Revising the Gendered Cannibal

Blood Diner, Jennifer’s Body, and to a certain extent, Trouble Every Day may construct women as monsters rather than victims, especially, as Barbara Creed argues in The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, “in relation to her mothering and reproductive functions,” but the monstrous actions of their cannibal antiheroes, Shitar, Jennifer, and Coré, are produced by male “intruders” who may, as Jack D. Forbes suggests, be the real cannibals in these films. As ecofeminist Jytte Nhanenge argues, “there is an interconnection between the domination of women and poor people, and the domination of nature” (xxvii). Creed asserts that what she calls the monstrous-feminine can “provide us with a means of understanding the dark side of the patriarchal unconscious” (166).

 

Perhaps it can also blur boundaries between male and female, and between culture and nature, offering a more-sane approach to the frontiers of land and body that rejects the wetiko disease Forbes describes:

the wetiko psychosis is a sickness of the spirit that takes people down an ugly path with no heart. They may kill, but they are not warriors …. Above all, the wetiko disease turns such into werewolves and vampires, creatures of the European’s nightmare world, and creatures of the wetiko’s reality (188). 

Instead, Forbes argues, we can choose to follow “a good path, a path of beauty” (189) that encourages love for the earth, “more respect for life, more respect for the living, more respect for all forms of life,” (178), including the nonhuman.

 

Ravenous, American Psycho, and Trouble Every Day illustrate some of the horrific consequences of choosing the cannibal path, either literally or figuratively. In their fictional contexts, the films critique Manifest Destiny, yuppie excessive consumerism, and post-colonial resource exploitation as figurative forms of cannibalism or, as Forbes declares, the wetiko psychosis.

 

Although their narratives are less didactic, Blood Diner and Jennifer’s Body illustrate the negative consequences of a pastoral myth that constructs frontiers of both the natural world and of women’s bodies as nurturing mothers or seductive and promiscuous whores.

 

They may also demonstrate the need for “a partnership ethic” like that historian Carolyn Merchant describes, in which “the needs of both humans and nonhumans would be dynamically balanced” (206). All these films leave viewers with more complex visions of cannibalism, a gendered disease with multiple sources but only one cure.