense of aspirational identity which is both ghostly and sinister. As far as the Other Mother’s spectral incarnation of the 1950s housewife is concerned, her assiduous desire to prepare delicious foods to consume is not, expectedly, just about satisfying Coraline’s physical needs. It is also, I would like to suggest, about regulating the set-up in her house as “ordinary” (Weiss 2008). Every instance of Coraline’s arrival at the Other Mother’s house is punctuated with the serving of food, either in the form of dinner or breakfast, according to the occasion. Although instances vary in grandeur from elaborate meals hosted in the dining room, to simple breakfasts served at the kitchen table, the continuous presence of meals and cooking is conspicuous and unavoidable. Looking beyond the n ­ arrative constraints of the film, one can see how what is being recalled here is food’s ability to transform both actions and relationships into periodised entities, constructed according to cultural conduct and the repetition of techniques and imagery that put the eating body at the centre. Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has long contended that both food preparation and

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consumption need to be situated “in time” as “punctuating” our lives via the needs of the body (1993, 11). Consumption, in this sense, calls for habituation, where the preparation and consumption of food become part of our everyday sense of normality through duplication and accepted exposure to practices and routines. In this context, the Other Mother’s performance of the cooking and feeding role exposes food’s ability to regulate situations. By using food as a medium, and as her first point of contact with Coraline, the Other Mother sets up her environment as comforting, unthreatening, and, for lack of a better term, ‘normal’. She centres her relationship with the young girl around the unspoken notion of culinary periodisation – the socially regulated component of our daily lives, in which eating occupies an extremely central position. In spite of the fact that she introduces herself as being something ‘other’ than the ordinary, the Other Mother’s treatment of the kitchen space, her cooking activities, and the feeding that will eventually ensue, clearly channel the desire to normalise the situation, to make it look like anything but the terrifying trap that it rightfully is. As Appadurai reiterates, within the practices that centre around the social positioning of the body, both cooking and eating perform important roles in structuring our “temporal rhythm” and guiding the “measure” on which the complex structures of behaviour are built (1993, 13). In Coraline, the logical chaos that would generate from going through an inter-dimensional portal and finding another mother in the kitchen is mitigated by the presence of food, and the normalising practice of cooking. The Other Mother’s world is forcefully constructed as ‘real’ by consumption, as the act grants events and exchanges a layer of physicality, and a perception of actual existence. Appadurai also suggests that any formalised instance of food sharing – especially in the form of celebratory meals attached to rites of passage – provides a perceived “natural” periodisation to life, as “consumption creates time” (1993, 15). The everyday is perceived as naturally occurring, but it is in fact constructed in its perception by the consumption of food (Giard et al. 1985), for food is not an immaterial presence, but provides a tangible point of reference for grounding our experiences into the fabric of the material world. The Other Mother’s use of cooking as a loving activity represents, however, a visible corruption of the pervasively understood mother–child relationship, as this interaction – unlike other instances of food sharing as gift-exchange  – is not usually culturally characterised by notions of debt or owing. Mauss suggests that, as far as cooking is concerned, “what

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imposes obligation” is the fact that food, as an object, is “not inactive”. Once the food is given and the consumer receives it, “the giver still has a hold over its beneficiary” (1990, 11–12). This debt presents itself in the Other Mother’s suggestion to Coraline that she should have buttons sewn into her eyes, and that this is a necessary step if the young girl wishes to stay in the alternative world. As the offer is made at the dinner table, there is a tacit understanding that Coraline is returning the Other Mother’s love by allowing the act to happen. It is hinted by the Black Cat – Coraline’ anthropomorphic animal friend and confidant  – that the Other Mother either wants “something to love”, or perhaps she is “just hungry”. Food lies at the metaphysical centre of the subverted and haunted relationship between the Other Mother – as giver – and Coraline – as receiver. This also reveals that the Other Mother will want to ‘eat away’ her child’s life, a truly terrifying implication that, although never fully explained, inflicts an unexpected and frightening meaning to the notion of culinary obligation. The idea that the Other Mother has been serving Coraline her favourite foods, only to then want to feed upon the young girl herself, introduces a haunting conceptual dimension that is reminiscent of the fate of cattle, or other animals reared for eating. This metaphorical understanding adds an industrial aspect to the exchange, reminding us of Anna Meigs’s suggestion that, as far as gift exchanges – particularly of food – are involved, the essence of reciprocity is so culturally perceived that the gift system of “love” also creates a mystical “economy of participation” and dependence between individuals (1997, 102). The suggested confusion between love and parasitic existence here opens the way for seeing food at the centre of a socio-economic exchange that involves not only the politics of the family unit but, more specifically, the extended tentacles of the wider food industry, including the layers of marketing and advertising that characterise the idea of ownership, and which cast a different light onto the notion of ‘hunger’ and the politics of both material and immaterial desire. In spite of the Other Mother’s efforts, however, as her plan to capture Coraline unravels, the constant and forced presence of food and its preparation paradoxically come across as unnatural, and extremely out of place. The choice of the stop-motion medium here should be particularly accounted for. Discussing the aesthetic construction of Coraline as a horror narrative, Andrew Osmond suggests that stop-motion is not “inherently warm or charming”, and, as such, it is perfectly suited to conveying “the witchcraft it resembles” (2010, 54). The visual ‘coldness’ suggested by Osmond is particularly effective in commuting that unavoidable sense of

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disorientation and estrangement that is proper to the film. I would like to add that the perceived detached nature of stop-motion is also particularly suited to communicating the conceptual perversion of not only the loving family narrative, but also of that sense of warmth and implied comfort that is often associated with food. In spite of their appetising looks, and inflected narrative meaning, there is nothing warm and comforting about the foods the Other Mother serves. As the audience, we fully perceive the sinister nature of the foods on the table, a cinematographic construction that is fully aided by stop-motion as a meaning-generating technique. We are told on a number of occasions that the Other Mother has been ‘watching’ Coraline via the eyes of her doll. The Other Mother has studied Coraline, following her moves, surveying her preferences. The Cat confirms that the Other Mother has constructed only the parts of the world that she knew Coraline would like. From entertainment shows to the foods that she cooks, everything is calculated and created to meet Coraline’s desires. The very idea of the Other Mother constantly watching Coraline is eerie, and unnerving, as this action not only determines her predatory nature, but also establishes the framework of the Gothic by evoking the traditional narrative structure of ‘being watched’ by someone or something unknown. The idea of ‘constantly watching’ also stretches the connection to consumer-capitalist politics via the notion of surveillance. The notion of studying consumers in order to gather their preferences and wishes – often known in more positive and seemingly harmless terms as ‘market research’ – has long been part of the marketing discourses of contemporary consumer-capitalism. David Lyon suggests that recent decades “saw a massive expansion of efforts to use surveillance technologies to manage consumers” (2001, 64). Naturally, the use of surveillance as a system of control is long-standing, not only in relation to the corporate organisation of workers, but reaching as far back to its uses in prisons and hospitals. Michel Foucault famously discussed the uses of the “panopticon” in his work Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, where he establishes the structure as the “diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form” (1991, 205). And although Foucault clearly established the uses of the panopticon in contexts far removed from the domestic kitchen, its conceptual connection to matters of consumer observation proves valuable. The uses of surveillance techniques are particularly known to be used in the food industry, the system of constantly watching consumers, and gathering information about needs and wants – reinforced and reiterated, of course, via the powers of advertising – emerging

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as a practice in the 1950s, and continuing to grow in strength and scope until it progressed into what became known as surveillance at the end of the twentieth century. The history of capitalist industry in the West, and particularly of the food industry and its politics of representation within both public and private spheres, has been a “matter of the deepening and extension of information gathering”, where notions of “want” and “need” become disconcertingly entangled, blended, and merged (Robins and Webster 1999,  97). The very notion of surveillance, of course, also ties in with techno-political discourses over privacy and the cultural notion of freedom, which have become a hotbed for speculation and controversy in the twenty-first century. In a haunting description of eating, Appadurai subverts the perceived tangibility of the practice and suggests that, in our contemporary era, consumption is in fact governed by ephemerality, scopophilia, and body manipulation, linked in a systematic way to an “asset of practices that involve radical new relationships between wanting, remembering, being and buying” (1993, 33). There exists a poignant critical resemblance of the Other Mother’s performance in relation to food and cooking in Coraline, and Appadurai’s interpretation of eating as a mystifying and mystified practice. When it comes to the food industry and the notions of both surveillance and persuasion, one cannot help but be reminded of advertising narratives, where food is often presented in a way that is unbelievably unblemished and lasting. Roland Barthes constructs a connection between food and the projection of “cultural images” in his essay on “ornamental cookery”, identifying how the wider media industries – especially advertising – subconsciously and implicitly indoctrinate consumers into perceiving both the cooking and the dining experience as “openly dream-like” and “totally magical” (1994, 79). Food adverts are interpreted by Barthes to be hypnotic and culturally mystifying. The highly decorative qualities of food in food photography and advertising are echoed in Coraline, when during the first lavish dinner served by the Other Mother, the girl is presented with many choices of perfectly constructed and displayed foods, and given the choice to pick what she likes. Coraline consumes the foods with glee, but it is impossible to miss her relish not only in what she consumed physically, but also for what they represent in broader terms, from the fulfilment of her perceived desires to the enactment of ‘choices’, which she is often denied by her actual parents. The very notion of hunger here is also called into question, as the desire for food is no longer associated simply with physiological stimuli. Falk suggests that whenever

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the narrative of food advertising is at work, even in its more seemingly obscure renditions, “hunger is not only hunger”, but it is an evocation of desire that encroaches upon the consumer (1994, 161). One can see this interaction in Coraline, as hunger transforms into a rendered and reimagined experience that is connected to the effective construction of the food experiences as desirable. Indeed, there is nothing natural about the food experiences presented by the Other Mother. They emerge as an “endless stream of representations” in which food products and practices are “transformed into positive experiences” (Falk 1994, 157). The satisfaction of the corporeal need – the physiological fulfilment that comes from eating – is superseded by the symbolic associations that derive from the practice itself. The illusion of choice, coming as a consequence of a haunted and haunting narrative of surveillance, creates an unavoidable fissure between the reality of the food and the fantasy of its consumption. The pursuit of Coraline’s food selection, and the constant surveillance that both creates and denies its fulfilment, essentially relies not on the application of credibility but, as John Berger would put it, on “day-dreams” (2008, 146). The culinary set-up conveys a pervasive cultural narrative of user–buyer relations that exposes the exploitative nature of consumer-capitalism. The subtlety of the evocation here lies in the portrayal of the Other Mother as a monstrous, voracious creature, which will stop at nothing to gain her victim’s favour, so that she can eventually exploit her. In this sense, the food prepared by the Other Mother is a form of spectral marketing, a consuming and consumable narrative of desire that is meant to lure and captivate. Falk suggests that, in all instances of advertising and marketing, the link between the product and the concept implies “a metamorphosis in which the product transforms into representation” (1994, 153). That metamorphosis relates not only to the shift from “product-centred argumentation” to “product–user relationship”, but also the contextualisation of the “scene of consumption” as a depiction of experience and emotion (Falk 1994, 153). The very act of consumption becomes a decontextualised practice that relies on the re-imagination of the product itself, and the experience that will derive from its usage. In this context, the kitchen, as well as other areas of c­ onsumption, is transformed into a diachronic space of cultural “seduction”, where the difference between tangible and intangible, ‘real’ and ‘unreal’, is called into question (Baudrillard 1991). The treatment of food and culinary practices in Coraline exposes the fraught nature of eating as an embodied experience, suggesting that the practice itself is, in

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fact, nothing but a succession of constructed ideas and representations, challenging the tangibility of our everyday. The line between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ is called into question, as is the perceived separation between horror and pleasure. The very notions of food, food preparation, and eating become entangled in a ghostly logic of consumption where the “work of the imagination is to link the ephemerality of goods with the pleasures of the senses” (Appadurai 1993, 33). Food and its associated practices – from cooking to eating – are exposed as intrinsically performative and performable entities, predominantly guided by the rhetoric of identification, and its endless stream of cultural representations.

The Cannibal’s Kitchen The notion of coupling cannibal practices with organised kitchen work seems unthinkable. Our Western psyche has often been guided by the idea that cannibalism is something far removed from our civilised practices, and, therefore, its performance takes place in unorganised environments, often in the wilderness. This is even though, of course, the practice of ritualised cannibalism has been known to employ “various modes of cooking”, which continuously reveal “structural oppositions” within the society that practises it (Shankman 1969, 54). In recent years, however, the cannibal has moved to the city, and found a comfortable little spot in our domestic nightmares. In its move to the city, the cannibal has of course been accompanied by the serial killer, another figure of cultural horror that is deeply associated with our notions of safety and control. Although, thanks to recent shifts in narrative structure, we might now expect cinematic cannibals and serial killers to operate within the bounds of our progressive structures – the example of the highly educated and sophisticated Hannibal Lecter being particularly apt here (Brown 2012) – there is still something very unnerving about seeing cannibalistic cooking taking place in the kitchen, especially when that environment is presented as reasonably pristine in its conceptualisation. Any instance of cultural horror involving food – from cannibalism to other abominable instances of consumption, including eating pets – does not belong in the civilised Western kitchen. Although often unaddressed, I would like to argue that this is a very important, yet often tacit, framework in the construction of ‘kitchen horrors’, where our unspoken notions of civilisation, cultural control, and safety clash with the viscerality and embodied unavoidability of both food preparation and consumption.

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In recent years, instances of cannibal practices beginning in the kitchen have become more common in film, where the regimented nature of food preparation is obscenely coupled with the carving and cooking of human bodies, as if the human itself were just any other food. In Dumplings (2004), a well-known Hong Kong horror film directed by Fruit Chan, the kitchen becomes a site of horror as cannibal consumption is mixed with the seemingly mundane preparation of everyday food. In the film, mysterious cook Mei (Bai Ling) prepares miraculous dumpling dishes that promise to stop the aging process and bestow beauty and youth upon those women who are wealthy and lucky enough to consume them. The list includes Mrs Li (Miriam Yeung), a middle-aged woman desperate to regain the beauty of her youth and the attention of her philandering husband. It is soon revealed that the main ingredient for Mei’s dumpling dishes is aborted foetuses. As the audience, we watch in horror as the film provides us with a sequence on Mei’s food preparation routine. A skilled and effective cinematography leaves us helpless as Mei’s cleaver mercilessly, but slowly and deliberately, descends upon the small dead foetus, and chops it up like any other ingredient in the dumplings. Meanwhile, Mei sings amiably in the kitchen, acting as if she were preparing a perfectly ordinary dish, with a perfectly ordinary list of ingredients. While no blood or gore are presented, and the scene does not indulge in any particularly violent treatment of the foetus – which is, in reality, presented in a distinctly sanitised manner  – the normalisation of the cannibal practices in the kitchen bestows upon the act a distinctly fearful quality. Witnessing the preparation of the foetus dumpling soup is as disturbing as it is stomach-­ churning. The distinct home-feel of Mei’s kitchen surroundings only heightens the interruption of the cultural cliché, as mundanity and monstrosity are juxtaposed, and then become one. Dumplings, of course, is not alone in its horrifying juxtaposition of the civilised kitchen set-up with cannibal practices, even if, admittedly, in its forcefully sanitised presentation, it is relatively rare. Other cinematic examples of the connection tend to capitalise on traditional horror conventions in a more vehement manner, tracing the conceptual connection between the culturally disruptive kitchen and horror aesthetics – the latter ­operating as what Thomas M.  Sipos terms the “visual language of fear” (2010, 1). In a haunting scene at the beginning of Feed (2005), for instance, the police’s discovery of two cannibal lovers who like to consume parts of each other’s body as they engage in intercourse  – a narrative inspired by a real-life case in Germany in 2003  – is preluded

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by the officer’s encounter with an unkempt kitchen, complete with dirty dishes and pans that hiss menacingly on the stove, filled with unknown, meat-like contents. The cinematography here evokes several conventions of the serial-killer horror film – playing with both “graphic violence” and the “subtle constructions of ominous atmosphere” (Worland 2007, 10): from the use of low-lights to evoke the metaphorical idea of secrecy, to a distinctive use of mise en scène where dirty surfaces are suggestive of the ‘dirty deeds’ – murder, torture, and sexual perversions – that are taking place in other areas of the house. A similar representation can be found in The Road, as the horror of cannibalism is not only made explicit, but clearly mirrored in the depiction of the abjectified cannibal kitchen. The man and his son discover this concomitantly with – chillingly – an underground cell containing a stock of human beings, who will be butchered, cooked, and consumed, just like cattle. Here we see how the film employs cannibal cooking as a disrupted and perverted cultural activity in order to recall the “emotive” side of horror (Sipos 2010, 6), resonating with the memory of both slaughter and cruelty. The victims’ horrific screams of “they are taking us to the smoke house!” continue to echo as, later on in the film, further screams suggestive of torture and murder are heard coming from the cannibal kitchen by the on-looking protagonists of the film, who have had a lucky escape from the cannibals. As far as cannibalism in these examples is concerned, I would like to suggest that the kitchen is actually at the centre of the construction of the horror experience, in virtue of its customarily controlled nature as a spatio-­ cultural entity. The kitchen is the space where, as Floyd and Forster put it, “spheres of daily experience” interact, merge, and solidify themselves as part of our historical narratives (2003, 1). Kitchens are regimented spaces, as much as they – culturally speaking – are understood as sites of creativity, family-bonding, love, and even nostalgia. When cannibalistic consumption happens in the regimented surroundings of a working kitchen – a place that is often considered to be safe, as far as food preparation is concerned – then the very notion of cooking also represents a haunting historical disjunction. This is where the narrative of the human being becomes interrupted by its own cultural regulations and uses of artefacts, from knives to stove. To illustrate the uses of the cannibal kitchen as a site of sociohistorical disconnection, one need only think of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007). Set in Victorian London, the film tells the story of Benjamin Barker (Johnny Depp), a humble barber who is wrongfully convicted and sent to a penal colony by the corrupt Judge Turpin (Alan

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Rickman), who harbours lustful intentions towards Barker’s wife. Fifteen years later, Barker returns to London under the assumed alias of ‘Sweeney Todd’ and is set on reaping his revenge. He finds an unlikely ally in Mrs Lovett (Helena Bonham-Carter), the owner of a shop that produces, by her own admission, “the worst pies in London”. As Todd reopens his old barber shop, the site becomes the stage for gruesome murders. Todd theatrically cuts open the throats of his customers, who are then dropped into the kitchen below via a secret door, and promptly prepared and cooked into pies by Mrs Lovett. The new ‘cannibal pies’ prove to be a hit with customers, and Mrs Lovett’s shop soon becomes very successful. The reappearance of Benjamin Barker, now disguised as Sweeney Todd, does more than simply add a layer of intrigue and movement to the narrative. It is on this very reappearance that the social interactions and meanings in the narrative pivot, as does the introduction of food as a successful metaphorical device. Indeed, as Todd arrives in London, he is but a ‘ghost’ of his former self. Taking on a new identity, he removes Benjamin Barker’s agency and relegates him to a feature of the past – unaddressed and, as far as the social context of London is concerned, long forgotten. It is clear, however, that the memory of Benjamin Barker still exists, even if it operates through the figure of Todd. Via the newly constructed identity of Todd, Benjamin Barker is, so to speak, ‘undead’, and Todd himself operates as the signifying bridge between the past and the present. There is no denying that, in the narrative, the return of the ‘ghost’ also triggers an array of personal memories, not only in Todd himself – who relives the injustice that was done to him and mutates remembrance into an his pulsating need for vengeance – but also in Mrs Lovett, who recalls Benjamin Barker well, and openly rekindles her secret feelings for him. The ‘ghost’ of Benjamin Barker, as well as the one of his wife, is what fuels the recollection, and makes the experience of it ‘alive’. Sweeney Todd and Benjamin Barker are reciprocal ghosts: similar, but never quite the same. Hélène Cixous famously argued that the ghost is “the direct figure of the uncanny” (1976, 542). Ghosts belong to a class of terrifying experiences that leads us back to that which we used to know, to a past that we recognise, but that is completely alien to our present. The ghost operates via an ­“ambiguous return” which, as Graham Huggan puts it, also has “farreaching social consequences” (1998, 128). Those social consequences are visible when the ‘ghost’ appears in Sweeney Todd, and history is reintroduced forcibly into the psycho-chronological field of the present. By its very appearance, the ghostly presence also threatens the existence and

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stability of the present’s current social structures. Once Todd reappears, his presence causes a disruption of the present, as the long-forgotten Benjamin Barker impinges on the seemingly stable sociological connections that make up the arena of the present, so much so that at times it is almost impossible to distinguish the memory of the past and the clarity of the present, as the two mingle and blend. It is precisely in this disjointed and profoundly ghostly framework that food becomes the conduit for the externalisation of the uncanny. The very act of eating – so unarguably grounded in the present, so viscerally connected to life rather than death – takes on a disjointed function as it aids the actualisation of memory into the present, and becomes the fulcrum for introducing the frightening nature of the ‘ghost’ into the here and now. The food in Sweeney Todd is not presented as ‘normal’, for truly, there is nothing normal about the return of Benjamin Barker in the guise of Sweeney Todd. The food in question is, of course, the dreaded pies, filled with human flesh and the unavoidable calling card of Todd’s murderous activities. The pies are hideous, revolting, and inevitably frightening. The thought of consuming human flesh is in itself repulsive, but the real fear lies in the inability to discern foe from hero at the very time when the pies are prepared and served. In Western terms, cannibalism in itself is a disruption of the human narrative. It is a circular practice, one that negates both present and past in its unchronological existence. The very existence of the cannibal pies prevents the present from moving forward, as it is a constant reminder of the hold that the past has on the sociality of the here and now. As the ghost of Benjamin Barker, Sweeney Todd shows contempt for those who destroyed his life, but the contempt for sociological structures emerges more forcefully in another practice: the practice of brutally slaughtering human beings, and serving them as filling in pies  – even if, technically speaking, it is Mrs Lovett who cooks the pies. Huggan suggests that ghosts “have contempt for boundaries, for all our cherished social distinctions” (1998, 128). In this sense, the preparation and consumption of the pies in Sweeney Todd is an interruption of the human sociohistorical cliché, as all that is tangible is, paradoxically, the presence of the ‘ghost’, intent in rectifying the sociological charters of the present. The physicality of life, and the present, is estranged from itself, and transformed merely into a reminder of the past. The disturbance that we perceive in Sweeney Todd is more than a simple recollection of disgust, even if, of course, it is cultural disgust that lies at the centre of the fearful kitchen-pie interchange. The

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mergence of cannibalism with the ritualised and civilised organisation of the kitchen space interrupts history by infringing the regulations that control not only behaviour, but our perception of what place we as humans being occupy in the broader network of existence. The introduction of the human being into the kitchen not as the cook, but as the food itself is, in a way, the simultaneous denial and forceful recollection of human history – at least as far as the Western perspective of progress is concerned. While the history of Benjamin Barker remains elusive in the figure of Sweeney Todd – whom most people fail to recognise as the wrongfully accused barber – the pies make that history a living presence. The human flesh in the pies is the reminder of the fate of Barker and his wife, and the punishment for allowing it to happen. Cannibalism here is the beacon of the reinstatement of the past into the present, but it is also, and simultaneously, what causes the present to be uncertain. The kitchen becomes, as such, a historically disjointed space, a liminal area where past and present collide, but the possibility of sociohistorical progress is denied by the cyclical nature of cannibal preparation and consumption. The cannibal pies – prepared as normally and as assiduously as if they were ‘normal’ pies – are the carriers of an “occluded history”, as Huggan puts it: a history that can never lead to a progressive present, or even a notion of the future (1998, 129). The slaughter that occurs before the pies are made is the signifier of the transformation of historical memory into a haunting of the present. For if it is true that all ghosts are uncanny, and that they “transform not the past itself, but our ‘normal’ socialised perception of it” (Huggan 1998, 129), then the pies also stand for the subversion of those stratified social and cultural layers that place the human being on top, and in charge. The culinary preparation of the human encroaches upon the present as a spatio-temporally inept practice. In turn, the consumption of the human in the culinary rigorous form of a pie inevitably challenges our cultural notions of normality. History cannibalises itself, as the conceptual properties of the kitchen are inverted in order to channel the interruption of the cultural regulation that customarily employs cooking to signify bonding, community, family, and growth. Therein lies the horror and the fear, as the kitchen is transformed into a site for cultural revulsions, and the very practice of cooking negates the historical progress of the human in virtue of its own hauntings, transgressions, and uncanny returns.

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Works Cited Appadurai, Arjun. 1993. Consumption, Duration and History. Stanford Literary Review 10: 11–23. Arnold, Sarah. 2013. Maternal Horror Film: Melodrama and Motherhood. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Barthes, Roland. 1994. Mythologies. London: Grant & Cutler. Baudrillard, Jean. 1991. Seduction. London: St Martin Press. Becker, Susanne. 1999. Gothic Forms of Feminine Fictions. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Berger, John. 2008. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin. Bloom, Clive. 2010. Gothic Histories: The Taste for Terror, 1764 to the Present. London: Bloomsbury. Brown, Jennifer. 2012. Cannibalism in Literature and Film. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Charles, Nickie, and Marion Kerr. 1988. Women, Food and Families. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Civitello, Linda. 2007. Cuisine and Culture: A History of Food and People. Hoboken: Wiley. Cixous, Hélène. 1976. Fiction and it Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s ‘Das Unheimliche’. New Literary History 7(3): 524–547. Cline, Sally. 1990. Just Desserts: Women and Food. London: Deutsch. Coward, Rosalind. 1984. Female Desire. London: Paladin. Craik, Jennifer. 1989. The Making of the Mother: The Role of the Kitchen in the Home. In Home and Family: Creating the Domestic Sphere, ed. Graham Allan and Graham Crow, 48–65. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Douglas, Mary. 1972. Deciphering a Meal. Daedalus 101(1): 61–81. ———. 2003. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Routledge. Elias, Norbert. 1979. The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners. The Journal of Modern History 51(1): 123–126. Falk, Pasi. 1994. The Consuming Body. London: SAGE. Fischler, Claude. 1988. Food, Self and Identity. Social Science Information 27: 275–292. Flax, Jane. 1993. Mothers and Daughters Revisited. In Daughtering and Mothering: Female Subjectivity Reanalysed, ed. Janneke van Mens Verhulst, Karelein Schreurs, and Liesbeth Woertman, 145–156. London: Routledge. Floyd, Janet, and Laurel Forster. 2003. The Recipe in Its Cultural Contexts. In The Recipe Reader: Narratives, Contexts, Traditions, ed. Janet Floyd and Laura Forster, 1–14. Aldershot: Ashgate. Foucault, Michel. 1991. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin. Freud, Sigmund. 1961. Civilisation and Its Discontents. New York: Norton. Giard, Luce, Michel de Certeau, and Pierre Mayol. 1985. The Practice of Everyday Life, Vol. 2, Living and Cooking. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Gilbert, Margaret. 2000. Sociality and Responsibility: New Essays in Plural Subject Theory. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Heldke, Lisa. 2005. But is it Authentic? Culinary Travel and the Search for the ‘Genuine Article’. In The Taste Culture Reader: Experiencing Food and Drink, ed. Carolyn Korsmeyer, 385–394. Oxford: Berg. Huggan, Graham. 1998. Ghost Stories, Bone Flutes, Cannibal Counter Memory. In Cannibalism and the Colonial World, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen, 126–141. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Inness, Sherrie A. 2001. Introduction: Thinking Food/Thinking Gender. In Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender and Race, ed. Sherrie A. Inness, 1–12. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kass, Leon. 1999. The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kelly, Traci Marie. 2001. ‘If I Were a Voodoo Priestess’: Women’s Culinary Autobiographies. In Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender and Race, ed. Sherrie A. Inness, 251–270. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Klein, Melanie. 2002. Love, Guilt and Reparation: And Other Works 1921–1945. London: Simon and Schuster. Koctürk-Runefors, Tahire. 1991. A Model for Adaptation to a New Food Pattern: The Case of Immigrants. In Palatable Worlds: Sociocultural Food Studies, ed. Elisabeth L. Fürst, 185–192. Oslo: Solum. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1991. Interview. In Women Analyse Women in France, England and the United States, ed. Elaine Brauch and Lucienne Serrano, 129–148. New York: New York Univesity Press. Lee, Martyn J.  1993. Consumer Culture Reborn: The Cultural Politics of Consumption. New York: Routledge. Lerner, Neil. 2010. Preface: Listening to Fear/Listening with Fear. In Music in the Horror Film, ed. Neil Lerner, viii–vixi. London: Routledge. Lupton, Deborah. 1996. Food, the Body and the Self. London: SAGE. Lyon, David. 2001. Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Mäkelä, Johanna. 1991. Defining a Meal. In Palatable Worlds: Sociocultural Food Studies, ed. Elisabeth L. Fürst, 87–96. Oslo: Solum. Maund, Barry. 1995. Colours: Their Nature and Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mauss, Marcel. 1990. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Routledge. Meigs, Anna. 1997. Food as a Cultural Construction. In Food and Culture: A Reader, ed. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, 95–106. London and New York: Routledge.

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Murcott, Anne. 2005. Purity and Pollution: Body Management and the Social Place of Infancy. In Body Matters: Essays on the Sociology of the Body, ed. Sue Scott and David Morgan, 125–137. London: The Falmer Press. Nicholson, Virginia. 2015. Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes: The Story of Women in the 1950s. London: Penguin. Oliver, Kelly. 1992. Nourishing the Speaking Subject. In Cooking, Eating, Thinking, ed. Dean Curtin and Lisa Heldke, 68–84. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Osmond, Andrew. 2010. 100 Animated Feature Films. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Otnes, Per. 1991. What Do Meals Do? In Palatable Worlds: Sociocultural Food Studies, ed. Elisabeth L. Fürst, 97–110. Oslo: Solum. Picart, Caroline Joan, and John Edgar Browning, ed. 2012. Speaking of Monsters: A Teratological Anthology. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Probyn, Elspeth. 2000. Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities. London: Routledge. Robins, Kevin, and Frank Webster. 1999. Times of Technoculture: From the Information Society to the Virtual Life. London: Routledge. Royle, Nicholas. 2003. The Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Sassatelli, Roberta. 2007. Consumer Culture: History, Theory and Politics. London: SAGE. Sceats, Sarah. 2004. Food, Consumption and the Body in Contemporary Women’s Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seremetakis, Nadia. 1996. The Memory of the Senses, Part 1: Marks of the Transitory. In The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity, ed. Nadia Seremetakis, 1–18. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shankman, Paul. 1969. Le Rôti et le Bouilli: Lévi-Strauss Theory of Cannibalism. American Anthropologist 71(1): 54–69. Shove, Elizabeth, Frank Trentmann, and Richard Wilk. 2012. Introduction. In Time, Consumption and Everyday Life: Practice, Materiality and Culture, ed. Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann, and Richard Wilk, 1–12. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sipos, Thomas M. 2010. Horror Film Aesthetics: Creating the Visual Language of Fear. Jefferson: McFarland. Spechtenhauser, Klaus. 2006. Refrigerators, Kitchen Island, and Other Cult Objects. In The Kitchen: Life World, Usage, Perspectives, ed. Klaus Spechtenhauser, 45–74. Basel: Birkhäuser. Theophano, Janet. 2002. Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote. New York: Palgrave. Warde, Alan, and Kevin Hetherington. 1994. English Households and Routine Food Practices: A Research Note. Sociological Review 42(4): 758–778. Waters, Melanie. 2011. The Horrors of Home: Feminism and Femininity in the Suburban Gothic. In Women on Screen, ed. S.W. Gillis, 58–73. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Weiss, Gail. 2008. Refiguring the Ordinary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Worland, Rick. 2007. The Horror Film: An Introduction. Malden: Blackwell.

CHAPTER 6

A Bitter Feast: Dining Tables in their Horror Contexts

There are numerous instances in film where horrific experiences take place at the dinner table, or where the dinner table becomes the focal point for discomfort, repulsion, and even fear. At times, a dining scene transforms into a moment for the uncanny to manifest, like in the case of Beetlejuice (1988), where dinner guests become ‘possessed’ and begin to sing and dance at the table. This scene’s long-lasting fame is arguably a result of its ability to merge an overarching sense of parodic humour – for fine dining and perceived ‘high class’ entertainment  – with the terrifying horror of demonic occurrences. In contrast to Beetlejuice’s endearing musical rendition, less humorous approaches to possession and demonic hallucination take place at the dining tables of other films. Consider Case 39 (2009), for instance, where a prison inmate is partially possessed by a demonic entity and hallucinates wildly while sitting at the shared dinner table in the prison canteen. He then proceeds to stab his fellow inmate with a fork in the neck, and eventually dies when he accidentally stabs himself in the eye. Other times, and beyond the prescribed narrative of demonic possession, the dinner table becomes the grounds for the cultural divisions that dictate categories of food horror to emerge. In Stargate (1994), Daniel Jackson (James Spader) is served  – much to his initial disgust  – an unappetising roasted lizard by his hosts, only to discover that, as he claims, “it tastes of chicken”. The disgust of consuming ‘the wrong foods’ is noticeable in Braindead (1992), where the dinner table channels the abject viscerality of food via the juxtaposition of disgusting notions: the disintegrating body and the aesthetically displeasing presentation of unappetising food. This © The Author(s) 2017 L. Piatti-Farnell, Consuming Gothic, Palgrave Gothic, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-45051-7_6

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film is famously remembered for the scene where a zombified grandmother begins to decay while having dinner with her family. One of her ears falls, horrifically, into her bowl of vanilla pudding, but she nonetheless proceeds to consume its contents, including the decaying ear. Capitalised upon here is what Brigid Cherry terms the general “yuk factor” of horror, which, when merged with food horror, usually takes on an even more disturbing and repulsive dimension (2009, 118). On other occasions still, the dinner table becomes the conduit for conveying the horrors of slaughter and cannibalism. This is the case of the truly horrific scene in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) when the unfortunate Sally (Marilyn Burns) is tied to a dinner chair and made to witness the cannibal feast, knowledgeable of the fact that she is most likely the next course. Meals, especially when in the structured setting of a dinner table, are important anthropological events that allow the partakers to become part of the social and cultural structures in which the culinary occasion is placed. Indeed, mealtimes are more than simply an opportunity to eat food, as they take on a clear sociological function instead. Mealtimes entail the presence of a group, a collection of individuals who not only eat together, but partake in the same regulations and structures – this includes instances where meals are consumed by individuals on their own, for even ‘eating alone’ is a practice shrouded in cultural regulation. Sociologist Joanne Ikeda suggests that “mealtimes are occasions when social groups are normally together and therefore provide opportunities […] to observe what is acceptable in terms of food-related behaviour” (1999, 152). Mealtime rules that construct and inform the culinary event are visible not only in terms of what foods are allowed and allowable as part of the meal, and in what order, but also in how one should behave around the foods themselves: how one should eat, what utensils to use, and even what conversation is appropriate for a mealtime exchange. In this, it becomes apparent that mealtime behaviour is just as culturally defined as the foods served. In their geopolitical evaluation of food habits, David Bell and Gill Valentine point out that, in sociological research, the dinner table “has been identified as an important site for the socialisation” of the family (1997, 64). In this context, the dinner table transforms into an important site of sociological and cultural exchange, and becomes an entity regulated by the behavioural standards that dictate what is appropriate and what is not, what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’. Notions of edible and inedible, clean and dirty, and even pure and impure become essential in delineating

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the appropriateness of mealtime behaviour, and in defining the dinner table as an important focus in distinguishing the categories of both food and conduct. In her well-known anthropological evaluation of eating as a social structure, Mary Douglas argues that there is a conspicuous and important relationship between meals, social distance, and the perception of intimacy (1972, 40). The meal, especially when seated at the table, is an exceedingly intimate experience. Individuals are made to sit close and share food, one of the most common, but also most visceral presences in human experience. It is intimate because it exposes the opening of the body to the outside world. The opening of the mouth and the disclosure of the boundaries of the body are profoundly personal acts. Simultaneously, as it hides notions of secrecy and even embarrassment, eating is also an unavoidably public activity, made even more so by the reduced boundaries and closeness of the dinner table. At the table, general movements are restricted, while the mouth is given free rein, the intake of food revealing the individual to the world, and vice versa. While the structures of dining are not universal – and neither are the behaviours that are deemed appropriate at the dinner table – we see that the contextual interruption of those rules is also a crisis of the cultural order, a socially uncanny practice that, by drawing attention to our despicable bodies, makes us feel exposed, uncomfortable, and repulsed.

The Ethnocentric Table

of Horrors

A notorious scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) sees the famous archaeologist and his companions, the singer Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw) and street-smart kid Short Round (Jonathan Ke Quan), attending a dinner party at the palace of the young Maharajah Zalim Singh. The dinner is held in lavish surroundings. The table is decorated sumptuously and with the finest crockery and silverware. The other guests make a list of the most eminent figures in the country, from dignitaries to the local gentry. Dinner is served by an array of waiters dressed in the finest clothing, who look after the guests in the most meticulous way. A great degree of expectation surrounds the meal, particularly from Willie and Short Round, who daydream of the culinary delights to follow. Once the food arrives at the table, however, it is not quite what Willie and Short were expecting. The guests are served a succession of dishes that range from an enormous baked snake filled with live and squirmy eels  – the

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unforgettably named ‘snake surprise’ – a tray of beetles, a soup filled with eyeballs, and served as dessert, chilled monkey brains. Willie and Short are appalled by the food – indeed, Willie even openly threatens to vomit – and the two are unable to consume any of the dishes, yet the other guests delight in what is placed in front of them, clearly interpreting them as delicacies. Unforgettable moments see a dinner guest slurping the insides of the beetles and spooning the chilled monkey brains into his mouth with glee, acts that prove too much for dear and fragile Willie, who eventually faints miserably (Fig. 6.1). Cinematography aids the visual repulsion of the moment. Close-ups of the dinner guest consuming the beetles and monkey brains make the act feel very real, while the slurping noises added by the sound mix reinforce the sense of disgust that emerges from the scenes. The disgust for the food is aided by the general unpleasantness of the dinner guests, who come under Willie’s scrutiny several times. The men burp, laugh loudly, and are – for the most part – overweight. Here we see the reinforcement of the tacit connection being established between the “out of bounds bodies” and “out of bounds foods”, reinforcing, as Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco suggest, the part played by cultural restrictions in determining the relationship between ‘corpulence’ and culinary disgust (2001, 1). To expose this narrative even further, at some point in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom it is even implied that the other dinner guests emit unpleasant smells, contributing to the feeling of revulsion that both Willie and Short Round experience. Willie acts disgusted throughout the

Fig. 6.1  The famous dish in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984): snake surprise

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meal, her facial expressions clearly communicating her feelings for her fellow diners. The other dinner guests are, culturally speaking, instrumental in constructing the general sense of unpleasantness that comically characterises the sequence. They are portrayed as grotesque figures, breaking both boundaries of corporeality and those of propriety. Disgust and revulsion, therefore, need to be associated to a set of textures and smells that are deemed unpleasant by the cultural structure. It is those violated associations that deliver, as Cherry suggests, the typical “audience responses to horror”, even when the film itself would not be strictly categorised as belonging to the genre (2009, 18). The feeling of disgust in The Temple of Doom appears to be aimed at a Western audience, providing an interpretative look at culinary differences as abnormal and repulsive. Manifestations of disgust, emerging from encountering foods that lack the recognition criteria of our cultural allowances, is a well-defined marker of what William Ian Miller terms the ‘us vs them’ structure of aversion (1998). This dichotomy of consumption is crucial in crystallising the ways in which dietary prohibitions aid the identification of the Other  – in terms of recognition, allowability, and acceptance. Disgust, in Miller’s terms, “recognises and maintains difference”, as it is the visceral rendering of the anthropological structures that pinpoint certain foods as being either in the ‘right’ group – ‘our’ foods – or the ‘wrong’ group – ‘their’ foods (1998, 50). When incorporated into the strictly regulated structures of dining, disgust helps the identification of cultural boundaries. Most importantly, Miller goes on to say, “it helps prevent our way from being subsumed into their way” (1998, 50). The narrative of conquest and colonialism is unmissable in Miller’s critique, and its understanding of disgust as a visceral and cultural emotion is informed by the structures of imperialism. When disgust pivots on the identification of foods that are, culturally speaking, portrayed as different and unusual, its evocation and manifestation confirms the perception of Otherness in those who view it  – both within and outside of the cinematic diegesis – and designates those who consume it as the topical Other. ‘Us’ is defined primarily by ‘the limits of our skin’, the physical boundaries of our bodies that construct an idea of where inside and outside meet. Psychologically speaking, ‘us’ is situated within the bounds of our cultural acceptance, that which we view as right and proper, which includes, as it is particularly relevant to eating and the dining space, the connotations of ‘clean’ and unpolluted. Disgust will be “readily triggered by

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those infringements of our jurisdiction that are nearest to our bodies” (1998, 50). While not all disgust is evoked by matters related to physicality, the identification of food – or, more specifically the ‘wrong’ foods – as a primary conduit for disgust comes as no surprise. Food is so visceral, so embodied, so unavoidably primitive. Actual cleanliness or consumability have little to do with cultural repulsion. The physical manifestation of disgust can be understood as a violation which is both moral and forcibly physical, and also requires suggestion of invasion in order to exercise its power. This interaction can be illustrated by thinking of when, in The Temple of Doom, Willy and Short Round do not need to actually consume the food in order to experience disgust. The visceral reaction manifests simply at witnessing others in the act of eating the ‘disgusting’ foods, and therefore clarifies its position as a warning signalling the violation of the cultural sensibilities that define the dichotomy of clean and polluted. Fear and disgust, in this context, merge to identify the limits of horror, constructing both the alimentary reality of food and the ritualised dimension of dining into a narrative of alienation and separation. There is also a suggestion that the virtually universal social connection established by eating – where “food is used to build and maintain social relationships” (Ikeda 1999, 151) – is actively interrupted by Dr Jones and his companions. They are in fact invited guests, and are offered the opportunity to partake in a dinner aimed at cementing friendly relationships, in an evocation of a well-known anthropological structure. The uses of food as a ‘social instrument’ are made clear in The Temple of Doom by the politicised undertones of the dinner itself, where guests are made to sit together and, in partaking of the same foods, promote not only social interaction, but also the clear acceptance of friendship beneath the multifaceted layers of consumption. The offer, however, is ill-received by the Western guests, as they are unable to partake of the food and experience the sense of conviviality that the meal was intending to communicate. As Ikeda suggests, “the acceptance of food indicates a willingness to establish […] a bond”. In turn, “refusing to partake” when food is offered may be viewed as “an unwillingness to establish a relationship” (1999, 151). To see this interaction more forcefully illustrated in cinematic terms, one need only think of other, more visually horrific examples such as Cannibal Holocaust (1980), where the sharing of the cannibal meal implies the extension of alliance, if not friendship. The simultaneously cultural and physical limits of horror are much gorier, naturally, in this example, but the constructed narrative of the meal as an arena for relational politics puts it, conceptually speaking, in the same

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representational category as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. In the latter, however, there is very little understanding of the friendly intentions hidden in the meal that is offered, a feeling shared not only by Willie and Short Round as guests, but seemingly by the audience too. The dinner is too alienating, too different, and too strange to provide a common ground between the three outsiders – who are clearly perceived as such – and the other dinner guests, as well as the gracious hosts. While Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom provides a comical look at food revulsions, hidden behind the humorous façade of disgust and repulsion appears to be a strong sociopolitical message. At the opposite end of the table from Willie and Short, Dr Jones is discussing the dark past of the palace and its occupants with the local dignitaries, suggesting that murderous acts are still taking place at the location. Dr Jones’s allegations are quickly shut down and he is made to apologise. This exchange transpires as the audience witnesses the ‘Western guests’ being horrified by the food, equally unable to consume the dishes as they are to form a social connection with their fellow guests. The food, here, acts as a metaphor for ethnocentricity. It highlights the cultural, social, and political barrier between the two factions, an ‘East meets West’ moment that cannot be ignored. It could be argued that a form of double-colonisation is at work: not only physical, via the food, but also cultural, via what the food represents. Although the mise en scène that ensues is a carefully calibrated mixture of horror and humour, the audience can take solace in knowing that Willie and Short Round do not consume any of the foods. They remain ‘unpolluted’ by the foods of the Other. The unpleasantness of the food is communicated via a succession of effective cinematic devices that focus on dramatic facial expressions and movements indicating a sense of astonishment and general disgust. For instance, the encounter with the “snake surprise” forces Short Round to freeze and stare in an open-mouthed position, so much that the gum he has been previously chewing falls out and drops theatrically onto the metal plate in front of him. It is significant that gum is what should drop out of his mouth, as gum has often been culturally and historically associated with Western economies – the United States in particular – so much so that, as Michael Redclift suggests, “chewing gum is a recognizable emblem of mass consumer culture in the developed world” (2004, 2). The loss of the gum might suggest that the culinary territory in which Short Round has stepped into is far removed from the American context, naturally carrying the implication that the social, cultural, and political boundaries of what

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is right and proper in the – perhaps small-minded – American sense has also been removed from the context. Here, food provides an evocative symbol of several cultural associations that seemingly range and stretch into the dichotomies of right and wrong, civilised and uncivilised, capitalist and non-capitalist, American and non-American. Food is, naturally, as much a representation as it is a physical presence. The dishes served at the banquet, from beetles to live eels, act symbolically as a stimulus for the associations of unpleasantness that come with it, and which rely – in order to find their effectiveness  – on what is deemed appropriate and what is not. The ‘horror’ foods that cause surprise, astonishment, and revulsion in Short Round and Willie only manage to do so by virtue of their power of evocation. The identification of the dishes as ‘disgusting’ relies on the edifying patterns of attitudes, behaviours, and even beliefs that lie at the centre of cultural differentiation. Those patterns are what firmly communicates, as Ikeda puts it, the “overall aura of pleasantness or unpleasantness” that is afforded to food (1999, 157). The establishment of that aura often lacks the sensitivity of rational judgment, and relies on notions of horror that are deeply perceived within the bounds of imagination. There is a worrying, and quite unavoidable suggestion within the narrative of the film that while Willie and Short Round  – and presumably Indiana Jones – are unable to consume the meal, they are not in fact the ‘strange ones’, but seemingly the only guests with a sense of culinary propriety. The perspective applied to the dinner is so ethnocentric that the meal becomes emblematic for a whole cultural system, an interpretation of national practices that are looked upon with disdain and repulsion. The offer of friendship is clearly denied. The refusal of the food represents the interruption of the social connection, as well as the political one. The audience will not be surprised to find out that, on the night following the meal, attempts are made to eliminate Dr Jones and his guests in their very own bedroom. The interrupted social politics of the dinner was the catalyst in conveying the overall destruction of any form of relationship, which leads to the cultural perception of threat. As Ikeda suggests, “when confronted with different values, customs, and behaviours, culture-bound individuals tend to assume that their own values, customs, and behaviours are admirable, sensible and right” (1999, 153). Through the notion of food horror, different layers of social horror manifest in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, highlighting the dangers of ethnocentric perception. Dr Jones and his companions conceive the food as horrific, a reflection of how they consider the local behavioural horror of ritual sacrifice – an

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opinion that is suggestively proposed as ‘right’ and fed to the audience, much like the culturally inappropriate and repulsive foods are. The social and religious horrors of the cult of Kali in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom are mirrored in their followers’ horrific culinary practices. The cult’s lack of rationality is reflected in the consumption of what the Western minds regard as ‘disgusting’. The abhorrence of the religious structure  – which stands, to some extent, as the metaphorical incarnation of Eastern political regimes, with their perceived cruel and unusual practices – is communicated via the revulsion that is found in food, a recognisable if alienating part of life that makes the cultural revulsion latent in consumption into a tangible presence. The suggested consumption of the horror food inevitably suggests a form of colonising body horror where, as Mark Jancovich suggests, the “monstrous threat” refuses to remain external, and challenges “the distinction between self and other, inside and outside” (2002, 6). Refusing to consume the repulsive banquet foods in The Temple of Doom signals the overall rejection to accept an exchange with the Other, including all the (perceived) horrors that the exchange might entail. Nonetheless, it is not only the presence of culturally horrific foods that makes the dinner scenes in Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom hard to stomach. Indeed, the revulsion aided by the subversion of the dinner table as a welcoming space, a location that is commonly understood, in the Western sense, as a ‘safe space’. The dinner table is transformed into an uncanny location, the site of odd and uncomfortable experiences, and the location for the cultural horrors of society to manifest and unfold. In its more culturally prescribed manifestations, disgust is also primarily associated, especially in terms of food and consumption, with notions of superiority. The very idea of contamination exercises power in the form of cultural dominance. That which is repugnant is also inferior, and does not engender respect or attention. In The Temple of Doom, Willy’s esteem for her fellow Indian diners visibly diminishes as the banquet progresses. The disgust for the inferior food is equalled with an aversion for those who consume it. “Claims of inviolability”, as William Ian Miller terms them, identify certain consumption practices, and therefore certain groups of eaters, as in need of protection from that which is seen as low and polluted (1998, 51). While the terms of this exchange may seem inevitably based in ethnocentric identifications, it is precisely that ethnocentricity that constructs the power of food disgust in films such as The Temple of Doom. Here the aesthetic portrayal and suggested texture of consumables – from

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slimy eels to grainy beetles and sticky brains  – are inevitably entangled with the anthropologically defined regulations that deem one food set as repulsive, and any disgust-filled reaction to it as appropriate. The strength of the ‘us vs them’ dichotomy, as far as food is concerned, is essential in constructing a theory of food and horror in which disgust operates primarily as a signifier of difference and, more specifically, to demarcate ‘Otherness’. Disgust signals the breach of our cultural margins, breaking our perceptions of safety. Or, to be more specific, it signals the possibility of that breakage, the potentiality of colonisation, both physical and emotional, inevitably causing panic, confusion, and eventually fear. The last is connected specifically to the association between disgust and that which is alien and strange. Disgust is a measure of horror, in that it locates “the bounds of the other”, as something “to be avoided, repelled or attacked” (Miller 1998, 50). Antonia Bird’s Ravenous (1999) proposes an interesting twist on the construction of the food narrative as part of the identification of the Other. Here, the cannibal meal is rendered as a highly ritualised shared practice in order to expose the fraught nature of consumption rules, and the unreliable construction of food horror in relation to notions of alienation and difference. The protagonist Boyd – a soldier in the American Union Army of the late nineteenth century  – engages in a manhunt aimed at the destruction of Ives, a cannibal who is known to have mercilessly killed and consumed his fellow frontier travellers. As Boyd and his fellow soldiers set out on Ives’s path, it is clear that their contempt for the man is cemented by his cannibalistic tendencies. His choice of abominable consumptions marks him as the Other, the enemy, the polluted and amoral individual. However, when Boyd finds himself trapped at the bottom of a ravine, he is forced to consume human flesh in order to survive. We see here a twist of the disgust narrative. The establishment of the Other through revulsion, and the seemingly alienating notion of the cannibal feast, becomes entangled with the regulated structures of the meal. This is reminiscent of Miller’s contention that our “territorial jurisdiction” can be easily violated if we allow it to be polluted: “we can become the other ourselves”, if we engage in various forms of “disgusting behaviours” that are understood as “violations of the self ” (1998, 51). As he consumes human flesh, Boyd becomes, to some extent, the Other. The violation of his body via an abominable substance constructs a narrative of disgust that is aimed at himself, as well as the other cannibal. For Boyd is, undoubtedly, a cannibal, as far as the consumption of human flesh is

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concerned. Yet, in the film, he refuses this label, as much as he is haunted by his encounter with Otherness, which now marks him as dangerous and ‘disgusting’. Later in the film, Boyd is also shown consuming a power-giving ‘cannibal stew’, made with the flesh of more of his fellow soldiers. The stew is supposed to have miraculous properties, and its consumption does, once again, save Boyd’s life when he is on the brink of death. The narrative portrays Boyd as a victim, his defilement caused by circumstances that are, to some extent, less accusatory, less polluting, and less disgusting. The intriguing part about this second instance of cannibal consumption in Ravenous, however, is that it does not take place in the wilderness, removed from the ‘bounds’ of civilisation. Instead, Boyd consumed the cannibal stew in the comfortable surroundings of the fort’s kitchen, using receptacles and commensal instruments that inevitably communicate the notion of civilisation and domesticity. In her well-known essay “Deciphering a Meal”, Mary Douglas suggests that every ‘meal’, so conceived, is a highly coded practice, reliant on strict structures. How something is eaten, when and where, is decided by an unspoken set of social rules that relies on, and simultaneously tacitly reveals, cultural affiliation. Douglas argues that meals are “taxonomic”, and therefore aid the creation of those boundaries that allow a sense of “order” to exist (1972, 62–63). In spite of the recurrent ‘eat or die narrative’, the consumption of the cannibal stew is part of the highly regulated system of our Western culinary structures and is, as far as those regulations go, an actual ‘meal’. As it plays with notions of boundaries, culinary acceptability, and the very notion of the meal, Ravenous uncovers the duplicity of the food horror narrative, as far as the cultural notion of Otherness is concerned, exposing the instrumental value of shared opinion in constructing not only the boundaries of alimentary disgust, but also in cementing the importance of food-loathing as connected not truly to notions of protection, but to the construction of ethnocentric permissibility.

Table Manners and the Threat

of Violence

The application of table manners is a universal prerogative of the human race. While the rules and regulations that people apply to eating, especially in the preconfigured set up of the ‘table’ – interpreted here as the formalised location where food is served and consumed  – often change according to context, geographical location, and chronology, one can see

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remarkable similarities around the globe. ‘Table manners’ are not simply a superficially defined assemblage of guidelines that identify the individual as polite and proper. How one acts, moves, speaks, and eats is regulated by the power of cultural imprint. Table manners are intrinsically connected to culture, and, as Margaret Visser states, are essential in “vigilantly maintaining” the power of the “order” to “support its ideals” and “buttress its identity” (1996, ix). Table manners are, essentially, systems of ritualised behaviour. They happen within strict structures and dictate uses and customs at specific times, and in specific order. Whether a meal is casual or formal, consumed with family or co-workers, it is constructed of regulations that are both historically and socially ordained, and must therefore be followed. Table manners operate, in this sense, as “social agreements” (Visser 1996, xi). And while rituals are, by their very definition, highly idiosyncratic and inherently changeable, there are commonalities in table manners that can be found in several contexts. Like all rituals, table manners are there to protect individuals and the group. That ‘protection’ may seem difficult to grasp at first sight, but it is deeply connected to understanding eating as a profoundly violent activity. Historically, countless accounts of violence erupting over dinner have been recorded. Consumption, as an extremely tactile experience, is also unavoidably intimate. Violence, as Visser argues, “could so easily erupt at dinner” (1996, xi). Any utensil at the table could readily be turned into a weapon. No one would be so unwise to deny the damage done to an eyeball by a fork wielded by an enraged and vicious maniac. Food can easily be thrown, while plates and glasses can be broken, used as sharp instruments to injure others very severely. All dining artefacts hold a violent potential, as does the forcibly intimate set-up of consumption in such a close and inescapable circle. Table manners, on the other hand, are employed, at social but deep and often subconscious cultural levels, to control behaviour and mitigate the possibility of violence erupting. The transgression of the uncontrollable body, aided by the limitless explosion of rage that can only be associated with desire, is neutralised by the notion of ‘manners’. The threat of rage and violence breaking out in the middle of dinner, with the social, cultural, and anthropological distraction it brings, continues to solidify during dinner. A number of films have been successful in capitalising on the fear, on the many “mealtime superstitions” – as Visser labels them – that have been known to point in the direction of a guest’s imminent death during dinner (1996, xi). One need only think of the famous dinner scene in Beetlejuice here, where the physical possession of the formal

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­ inner guests by the house ghosts – humorous for the v­ iewers, as the dind ers are made to sing and dance in the middle of consuming their starters – eventually ends in the physical manifestation of horridly anthropomorphic hands, composed of the unfortunate prawn cocktails, violently pushing the dinner guests’ faces into the dining plates. The unpredictability of the diners’ behaviour, proposed through the idea of possession, is what makes the scene unexpected, and makes for uncomfortable viewing, even for just a few seconds. The observance of dinner rituals is what makes us part of a community, or a group, and therefore makes us feel ‘safe’ in our social positions. The ultimate violence of the scene, although not gory or bloody, is surprising. Its interpretation gestures towards punishment for the guests’ interruption of the dining cliché, and their transgressive behaviours at the dinner table. In Beetlejuice the physical violence at the dinner table is surrounded by a veneer of humour, presumably in an effort to mitigate the repulsion that, I would like to suggest, is still pointedly felt and noticeable. Other examples, however, are less subtle in their construction of table manners as a control mechanism for transgressive physical behaviour. To fully illustrate the extent to which manners function as a safety structure against violence at the dinner table, it might be necessary to turn to a more forceful – so to speak – example of this dynamic at play, where the visual repulsions of eating, the tacit narrative of disgust, and the horrors of bodily torture mingle and merge. Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) elucidates this interaction in an efficient manner. The film – now famous for its graphic scatological scenes, violence, and cannibalism, as well as its lush and over-the-top production design – tells the story of how local gangster Albert Spica (Michael Gambon) takes over the once high-class restaurant Le Hollandais run by French chef Richard Boarst (Richard Bohringer). Albert makes nightly appearances to dine at the restaurant, together with his band of criminal affiliates and his long-suffering wife Georgina (Helen Mirren). Albert is prone to violent displays, and his meals are characterised by him constantly voicing his disdain for the food served. In his exploits during dinner, Albert is in breach of several, if not all, regulations of behaviour at the dinner table. He talks loudly, is rude, oafish, and laughs uncontrollably, generally disrupting the dinner experience for the other patrons in the restaurants, including his wife Georgina, who is clearly disturbed and bored by him. Albert often engages in open confrontations at and around the dinner table. He ridicules the food served, shouts at the waiting staff, and abuses the other patrons in the establishment. This, it is made clear,

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is ­unacceptable behaviour as it contravenes the expectations surrounding mealtime conduct. Ikeda suggests that “meals are taken against a background of rituals and assumptions”, which include “cultural restrictions on movement and the pursuit of alternative activities while seated” (1999, 50). Ritualised forms of dinner table behaviour are thrown into sharp relief because of the limited physicality of mealtimes, coupled with the awkward, almost disturbing, knowledge that the mouth – the unmissable orifice – opens and closes to consume food. Eating is, in truth, a disturbing activity, and once the mechanics of the activity are under particular scrutiny, the surrounding behaviour needs to be controlled, perhaps in an effort to mitigate the disruption caused as the oral orifice is at work. Although, at this stage in the narrative, blood and gore have yet to make an appearance, Albert’s behaviour is horrifying. It represents the breakage of civility, the disintegration of human conduct. Most of all, it exposes, by drawing attention to the fragility of the cultural constructions that we erect to protect ourselves  – mirrored here in the failed table manners – the fear that the innately sadistic side of humanity may rise to the surface. The food horrors that litter the dining experience in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover evoke a sense of ancestral horror as they are indicative of the repressed animal urges that we so desperately try to keep hidden. The interruption of the ritualised behaviours surrounding the dinner table cause the exposure of consumption as the transgressive practice that it truly is. The fragility and extreme physicality of the human body is made visible and unavoidable in eating, and all behaviour that surrounds it must mask it. On the one hand, Albert’s dining table exploits are undeniably difficult to watch, as they draw attention to the nature of the dinner table as a trapping device. In the midst of the meal, partakers are somewhat stuck together, forced to endure Albert’s behaviour while they consume their food. On the other hand, there is something outrageously compelling about Albert’s uncontrollable behaviour at the dinner table. To witnessed his unrestrained body – as it eats, spits, dribbles, and shouts – is also paradoxically liberating and magnetic. He is repulsive, as much as he is fascinating, encapsulating, one might want to argue, the very essence of Gothic horror. Albert’s dining behaviour is, as Douglas Keesey argues, something “we love to hate”. Although he is “despicable”, he also speaks to our unregulated unconscious desires, allowing us to “venture into those areas of least avowable obsession that frighten, dismay, shock and disgust us, but which we very well know haunt us all” (2006, 83).

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From a cultural materialist perspective, the experience of dining out, for a large number of people in Western cultures, is what Deborah Lupton calls “the apotheosis of civilised eating” (1996, 98). In a public space, the format and expectations surrounding a meal become even more visible than they would in a familiar and familial setting. In The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Albert’s vulgar behaviour is deemed even more deplorable precisely because it happens at the dinner table. That sense of disgrace is related to the subconscious notion that eating is a horrible practice, and that the dinner table, with its intimate and inescapable politics, is nothing more than a façade to cover the potentially repulsive nature of our corporeal experience. Indeed, Albert’s despicable table manners are made even more disturbing and unacceptable by the fact that they take place in a public dining space. Ontologically speaking, the body is even more exposed in a public space such as a restaurant, where the visceral and intimate act of eating is peculiarly shared not only with those who sit at our table, but with the masses of strangers who also occupy the premises at the same time. As Ikeda suggests, “the public provision and consumption of food appears to be highly structured” and “culinary structure continues to mirror and occasionally distort” the “social structure” (1999, 92). The use of the term “distort” here is peculiar, as it suggests that, on the one hand, the experience of dining in a public space is so structured and regimented that it almost becomes an unbelievable projection of how people communicate. On the other, I also take the focus on ‘distortion’ to mean that the viscerality of eating is made so unavoidable when sitting at a dining table that the regimented nature of dining operates as a masking device to separate people from the knowledge of their physical exposure. Any disruption of that regimented structure becomes strange and weird, and generates feelings of unease that are as connected to the break in social structure as they are to the actualisation of repressed nightmares about the abject nature of the open, eating body. Eating in a restaurant is an activity that is, inevitably, commodified. But the food is not the only centre of the commodity exchange. The eating body is also at the centre, permanently under scrutiny as it sits at the dinner table. According to Joanne Finkelstein, public dining in our contemporary era has much to do with self-representation and “the mediation of social relations through images of what is currently valued, accepted and fashionable” (1989, 3). The fashionability of the dining event is indeed highly communicated in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. The surroundings are lavish and the food is pretentiously opulent. The patrons, and Georgina in particular, wear sumptuous clothing that verge on the

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ridiculous – with the costume design by Jean-Paul Gaultier here fittingly communicating the idea of grandeur, as well as the essentially vapid nature of the experience. The clothes, as much as the fashionable table settings and the hushed conversations, act as catalysts to render the detached and concomitantly appreciative natures of the clearly well-bred diners. The film, of course, is undeniably self-conscious of the commodified nature of restaurant eating as a pseudo-genuine social event. This can be seen in the openly theatrical nature of the acting, the over-the-top assemblage of the costumes, and the carefully staged nature of the interactions – aided by the use of a sensually offensive mise en scène, where surreal changes of colour in the restaurant’s’ decor mediate the feelings and expressions of characters, as the well the moody shifts of the narrative itself. The commodification of the restaurant experience, while clear and obvious, is also unspeakable. Dining at the restaurant is a matter of choice, and expectations surrounding the experience must be met. In her critical analysis of our contemporary cultures, Keya Ganguly asks an important question: “what is made conspicuous by patterns of consumption: money or the magic of mythic associations?” (2001, 118). We see the answer provided in Albert Spica’s representation. He is brusque and boorish. He declares himself a gourmand, yet he is unable to appreciate the fine nature of the foods served, nor is he able to show any respect for his fellow diners and the surroundings of the locale. While boasting about the quality of the food, Albert is also incapable of formulating any pleasured and pleasurable responses. Albert continuously reminds his fellow diners, as well as the chef, of his status as owner, a crass act which is not well received. It is clear that Albert is desperate to belong, but his behaviour interrupts the cliché. Albert is the oafish nature of capitalism emerging: a hungry, brutal force that continues to consume and lose sight of the social boundaries that are hidden in the seemingly mundane practice of eating. Dining regulations are a control mechanism. They dictate the behaviour of the individual by constructing notion of right and wrong which is, in truth, circumstantial and arbitrary. Table manners are, in Visser’s words, “a system of taboos designed to ensure that violence remains out of the question” (1996, xi). The aim remains, under layers of propriety, to impose rules on the diners so that their extreme physicality is hidden under the surface of social acceptability. Individuals are protected by the regulations of behaviour that define dining in its various contexts. Often, the more formal the set-up, the more obvious the regulations of table ­conduct. This simple notion suggests the desire to keep the intimate

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situation of eating controlled, as the likelihood of consuming with strangers  – and the physical and psychological exposure that lies therein  – is more heightened when consuming dinner in a formal setting. The breaking of the expected table manners in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover inevitably results in physical transgression and violence. Albert is crude during his meals, but his uncontrolled behaviour also erupts beyond the limits of his own dining table at the restaurant. Once the veiled propriety of the dining act is abandoned – and table manners cease to regulate behaviour in the eating space  – Albert becomes physically abusive to other patrons. He forces his own guests to consume food they are disgusted by, as he constantly utters profanities and obscene comments. Here, his ‘lack’ of table manners is reflected in his psychologically violent behaviour, as he subjects his associates, including his wife, to several acts of emotional torture. Eventually, Albert’s exploits echo Visser’s contention about the latently violent nature of the dining context (1996). The disintegration of table manners gives way to fully violent and physically abusive behaviour. Albert overthrows numerous tables, disrupts the eating experience for all the restaurant diners by shouting and screaming, and even goes as far as physically abusing one particular patron by pouring food all over him and attacking him with dining utensils. The violence that results by the loss of table manners peaks in a horrible twist when Albert and his gang later employ a wooden spoon as the instrument used in suffocating Michael − Georgina’s lover (Alan Howard) – with the pages of his favourite book. As the food utensil literally becomes an instrument of sadistic violence, Albert monologues about his feelings of disaffection, of estrangement, of feeling unloved and unappreciated by all, especially his wife. And while the killing does not technically happen at the table, the juxtaposition of the cooking utensil and Michael as the victim – who, previously, had been presented as a respectful restaurant diner, with impeccable table manners – make it possible to draw a connection between the bloody murder and consumption, all the more because Michael is suffocated, forced to ‘ingest’ the book pages. Later in the narrative, the cooked body of Michael will be served to Albert by chef Richard and Georgina, as Albert himself is forced to consume the body at gunpoint. One can also see here, in a latent way, a conceptual inversion of the patriarchal narrative, as Georgina transforms her husband into a cannibal, neutralising his perceived cultural superiority. Overall, Albert’s acts of dining-table abuse are horrific because they expose the breakdown of our civilised consciousness, the disruption of our modern existence, and, to some extent, the failure of our consumer-­driven clichés.

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Dining with Death, and the Horrors of Torture What clearly emerges in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover is that a failure to uphold table manners can easily result in an alienating and repulsive evocation of not only the inadmissible viscerality of the human body, but also the manifestation of that violence that our rituals try so desperately to keep away from our dining areas. It is also important to establish the dining table itself as the centre of ritualised activities that do not simply pivot on the notion of ‘manners’, but also extend the notion of control to the culinary exchanges that dictate our bodily interactions. While in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, murder takes place away from the table – Michael is slayed ‘after’ dinner, and his body served as a dish only as a fait accompli – and we only see a correlation between the break in table manners and the lack of physical control that lies at the central of sociocultural horror, it is necessary to explore the implications of actual murder, and the horrors that derive therein, taking place at the dinner table. Here we see the visualisation of the violent act merging with the actual act of eating, as the two fuse to provide a repulsive and frightening hybrid of viscerality, desire, and blood. To illustrate this interaction, one can turn to the film Sushi Girl (2012). While a relatively unknown piece in the lines of mainstream cinema, the film holds reasonable cult fame due to the inclusion of once extremely famous and iconic actors, including Mark Hamill – of decade-spanning Star Wars fame – and Noah Hathaway, the young Atreyu from The Neverending Story (1984). The plot of Sushi Girl revolves around a group of robbers who are invited to a secretive dinner, held in a remote warehouse, by the once-­ leader of the gang, Duke (Tony Todd). We are told that their last job – a diamond robbery that took place six years previous  – went horribly wrong, and that they all miraculously escaped the police. All except Fish (Noah Hathaway), who spent six years in prison. The robbers came out of the job empty-­handed, and they all suspect that Fish actually stole the diamonds and hid them before being incarcerated. The reason for the reunion is to try and persuade him to give up the location of the loot. Although the film may initially look quite tasteless, it is aesthetically beautiful, with a cinematography that employs the wide use of chiaroscuro, slow focus, and extreme close-ups, which make the viewing a distinctly unsettling experience. The main focus of the narrative in Sushi Girl is, however, the dinner table, around which the majority  – if not all – of the action takes place.

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As one of the guests, Crow (Mark Hamill), arrives at the warehouse, he clearly has no expectation of grandeur. The building itself is run down and does not promise to reveal any hint of decadence hidden therein. Once inside, Crow meets with Duke and finds himself in the middle of an old industrial kitchen. Crow notices immediately that the kitchen itself looks abandoned and derelict, and has not been used in a long time. The introduction of the decrepit kitchen here is significant. Culturally speaking, the kitchen is often viewed as a bustling environment, the location for preparing food, and the core from which all convivial structures stem. If cooking is at the heart of our “community practices”, then the kitchen also comes to stand for our “real” experiences (Short 2006, 109), a locational rendition of our metaphorical attachments to food and cuisine in terms of identity. Even when the kitchen is part of a public establishment – such as a restaurant – it is still commonly understood as a lively environment, the centre of interpersonal relations where the connection between food, family, and community is born. But the kitchen in Sushi Girl is, so to speak, a dead kitchen. Unused and darkened, it is an unnecessary presence. The lack of a functioning kitchen immediately causes strangeness, discomfort, and preludes to the fear that the events to follow will evoke. The metaphorical use of derelict kitchen imagery communicates the break in interpersonal relationships that Duke and his affiliates are experiencing. Once business partners – in robbery circles – their relationship is interrupted by mistrust and dislike. Although they know each other, they are clearly not friends, and do not belong together as part of a group. Just as the kitchen is Othered from its primary use – the preparation of food, and the lead up to eating, a highly embodied and alive activity – so are the men separate and estranged. One might argue that reading the kitchen as an alienating space, disconnected from the actual structures of life, is only surprising on the surface. In her anthropological study of eating practices, Frances Short has found that, in our highly technological contemporary context, many people feel “overly anxious” about cooking  – especially for others  – and, they find the “mystique” surrounding the place of the kitchen in our community “intimidating” and “inhibitory” (2006, 108). Short appears to be suggesting that, on the one hand, cooking is a practice that is metaphorically conducive for cultural notions of family, community, and bonding. On the other hand, the very prospect of cooking may also cause feelings of alienation and social shame, if one does not have the necessary skill to prepare food as accurately as expected (Jackson 2015, 147).

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In our twenty-first-century Western culture, therefore, a sense of duality exists in relation to cooking as a practice, highlighting the potential anxiety that might further derive from any engagement with the kitchen as a shared space. Although I am not suggesting that Sushi Girl is proposing an overt critique of the kitchen as an ‘anxious space’ in relation to contemporary cultural trends, it is important to consider the multifaceted levels on which the seemingly abandoned kitchen in the narrative operates. Building a connection between the unused kitchen and the fraught social relationships that will emerge in the film, one might like to suggest that the ‘dead kitchen’ stands for the social ineptitude of the dinner guests, and their inability to actually establish an emotional connection as human beings. Welcoming guests to a dinner where the kitchen is derelict clearly signifies a lack of that convivial connection that makes eating the social activity that it is (Jackson 2015, 45). Indeed, the lack of a functioning kitchen in Sushi Girl stands for the lack of a functioning community, and immediately causes strangeness, discomfort, and preludes to a sense of anxiety and even fear that the rest of the film will fulfil. Upon entering the next room, Crow discovers it to be a large and carefully assembled dining room. The set up of the dining table is accompanied by a number of peculiar and strange frameworks that immediately communicate a sense of anxiety. Crow is quickly in awe of the room, even though he inevitably notices the aesthetic mixes that classify it, claiming the room to be too over the top, “too Ming Dynasty”, and “not very Japanese”. The Chinese elements are obviously at odds with the Japanese décor – unavoidably – by the dining table, set with Japanese-style dining ware. This level of stylised performance in relation to food evokes Deborah Lupton’s contention that consumables can “reflect” how people “perceive themselves, or would like to be perceived”. Lupton goes on to label food as the “ultimate consumable commodity” (1996, 22–23). This notion of “consumable” is played out clearly in Sushi Girl as the cultural dimensions of materialism and eating intersect. Upon the table lies lengthwise the eponymous “Sushi Girl”, whose naked body is arranged with delicate pieces of sushi. Crow’s commentary is unsurprising when he suggests that the dining set-up, as well as the food presented, lacks authenticity – for who, truly, would expect an “authentic” Japanese dining experience to involve a naked female body functioning as a live serving platform (Fig. 6.2)? The narrative openly suggests that a high degree of performance is involved in the presentation of the food, but also in its consumption. In a way, the strange set-up liberates the narrative from notions of culinary

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Fig. 6.2  The eponymous title character (Cortney Palm) in Sushi Girl (2012)

verisimilitude and permits the mystification and manipulation of the dining experience in ways that are predictably and openly disturbing. The unusual, and culturally inappropriate, nature of the dinner immediately communicates the centrality of food in what will be revealed to be horror exchanges, or, at least, challenges to the sanctity of the body in various and multifaceted representations. The lavish and clearly over-the-top table setting is already used, even at this embryonic stage, as a suggestive metaphor for Western overconsumption and overcommodification, validating E.N. Todhunter’s long-standing claim that the dinner table, especially in its more public and performative incarnation, operates as a site of “prestige, status and wealth” (1973, 301). What emerges is a certain sense that the wealthy diners are bored and emotionally apathetic, and fill the clear gaps in their social discourse with excess, torture, and murder. The corporeal excesses, including eating, are intended to mirror and channel the social horrors of Western society. The unorthodoxy of the objectified dining platform ultimately operates as a site of discomfort, and preludes a sense of anxiety and even fear that the rest of the film will fulfil. Food historian Susan Ardill argues that “food is about boundaries, maps of the body, the outlines of social give and take” (1989, 84). The very practice of eating is strongly connected to the opening and closing of the body at various times and in various situations. Parts of the body are seen as usually associated with food, such as the mouth and hands. Other parts of the body are not usually connected to eating, and a number of cultural

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taboos and behavioural regulations maintain a distance between the inadmissible parts of the body and food. The mapping of the body, discussed by Ardill, gives us an indication of the social boundaries that surround food and eating. What is allowable and what is not, what is proper and what is improper, all construct a socialised and politicised understanding of the body – especially the eating body – in context. Hands are meant, first and foremost, to prepare food, to assemble it in an acceptable fashion, and to present it to the eaters in a proper way. Then, hands will be called upon to assist in eating, as they help to transport the utensils that we employ for eating, as well as the food itself. Other parts of the body are regarded as improper when it comes to the handling of food, and their inappropriate connection to eating causes disgust and social horror. Feet, for instance, are not deemed to be an appropriate body part to handle food. Perceived as dirty and, to some extent, ‘polluted’, feet should not be found next to food. Or, at least, not in the wider structures of Western culture, which has very strict and inflexible understandings of cleanliness and propriety in relation to bodies and eating (Douglas 2003). Like feet, other parts of the body are deemed unfit to make contact with food. Areas of the body, in particular, that commonly release fluids represent an extreme incarnation of the abject, potentially contaminating the food and, in turn, those who are about to consume it. The mapping of the body via food, therefore, is steeped in social and cultural horror. Food delineates the boundaries of the ‘proper’ body as much as the body allows the treatment of food to be deemed acceptable or inacceptable. Anything beyond the layers of social and bodily acceptability is strange and perplexing. Serving sushi on the woman’s body in Sushi Girl challenges the cultural mappings that define the body in relation to food and eating. The placing of the food on the woman’s body breaks a number of sociocultural taboos that keep food and certain areas of human flesh firmly separate. It is not too difficult to grasp the idea that the woman’s body is ‘served’ to the guests as much as the sushi is, and the perfection of her form is meant to complement the feeding pleasures that will come from the food. There is something lavish about the way in which the food is presented, but that same lavishness also causes disorientation and confusion. The choice of sushi here should not come as a surprise. Sushi is a food that is often presented in highly stylised form, with geometric lines dictating where the different types of food will go and how they should be approached by the eater (Booth 2010, 173). As the sushi chef  – played by Sonny Chiba – reminds the girl, “Remember you are a tray. You must not move. You must not make eye contact. You must not react. No ­matter what

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you see … or hear.” The decorative nature of the sushi latently operates as a highly decorative effort to obfuscate the actual physicality of the woman – as a body that emits fluids, from sweat to other forms of waste – and supersede it in favour of its perceived aesthetic delectability as a sexual object to be fetishised and ‘consumed’ (Stratton 1996, 185). And while the men lust after the female body, as much as they consume the sushi, the combination of the two forms of consumption creates a sense of discomfort that is forcibly perceived. For so many elements are not quite ‘right’ about the Sushi Girl. From her catatonic state to her objectified use as a plate, she is a breach of the social structures that define conduct both at and away from the dining table. While the majority of the dining party feast – their eyes on the naked woman and their taste buds on the sushi delicacies – Fish refuses to consume any of the food on offer. His refusal to consume the food – claiming that he “fucking hate[s] sushi” – immediately separates him from the group, and marks him as the outsider. Sushi Girl latently recalls Lupton’s sociological contention that “food is instrumental” in strengthening “group identity”: sharing the act of eating, she argues, “brings people into the same community” (1996, 25). The film’s narrative spends some time building an empathetic case for Fish, by showing him, in a way, as the victim. Imprisoned for over six years, he is denied contact with his wife and daughter, from whom he is painfully estranged. Upon return to the real world, he is forcefully reunited with his former business partners. Unlike them, Fish is portrayed as approachable and less interested in the materiality of wealth. Unlike them, Fish does not relish the sight of the Sushi Girl, and his disdain for the awkward and disturbing display is mirrored in his refusal to eat. Fish’s rejection of the food offered is very evocative and unmissable reiteration of his group belonging. Sushi Girl uses the commonly and socially understood notion of ‘food preference’ as a line of demarcation, singling out the stranger according to what he likes, and does not like. Discussing the relationship between food consumption and the formation of group identity, Heldke reminds us that all tastes and flavours are “marked” as “attaching” to particular groups, and “separate” the outsider from the group itself (2005, 386). Here, sharing food is an act of kinship. The dinner is meant to bring the men together, and an aura of faux nostalgia surrounds the event. As the social narrative of the past clashes with the reality of the present, the food becomes a catalyst for their incompatibility, being presented in an alienating and strange way. Inevitably, Fish’s place as the outsider peaks in his torture, and eventual murder.

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It is also significant to notice, en passant, that the code name “Fish” constructs a distant, but unmissable connection between the man and the food, as fish is one of the main ingredients in sushi. There is almost a suggestion here that Fish the man will be consumed, in a horrific fashion, as much as the sushi on the table, instilling a sense of dread into the exchange. This introduces the possibility of Fish suffering forms of physical violence that will destroy him, as much as the sushi is destroyed as it is eaten. The torture techniques inflicted upon Fish are indeed reminiscent – even if in a highly representational manner – of the practice of eating, as are the items present on the Japanese-style dinner table. He is tortured with a chopstick  – an instrument of consumption for the sushi. He is beaten with the shards of a bottle that previously contained the sake on the table. He is then made to suffer by having his teeth brutally removed, as if to punish his mouth for its refusal to consume the food that the other guests had partaken in. A disturbing case of culinary contrappasso seems to be at work here, as Fish violently and horrifically experiences the punishment for refusing to share the food provided on the table, with all the kinship associations that this entails. Duke and the others are relayed as sadistic and self-interested beasts, violent and emotionally disassociated. Yet, they are presented in a strangely quotidian way. Invited over by Duke for what is often referred to as a “reunion”, the men sit neatly at the table, occupying their given places in an oddly respectful manner. While away from the table they are violent and out of control, they methodically move away from their dining seats to torture the unlucky Fish, and return to the table in an orderly fashion, to consume their food and drink, just as any other dinner guest would, in other circumstances. There is a disturbing naturality to the way in which they all sit at the dining table, taking bites of the sushi and sips of sake. The blood and gore that identify their encounters with Fish is not transported back to the dining table, suggesting the intention to maintain the dining table as an ‘unpolluted’ area, one that is regulated by strict rules of conduct that even a murderer would not want to breach. Cherry suggests that, in a variety of films hinging on the genre definition of horror, “the emotions of disgust and horror” are often tolerated to satisfy a “curiosity about unnatural monsters” (2009, 24). Undoubtedly, the ­set-­up of the dinner in Sushi Girl is strange and unusual, and already challenges the everyday notion of consumption, especially at the dinner table. Similarly, the food is served in an odd and uncomfortable manner, which must be perceived by the viewer in relation to its cultural disposition. Sushi Girl,

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however, ­challenges the very notion of ‘unnaturality’ suggested by Cherry. The ‘monsters’ in question  – the men as murderers and torturers  – are anchored to an alienating sense of normality by the food they consume, for eating is an entirely relatable act. The overall horror effect of the exchanges in the dining room are not steeped solely in the blood and gore of the torture scenes. Indeed, they find their most alienating power in the association between common and uncommon, known and unknown, self and ‘other’, that is to be found in eating (Abbots and Lavis 2015, 19). The scenes are horrific precisely because of their unnerving normality, which, paradoxically, transforms the exchanges into decidedly abnormal and frightful experiences. The normality of eating, and the commonality of food, are subverted by being associated with the broken corporeal boundaries of the everyday – the naked body as food platform – and the disturbing affiliation with torture and death. As the narrative progresses, it becomes clear that Duke’s choice of the Japanese-style meal is more than simply a matter of culinary preference. While initiating the torture of Fish, Duke reveals gruesome details of how his father abused him during his youth. It is revealed that a lot of the lessons about violence that Duke received were inspired by a clearly warped understanding of Japanese culture in relation to Yakuza clans. We are told that, upon travelling to Japan in his adult years  – a journey he undertook to discover the fascination that his father had held with the violent Yakuza – Duke discovered himself to be “just like them”. In other words, his overblown approach to violence was somehow justified by an indulgence in cultural inaccuracy that ritualised physical abuse and torture. On occasions, Duke reprimands his dining guests, claiming that bickering is unbecoming of them, as “Yakuza don’t do that”. In this framework, the choice of sushi as the food to be served becomes emblematic of Duke’s affiliation with the ritualised and deeply hierarchical violence of the Yakuza, and methods of persuasion that rely on torture. The food here authenticates Duke’s violence, and his way of being, a clear reminder of the identity he wants to project and the path he wants to follow. Heldke suggests that, as we eat, flavours “possess surprising power to remind us of our identities” (2005, 387). Our food choices, and preferences, are never disconnected from our cultural framework, and have the distinct ability to project an image of who we are, or, at least, how we see ourselves. For Duke, sushi speaks of Yakuza, and the choice of the Japanese-style meal is a clear reminder of the horrors of violence and abuse that, paradoxically, he continues to himself perpetuate.

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The choice in sushi as the food served is once again revelatory, not only in relation to its cultural, if not geographical connection with Japan, but also because sushi occupies an important part in the conceptualisation of Japanese consumer-capitalist structures. The very presence of sushi – associated as it is with cultural notions of celerity and quick consumption – tacitly evokes the alienating nature of fast-paced twenty-first-century life, validating, as Shirley Fedorak suggests, the lack of socialisation and humanisation that lies at the heart of “modernisation” and “globalisation” processes, both in Japan and globally (2009, 87). Sushi is often consumed as a quick meal, a form of fast food that does not leave much room for interpersonal connections. And yet, the nature of sushi as a quick and fast meal in contemporary cultures is explicitly ignored by Duke and his dining guests in Sushi Girl, which reiterates the sense of cultural alienation and social distortion that pervades the film’s narrative. The understanding of sushi as a highly ritualised food is constructed and used to validate forms of violence associated with a cultural regulation that clearly the Western diners in the film fail to grasp. In the case of Duke, the dinner table, complete with the sushi, unveils his compulsion towards violence. It is soon revealed – and unsurprisingly so – that Duke’s attachment to the horrors of the Yakuza, which the sushi clearly symbolises, is a manufactured and sense-imposed one, and does not come from a clear cultural affiliation that runs through layers of contextually dictated behaviour. One might be tempted to discuss Duke’s uses of the Japanese dinner in terms of “cultural appropriation” (Huck and Bauernschmidt 2012), but that would be, although interesting, far too simplistic. While a mesh of consumption practices exists in the film, there is also a sense in which that mesh operates as a critical rationalisation of difference, hinting, in a veiled manner, at the use of food as a medium of estrangement, as the horrors of violence clash with the imposition of cultural normalcies. The dinner in Sushi Girl is reminiscent of other famous sushi dinners in film, where a meeting of a crime council-like group takes place. Unavoidable among the examples is the sushi dinner in Kill Bill, Vol. 1, hosted on the night when O’Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu) takes control of the Yakuza high crime council and assumes her position as its new leader. The intertextual similarities between the two depictions are difficult to avoid. In both films, the dining room and table are made distinct by the use of dark colours. The play with chiaroscuro is suggestive of dark dealings and violence. In both scenes, sushi is the food of choice, clearly seen  – although not commented upon – lying on the plates of the Yakuza bosses

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in Kill Bill, as much as it is in Sushi Girl. In Kill Bill, we see, once again, the dinner table performing as the centre stage in a heated exchange that results in extreme violence. Unhappy with the comments made on mixed heritage by the unfortunate Boss Tanaka (Jun Kunimura), O’Ren theatrically runs down the table and severs the head of the unsuspecting Boss with her sword. The display is extremely gory and purposely exaggerated, as upon the severing, blood flows from Boss Tanaka’s mauled neck in an upright and quite unbelievable geyser-like manner. The horror that generates from the scene relies not only on the clear visual properties of the killing – which, in a way, are almost expected – but, more specifically, from a certain breakage in social relations that usually come with the notion of sharing food at the table. The very idea of commensality implies the presence of kinship. Commonly speaking, those who share foods together are seen as being on good terms, safe terms even. To keep company at dinner is a clearly recognisable act of friendship. The very etymological roots of ‘company’ reveal these implications, being a composite derived from com- (together) and panis (bread). Cultural philosopher and physician Leon Kass reiterates the part played by food in establishing relationships, claiming that “we sow seeds of community in breaking bread together” (1999, 131). “Bread” here should not be taken literally, but understood instead as food in general, which we share with others during the same meal. This is an almost universally understood function of food, regardless of culture. In eating together – or, more specifically, in sharing a meal at the same table – people establish affiliation. As far as the Western context is concerned, there is a certain pseudo-spiritual dimension to the act of sharing food together, a legacy of the Judeo-Christian beliefs that constructed eating as part of religious doctrine. To share a meal is to profess belonging to a similar group, to establish a relationship of empathy and affinity, and to acknowledge those that we eat with as ‘friends’. For the dinner table, as Kass argues, is not only an “instrument of ease and community”, but also “an embodiment of human rationality”, aided by its “remarkable capacity to distinguish [and] to recognise” (1999, 136). In Kill Bill, however, this connection of kinship is severed, in much the same way as Boss Tanaka’s head. The shock of the killing is heightened by the break in cultural relations and the ­interruption of the ritual of kinship that is created by food. The physical horror that derives from the scene is made more visible by the knowledge that the other dining guests are forced to sit firmly in their seats, as blood mixes with their sushi, and the boundaries of both propriety and safety are breeched.

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Practically speaking, the individual performs eating separately. Nonetheless, the gathering around a table also transforms this activity into an inherently public one. It is not surprising to see that the issue on Boss Tanaka’s mind should be uncovered ‘at dinner’, so to speak. While eating is characterised by a series of ritualised and strictly conducted behaviours – especially once one sits at the table – the dinner table keeps individuals close and demands engagement and interaction with company. Connecting notions of consumption, identity, and intimacy, Visser contends, eating in company “necessarily places the individual face to face with the group” (1996, xi). The group maintains a sense of social cohesion through consumption. Eating and drinking solidifies the group, and openly acknowledges agreement. The Yakuza bosses raise their glasses to O’Ren, using an item of consumption – in this case, a drink that is suggestively put forward as sake – to express their loyalty to her, in a wellacknowledged ritual move. It is of note that, while the other guests clearly feast and celebrate, the sushi in front of Boss Tanaka remains untouched. He sinks into his seat, focusing on his cigar, and ignoring the dish served on his plate. The refusal to partake in the food is, once again, evocative. The sushi is clearly a celebratory meal, a convivial expression of O’Ren’s success. Tanaka refuses the food as much as he refuses O’Ren ascension, what he calls a “perversion”. The refusal here foregrounds his physical outbursts. He slams his hands on his filled plate, in a redolent move. His corporeally transgressive behaviour is aimed at the table where the food sits, but is directed at O’Ren. It is almost as if the food becomes a substitute for the woman herself, and in showing his disdain he rejects them both. The sushi is smashed and turned to almost inedible pieces. The fine plate on which it rests is also destroyed, suggesting that the structure upon which his relationship to the council rested is also shattered to pieces. This narrative finds critical validation in Visser’s suggestion that “the actual taking part” in a meal “suggests identity” (1996, 20). The action of eating together exemplifies relationship to such an extent that refusal causes dismay and shock. The decision to not partake in a shared meal, especially in the formalised setting of the dinner table, is a social horror in itself, for the decision speaks (far too) loudly of desires and affiliations. Boss Tanaka’s outburst draws attention to the ‘unnaturality’ of his behaviour, as far as sitting at the dinner table is concerned. Places are occupied in an ordained manner and diners are expected to perform in alignment to the rules that regulate conduct and in accordance to the relevant cultural context. The break in table manners signals the

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failure of the rituality and opens the way for an interruption in physical boundaries. Table manners do not simply aid the consumption of food, but they commonly regulate how eating, in its role as a sociocultural practice, should be performed (Flammang 2009, 10). Nonetheless, once eating, as an activity, is no longer on the menu, and the social repulsion caused by breaking ritual takes place, the body is placed at the mercy of all other physical acts. The violent outburst on Tanaka’s part is surprising and disturbing at an almost visceral level, but primarily because it foreshadows the events to come, and suggests to the viewer that this singular violent act will soon be followed by others of an even greater magnitude. Contextualising the connection between notions of corporeal safety and food consumption, Visser argues that it is one of the “chief rules” of “dining etiquette” to “keep the lid on the violence” that “the meal being eaten presupposes” (1996, 20). For once the food is destroyed, so are the restrictions and regulations that protect the individual at the table. O’Ren’s killing of Boss Tanaka is horrific because it is bloody, but also because it breaches all the rules of dining etiquette that preserve the individual during eating. All meals are, to some extent, ‘violent’. Firstly, because they rely on physical movements that break and tear. Secondly, because, behind every meal  – especially one that is based on the consumption of living creatures – lies the inevitable destruction of physical matter. Hidden somewhere in the discourse of propriety and culinary regulation lies the intent and desire to keep the human being away from the danger that is inherent to both food preparation and consumption. Eating is a ferocious activity, but that ferociousness is usually aimed at the food, not the diner. For while humans do the slaughter of animals, they themselves do not get slaughtered  – especially not at the dinner table. Boss Tanaka is conceptually ‘butchered’ by O’Ren, his fate acting as an ancestral reminder of the violence that is inherent to eating, and a visual representation of superiority that refuses to rely on subtle gestures and the clanking of glasses. We see here a representational echo of Visser’s contention that “behind every rule of table etiquette lurks the determination of each person present to be a diner, not a dish” (1996, 4). Even when the threat of cannibalism is not in any way present or considered, table etiquette – controlled movements, ritualised behaviours, respectful kinship  – preserves the human individual from becoming the centre of violence. Table manners preserve the perceived cultural sanctity of the body, and keep the individual ‘safe’.

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Restaurant Nightmares, Domestic Visions, and the Culinary Horrors of Power The idea that a dinner in a public place – such as a restaurant or a café – can act as an Othering experience, and as a source for horrific exchanges – of both a physical and social nature – is a common presentation in contemporary film. We have already seen this interaction illustrated in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, where violence and murder collide in the metaphorical space of the dinner table. In addition, the public dining space is proposed as the site of disturbing experiences in examples such as The Restaurant (2008) and Bitter Feast (2010), where the ‘horrors’ connected to restaurant dining range from hauntings and hallucinations, in the former, to the ‘social horrors’ of public humiliation, hostility, and rejection, in the latter. Bitter Feast proposes a particularly fascinating horror dimension to the idea of ‘public consumption’ in merging notions of torture  – both physical and psychological  – with the seemingly unconnected notion of ‘reality television’, where a disgraced TV chef (James LeGros) kidnaps one of his harshest online critics (Joshua Leonard) and forces him to cook a number of dishes to perfection. When the critic inevitably fails, the chef physically abuses him and proceeds to starve him to death, filming the whole process in a macabre rendition of the public television display. Examples such as Bitter Feast and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover are suggestive of how the public place often offers the perfect arena for anxieties about food to manifest, and these are, more often than not, latent manifestations of social dysfunctions, psychosis, neurosis, and disjunctions that operate within both our corporeal and extra-corporeal experiences. To fully grasp the notion of the restaurant dining space as a site of anxiety and disaffection, one need only think of American Psycho (2000). Here, a succession of dinners at fancy restaurants – even though they are meant to take place between friends and family members – are commonly a source of vexation, and openly rely on continuous representation and display. The overly elaborate food served is not simply a recollection of 1980s culinary practices, an era where minimalism, obsessive d ­ ecoration, and a considerable lack of substance – both physically and figuratively – characterised the food served, and provided an apt metaphor for the vapid waves of rampant consumerism that are often treated as synonymous with this decade. Indeed, the fancy nature of the dishes served in the restaurants where Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) and his associates dine is also r­ epresentative of the

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socially horrific nature of their relationship. The food is heavily commented upon, and Bateman and friends discuss meaningless topics as they eat, continuously performing their yuppie persona, and openly not caring about the feelings and well-being of their fellow human beings. Here we see the disjointed and display-heavy nature of the restaurant being channelled in order to convey the social ineptitude of the diners. The perceived ordinariness of eating is interrupted by the clear ideology of display that is inherent to the restaurant setting, a reminder of Rosalind Coward’s well-known contention that the “very appearance of naturalness” that is perceived to exist in eating is always inevitably laced with “social symbolism” (1984, 109). The restaurant narrative, with its anxious, sociopathic, and liminal displays, also functions as the framework for the Bateman’s gruesome killings, as his commentaries over food and drink remain constantly present, even as he is about to engage in the murder of his victims. The focus on the restaurant experience as socially and psychologically disjointed is made even clearer when the dinner in question is, in fact, a business dinner, an exchange between businessman and client. A number of films have focused on the unnaturality of the exchange, not only emotionally, but also physically. An example that clearly springs to mind here is Goodfellas (1990), where the group of Italian American mobsters is frequently seen sitting at the table in  local restaurants, discussing all manners of sickening topics. This is a narrative also echoed in a number of other films, such as Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Casino (1995)  – as well as popular television examples such as The Sopranos (1995–2007) – where conversations about criminal activities often take place at the dinner table, both at home and in restaurants. It is particularly worthy of note that, in spite of their content, the conversations are taken as ‘normal’ and are not the cause of disquiet for anyone. On a particular occasion in Goodfellas, however, when a murder takes place during dinner  – the result of an altercation between diner Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) and the waiter  – the interruption of the cultural cliché, covering both the dining experience and its place as part of a public space, generates anxiety and even fear, in both the film’s characters and its viewers. A further instance of the representation of the restaurant experience as culturally and ­conceptually disjointed – and one that goes slightly against the grain of the norm, even a horror one – is The Lonely Guy (1984). Here, Steve Martin’s character, Larry Hubbard, is pictured dining alone in a restaurant, and this often frowned upon – not to say socially feared – practice is used as a conduit for uncovering our contemporary notions of cultural

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alienation within consumer-capitalist practices. Eating may indeed seem a mundane ­activity, but its performance is also unavoidably meaningful. This oxymoronic conjunction is particularly heightened in the setting of the restaurant, a place that is so unavoidably public. In her sociological study Dining Out, Joanne Finkelstein points out that eating in restaurants is a very “artificial exercise in manners” (1989, 130). Affected by the pressure of social identification, Finkelstein claims, people who eat in restaurants tend to imitate others and thereby suffocate their own desire for individual experience. The social setting of the restaurant notoriously limits the “choice of self ” available to the individual (1989, 130). In this context, restaurant dining merges corporeal experiences into a system of cultural communication (Piatti-Farnell 2011). Although Finkelstein’s position seems excessively fixated on the idea of an ‘authentic self’ struggling to get out in an oppressive eating environment, her approach to restaurant dining is useful where the presentation of the public eating space is concerned. As tacitly proposed in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, the public eating space is a simultaneously repulsive and oppressive space. The contextualisation of the restaurant experience – especially when coupled with the social irregularity of the business–client relationship, as a disjointed and Othering experience – makes it the perfect vector through which the anxieties surrounding corporeality, sociability, and interpersonal connections can emerge. For truly, one can easily imagine being stuck in an awkward situation at a restaurant, and being unable to leave, and the feeling of constantly ‘being watched’ that derives from transporting the viscerality of the eating body into a public space. The Othering nature of the restaurant experience, especially in a business context, is given particular attention in Dans Ma Peau (2002). In a disturbing, yet mesmerising scene, Esther attends a dinner with her supervisors and two very important clients. The dinner is meant to be the ideal location for discussing important business matters, and it is barely disguised as a sociable experience. Already plagued by the emergence of neurosis and psychosis s­ymptoms – which have manifested with her acts of self-mutilation, and which will later on in the narrative develop into instances of self-­cannibalism – Esther is visibly uncomfortable at the dinner. She finds the conversation difficult to follow, remaining quiet and disassociated. She is also visibly disinterested in her food, even though the restaurant is clearly of an expensive persuasion. Feeling inadequate, Esther withdraws from the conversation, and is unable to engage in the physical

 

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act of food c­ onsumption. The rejection of the food is more than simply a lack of appetite. It is a physical representation of the social anxiety that comprises the business meeting. The dinner is clearly a display of superiority and control on both the business and clients’ part, evoking Sydney Mintz’s contention that food relations are, on the majority of occasions, “organised displays of power” (1986, 154). There is also a distinct suggestion in the narrative that the power relations at play are unavoidably gendered. Esther is meant to entertain a delightful conversation, and consume both food and wine with glee, performing the role of female companion to the male representations of power at the table. A narrative of subordination is established through the forced ‘naturalness’ of eating, as this expresses and disguises the extent of social control over the way in which women, in particular, consume (Coward 1984, 109). The perceived inadequacy of Esther as a dining companion in Dans Ma Peau is heightened by the presence of the female client, who moves at ease around the meanders of both business conversation, and culinary appreciation, as is clearly expected of her. Here is a further reminder of narratives of display and gender control, often intrinsic to our modern culinary practices in the Western context. In the midst of the meal, Esther seems to lose control of her body. Her left arm begins to move around the table of its own accord, messing up the food on her plate. In spite of Esther’s efforts to control it, the arm fully detaches from her body. She then stabs it with a steak-knife, and excuses herself from the table, under the watchful eyes of her fellow diners, who had noticed her silence and disassociation with reproach. It is suggested that the arm incident at the table was nothing more than the fruit of Esther’s hallucinations. The incident is, however, a skilful representation of the experience at a restaurant dinner table as extremely disjunctive and anxious, challenging the stability of both our emotional expression and our corporeal control. As Esther fails to cope with the pressure of the business exchange at the table, her body becomes uncontrollable, disconnected, Other. Her detachment and sense of social disaffection become metaphorically rendered in the Otherness of her own arm, which refuses to obey her and is no longer participating in the display of dining etiquette as expected. Coward suggests that, in the business–client relationship, the “meal out” in a “good restaurant” is provided “by the company as a way of expressing wealth [and] status” (1984, 109). It is worthy of note that the Othered arm goes as far as mocking the food on the plate, by p ­ laying with it rather than helping to consume it, and therefore rendering it ­inedible.

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The ­perceived pleasure of the food experience is negated, and exposed as an anxious and distinctly liminal space, deprived of gratification, yet forcefully portrayed as desirable. Coward goes on to contend that a close scrutiny of the restaurant set-up reinforces the “impression that specialoccasion meals are more often than not symbolic affirmations” of “obligations” (1984, 110). The pressure to act and perform in Dans Ma Peau is clear, as is the representation of the restaurant business exchange as an ‘unnatural’ space, where the consumption of food is distinctly connected to the performance of status and power. Of course, the notion that food exchanges are connected to power structures is well established. Pioneer anthropologists such as Mintz have long argued that food is connected to the expression of superiority and control, and that “power”, in connection to eating, always takes on a contextual meaning for people, “in terms of what it means for them” (1996, 30). The giving and receiving of food, especially in a host–guest type of situation, is never divorced from systems of power and control. A meal offers opportunities not only for “status symbolism”, but also for the establishment of relationships which are based on service, obligation, and repayment. Following Mintz’s contention, Roy C.  Wood suggests that the giving and receiving of food is never “a neutral act”, but “affords opportunities” for both host and guest to display appropriate behaviour, and recognition thereof (1995, 47). While Roy’s suggestion may appear purposely contentious, it is fitting to remember that power relations take on many guises, and that being in charge of food distribution should never simply be classified as an act of love – as many contemporary sources have done, especially in relation to motherhood – but should also be interpreted as bestowing upon the giver a position of control, which inevitably creates an exchange based on agreement and return. The social obligation created by the food-giving system of a meal seems not only mundane, but obvious in its construction. All the same, contemporary films have identified the power relations hidden in food-giving as a source of uneasiness, and even fear. Although so far in this chapter I have dedicated greater attention to the culinary ‘power plays’ that take place at a restaurant’s dining table, one should not think that issues of power do not occupy a particular horror dimension in a film setting where eating at home is concerned. Indeed, a tacit narrative of simultaneous control and annihilation, as far as serving and consuming food go, has already emerged in examples such as Coraline

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(2009), where the dynamics of the dinner table are profoundly entangled with the politics of kitchen labour and the tortured notion of ‘love’. A most evocative example of the connection between power and food giving, and the cultural anxiety that this creates, can also be found in Misery (1990). In this narrative, the injured and bed-bound writer Paul Sheldon (James Caan) is completely at the mercy of his rescuer and carer, Annie Wilkes (famously played by Kathy Bates). Although here the focus of the eating experience is not, physically speaking, ‘a table’, one can still see the dining area around the bed operating on a similar premise. Annie brings trays of food for Paul, and has complete control over his feeding patterns, but also, and therefore, the overall organisation of his daily life. In this film, the nature of nurturing – here understood especially in connection to providing food, and the maternal undertones that this connection entails – is explored via its inevitable and seemingly paradoxical connections to periodisation and social control (Jackson 2015, 148). The character of Annie Wilkes seems to archetypically incorporate the two sides of the ‘mother’ figure: the loving, caring, and providing mother on the one hand, and the destructive, engulfing, murderous mother, on the other (Neumann 1972, 12). This historically dynamic, and highly dualist, approach to the figure of the mother is well known in anthropological studies, and is, of course, suggested in a number of films, as well as other narratives, both mentioned in this volume and elsewhere. In Misery, meals are indeed at the centre of the discourse of dependence, with its suggestively maternal undertones. Access to food, and the ability to eat as chosen, is portrayed here as the metaphorical indicator of the cultural state that is understood as the benchmark of – clearly negated – ‘freedom’. In these terms, food is central to the construction of the narrative of imprisonment, as Annie is completely in control of Paul’s eating schedule, leaving him helpless. Paul’s position as the guest becomes more and more unsettling as the narrative progresses, and as his relationship with Annie deteriorates. Her resentment towards him is almost palpable, and a nod must be made to Bates’s convincing performance  – extreme nurturing evolves into forms of torture, both p ­ sychological and physical. The psychological violence enacted through food quickly descends into the physical violence that sees Annie torturing and further injuring Paul, to prevent him from escaping. Indeed, to witness Paul being completely at Annie’s mercy is rather unsettling. Through food and drink multiple instances of drugging and poisoning

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take place in the film. Discussing the place occupied by food in social relationships, Wood suggests that all meals in a guest–host context are intended to “elicit some reciprocal gift” or “service”, so that the “social debt” can be repaid (1995, 47). In these terms, Misery provides a clear representation of the power relations that tie food giver to food receiver, not in a position of servitude, as it often appears, but in a context of control and obligation. The horror nature of the film is communicated long before any instance of violence appears, and it is to be found precisely in the relation to food that is established, constructing a frightening context of domineering behaviour, and ultimately possession. The power that is granted to Annie in virtue of her control over meals makes her ‘monstrous’ in the sense that she overrides simple notions of choice and preference, and shapes the consumption patterns in her ‘guest’s’ life. She is overbearing and over-­attentive, so much that the food regime becomes part of the imprisoning system that elicits uncomfortable feelings in the viewer. The foods served become secondary in terms of displeasure, subordinate to the structures of consumption that propose them. That is to say, while the foods themselves are acceptable, the context in which they is horrific. It relies on notions of entrapment and control, validating Bernard Lyman’s suggestion that food situations exist only in associations, and find their symbolic meaning only in the “mood” or “sense of well-being” which “they engender” (1989, 157). It has been my long contention that the dinner table brings with it a repertoire of culturally inscribed conventions, and affords a performative arena in which social relations can be “created, cemented or destroyed” (Piatti-Farnell 2011, 117). In terms of identity formation, mealtimes represent significant occasions when groups are normally together and this function is deeply entangled with notions of normalcy and identity. In this approach, I follow Wood’s suggestion that mealtimes provide opportunities “to observe what is acceptable in terms of food-related behaviour” (1995, 48). Nonetheless, and precisely because of its identity-making properties, and its connection to the socioculturally regulated processes that construct human relations in both the private and public spheres, meals are also at the centre of unavoidable emotional conundrums. By this, I mean that, if all meals are part of a display system, to one extent or the other, then their very presence signals performance and a paradoxical perversion of the naturality of eating – especially in the home – which is often tacitly advocated by our cultural narratives of consumption. Meals are violent affairs, therefore, not only physically speaking, but also

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psychologically as well. To extend the understanding of the home’s inner dining table as a site of psychological transgression and power displays, one should also think of American Beauty (1999). Here, a fascinating scene sees Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) having dinner with his highly materialistic wife Carolyn (Annette Benning) and angst-filled teenage daughter Jane (Thora Birch) in the family’s dining room. In spite of the fact that the dinner takes place ‘at home’, there is a high level of display at work, as the dinner table is meticulously presented with expensive china and silverware and is, in a way, a strangely alien presence as part of an everyday meal for a middle-class family like the Burnhams. It soon becomes clear, however, that the dinner is also a very fraught affair, as communication between family members breaks down, and the argument peaks with Lester throwing the asparagus dish against the wall. Although there is no hint of the traditional horror narrative in this scene – no blood, no murder, no physical torture – it becomes apparent that the dinner table is the site of deep-set social horrors, of the incomprehension within the family and the latent preoccupations with consumerism and appearance that are proposed as being at the centre of the unit’s social disintegration. Conceptually speaking, meals are considered to be at the heart of Western visions of family perfection, and culinary traditions  – from the food served to how it is consumed at the table  – are an essential part of this visualisation. Eating has often been viewed as a highly politicised activity in relation to family dynamics, and, in the modern era, the role played by food advertising in cementing notions of what is ‘normal’  – including gender roles  – in relation to cooking has been instrumental, especially in the United States (Parkin 2011, 4). American Beauty entertains this notion by cleverly showing the cracks in the image of family perfection through the disintegration of the dinner table as a site of community, and the introduction of a narrative of mistrust and social revulsion, as the contempt between the Burnham family members is palpable. In this sense, American Beauty projects an unavoidable image of the true American Gothic, where alienating images of the social everyday construct the narrative of horror that lies latent in the display-driven interactions of contemporary society (Goddu 1997). The subtle critique of American consumer politics becomes evident as several connections to the manufactured nature of everyday life in the American context – from work to the family and food – litter the film’s narrative. The dinner table is at the centre of this exchange, as the very notion of culinary tradition is twisted, distorted, and morphed.

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Works Cited Abbots, Emma-Jayne, and Anna Lavis. 2015. Introduction: Reflecting on the Embodied Intersections of Eating and Caring. In Careful Eating: Bodies, Food and Care, ed. Emma-Jayne Abbots and Anna Lavis, 1–23. London and New York: Routledge. Ardill, Susan. 1989. Susan Ardill’s Vegetable Curry in Coconut Milk. In Turning the Tables: Recipes and Reflections from Women, ed. Sue O’Sullivan, 82–91. London: Sheba. Bell, David, and Gill Valentine. 1997. Consuming Geographies: We Are Where We Eat. London: Routledge. Booth, Michael. 2010. Sushi and Beyond: What the Japanese Know about Cooking. London: Vintage. Braziel, Jana Evans, and Kathleen LeBesco. 2001. Introduction. In Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression, ed. Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco, 1–18. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cherry, Brigid. 2009. Horror. London and New York: Routledge. Coward, Rosalind. 1984. Female Desire. London: Paladin. Douglas, Mary. 1972. Deciphering a Meal. Daedalus 101(1): 61–81. ———. 2003. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Routledge. Fedorak, Shirley. 2009. Pop Culture: The Culture of Everyday Life. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Finkelstein, Joanne. 1989. Dining Out: A Sociology of Modern Manners. Cambridge: Polity. Flammang, Janet A. 2009. The Taste for Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Ganguly, Keya. 2001. States of Exception: Everyday Life and Postcolonial Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Goddu, Theresa. 1997. Gothic America: Narrative, History and Nation. New York: Columbia University Press. Heldke, Lisa. 2005. But is it Authentic? Culinary Travel and the Search for the ‘Genuine Article’. In The Taste Culture Reader: Experiencing Food and Drink, ed. Carolyn Korsmeyer, 385–394. Oxford: Berg. Huck, Christian, and Stefan Bauernschmidt, ed. 2012. Travelling Goods, Travelling Moods: Varieties of Cultural Appropriation. Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag. Ikeda, Joanne. 1999. Culture, Food and Nutrition in Increasingly Culturally Diverse Societies. In A Sociology of Food and Nutrition: The Social Appetite, ed. John Germov and Lauren Williams, 149–168. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jackson, Peter. 2015. Anxious Appetites: Food and Consumer Culture. London: Bloomsbury. Jancovich, Mark. 2002. “General Introduction.” In Horror, The Film Reader, edited by Mark Jancovich, 1–20. London and New York: Routledge.

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Kass, Leon. 1999. The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Keesey, Douglas. 2006. The Films of Peter Greenaway: Sex, Death and Provocation. Jefferson: McFarland. Lupton, Deborah. 1996. Food, the Body and the Self. London: SAGE. Lyman, Bernard. 1989. A Psychology of Food: More Than a Matter of Taste. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. Miller, William Ian. 1998. The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mintz, Sydney. 1986. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. London: Penguin. ———. 1996. Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past. Boston: Beacon Press. Neumann, Erich. 1972. The Great Mother. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Parkin, Katherine J. 2011. Food is Love: Advertising and Gender Roles in Modern America. Philadelphia: University Pennsylvania Press. Piatti-Farnell, Lorna. 2011. Food and Culture in Contemporary American Fiction. New York: Routledge. Redclift, Michael. 2004. Chewing Gum: The Fortunes of Taste. London and New York: Routledge. Short, Frances. 2006. Kitchen Secrets: The Meaning of Cooking in Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg. Stratton, Jon. 1996. The Desirable Body: Cultural Fetishism and the Erotics of Consumption. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Todhunter, E.N. 1973. Food Habits, Food Faddism and Nutrition. In Food, Nutrition and Health: World Review of Nutrition and Dietetics, ed. Misoslav Rechcigl, 16th ed. Basel: Karger. Visser, Margaret. 1996. The Rituals of Dinner: The Origins, Evolutions, Eccentricities and the Meaning of Table Manners. London: Penguin. Wood, Roy C. 1995. The Sociology of the Meal. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: Consuming Gothic and Its Discontents

In the final stages of the analysis, I remain aware that this book has shaped itself, in disciplinary terms, as a hybrid. Consuming Gothic is a critical fusion that, in its malleability, reflects the refusal of food to be relegated to one area of life, as well as the Gothic’s ability to adapt to context and situation. Writing this book, for me, has been a process driven by critical intersections. While providing an analysis of food in its various cinematic contexts, my work is neither sited in Gothic studies nor film studies. Even in terms of its relationship to food studies, it maintains a critical separation from any strict attachment to a particular subdisciplinary strand, unwilling to see any engagement with food as only connected to either anthropology or sociology, phenomenology or cultural studies, communication studies or gender studies. In my approach, I have followed Sarah Sceats’s contention, in reiterating that “[f]ood is not bound within any single discourse, but becomes impregnated with meanings from the many and various frameworks within which it figures” (2004, 126). Overall, I found fertile ground in film as a representational arena, as this medium, although largely audio-visual, is also metaphorically attuned to the polysemic and protean uses of eating as a multisensorial experience. The choice of film as a medium, however, does not preclude the considerations made in this volume to be transported to different audio-visual media, such as television, even though, of course, the intricacies of the medium itself – especially in terms of audience, broadcast, and reception, will need to be considered in the transition. A desire to represent food © The Author(s) 2017 L. Piatti-Farnell, Consuming Gothic, Palgrave Gothic, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-45051-7_7

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horror  – with all its connections to disgust, revulsion, alienation, and fear – in c­ ontemporary cinema, and the noticeable recent insurgence in its depiction, signal and confirm an increasing fascination and preoccupation with the social, cultural, and economic consequences of eating. As far as cinematic representation is concerned, food horror emerges as part of a continuous cultural trend that throws the consuming body into sharp relief, and food itself lies at the centre of our Western cultural apprehensions, especially in terms of overconsumption. Through an interdisciplinary approach to food horror in its cinematic contexts, my analyses of the films presented reveal a peculiar relationship between food, eating, recurrent bodily transformations, repetition, and fragile psychic states. The common and culturally understood positive and beneficial connection to food is rapidly transformed into a menacing presence, a process of (un)becoming that threatens the social bounds of our selves. While imparting a critical look into food experiences that are, often literally, too hard to stomach, these contemporary films provide prolific metaphorical structures where the mysteries of death and Otherness become entangled with eating, one of the most embodied and arguably ‘alive’ of all human activities. Terry Eagleton famously observed that food “makes up our bodies, just as words make up our mind” (1998, 207). Drawing attention to new and contemporary ways to express alienation and liminality in the decades before and after the arrival of the twenty-first century, the complicated and often ambiguous relationship between food and horror draws important and inescapable connections to matters of the uncanny, the grotesque, the abject, as well as the sensationalisation of transgressive corporeality and monstrous pleasures. The appeal of disgust in contemporary cinematic narratives – from Feed to Se7en, from The Human Centipede to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, to recall but a few – pivots precisely on its blurred identity, on its meshed affinity with the very concept of pleasure, where the repulsion of ‘horror’ is rendered paradoxically irresistible by our perpetual desire to view, scrutinise, and consume. Therein lies the appeal of food horror as a representational category, its normality dangerously appealing as it transforms into the abjected, the undesirable, the culturally unspeakable. What has clearly merged throughout this volume is that food horror – as the critical and aesthetic category that I have worked on identifying – is not an occasional manifestation. It runs through the fabric of our contemporary filmic narratives, and forcefully presents itself whenever notions

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of culture come to play. All film representation is, to some extent, cultural representation, and this also means that when food horror appears in film its uses are always cultural. In considering food and horror as a category, I was less interested in strictly looking at films in context – or, to be more precise, in the socio-historical context in which each film was produced. Indeed, my critical journey has been guided by identifying patterns of signification that run across the films considered as cultural narratives, regardless of their chronological placing. Whilst still aware that no filmic notion – including food horror, and its socio-aesthetic practices – can ever be truly regarded as “universal” (Gunning 2008, 195), I was more inclined to find representational threads that connect instances and examples across the broader time spectrum. For this reason, I did not investigate what every single instance of food horror ‘meant’ in relation to its social and political context, at a given time. Naturally, the latter is an important part of the cultural dissection of food horror in film, and it has still surfaced in my analysis whenever appropriate. On balance, no medium ever exists in a historical vacuum. Overall, however, my study has taken a transhistorical approach and focused primarily on evaluating the repercussions of food horror in the broader sense. Further scholarship may want to pursue a more contextual analysis of food horror in specific films – as well as other media – as I have done elsewhere in my work. Confirming that the Gothic proves an effective medium to unravel larger cultural and social structures, my approach has underlined the importance of considering ‘food horror films’ when thinking about such conceptual fields as corporeality, subjectivity, gender, sexuality, class structures, and national identity. I have hoped to demonstrate how the metaphorical use of ‘food horror’ pluralises existing traditional understandings of horror experiences (both visually and conceptually) and establishes a symbolic connection to culturally specific concerns such as consumerism, sexuality, health and body size, and family politics. As its own representational category, ‘food horror’ also emerges as bound up, explicitly or implicitly, with modes of political economy and consumerism. Ultimately, my analysis has established a critical understanding of the eating body as in itself ‘monstrous’, an entity that breaks the boundaries of cultural propriety, and is horrific both conceptually and aesthetically. As a result, a new definition of the ‘Gothic body’ might need to be pursued, one that encapsulates a shift in imagery and concept inevitably linked to the cultural politics of food.

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Generally speaking, this use of food as a sociocultural metaphor should not come as a surprise, considering Jane Ferry’s existing claim that “a close observation of food in the narrative framework of film reveals its powerful, coded, cultural meanings that structure the arrangements of social life” (2003, 1). In charting the different manifestations of food and horror in film, and in response to existing filmic food scholarship, I have also aimed to identify specific techno-political anxieties that are seen as proper to the Gothic mode and the horror framework in our contemporary era. What emerged from this was that seemingly harmless locations such as kitchens and dinner tables can take centre stage in unleashing the horror of Western apathy, disengagement, madness, violence, and alienation. These ‘cultural hauntings’ are amplified by the usage of the culinary. The traditional power of food is subverted in order to channel the social horrors that are usually kept concealed. A spectral, haunted, or murderous kitchen is a very spatially embodied rendition of our cultural failures. Food, in this sense, becomes a metaphor to indicate the fear of what is buried under the surface of ‘perfect’ social dynamics, where the true horror is not always a matter of blood and gore, but takes the guise of the culturally unspeakable. Both eating and cooking are uncovered as metaphorical activities of the self. Together, they construct a representational context of consumption where the haunting psychology of the everyday, the porous boundaries of corporeality, and the uncanny limits of consumer identity collide in the idiom of food. Throughout the volume, I gestured multiple times towards notions of food as ‘Other’ in connection to various cultural notions – disgust in particular – and its connection to bodily politics. The revulsion of orality appears to be of particularly importance whenever instances of food horror are represented. The mouth continues to be a privileged site of symbolic interaction – from hunger to speech – but its properties as a locus of exchange are particularly important whenever the visceral properties of food come into sharp relief. Both the horrors of ingestion, and the more broadly defined concept of food horror, are not connected simply to the fear of harm, but tap into the different layers of our cultural notions of propriety, and the “deep sense of revulsion and disgust” about what the mouth does (Blackman 2008, 92). Although I did consider in detail the part played by the oral orifice in the construction  – both physical and figurative  – of food horror, I did not extend the notion into an actual analysis of bodily harm and damage, especially in connection to the social,

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historical, political, and even cinematic incarnations of poison as an entity. Disgust, of course, is not necessarily indicative of what is harmful, and, in turn, that which is physically harmful is not necessarily disgusting. Poison represents its own conceptual category of ‘horror’, and this will need to be evaluated in its own right, especially in connection to the representational schemas of popular culture. As a result of the critical investigations of this book, I have come to a clear critical realisation, which can, in this context, act as a form of conclusion. In its interactions with notions of both corporeality and sociality, the efficacy of food horror in the multisensorial medium of film seems to lie precisely in its viscerality. As notions of pollution and purity litter the construction of food as a ‘horror matter’, the anthropologically defined pure body is challenged in its very stead. What is more, food is intended to enter our bodies, and is therefore inherently Other from the onset, whether this recognitions happens consciously or unconsciously in each individual. For, in spite of its indispensability, eating is a disgusting activity, where hedonistic pleasures are foreshadowed by the unspeakable presence of waste and contamination. In its own dual nature as both pleasurable and disgusting, food draws attention to our own corporeal dualities, and the nature of our bodies as permeable and culturally unstable entities. What is more, food is ephemeral, and transient, and, as such carries a clear conceptual affinity with our bodies. And like our bodies, food is organic and will inevitably decay. Indeed, its appeal lies precisely in its inescapable nature as a matter that will deteriorate, dissolve, and eventually disappear. This is what Elspeth Probyn terms “the finitude of food” (2000, 130), in an echo Sean French’s identification of eating as a “dark pleasure”, rife with the promise of death and putrefaction. Any horror narrative that relies on food as its representational axis inevitably recalls the fate of our bodies, their corporal evolutions and de-evolutions functioning as a loud reminder that we, just like the food, will one day deteriorate and rot. In its cinematic representations as matter of horror, food breaks the boundaries of the body, and challenges the strength of our cultural proprieties. Just as we could never hope to escape the viscerality of food, so we could never avoid our own embodied fate. For food  – through both its consumption and its culinary practices  – continuously demands to become us, and, as such, reminds us of our own ephemerality, of our own materiality, and the inescapable shackles of our own mortality.

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Works Cited Blackman, Lisa. 2008. The Body: The Key Concepts. London: Berg. Eagleton, Terry. 1998. Edible Écriture. In Consuming Passions: Food in the Age of Anxiety, ed. Sian Griffiths and Jennifer Wallace, 203–208. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ferry, Jane. 2003. Food in Film: A Culinary Performance of Communication. London and New York: Routledge. Gunning, Tom. 2008. Film Studies. In The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Analysis, ed. Tony Bennett and John Frow, 185–205. London: SAGE. Probyn, Elspeth. 2000. Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities. London: Routledge. Sceats, Sarah. 2004. Food, Consumption and the Body in Contemporary Women’s Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Filmography

Alien. Directed by Ridley Scott. Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox. Alive. Directed by Frank Marshall. Santa Monica: Kennedy/Marshall Productions. 1993. American Beauty. Directed by Sam Mendes. Hollywood: Paramount. 1999. American Psycho. Directed by Mary Harron. Santa Monica: Lionsgate. 2000. Apocalypse Now. Directed by Francis F.  Coppola. San Francisco: American Zoetrope. 1979. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. Directed by Jay Roach. Los Angeles: New Line Cinema. 1999. The Babadook. Directed by Jennifer Kent. New York: IFC Midnight. 2014. The Beach. Directed by Danny Boyle. Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox. 2000. Beetlejuice. Directed by Tim Burton. Burbank: Warner Brothers. 1988. Bitter Feast. Directed by Joe Maggio. Orlando Park: MPI. 2010. Black Swan. Directed by Darren Aronofsky. Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox. 2010. Blade. Directed by Stephen Norrington. Burbank: Warner Bros. 1998. The Blob. Directed by Irvin Yeaworth. Hollywood: Paramount. 1958. The Blob. Directed by Chuck Russell. Culver City: TriStar Pictures. 1988. Brain Damage. Directed by Frank Henenlotter. Ellicott City: Palisades Entertainment. 1988. Braindead. Directed by Peter Jackson. Wellington: WingNut Films. 1992. Breaking Dawn, Parts 1–2. Directed by Bill Condon. Universal City: Summit Entertainment. 2011–2012. Cabin Fever. Directed by Travis Zariwny. New York: IFC Midnight. 2002. Cannibal Holocaust. Directed by Ruggero Deodato. Rome: United Artists. 1980.

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Case 39. Directed by Christina Alvart. Hollywood: Paramount. 2009. Casino. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Universal City: Universal. 1995. Chocolat. Directed by Lasse Hallström. Santa Monica: Miramax. 2000. Compulsion. Directed by Egidio Coccimiglio. Los Angeles: Uncork’d Entertainment. 2013. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Direct by Peter Greenaway. Satnta Monica: Lionsgate. 1989. Constantine. Directed by Francis Lawrence. Burbank: Warner Bros. 2005. Coraline. Directed by Henry Selick. Universal City: Universal. 2009. The Crazies. Directed by Breck Eisner. Beverly hills: Overture Films. 2010. Creepshow 2. Directed by Michael Gornick. Los Angeles: Laurel Entertainment. 1987. Dans Ma Peau (In My Skin). Directed by Marina de Van. New York: Fox Lorber. 2002. Death Becomes Her. Directed by Robert Zemeckis. Universal City: Universal. 1992. Delicatessen. Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro. Paris: UGC. DodgeBall. Directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber. Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox. 2004. Drag Me to Hell. Directed by Sam Raimi. New York: NBC Universal. 2009. Dread. Directed by Anthony DiBlasi. Los Angeles: Midnight Picture Show. 2009. Dumplings. Directed by Fruit Chan. 2004. The Evil Dead. Directed by Sam Raimi. Meridian Starz Films. The Exorcist. Directed by William Friedkin. Burbank: Warner Bros. 1973. The Fly. Directed by David Cronenberg. Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox. 1986. Fatal Attraction. Directed by Adrian Lyne. Hollywood: Paramount. 1987. Feed. Directed by Brett Leonard. Sydney: Becker Film International. 2005. Fried Green Tomatoes. Directed by Jon Avnet. Universal City: Universal. 1991. Ghostbusters. Directed by Ivan Reitman. Culver City: Columbia. 1984. Ghost Ship. Directed by Steve Beck. Beverly Hills: Village Roadshow Pictures. 2002. Goodfellas. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Burbank: Warner Bros. Gremlins. Directed by Joe Dante Burbank: Warner Bros. 1984. Grace. Directed by Paul Solet. Beverly Hills: Anchor Bay. 2009. Halloween. Directed by John Carpenter. Los Angeles: Compass International. 1978. Hannibal. Directed by Ridley Scott. Beverly Hills: MGM. 2001. Heartbreakers. Directed by David Mirkin. Beverly Hills: MGM. 2001. The Hidden. Directed by Jack Sholder. Burbank: Warner Bros. 1987. The Hills Have Eyes. Directed by Alexandre Aja. Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox. 2006. Hunger. Directed by Steve McQueen. London: Film4 productions. 2008.

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Hunger. Directed by Steven Hentges. Toronto: Phase 4 Films. 2009. The Human Centipede (First Sequence). Directed by Tom Six. Amsterdam: Six Entertainment. 2009. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Hollywood: Paramount. 1984. Jurassic Park. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Universal City: Universal. 1993. Kill Bill, Vol. 1. Directed by Quentin Tarantino. Satnta Monica: Lionsgate. 2003. The Last House on the Left. Directed by Wes Craven. New  York: Cunningham Films. 1972. The Lonely Guy. Directed by Arthur Miller. Universal City: Universal 1984. The Lost Boys. Directed by Joel Schumacher. Burbank: Warner Bros. 1987. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Directed by Peter Jackson. Los Angeles: New Line Cinema. 2002. The Machinist. Directed by Brad Anderson. Hollywood: Paramount. 2004. Maggie. Directed by Henry Hobson. Santa Monica: Lionsgate. 2015. Mama. Directed by Andrés Muschietti. Universal City: Universal. 2013. Minority Report. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox. 2002. Misery. Directed by Rob Reiner. Burbank: Warner Bros. 1990. The Neverending Story. Directed by Wolfgang Petersen. Burbank: Warner Bros. 1984. Night of the Creeps. Directed by Fred Dekker. Culver City: TriStar Pictures. 1986. 9 ½ weeks. Directed by Adrian Lyne. Los Angeles: Galactic Film. 1986. Norbit. Directed by Brian Robbins. Glendale: DreamWorks. 2007. The Nutty Professor. Directed by Tom Shadyac. Beverly Hills: Imagine Entertainment. 1996. Oldboy. Directed by Park Chan-wook. Miami: Sow East Films. 2003. The Perfect Host. Directed by Nick Tomnay. Dallas: Magnolia Pictures. 2010. Poltergeist. Directed by Tobe Hooper. Burbank: Warner Bros. 1982. Psycho. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Universal City: Universal. 1960. Ravenous. Directed by Antonia Bird. Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox. 1999. Reservoir Dogs. Directed by Quentin Tarantino. Santa Monica: Miramax. 1992. The Road. Directed by John Hillcoat. New York: Dimensions Film. 2010. Rosemary’s Baby. Directed by Roman Polanski. Hollywood Paramount. 1968. Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Rome: Produzioni Europee Associati. 1975. Scrooged. Directed by Richard Donner. London: Mirage Films. 1988. Se7en. Directed by David Fincher. Burbank: Warner Bros. 1995. The Shining. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Burbank: Warner Brothers. Shivers. Directed by David Cronenberg. Chatsworth: Image Entertainment. 1975. Stargate. Directed by Roland Emmerich. Beverly hills: MGM. 1994. The Stepford Wives. Directed by Frank oz. Hollywood: Paramount. 2004.

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The Stuff. Directed by Larry Cohen. Los Angeles: Egami. 1985. Sushi Girl. Directed by Kern Saxton. New York: Magnet Releasing. 2012. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Directed by Tim Burton. Hollywood: Paramount. 2007. The Silence of the Lambs. Directed by Jonathan Demme. Beverly Hills: MGM. 1991. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Directed by Tobe Hooper. Orlando Park: MPI Media Group. 1974. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Directed by Marcus Nispel. Los Angeles: Platinum Dunes. 2003. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning. Directed by Jonathan Liebesman. Los Angeles: Platinum Dunes. 2001. Theatre of Blood. Directed by Douglas Hickox. Beverly Hills: United Artists. 1973. Thinner. Directed by Tom Holland. Hollywood: Paramount. 1996. Under the Skin. Directed by Jonathan Glazer. New York: A24. 2013. The War of the Roses. Directed by Danny DeVito. Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox. 1984. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. Directed by Robert Aldrich. Burbank: Warner Bros. 1962. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Directed by Mel Stuart. Burbank: Warner Bros. 1971. The Witches of Eastwick. Directed by George Miller. Burbank: Warner Bros. 1987.

Index1

A abject, 6, 16–20, 28, 43, 48, 53, 57, 61, 62, 67, 70, 78–81, 83, 84, 98, 100–3, 109, 111, 115, 118, 119, 201, 221, 235, 242, 262 abominable, 17, 28, 29, 39–85, 91, 94, 141, 149, 161, 211, 230 Aldana Reyes, Xavier, 10, 11, 19, 56, 57, 72, 123 American Beauty, 30, 257 American Psycho, 29, 74, 75, 140, 161, 170–3, 250 anorexia, 116, 117, 119, 121 appetite, 9–11, 27, 80, 91, 98, 156, 157, 160, 175, 184, 253 B bad breath, 49 Barthes, Roland, 3, 24, 209 Bataille, Georges, 151, 154

1

Beetlejuice, 30, 221, 232, 233 blood, 2, 4, 18, 25, 26, 68, 75, 76, 80–2, 95, 96, 119, 126, 127, 139, 142, 147, 152, 153, 159–61, 168, 170–3, 184, 185, 188, 200, 212, 234, 238, 244, 245, 247, 257, 264 body, The, 3–5, 8, 11, 12, 14, 16–19, 25, 29, 39–42, 45, 47, 48, 51, 61, 62, 72, 73, 75–8, 80, 83, 84, 89–93, 96, 98–100, 102, 103, 107, 108, 112, 114, 115, 117, 118, 122, 123, 125, 133–5, 144, 145, 147, 150–5, 157, 164, 165, 167, 168, 170, 173, 180, 193, 206, 223, 235, 237, 241, 242, 249, 265 butcher/butchering, 71, 95, 124, 125, 139, 146–9, 151–4, 156, 157, 165–70, 184

 Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote notes.

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INDEX

C Cabin Fever, 28, 39, 40 cannibalism, 3, 9, 10, 24, 28, 29, 66, 67, 71, 85, 94–6, 122–8, 135, 142, 143, 146, 149–51, 156, 166–9, 172, 174–6, 211, 213, 215, 216, 222, 233, 249, 252. See also self-cannibalism cinema/cinematic, 3, 4, 9, 10, 12, 18, 20, 21, 23–30, 45, 48, 49, 65, 78, 79, 90–2, 96, 107, 108, 110, 113, 114, 116, 119, 123, 126, 127, 146, 157, 160, 161, 170, 183, 184, 198, 211, 212, 225–7, 238, 261, 262, 265 community, 3, 40, 46, 84, 133, 134, 165–7, 170, 191, 216, 233, 239, 240, 243, 247, 257 Compulsion, 29, 188–97, 204, 246 consumer capitalism. See consumerism consumerism, 74, 250, 257, 263 consumption, 1–17, 19, 20, 23–30, 41, 43, 50–4, 57–62, 64–7, 69–72, 74, 75, 77, 79–85, 90, 91, 94–9, 103, 104, 107, 109–14, 117, 118, 121, 122, 124–8, 133, 134, 136, 138–46, 149–51, 155, 156, 158–67, 169–76, 180, 182, 186, 190, 191, 194, 205, 206, 209–13, 215, 216, 225, 226, 229–2, 234–7, 240, 241, 243, 244, 246, 248–50, 253, 254, 256, 262, 264, 265 cooking, 3, 5, 6, 8, 23, 24, 26, 29, 62, 64, 65, 138, 143, 147, 157, 158, 162, 163, 182, 184–97, 203–6, 209, 211–13, 216, 237, 239, 240, 257, 264 The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, 238, 250 coprophagia, 57, 59–61 Coraline, 29, 202–10, 255 corporeality/corporeal, 4, 5, 11, 28, 62, 72, 98, 102, 104, 112, 118, 121–4, 134, 145, 150–5, 163, 170,

210, 225, 235, 241, 245, 249, 250, 252, 253, 262–5 corpse, 49, 79, 102, 113, 118, 119, 149 The Crazies, 28, 40 culinary, 9, 17–21, 29, 30, 41, 48, 51, 52, 54, 55, 59, 64, 66, 69, 113, 158, 163, 164, 180, 183–5, 188, 190–6, 204–7, 210, 216, 222–5, 227–9, 231, 235, 238, 240, 244, 245, 249–7, 264, 265 culture, 1–4, 8–10, 13, 15, 16, 18, 20, 22–4, 29, 30, 49, 50, 52, 66, 75, 83, 91–3, 98, 103, 110, 134, 140, 146, 148, 151, 156, 158, 163–5, 167, 170, 172, 174, 180, 192, 200–2, 205, 227, 228, 232, 235, 236, 240, 242, 245–7, 265 D death, 2, 16, 39, 45, 47, 49, 56, 68, 69, 75, 76, 79, 93, 96, 100, 104, 111, 113, 118, 119, 121, 136, 139, 159, 160, 171, 183, 185, 215, 231, 232, 238–50, 262, 265 decomposition, 118 Deleuze, Gilles, 122, 123 dining table, 24, 29, 221–57 dirt, 18, 40, 103, 105, 118, 181, 199, 200, 213, 222, 242 disgust, 1–4, 10–26, 28, 30, 41, 43–5, 47–54, 56–61, 64, 65, 67, 69, 72, 81, 97–106, 108, 110–12, 117, 118, 127, 135, 159, 163, 164, 170, 180, 182, 183, 203, 204, 215, 221, 224–31, 233, 234, 237, 242, 244, 262, 264, 265 dog, 64, 66–9, 71, 127, 154, 251 Douglas, Mary, 17, 24, 42, 103, 105, 111, 165, 181, 186, 200, 223, 231, 242 Dumplings, 27, 29, 212

INDEX  

E eating, 2–6, 8, 10–14, 19–21, 23–6, 28–30, 47, 55–8, 60–71, 78, 82, 94, 96, 97, 101, 102, 104, 107, 110, 111, 116, 120, 122–5, 127, 128, 134, 136–41, 155, 156, 160, 161, 164, 165, 170, 172, 174, 175, 181, 182, 184–7, 189, 191, 193, 194, 196, 197, 205–7, 209–11, 215, 222, 223, 225, 226, 231–45, 247–9, 251–7, 261–5 edible/inedible, 12–16, 41, 48, 51–4, 64–71, 90, 91, 125, 128, 133–5, 145, 222, 248, 254 ethnocentric/ethnocentrism, 11, 13, 223–31 excess, 12, 17, 28, 43, 90, 94, 98, 101, 103, 108, 111, 164, 196, 241 The Exorcist, 2, 4, 45, 47 F faeces, 18, 44, 53, 57–62, 200 Falk, Pasi, 4, 6, 40, 41, 43, 133, 134, 145, 150–6, 165, 169, 170, 209, 210 family, 7, 55, 62–7, 69, 70, 78, 119, 146, 147, 149–3, 155–7, 166–70, 175, 180, 181, 183, 192, 196, 197, 202–4, 207, 208, 213, 216, 222, 232, 239, 250, 257, 263 fat (body), 44, 48, 97–115 Fatal Attraction, 28, 62–6 fear, 2–4, 10, 11, 13, 15, 17, 18, 20, 22, 23, 25, 26, 29, 30, 39, 40, 45, 50, 51, 56–8, 60, 67, 69, 72, 78, 84, 91, 95, 100–4, 106, 117, 119, 151–5, 157, 160, 161, 164, 168, 170, 174, 179, 185, 199–201, 212, 215, 216, 221, 226, 230, 232, 234, 239–41, 251, 254, 262, 264 Feed, 28, 89, 91, 98, 101, 102, 104, 106, 109–12, 112, 114, 115, 181, 212, 262

273

feederism, 110 femininity, 78, 108, 188, 189, 197 Fiddes, Nick, 15, 63, 64, 66–8, 70, 139, 143, 159, 161, 163, 171, 174, 175 Fieldhouse, Paul, 5, 8, 13–16, 90 film, 1–5, 9–11, 15, 19–30, 39, 40, 43, 45–7, 49, 52, 54–63, 65, 67, 69, 71, 72, 74–7, 79, 80, 83, 89, 91, 93–6, 98, 100–2, 106, 109–16, 123, 127, 128, 136–8, 140–4, 146, 147, 159, 161, 162, 164–7, 171–5, 179–81, 183–5, 187, 188, 192, 195, 197, 198, 202, 205, 208–10, 212, 213, 221, 222, 225, 228, 229, 231–3, 236, 238, 240, 241, 243, 244, 246, 250–2, 254–7, 261–5 Freud, Sigmund, 6, 8, 44, 84, 152, 191 G ghost(s), 48, 55, 56, 182, 214–16, 233 Ghostbusters, 26, 29, 179–81 gift, 80, 95, 138, 201, 202, 206, 207, 256 Gothic, 9, 10, 16, 19, 25, 29, 30, 49, 50, 60, 62, 71, 90, 98, 112, 123, 128, 164, 166, 182, 187, 195, 196, 199, 208, 234, 257, 261–5 Gremlins, 26, 29, 183 Grosz, Elizabeth, 6, 19, 41, 48 Guattari, Félix, 122, 123 H hallucinations, 29, 46, 56, 93, 94, 96, 128, 183, 188, 221, 250, 253 haunting, 1, 3, 29, 40, 42, 43, 45, 46, 48, 75, 77, 80, 83, 90, 92, 98, 100, 109, 110, 116, 121, 128, 147, 162, 166, 179–216, 250, 264

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INDEX

health, 6, 10, 16, 102, 106, 107, 110, 113, 115, 116, 159, 164, 199, 200, 203, 263 The Hills Have Eyes, 29, 70, 91, 165–70, 175 horror, 1–30, 39–85, 89, 135, 179–216, 221–57, 262, housewife, 187, 195, 205 The Human Centipede, 27, 28, 59–62, 91, 262 hunger, 9, 11, 20, 21, 28, 30, 57, 67, 77, 81, 82, 89–128, 141–3, 161, 162, 172, 173, 176, 186, 207, 209, 210, 264 Hunger (2009), 28, 94–6, 141, 161 I identity, 7, 8, 11, 16, 18, 28, 78, 85, 100, 107, 108, 113, 115, 118, 119, 126, 140, 143–5, 151, 157, 165, 180, 191, 200, 201, 205, 214, 232, 239, 243, 245, 248, 256, 262–4 Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, 30, 91, 223, 224, 227–9, 262 ingestion, 6, 13, 17, 39, 40, 42, 45–7, 57, 60, 72, 77, 83, 93, 114, 122, 124, 170, 189, 264 intimacy, 45, 63, 189, 223, 248 K Kill Bill, Vol. 1, 30, 246, 247 kitchen, 24, 27, 29, 53, 55, 62, 120, 162, 179–216, 231, 239, 240, 255, 264 knife, 29, 95, 124, 125, 127, 183–5, 253 Korsmeyer, Carolyn, 6, 12, 16, 50, 52–4, 56 Kristeva, Julia, 6, 18–20, 43, 53, 61, 62, 78, 80, 81, 84, 85, 100, 103, 105, 106, 109, 118, 199, 201

L Leatherface (character), 145–57, 168, 175 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 24, 52, 152, 153, 157, 158, 162, 165 love, 2, 6, 9, 17, 29, 69, 78, 82, 111, 113, 164, 188–92, 196–211, 213, 234, 254, 255 M The Machinist, 28, 89, 91, 112, 113, 115–17, 119–21, 123 madness, 29, 40, 42, 63, 90, 93, 96, 151, 172, 179–216, 264 meal/mealtimes, 7, 11, 12, 64, 68, 101, 120, 121, 153, 163, 184, 186, 189, 190, 192, 222–4, 226–8, 230–2, 234, 235, 245–9, 253, 254, 256, 257 meat, 10, 15, 29, 52, 55–7, 64, 126, 134, 136–40, 142–4, 146–9, 152, 157–64, 168, 171, 173, 174, 181, 194, 202, 213 memory, 8, 21, 24, 50, 62, 75, 185, 191–3, 195, 213–16 Miller, William Ian, 16, 18, 22, 44, 47, 48, 57, 58, 61, 102, 225, 229, 230 Misery, 29, 170, 184, 255, 256 monstrous/monster, 1, 9, 10, 26–8, 30, 45, 78, 79, 83, 91, 166, 167, 183, 210, 229, 244, 245, 256, 262, 263 mother, 6, 29, 61, 62, 77–85, 106, 166, 184, 189, 196–210, 255 murder, 29, 42, 44, 65, 83, 84, 94–6, 113, 118, 135, 137, 138, 141–3, 146, 166, 167, 170–4, 176, 181, 183, 196–211, 213–15, 227, 237, 238, 241, 243, 250, 251, 255, 257, 264

INDEX  

N normal/normality, 14, 16, 50, 51, 65, 67, 98, 100, 102, 103, 112, 114, 123, 141, 142, 151–3, 176, 183–5, 206, 215, 216, 245, 251, 257, 262 nourishment, 3–5, 11, 13, 14, 41, 78–83, 85, 90, 135, 191, 196, 200, 201 O oral/orality, 2, 6, 15, 17, 18, 27, 28, 39–85, 122, 155, 160, 175, 234, 264 Other/Otherness, 1, 4, 12–16, 29, 44, 45, 47–9, 53, 61, 64, 67, 70–2, 75, 76, 80, 100, 106–8, 112, 114, 115, 118, 143, 150, 157, 161–3, 181–3, 186, 187, 196–212, 221, 225, 227, 229–31, 233, 241, 242, 253, 254, 264, 265 P pet(s), 28, 51, 62–71, 91, 134, 141, 190, 211 pleasure, 4, 15, 17, 18, 21, 22, 40, 44, 49, 50, 74, 81, 114, 117, 122, 135, 151, 152, 154–7, 160, 169–6, 185, 189, 193, 195, 199, 211, 236, 242, 254, 256, 262, 265 pollution/polluting, 17, 40–2, 44, 47, 48, 56, 59, 80, 102, 103, 105, 110, 135, 200, 231, 265 Poltergeist, 26, 28, 55, 56, 181 pregnancy, 77–85, 162 Probyn, Elspeth, 9, 11, 98, 122, 124, 156, 176, 189, 265 propriety/proper, 17, 18, 51, 63, 69, 70, 97, 98, 101–7, 111, 115, 118, 123, 134, 141, 149, 151, 152, 154, 164, 165, 167, 175, 176, 182, 183,

275

185, 208, 225, 228, 232, 236, 237, 242, 247, 249, 263, 264 R raw/rawness, 29, 52, 143, 157–64, 182, 189, 191 repulsion, 12, 16, 17, 19, 22, 28, 42, 49, 50, 64, 65, 69, 85, 97, 106, 112, 115, 117–19, 135, 156, 221, 224, 226–8, 233, 249, 262 rhizomatic/rhizome, 12, 123, 124 The Road, 29, 92, 112, 181, 213 Rosemary’s Baby, 27, 29, 79, 81, 84, 162 rotten, 18, 28, 50–8, 118 S salivate, 163 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 73–7 Se7en, 28, 43, 48, 89, 98–104, 106, 262 self-cannibalism, 28, 122–8, 252 senses, the, 6, 21, 22, 50, 189, 193, 195, 211 sensorial stimuli. See senses, the The Shining, 29, 181, 184 sight (sense), 1, 18, 20, 48, 50, 52, 55, 58, 61, 62, 85, 102, 108, 111, 112, 115, 154, 160, 164, 185, 232, 236, 243 The Silence of the Lambs, 2, 29, 91, 160, 161, 181 skin, 27, 28, 72–7, 80, 123, 125, 126, 128, 146, 175, 225, 252 slaughter, 27, 29, 71, 94, 95, 126, 134–41, 143–57, 165, 167–76, 213, 216, 222, 249 slaughterhouse, 25, 29, 133–76 slimy, 28, 71–7, 159, 163, 203, 229 smell (sense), 4, 11, 20–4, 43, 44, 47, 49, 50, 52–4, 56–8, 61, 99, 112, 189, 224, 225

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INDEX

spectacle, 3, 135–44, 157 spectral/spectrality, 179, 180, 182, 194, 197, 205, 210, 264 speech, 43, 155, 156, 198, 264 spit/spittle, 18, 43, 55, 61 starvation, 28, 30, 57, 93, 142 The Stepford Wives, 29, 187, 195, 204 surveillance, 208–10 Sushi Girl, 30, 238–41, 243, 244, 246, 247 Sweeney Todd, 29, 140, 144, 146, 150, 152, 213–16 T table manners, 231–8, 244, 248, 249 tactile. See touch taste (sense), 4, 7, 11, 12, 14, 17, 20–3, 29, 40, 41, 43, 49, 50, 52, 54, 56–8, 60–2, 71, 72, 74, 112, 133–76, 186, 188, 189, 192, 194, 221, 238, 243 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 27, 29, 39, 140, 146–8, 150–3, 155–7, 166, 168, 170, 175, 222 thin (body), 109, 112–21, 199 torture, 25, 29, 30, 42, 59, 89, 93, 124, 145, 149, 154, 155, 167, 172, 181, 213, 233, 237–50, 255, 257 touch (sense), 11, 20–3, 41, 48, 61, 71, 72, 75, 109, 159, 187, 192 transgression, 28, 43, 49, 151–3, 155, 157, 170, 232, 237, 257 21st century, 27, 107, 114, 209, 240, 246, 262

U uncanny, 20, 48–50, 187, 188, 194, 205, 214–16, 221, 223, 229, 262, 264 Under the skin, 28, 72, 73, 75–7 V vampire, 1, 3, 9, 26, 55, 80, 99, 159, 182 violence, 29, 30, 69–71, 81, 94–6, 124–6, 135–8, 140–3, 145–7, 149, 156, 157, 159, 161, 168–71, 173–6, 183–5, 188, 213, 231–8, 244–7, 249, 250, 255, 256, 264 visceral/viscerality, 2, 15–17, 19, 20, 23–5, 43, 45–51, 54, 58–61, 72, 74, 85, 89, 91, 92, 97, 98, 102, 103, 106, 111, 115, 119, 127, 142, 170, 171, 186, 191, 211, 215, 221, 223, 225, 226, 235, 238, 249, 252, 264, 265 Visser, Margaret, 232, 236, 237, 248, 249 vomit, 18, 43–50, 53, 58, 100, 200, 224 W The War of the Roses, 28, 68, 69 weight (body), 104, 108, 109, 113, 116, 117, 120, 121 Western society, 64, 139, 241 Z Žižek, Slavoj, 141, 142, 157 zombie, 1, 3, 4, 26, 42, 182, 183