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).