The Vegetarian Underpinnings of Cannibalism in Film
Most people can’t last past lunchtime without making an ethical decision about acceptable consumption that reveals their attitude towards the value of life. Raw (2016) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) make the argument that mankind’s slaughter and consumption of animals suggests dormant murderous and cannibalistic urges laying in all of us. Genetics and breaks in social conditioning allow cannibalism to rise in these films. Once it does, the audience is forced to identify uncomfortable parallels to their own meat-eating. The setting and cinematic techniques blur the line between human and animal and illuminate the fact that the distinction is not as meaningful as we tell ourselves. Neither film, however, is exclusively about eating meat or vegetarianism.
Raw director Julia Docournau rejected the film’s pro-vegetarian label, arguing that Justine’s being vegetarian was just a storytelling device. In Docournau’s words, “if you’re going to have a character become a cannibal, it’s good to have her be the complete reverse of that at the start of the story.” Tobe Hooper is more sympathetic to a pro-vegetarian reading of Texas Chainsaw, as he had given up eating meat while making the film, but clarified that the most important theme was “the chain of life and killing of sentient beings.” These works draw attention to blind spots in our moral codes by conflating taboo behavior like cannibalism with something as banal as eating a hamburger. By convincingly linking mistreatment of animals with violence towards other humans, Raw and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre peel back a facade that shows a society teetering on the brink of savagery.
These films suggest something sinister about a species that still chooses to eat living things after evolving past the point where it has to. William B. Irvine follows the justifications for meat-eating to their logical conclusion in his essay Cannibalism, Vegetarianism, and Narcissism with a provocative hypothetical. Irvine lists out the main reasons why people argue eating cows is not inhumane: they are killed painlessly, are bred only to be eaten, and are unable to communicate whether or not they value their own lives. To counter these arguments, Irvine makes a business proposal to his ethics class. The proposal is that, with the permission of their parents, infants will be bred, killed, cooked, then sold to a club of eccentric millionaires to be eaten. The babies will be treated well, killed without pain, and will never suspect that there is anything wrong during their short lives. The class denied this business’ similarity to mankind’s treatment of cattle and instinctively rejected the proposal; the rest of the essay attempts to explain why. Irvine’s takedown of flimsy excuses for meat-eating like the animals being treated well before they are slaughtered reveals that most pro-meat arguments are centered on animals lacking an unquantifiable soul. The essay quickly points out that the lack of empirical evidence for a soul makes it easy for humans to evade the fact they are making a judgement about the value of a life when they eat meat. Traits that people argue are inherently good and worth preserving, like rational thought or creativity, are really subjective traitd that derive their goodness from the benefit they provide other human beings. Through this type of analysis “the narcissism of our value system becomes apparent”, and we are left with the revelation that we eat things when we don’t feel we can draw anymore value from them.
Cats and dogs are spared for their companionship, and we stay away from humans because they are capable of “things animals can’t do, like manufacturing automobiles, building bridges, painting pictures, programing computers, and writing philosophy papers.” Animals like cows and pigs are eaten because people don’t want anything from them but their meat. This leads to the sobering conclusion that meat-eating persists because the species at the top of the food chain values their comfort more than another living thing. Irvine makes the important distinction that the essay is not necessarily arguing farmers are the same as murderers, just as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre did not equate those who cooked human meat with those who unknowingly ate it. Instead, these works expose the fundamental hypocrisies of a society that glorifies meat-eating but condemns cannibalism to ponder what our casual acceptance of killing animals suggests about the human psyche.
Much of Raw and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s power comes from their ability to link human and animal lives before any cannibalism is revealed. Before Justine starts to change, she vehemently argues that there is no meaningful difference between raping a monkey and a human as a monkey knows enough to tell it is being put through something it doesn’t want. In a later scene, a man tells Justine and her roommate Adrienne that truckers switch out their blood with pig’s blood to avoid DUIs, as pig and human blood are apparently similar. The suggestive and menacing way he touches Adrienne while he says this conveys two message: pigs and humans are more biologically similar than we think, and human behavior can be worse than a pig’s. Texas Chainsaw takes a firm stance against meat-eaters when a member of the deranged Sawyer family gleefully describes how he used to club cows to death when he worked at a slaughterhouse. Rather than simply condemn this method of killing as cruel, Pepper insists that “people shouldn’t kill animals for food.” Establishing a connection between all living things broadens the ways that the filmmakers can shock us.
Docournau’s cinematography in Raw carefully emphasizes the grossness of animal meat while occasionally choosing to make human meat look more palatable. Comparing the shot of the stolen burger patty covering Justine’s lab coat in a thick, brown grease to Alex’s small, bloodless finger leaves one unsure of what meal is supposed to be gross. Justine graduating from raw rabbit, to cooked shawarma and burgers, to human flesh suggests that all meats exist on the same spectrum and cannot be separated without serious consideration. Hooper also uses cinematic manipulation to prevent audiences from being able to distinguish violence against animals from violence against humans. By choosing not to reveal the source of the barbecue meat at the start of the film, Hooper forces the viewer to reckon with the fact that there is no visible difference between animal and human meat. The room where Leatherface cuts up his victims also suggests that murder and animal slaughter are different manifestations of the same impulse. Victims are left to bleed out on meat hooks then stuffed in a freezer afterwards. Animal bones are inexplicably littered throughout the room, implying the killers see little difference between what they are doing now and their work at the slaughterhouse. In one of the most explicit attempts to link human and animal life, Hooper inserts audio of a squealing pig as Kirk is sliced open by Leatherface’s chainsaw. Forcing us to listen to what a pig sounds like before it ends up on our plates in this context makes it more difficult to view human life as more important for the rest of the film.
Character actions in both films suggest that some of us kill animals because it is a socially acceptable way to channel barely repressed murderous urges. After Justine develops a taste for human flesh, she does everything that she can to avoid killing a person to eat. During this struggle, she revels in slicing open a dead dog during a veterinary lab. The suggestion here isn’t that Justine is being a good person by only taking her impulses out on the dog, but that evolution has directed our violence at vulnerable sources without making us less violent. Two critical scenes in Raw affirm that we are not supposed to think of dogs as significantly different than humans. When Alex blames the eaten finger on the family dog Quicky, Justine’s father says that an animal that gets a taste of human needs to be put down because it might attack if it liked the taste. Justine’s father is well aware of his wife and daughters’ condition, so this line implies that the “disease” they have makes them behave like dogs. Later on, the shot of Alex and Justine being held back by the necks after biting and attacking each other in front of the school evokes two dogs being restrained by their collars. The Sawyers in Texas Chainsaw used to work at a slaughterhouse before the switch to the more “humane” cattle gun forced them out of jobs. The hitchhiker from the family that the protagonists pick up makes what attracted him to the job very clear when he brags “I was the killer!” and shows them Polaroids of the dead cows. To him and his relatives, it wasn’t important what they were killing, only that they got the chance to kill. When they lost their jobs at the slaughterhouse, they redirected that same bloodlust towards humans. These examples help elucidate that the filmmakers are not solely concerned with whether harming animals is better or worse than harming humans; they only care about forcing us to see the similarities.
An innocent scene before The Texas Chainsaw Massacre goes to hell lays out the purpose of these two films. When Franklin begins explaining the new gun slaughterhouses use to push holes into cow’s brains, Sally cuts him off to say “Franklin, I like meat, please change the subject!” The characters of Raw also try to brush over the implications of meat-eating when Alex urges Justine to eat the rabbit kidney without thinking so that she will fit in with her classmates. Both films are acutely aware that many people would prefer not to think about where their food comes from. Raw and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre are able to terrify and provoke because they train an unblinking eye at the subject of meat-eating. Every uncomfortable aspect of meat-eating culture is analyzed until our stomachs turn, then lingered on for a beat longer. Neither film presents cannibalism as an aberration that can be stomped out, but something intrinsic to humans that is passed on through generations. Everyone in the Texas Chainsaw family from the college-aged hitchhiker to the 108-year-old grandfather has an appetite for human flesh and pitches in to the family business. The hitchhiker, Leatherface, and the grandfather are all grotesques, but the oldest brother Drayton is presented as the charming owner of the gas station. His character is important because it makes it clear that some cannibals can blend in with society and mask their dark impulses in acceptable professions like barbecue chef. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre does not specify whether the cannibals have an uncontrollable urge to eat humans or if they are just sick people whose sadism knows no boundaries.
Raw makes an even more compelling argument for cannibalism as a symptom of human evolution. Justine and Alex’s mother does not recruit them to start eating people like the Sawyer family elders. On the contrary, she forces them to be vegetarian and hides the truth about her diet from them. But all it takes is one taste of meat for Justine and Alex to head down the same path. The introduction of this genetic component at the end of the film makes us realize that Justine and Alex are not freaks, and have not been led to cannibalism by their environment, but are biologically wired to eat their own kind. By ending the film without revealing how long this gene has been passed down for, Raw leaves open the possibility that these tendencies have been a part of human life since Adam and Eve. That a taste of rabbit meat converted the sisters from vegetarians to cannibals suggests that the decision to eat something that was once a living thing matters more than what that thing used to be. Raw and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre ponder why the distinctions between vegetarian, meat-eater, and cannibal matter to a species evolved enough to both kill anything on the planet and recognize the implication of doing so. Highlighting these hypocrisies and selective moral blind spots forces the confrontation of hard truths and urges us all to think with our minds and hearts rather than stomachs.
