American Psycho (2000) and Wendigo

American Psycho (2000) illuminates expanded definitions of frontier constructed on similar dichotomies found in Ravenous: colonizer/colonized, masculine/feminine, nature/culture, and Wendigo or wetiko/sustainability. According to Annette Kolodny, a frontier, and the literature and film that embody it, “may be identified by its encoding of some specifiable first moment in the evolving dialogue between different cultures and languages and their engagement with one another and with the physical terrain” (Lay of the Land 13). Kolodny’s definition of frontier expands it beyond traditional views of the American West to include multiple collisions between “a currently indigenous population and at least one group of newcomers or ‘intruders’” (13). Despite their contemporary contexts, American Psycho highlights similar collisions from a gendered perspective.

Scholars examining Mary Harron’ film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho primarily explore how the film plays with and responds to genre expectations, with a nod to Patrick Bateman’s (Christian Bale) identity construction and status as an unreliable narrator. David Eldridge’s “The Generic American Psycho,” for example, asserts that “the power of genre classifications was a constant concern” in both novel and film (19). David Robinson’s “The Unattainable Narrative: Identity, Consumerism and the Slasher Film in Mary Harron’s American Psycho” also highlights the film’s genre responses, asserting that the film “borrows the horror genre’s trademark self-consciousness and takes it to a new level, marrying the genre to a larger body of cultural narratives, including those of television, pop musing, news media, and advertising” (26). These multiple cultural narratives also provide fodder for Bates’ identity construction as both venture capitalist and real or imagined cannibal serial killer.

We assert, however, that in American Psycho, Patrick Bateman, a wealthy New York investment banking executive negotiates a post-colonial frontier in which women become landscapes to exploit, annihilate, and cannibalize, just as he and his colleagues consume material culture and collide with those who provide it. Although Bateman hides what could be psychopathology from his co-workers and friends and dives deeper into a deviant world like that described in Wendigo mythology, his aberrant responses to the 1990s Yuppie world of excess merely amplify theirs. According to Jennifer Brown, in American Psycho “the cannibal has become the reviled image of overindulgence, overspending, and overexploitation of resources” (214), more “us” than “them.” As a contemporary Wendigo, Bateman bumps up against the feminine underclass on Wall Street, negotiating a modern frontier without the sanity Forbes prescribes. Only Jean (Chloë Sevigny), Bateman’s secretary, survives the crash.

Ravenous and Wendigo, continued

In Antonia Bird's Ravenous, Colqhoun’s (Robert Carlyle) cannibal story prompts George to recount the Wendigo myth, highlighting Colqhoun’s literal cannibalism as well as the imperial repercussions his journey westward represents. As Danette DiMarco articulates so well in her “Going Wendigo: The Emergence of the Iconic Monster in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Antonia Bird’s Ravenous,” the film “is an appropriative text that invokes the Wendigo myth and evaluates cannibalistic discourse more broadly in order to critique Western cultural crisis” (134). 

Through the figure of the Wendigo, the film elucidates a direct relationship between literal cannibalism and figurative consumption of the American frontier Jack D. Forbes calls this figure the wetiko disease, “the disease of exploitation” (xix). According to Forbes, wetiko is a Cree term (windigo in Ojibway, wintiko in Powhatan) which refers to a cannibal or, more specifically, to an evil person or spirit who terrorizes other creatures by means of terrible evil acts, including cannibalism” (24). 

For Forbes, “imperialism and exploitation are forms of cannibalism and, in fact, are precisely those forms of cannibalism which are most diabolical or evil” (24). Jennifer Brown reinforces this connection between imperialism and cannibalism in Ravenous, asserting “Rather than the colonial use of cannibalism as tag of the savage, it is the white man who is barbaric and the Native American who is calm, intelligent, and reminds us that ‘whites eat the body of Christ.’” (226).

In Ravenous, Colqhoun and Capt. John Boyd (Guy Pearce) of Fort Spencer illustrate conflicting responses to both the frontier myth and Wendigo. To save the land and its people, Wendigo/colonizer must die. 

Ravenous Wendigo Analysis 1

In cannibal horror films like Ravenous, gendered bodies and the volatile agents of the material world they inhabit may become violently intertwined. At Fort Spencer, Boyd joins a group of misfits with little to do on this empty range: Hart, the commanding officer; Toffler (Jeremy Davies), the company chaplain; Knox (Stephen Spinella), the drunken doctor; Reich (Neal McDonough), the only real soldier of the group; Cleaves (David Arquette), the heavily medicated camp cook; and George and his sister Martha (Sheila Tousey), the troops’ Indian guides. 

The dull life they maintain in this wilderness fort is shattered, however, when Colqhoun/Colonel Ives arrives and introduces cannibalism and the Wendigo myth into the plot. Colqhoun also gives a name to the cravings Boyd so wishes to end and amplifies the impact of gender on its manifestation. Although an emasculated Boyd resists Wendigo, and Martha escapes its effects, Colqhoun embraces it. 

Frostbitten and famished, Colqhoun provides the narrative that transforms Ravenous from Western to horror. Colquhoun’s Westward movement story first connects him with the Manifest Destiny of both the Mexican-American War and the westward movement. According to Colqhoun,

We left in April. Six of us in all. Mr. MacCready and his wife, from Ireland. Mr. Janus, from Virginia, I believe … with his servant, Jones. Myself - I'm from Scotland. And our guide … a military man, coincidently. Colonel Ives. A Detestable man … and a most disastrous guide. He professed to know a new, shorter route through the Nevada's. Quite a route that was. Longer than the known one … and impossible to travel. We worked … very, very hard. By the time of the first snowfall we were still a hundred miles from this place. That was November.

When the journey from Virginia to California is disrupted by the horrific winter conditions of the Sierra Madres, however, their pioneering spirit transforms to the Wendigo to which it is compared:

Preceding in the snow was futile. We took shelter in a cave. Decided to wait until the storm had passed. But the storm did not pass. The trails soon became impassable, and we had run out of food. …We remained famished. The day that Jones died I was out collecting wood. He had expired from malnourishment. And when I returned, the others were cooking his legs for dinner. Would I have stopped it had I been there? I don't know. But I must say, when I stepped inside that cave … the smell of meat cooking … I thanked the Lord. I thanked the Lord. And then things got out of hand. I ate sparingly. Others did not. The meat did not last us a week and we were soon hungry again only, this time our hunger was different. More severe, savage.

Colqhoun embodies and embraces Wendigo--both literally as cannibal and figuratively as colonizer in frontier America. 

Ravenous and the Frontier Myth

In a pivotal scene in Antonia Bird’s cannibal Western, Ravenous (1999), F. W. Colqhoun (Robert Carlyle), a stranger suffering from frostbite and seeking solace in the California fort at the center of the film admits he survived a lost wagon train journey from Virginia by feeding on the travelers who “expired from malnourishment.” Instead of offering sympathy, however, the fort’s American Indian guide, George (Joseph Runningfox), grows anxious and calls him Wendigo, showing the fort’s commander, Colonel Hart (Jeffrey Jones) a Wendigo Ojibwa myth illustrated on a blanket. According to the myth, when a man eats another’s flesh, usually an enemy, he steals his strength, his essence, his spirit, so that his hunger becomes craven and insatiable. The more he eats, the more he wants, and the stronger he becomes. For George, when men become cannibals, they become Wendigo, superhuman monsters with insatiable appetites. In the context of the westward movement Colqhoun embodies, Wendigo may also coincide with the white man’s voracious hunger for land.

Set in 1847, immediately after the Mexican-American War and right before the California gold rush, Ravenous explicitly addresses the Wendigo cannibal myth. In Ravenous Wendigo is both reality and metaphor for Manifest Destiny and the environmental and human exploitation that accompanies it. Inspired by the Donner party incident of the same year and the trial of 1870s cannibal prospector Alfred G.Packer, the film follows Capt. John Boyd (Guy Pearce) to Fort Spencer, a desolate military outpost in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. He has been banished because he is viewed as a coward; yet he is also honored as a hero because he bravely defeated a Mexican fort after ingesting the blood of his peers. His commander General Slauson (John Spencer) belittles this bravery, however. After watching Boyd’s inability to consume a large steak at a victory dinner, he declares, “You’re no hero. I want you as far from my company as possible.”

In cannibal horror films like Ravenous, gendered bodies and the volatile agents of the material world they inhabit may become violently intertwined. At Fort Spencer, Boyd joins a group of misfits with little to do on this empty range: Hart, the commanding officer; Toffler (Jeremy Davies), the company chaplain; Knox (Stephen Spinella), the drunken doctor; Reich (Neal McDonough), the only real soldier of the group; Cleaves (David Arquette), the heavily medicated camp cook; and George and his sister Martha (Sheila Tousey), the troops’ Indian guides. The dull life they maintain in this wilderness fort is shattered, however, when Colqhoun/Colonel Ives arrives and introduces cannibalism and the Wendigo myth into the plot. Colqhoun also gives a name to the cravings Boyd so wishes to end and amplifies the impact of gender on its manifestation. Although an emasculated Boyd resists Wendigo, and Martha escapes its effects, Colqhoun embraces it.