Cannibals have saturated art for centuries. From Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” to modern masterpieces like “Bones and All,” we are fascinated with monstrous immortals. We look at them as the ultimate sinners — traitors to their species — but we’re obsessed with what makes them tick because, deep down, that hunger lives in us all. We make films about their love, write songs about their horror, craft TV shows that send us down their inhuman spiral because they speak to humanity’s most primal unleashing. They refuse to deny themselves of their desires, taking their indulgence to the extreme. We might cover our eyes when their gory cravings take over, but there’s always the urge to peek out at their depravity. The only thing that separates us, people living under the social contract, and them, the breakers of that contract, is restraint.
Vampires are the restrained cannibal we’ve been satisfied with for the past few decades. The way we portray them in media shows them feeling guilty for their crimes — disgusted at the monsters they’ve become — and yet it doesn’t stop them from draining their victims dry. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “The Vampire Diaries” both became popular because of their characters’ compellingly anguished struggle against their bloodlust. The Twilight Saga even pushes its central vampiric characters into a “vegetarianism” that relegates them to only consuming animal blood. This further restrains the monster inside them, but doesn’t satisfy the beast within. The Cullens are still hungry for the kind of blood only humans can provide, their self-control just prevents them from acting on it. Self-control is also what prevents our vampire lead Edward (Robert Pattinson, “The Batman”) from fully committing to his human lover Bella (Kristen Stewart, “Spencer”). His desire for her is so closely paralleled to his desire for blood that the two become wholly intertwined. Within the cultural psyche, cannibalism speaks to the carnal desire for all-consuming passion. Most people don’t want to ever actually taste human flesh, but we all have an innately primal desire to have the all-consuming love that we so often deny ourselves.
But what happens when we stop denying ourselves?
The collective unraveling of restraint has pushed cannibal media into the really gory stuff, removing any pretense of civility. We’re no longer satisfied with vampires. Now, we’re seeing art about the messier, wilder, more intimate cannibal. They don’t shy away from their own monstrosity or desire; rather, they embrace it in a way that reveals the animalistic nature of their seduction. They don’t stop at the blood; they need to consume the entirety of a person, and sometimes that’s still not enough. This image captures the depravedly romantic desires that humanity suppresses and gives them an outlet to run free with the metaphor of consumption.
Different media following these characters aestheticizes them uniquely, but they all manage to flout expectations of heartlessness. On the contrary, the idea of the apathetic cannibal is completely absurd. There is an inherently visceral sense of emotion behind the act of needing someone so badly that it leads you to consume them. Even in restrained, stoic cannibals like Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen, “Another Round”) on NBC’s “Hannibal,” the driving motivation behind his peculiar eating habits is love. He appreciates his human meals to the point of artfully crafting them into gourmet entrées. He cherishes the experience of integrating others into himself and the power afforded to him through the act, but his mask of civility cannot hide the violence of his love.
Within the context of civilized society, Hannibal is an outlier who shows love through control. But, if this love were to be transplanted into a primal environment without civilized restraints, what would it really look like? Showtime’s incredible series “Yellowjackets” transplants a tight-knit group of girls into a secluded wilderness and leaves them to fend for themselves. Free of the judgment of civilization, their cannibalism becomes a form of sustenance that keeps them alive in the face of starvation. It saves them from the brink of death, and it’s still all about love. The first person to take a bite of Jackie’s (Ella Purnell, “Arcane”) perfectly cooked corpse is her lifelong best friend Shauna (Sophie Nélisse, “The Book Thief”). Their love for each other was too intense for her to let Jackie go, and in a trance-like state, Shauna whispers that Jackie “wants them to” from beyond the grave. It paints the cannibalized as someone offering themselves up as a gift to their devourer, like a pious sacrifice to their most beloved. The cannibal, thus, eagerly accepts the offering as a way to forever remain with their loved one.
This deeply romantic idea is also brilliantly explored in Hayden Silas Anhedönia’s junior album “Preacher’s Daughter.” The album follows her on-stage persona, Ethel Cain, through her difficult life even through the end of being murdered and eaten by her lover. The moment he begins to devour her, she repeats “I just wanted to be yours / Can I be yours? / Can I be yours?” as a soft piano melody continues in the background. When he puts the flesh to his teeth, she becomes irrevocably his. Now, the metaphor peels back to reveal the facet of ownership. She loves him so much that she wants to belong to him, but she loses ownership of herself in the process. It’s almost a holy experience for her to remain a part of him, even from beyond the grave. This isn’t even about her spirit, which watches from above and cannot belong to her lover; he can only have the flesh. It speaks to the carnal human desire to be touched and remain impossibly close to another person.
Being consumed is the closest one person can be to another. You literally become a part of them. When asked about the motif of cannibalism in her work, Anhedönia stated that, before she ever knew about sex, each time she had a crush, she wanted to “open (herself) up and pull someone into (her) and devour them.” This desperate need for physical intimacy is exactly what the cannibal metaphor points out to us in the most glaring way possible. It’s the darker side of love and sex that nobody wants to acknowledge but that everybody knows is there, lurking in us all. Anhedönia sees the metaphor as “an act of devotion.” What could be greater devotion than offering up all that you are? It isn’t about a love that sets boundaries, but the desire for all-consuming passion that none of us can ever truly escape. For Anhedönia, escape is boring. Love isn’t real “if I don’t want to eat you.”
In her song “Dog Days,” she tells her lover to “cut her up and eat her like the bread and blood at church.” This line and the haunting vocals behind it paint the primal need for physical closeness as something holy, like an act of worship. He’s “a feral dog” that she “worships in bedroom ceremonials.” Despite his depravity, she still subjugates herself for him. Her lover “walk(s) a fine line between god and animal,” which is the perfect intersection of the dynamics at play here, highlighting a twistedly pious devotion. It’s an animalistic act unconcerned with the immortal soul, one that cares only about the physical pull of desire itself. But the power imbalance between the worshiper and the worshiped cannot be ignored.
Once a worshiper has been consumed, they can never be consumed by another. But the cannibal can devour as many people as they want. To be eaten is the ultimate act of devotion by a humble lover, but to eat is to accept the offering and continue on with immortality. This isn’t a fair or democratic love but one that operates on the laws of the wild. Eat or be eaten. Find food or starve. The loser in this game will eventually learn how to fight back. The act of devouring Cain’s character makes her lover sick. It’s her own revenge for taking too much of her and leaving her with nothing. He may have loved her in life, but treated her poorly, so despite her love for him in death, she’ll do the same.
The only way to level the playing field is to have both lovers on equal ground. Luca Guadagnino’s film “Bones and All” is a love story between two cannibal characters. Having them both be capable of devouring each other makes the game of love all the more dangerous. They understand each other in a way nobody else can because they’ve accepted their intensely ugly desires. The love they share is one that can only be achieved through their core similarities, but it still has the same outcome. Because neither of them is intrinsically subjugated by the other, one of them must willingly relinquish their power and offer themselves up. When Lee (Timothée Chalamet, “Dune”) begs Maren (Taylor Russell, “Escape Room”) to eat him, he does so out of the desire to nourish his lover with his final act. It’s an explicitly consensual act of devotion as he pleads to become a part of her.
This is the kind of love we don’t want to look at. It isn’t clean or chaste or juvenile. It is heavy and obsessive and overwhelming, but it lives within us regardless of whether we choose to accept it or not. This, as my meemaw Ethel Cain would say, is “the face of love’s rage.” Its all-consuming intimacy sustains and destroys us, but our animal forms yearn for it nonetheless. Now that the mask of civility has been forcibly removed, we’re seeing more and more media about cannibals. It isn’t so easy to look away from it anymore, so we need to confront it and find the beauty behind the ugly gore.
Daily Arts Writer Mina Tobya can be reached at mtobya@umich.edu.