Truth Is Revealed In Taboos

What the weird new fascination with cannibalism reveals about what everyone really wants.

Bones and All, a romantic horror about two cannibalistic teenage lovers on a road trip across 1980s America, received a ten-minute standing ovation when it debuted at the Venice Film Festival last summer. It is the latest in a growing trend of non-fantastical films and series juxtaposing cannibalism alongside themes of self-discovery or coming of age, such as Cannibal (2013), Raw (2016), Yellowjackets (2021), and Fresh (2022). “Cannibalism has a time and a place,” The New York Times tweeted this summer. “Some recent books, films and shows suggest that the time is now. Can you stomach it?” With the body central to nearly every moral debate of our age, this trend merits our reflection.

Timothée Chalamet, who stars in Bones and All alongside Taylor Russell, told Rolling Stone, “It was a relief to play characters that are wrestling with an internal dilemma absent the ability to go on Reddit, or Twitter, Instagram or TikTok and figure out where they fit in.” There are now millions of people doing just this, from the so-called spoonies (young women, mostly, suffering from invisible and hard-to-diagnose illnesses) to incels (“involuntary celibate” young men raging against their perceived sexual ostracism).

“I think societal collapse is in the air — it smells like it,” Chalamet said. “And, without being pretentious, that’s why hopefully movies matter, because that’s the role of the artist . . . to shine a light on what’s going on.” Whether Bones and All speaks intelligently to our crises remains to be seen, but it wouldn’t be the first time artists have successfully used the metaphor of grotesque eating disorders to illuminate cultural pathologies.

Franz Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist,” written in 1922, follows a man who exhibits himself in public while undertaking spectacular fasts that leave him emaciated. At first, townspeople look upon him with horror and fascination, but other sights distract, and soon his feats of asceticism no longer generate allure, or income. He eventually joins a circus, where he runs into the same problem — other animals in the show are more impressive. When asked, near death, why he fasted, he says, “Because I couldn’t find a food which I…