American Mary and Body Modification: Nature and the Art of Change

At a turning point in the contemporary feminist “Frankenstein” film American Mary, Ruby (Paula Lindberg)—one of Mary’s future body modification clients—explains why she wants to change her appearance: “I don’t think it’s really fair that God gets to choose what we look like on the outside,” she proclaims. Ruby’s declaration at first seems to align well with scholars’ assertions that humans decorate and modify their bodies to separate themselves from the animals and nature, for, as genetic researcher Gillian M. Morriss-Kay argues, “Creating visual art is one of the defining characteristics of the human species.” Morriss-Kay agrees, suggesting, “The earliest known evidence of ‘artistic behaviour’ [sic] is of human body decoration, including skin colouring [sic] with ochre and the use of beads, although both may have had functional origins.”

 

Ruby’s desire to determine what her body looks like on the outside seems to take this characteristic just a little further, since, as anthropologist Enid Schildkrout of the Smithsonian states, “there is no logical reason to separate permanent forms of body art, like tattoos, scarification, piercing, or plastic surgery, from temporary forms, such as makeup, clothing, or hairstyles.” More extreme forms of body modification convey information about a person’s identity in ways similar to the more traditional and temporary choices people make to color their hair and shave their faces.

 

For Ruby, a fashion designer and owner of Ruby Real Girl designs, surgically changing her body provides some of the same results as fashion and makeup, except that those changes are more permanent. It seems to separate her from her natural “God-given” form and from the natural world it represents and inhabits. The claim is that animals change their appearance only because evolution has determined those changes ensure survival, both physical and sexual. And those changes rely on internal biological responses rather than deliberate additions from the external environment. A cuttlefish may change the color and shape of its skin and body to hide from predators, hypnotize prey, and seduce potential sex partners, but these survival adaptations are evolutionary rather than learned behaviors and draw on biology rather than the incorporation of external objects.

 

Yet we argue that this separation between humans and animals rests on a limited perspective of the natural world. Although the body modification illustrated in American Mary may amplify the drive for individuality found in makeup and hair changes, it does not necessarily separate humans from animals. Instead, it replicates the behaviors of animals from the bowerbird to particular species of spiders and caterpillars. When characters in American Mary modify their bodies to express their individuality and survive, they don’t separate themselves from nature; instead they align themselves with the animal world. When either animals or humans change their appearance, they gain an evolutionary advantage that assures their reproductive and biological persistence.

 

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.

Columbus and Other Cannibals

Scholars in the humanities concur with arguments from the sciences regarding the cannibal. According to linguist Ellen B. Basso’s study of South American oral history, “The warriors in these stories stand out most vividly as men who tried to reconfigure certain basic values central to their particular designated roles. Their actions thus transcend the time of cannibalism and blood feuding, of desperate migrations in search of a place to live peacefully” (304). Historian Phillip P. Boucher complicates constructions of cannibalism when he asserts “The Island Caribs’ refusal to accept religious and political—but not economic—hegemonization certainly prolonged their existence as an autonomous people” (8). Boucher leaves the question regarding whether or not Caribs were cannibalistic unanswered. He first suggests, “their cannibalistic practices were limited to occasional consumption of prisoners of war and were thus a minor aspect of their culture” (6). But, according to Boucher’s research, they also may have “killed male captives in elaborate rituals, that they burned their captives’ flesh and carried the ashes in small calabashes around their necks, ate the fat on certain occasions, and finally, used human bones to make flutes” (7). Boucher concludes, however, that these stories, or those told by Caribs themselves, are irrelevant. Instead, “What is clear about the issue of cannibalism is that, starting with Columbus and the Spaniards, Europeans leveled grossly distorted charges of man-eating against potentially enslavable peoples who ferociously resisted incursions into their island homelands” (7).

 

Boucher’s conclusion regarding representations of Caribs and other indigenous people as cannibals broaches another strong area of research among anthropologists and scholars in the Western humanities: how the trope of cannibalism has been developed and used to exploit colonized people and their land. W. Arens broaches this trope in his 1979 work, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy. Visual culture scholars Barbara Creed and Jeannette Hoorn’s edited volume Body Trade: Captivity Cannibalism and Colonialism in the Pacific highlights cannibal narratives of the fantastic, asserting that anthropophagy, or ritual uses of cannibalism, typically was constructed to vilify indigenous people, dehumanizing them by associating them with cannibalism. As Creed and Hoorn assert, “this book uses the concept of ‘body trade’ as a means of re-reading traditionally racist, sexist and Eurocentric views about race relations in the Pacific from the time of early European contact to the present” (xiv). Creed and Hoorn’s study “bring[s] together the inter-related ways in which the indigenous body has been marked and exploited by colonial practices” (xiv). 

 

Comparative literature scholar, Zita Nunes concurs in Cannibal Democracy: Race and Representation in the Literature of America, exploring “the metaphor of cannibalism as a mobile metaphor that inheres in attempts to conceptualize the relationship between race and democracy extending far beyond Brazil and that the original national focus was insufficient” (xvi). Told from the perspective of indigenous people, Jack D. Forbes’ Columbus and Other Cannibals connects the metaphor of cannibalism to the wetiko disease, “the disease of exploitation” (xix) illuminated in Ravenous. Forbes asserts, “It is my hope that enlarging upon the concept of the wetiko disease and discussing its origin, epidemiology, and characteristics that I can be of some help to [people] concerned about violence, about the environment, about decency, and about human authenticity” (xxi). After outlining a history of exploitation, of “cannibalism” of cultures and their people, Forbes proposes a good “sane” path that embraces interdependence. Catalin Avramescu’s An Intellectual History of Cannibalism examines this construction of cannibals in philosophical accounts.

 

Historians take a variety of approaches to the issue and history of cannibalism. Francis Barker and her colleagues declare in their edited volume, “Where in the past the figure of the cannibal has been used to construct differences that uphold racism, it now appears in projects that deconstruct them” (242). Other historians examine specific instances of colonizers’ use of the trope to subjugate and/or dehumanize indigenous people. [i] In his review of four late 1990s studies of cannibalism and genocide, ethnohistorian Dan Beaver updates these arguments, concluding,

Historically, the term cannibal often has expressed the unreflective hatred and distrust of one culture for another, leading some scholars to approach the term as a metaphor for the ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’…. the cannibal metaphor has extended in contemporary fiction to the ‘savage’ excesses of the American financial elite of the 1990s” (672). 

As Jennifer Brown asserts, cannibal representations in literature film demonstrate that Westerners “are rapacious, cannibalistic aggressors” (14). These manifestations of the cannibal metaphor are broached both explicitly and implicitly in Ravenous, American Psycho, and Trouble Every Day.

 

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[i] See the following examples: Darling, Andrew J. “Mass Inhumation and the Execution of Witches in the American Southwest.” American Anthropologist, New Series. 100. 3 (Sep., 1998): 732-752. Print. And Conklin, Beth A. “Consuming Images: Representations of Cannibalism on the Amazonian Frontier.” Anthropological Quarterly. 70.2 (Apr 1997): 68-78. Print.

Interdisciplinary Views of the Cannibal

Many scientists agree with Travis-Henikoff’s premise in Dinner with a Cannibal. In a Science News article, for example, Bruce Bower highlights the work of geneticist John Collinge of University College London. Collinge and his colleagues’ studies concluded, “Cannibalism among prehistoric humans may have left lasting genetic marks, a team of scientists contends. Their controversial argument hinges on a link between specific DNA mutations and a disease that afflicted South Pacific villagers who practiced cannibalism as late as 1950” (Bower 229). Biologists Volker H. W. Rudolf and Janis Antonovics assert, “in the animal kingdom, cannibalism is generally a one-on-one interaction in which a larger and stronger individual kills and consumes a smaller and weaker conspecific (Polis 1981). Under these conditions, cannibalism is likely to be an ineffective mode of disease transmission” (1207). And Scott A. Wissinger, et al’s Ecology article “suggests that recruitment regulation by cannibalism is most likely when young-of-the year are vulnerable to cannibalism but have low dietary overlap with cannibals” (549).

 

Most anthropologists also acknowledge the existence of cannibalism in human history, exploring the phenomenon in particular contexts and for specific purposes. Ilka Thiessen analyzes “cannibalism's recounted past, present, or mythical existence in relation to female imagery,” in Papua, New Guinea, and concludes that cannibalism, real or mythic, “becomes a defining characteristic of what it means to be female or male in these societies” (142). Shirley Lindenbaum asserts, “Even among sceptics [sic], cannibalism is acknowledged in several forms. Survival cannibalism and cannibalism as psychopathology are most frequently noted” (477). According to Lindenbaum, constructions of “cannibalism as a sign of strength, self-reliance, and possibly a threat to outsiders” may have “transformed a taboo into a totem and redefined anthropophagie primitivism as a positive value” (493). And Marshall Sahlins declares,

The deconstructive strategy is not to deny the existence of cannibalism altogether. That would invite consideration of the substantial historical record of the practice, whereas the objective rather is to establish doubt about it. Not that there was no cannibalism, then, only that the European reports of it are fabrications (Obeyesekere 1998). Even so, not all such reports need be questioned. (3)

Constructing the Cannibal

The May 2013 unearthing of what Nicholas Wade of The New York Times calls “the first physical evidence of cannibalism among the desperate population” at the Jamestown colony site in Virginia demonstrates how pervasive cannibalism becomes when survival depends upon it. According to Wade, archeologists found “cut marks on the skull and skeleton of a 14-year-old girl [that] show that her flesh and brain were removed, presumably to be eaten by the starving colonists during the harsh winter of 1609.” This evidence corroborates written reports from the period and builds on a history of cannibalism among humans and other species.[i] As paleoanthropologist Carole Travis-Henikoff declares, “Few people believe their ancestors practiced cannibalism, and some scholars deny its existence altogether, but the truth is … we all have cannibals in our closets” (23). According to Travis-Henikoff,

Cannibalism is the ingestion of other of one’s own species and is practiced throughout the animal kingdom, from one-celled organisms to humans. The reason for cannibalism’s ubiquitous nature lies in its antiquity. Recent finds of species-specific tooth marks on dinosaur bones prove occurrences of cannibalism dating back to the Mesozoic era” (23).

 

In her Dinner with a Cannibal: The Complete History of Mankind’s Oldest Taboo, Travis-Henikoff offers evidence for multiple types of cannibalism, from the survival cannibalism noted in Jamestown to the medicinal cannibalism of the Inquisition. [ii] As she and others note, cannibalism is celebrated in at least one book and film, Alive (1993), despite the R rating for cannibalism and ulcerative sores. Her work builds on the research of scientists and scholars from multiple fields, substantiating the existence of cannibalism without condemning its practice.

 

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[i] In her Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture chapter, “Going Windigo: Civilisation

and Savagery,” Bernice M. Murphy further explains this history.

[ii] In a May 2012 Smithsonian Magazine article, Maria Dolan suggests a contemporary form of medicinal cannibalism might be the black market in body parts for transplants.

Jennifer's Body, continued.

The first victim we see is Jonas (Josh Emerson), a football player upset about losing his best friend in the bar fire. She lures him into the woods and claims his friend told her they would make a great couple: “Feel my heart, Jonas. I think it’s broken,” she exclaims and begins taking off his clothes. The atmosphere grows eerie when animals begin surrounding them in a weird Disney’s Snow White moment. When Jonas looks at the animals nervously, Jennifer tells him they’re waiting, and opens his shirt and pants. “You’re going to see your buddy really soon,” she tells him and attacks.

When she lures the Goth poet Colin (Kyle Gallner) to a deserted house, rats and roaches appear right before she kills and eats him. Each of these masculine character types, the film suggests, both satisfy and strengthen the supernatural Wendigo. By choosing males so willing to ravish her perfect body, however, Jennifer serves as both cannibal and cannibalized, perhaps ineffectively avenging the damage done to frontiers of nature and women’s bodies.

Jennifer’s role changes, however, when she shifts her attention to Chip (Johnny Simmons), Needy’s boyfriend. Unlike Josh and Colin, Chip rejects Jennifer’s advances after she lures him to a pool house on the way to the school dance. Needy hears his calls, but when she reaches him, Jennifer has already bitten him. He’s dying but hands Needy pepper spray to protect her. Jennifer vomits black blood and rises above the pool: “Do you have to undermine everything I do? You’re such a player hater,” she tells Needy. Needy confronts her about Chip, and before Jennifer can kill her, Chip spears Jennifer with a pool tool. “You gotta tampon?” she asks Needy and jumps out a window. “I should have believed you. I’m sorry,” Chip says and tells Needy he loves her.

By murdering Chip, Jennifer has also transformed Needy, sparking her to return for revenge with a box cutter. Jennifer bites her, but Needy cuts a cross into Jennifer’s body and takes her BFF necklace. Jennifer falls back on the bed and Needy stabs her in the heart. Jennifer’s breathing stops, and her color returns. Jennifer’s mom finds Needy, and in the next scene, Needy is in solitary at the mental hospital that opened the film. She tells the audience, “I’m a different person now.” She has absorbed some of Jennifer’s powers because she survived the bite and floats up to a high window in her cell and escapes in her bunny slippers. The knife that turned Jennifer into a cannibal appears, along with the red balls from science experiments. Needy picks up the knife and hitchhikes toward Low Shoulder’s next concert, telling a driver “tonight will be their last concert.”

The film ends with a photomontage of the band after their concert, first with groupies partying in their hotel suite. Then images change to blood and their bodies covered in plastic. The photographs look like forensic evidence now. A last shot shows us Needy in a surveillance camera walking away and pulling up her hood. Needy defeats both cannibals in Jennifer’s Body, destroying an indie band whose success was built on Jennifer’s violated body and the succubus they perhaps inadvertently created. By rejecting the construction of woman as victim, Jennifer’s Body may also disrupt a pastoral fantasy and frontier myth that feminize nature in order to exploit it.

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). These films leave viewers with more complex visions of cannibalism, a gendered disease with multiple sources but only one cure.

Jennifer's Body and Exploitation

Jennifer’s Body takes an approach to cannibalism that builds on the supernatural elements of Blood Diner and the constructions of masculinity explored in Ravenous and American Psycho. Unlike Blood Diner, the focus of the film is not on the ritual that creates the cannibal, but on her hunger: Its satiation makes a statement about the multiple masculine representations in small towns like the Devil’s Kettle of the film, as well as the limitations of female power within its context. In Jennifer’s Body, Jennifer (Megan Fox) is transformed into a cannibalistic succubus by a satanic ritual performed by indie band Low Shoulder to ensure their success. When she and best friend Anita “Needy” (Amanda Seyfried) hear them play at a local bar that suddenly catches fire, and Nikolai (Adam Brody), the band’s lead singer, recruits her for their ritual, thinking she’s a virgin. Because Jennifer has had multiple sexual experiences, however, the ceremony backfires, turning Jennifer into a demon-possessed monster who feeds on men.

Jennifer recounts the tale for Needy in a scene later in the film, and we see her experience with Low Shoulder in flashback. Jennifer calls them “agents of Satan with really cool haircuts.” From Jennifer’s point of view, we see the inside of their van on her drive away from the bar. There are occult books on the floor, and Nikolai declares, “God, I hate girls,” when she begins to cry. To stop them, Jennifer claims she is a virgin, not knowing they need a virgin sacrifice for their ritual. She tries to escape, but they’re determined because they believe it’s the only way they can succeed as musicians. As Nikolai explains:

“Do you know how hard it is to make it as an indie band these days? There are so many of us, and we're all so cute and it's like if you don't get on Letterman or some retarded soundtrack, you're screwed, okay? Satan is our only hope. We're working with the beast now. And we've got to make a really big impression on him. And to do that, we're going to have to butcher you. And bleed you. And then Dirk (Juan Riedinger) here is gonna wear your face.”

After saying some words from an Internet download, Nikolai begins stabbing her with a knife and then throws it into a bubbling whirlpool under the town’s waterfall. When Jennifer wakes up, she has been transformed into a demonic cannibal who feeds on men to maintain her beauty and strength. When her tongue lights up in flames after a kill, for example, she tells Needy she “feels like a god.”

By including sympathetic male victims, however, the film takes a more subtle approach to its ecofeminist message. Jennifer’s prey are not the typical villains found in revenge films but stock character types found in teen films: the class jock and the sensitive Goth poet. In both of the murder and cannibal scenes, the natural world responds to Jennifer’s violence, watching her raptly as she devours each of her frightened victims and providing a macabre interpretation of the woman/nature connection perpetuated by dualistic thought.