Appetites and Anxieties: Food, Film, and the Politics of Representation

5. When Humans Are the Food Product: An Ideological Look at Cannibal Films

5 When Humans Are the Food Product An Ideological Look at Cannibal Films Cannibal films have a complex and unsettled relationship to food films. Discussing the food film genre that emerged in the 1980s, Anne Bower highlights the genre’s use of restaurants, kitchens, and food shops, and its focus on food as a means for conveying characters’ identities, social situations, and personal relations. Having identified food films’ semantic patterns and central thematic concerns, which can be structured to emphasize utopian or dystopian visions of food and society, Bower tests the boundaries of the genre by considering the question: do cannibal films belong to the food film genre? The inquiry leads her to conclude that an “overreliance on strict genre definitions may be limiting” and that the “semiotic uses of food are even more multivalent and powerful than a concentration on ‘food films’ alone would allow us to understand” (6, 7). Cannibal films confirm and illustrate Bower’s point, for their “semiotic uses of food” provide a clear view of the characters’ values, beliefs, and social status. Their depictions of cuisine choices, procurement policies, and eating protocols take on heightened significance precisely because human beings are placed in the food category. In this circumstance, characters’ interaction with the food product becomes the most salient marker of individual and cultural identities: engaging chapter 5 130 in cannibalism places characters squarely on one side of the divide between civilized and uncivilized behavior. Like dystopian food films, cannibal films often use characters’ food behaviors to signal personal and social disorder. In addition, whereas some cannibal films do little more than exploit cultural taboos to generate sensation, other films use troubling representations of foodways to comment on class, colonial , and cultural injustice. By examining the larger implications of consumption, cannibal films delve into dimensions of food rarely featured in commercial cinema. Films in which humans are the food product often comment on the symbolic but systemic cannibalism of imperial and economic ventures. They reflect the fact that empires have framed their military campaigns as righteous efforts to consume and cleanup “uncivilized” behavior. The films mirror the reality that corporations tout their ability to devour the competition; executives flaunt their ability to “eat that guy for lunch.” With flesh-eating metaphors part of everyday life, cannibal films go on to complicate the simple opposition between civilized and uncivilized people. They tap into people’s awareness that, historically, accounts of cannibalism have been unreliable, designed to serve the interests of “civilized” people in search of profit or lasting fame. Thus, today, cannibal films rely on people’s knowledge that cannibalism can function as a sign of primitive savages and as a marker of savage empires and corporations. Variations in the films that deal with cannibalism confound efforts to map out a set of shared semantic elements that extend beyond their common use of humans as the food product. Films also use cannibalism in different syntactical structures. For example, in a utopian film like Bagdad Cafe, the early references to cannibalism show that the isolated individuals need to create community. By comparison, 301/302 wraps up its deeply dystopian vision of food and society with the characters in power (the detective and the cooking-obsessed woman) engaging in cannibalism. Other representations of cannibalism reflect the utopian-dystopian spectrum. Cannibal films include comedies like Abbott and Costello’s Africa Screams (Barton, 1949), Herschel Gordon Lewis’s gore favorite Blood Feast, campy satires like Eating Raoul, psychological thrillers such as The Silence of the Lambs, and its sequel from 2001 and prequels from 2002 and 2007. Cannibalism is central to the when humans are the food product 131 various comedy, horror, and musical versions of the pulp fiction and stage melodrama Sweeney Todd (1926, 1928, 1936, 2007), along with The Hills Have Eyes (Craven, 1977), which led to Wes Craven’s 1984 directto -video sequel as well as Alexandre Aja’s 2006 remake of the original and the 2007 sequel to this remake directed by Martin Weiss. The consumption of humans by flesh-eating zombies features prominently in several horror films, perhaps most notably in writer/ director George Romero’s numerous “living dead” films: Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978), Day of the Dead (1985), Land of the Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead (2007), and Survival of the Dead (2009). Although one could argue...