Consumptive Desire: Symbolic Eating in Guadagnino’s Bones and All
by Finn Witham
Maren and Lee
Throughout his career as a filmmaker, Luca Guadagnino has defined himself as a master—both aesthetically and diegetically—of depicting eroticism. From the thrilling twists of I Am Love (2009) to the poignant bildungsroman Call Me by Your Name (2017), Guadagnino excels in portraying captivating romances. As thrilling as his cinematic corpus is, he has, until recently, remained firmly rooted in drama; crafting mostly plausible narratives devoid of the supernatural elements or gore that typifies true horror. While Guadgnino did dip his toe in the generic waters of horror with Suspiria (2018), the film was inspired by the earlier Italian film of the same name, Suspiria (Argento, 1977). Although a stunning and ingenious adaptation, Guadagnino’s first non-derivative, standalone horror film is Bones and All (2022). In Bones and All, Guadagnino synthesizes the romantic motifs which have characterized his work and—in illustrating a parallel between eroticism and cannibalism—depicts true love not as something of beauty, but as something terrifying, haunting, and horrific.
In one of the earliest scenes in the film, the protagonist Maren (Taylor Russell) sneaks out to a high school sleepover. Lying under a glass coffee table with her classmate Sherry, the two appear poised to kiss. Instead, Maren opens her mouth and sucks Sherry’s finger before biting off its flesh. We soon learn that Maren is an “eater,” a born cannibal who instinctively and compulsively feeds on other humans. As the film progresses, Maren meets an elderly man and fellow eater, Sully (Mark Rylance), with whom she feeds on a corpse. She later meets another eater, Lee (Timothée Chalamet), with whom she develops a romantic relationship and embarks on a cross-country voyage with no apparent destination. Initially, cannibalism appears to be some kind of supernatural curse. Eaters are seemingly born with their flesh-eating desire; Sully detects Maren by smelling her, and the eaters appear to recognize each other by a strange sixth sense.
Sully and Maren
In short, the film on its surface is a traditional and gruesome work of horror: some cryptic force takes hold of otherwise unremarkable people and forces them into grisly behavior beyond their control. However, in arguably the most disturbing scene of the film (a highly contested designation), Maren and Lee meet a pair of eaters, one of whom, named Jake, explains the darkly transformative power of eating an entire body “bones and all.” Strikingly, his companion, Brad, is not a born eater: he chooses to engage in cannibalism because he is intrinsically—not supernaturally—compelled to do so. Here, the would-be occultism of the film breaks down: cannibalism is no longer a curse from above but a drive from within.
By demystifying cannibalism, Guadagnino turns it into a metaphor for erotic or unconscious desire itself. To be an eater is not to be possessed, but to be compulsively driven by an intrinsic desire that even ‘normal’ humans can feel, if they allow themselves to. After the “bones and all” scene, the as-yet subliminal eroticism of the film—earlier alluded to by Maren and Sherry’s kiss-turned-bite scene—comes out in full force, as Lee seduces an amusement park worker before eating him. In a set of Freudian twists, Maren visits her psychiatrically hospitalized mother (an eater) and literally escapes her devouring maw; while Lee reveals that he ate his own father (also an eater), after the latter tried to eat him. After a brief breakup, Maren and Lee settle down. However, their finally harmonious relationship is quickly destroyed when Sully—enraged at Maren’s continual rejection of his offer for the cannibalistic partnership she finds with Lee—breaks into their home and attempts to eat Maren. As he hovers, literally slobbering, over her body, Lee intervenes and fights Sully, eventually killing him, but not without suffering a mortal wound. As Lee lies stabbed, bleeding out, and dying, he instructs Maren to eat him “bones and all,” which she does.
Maren and Lee
Even without the erotic subtext, the visceral gore of the film evokes deep physiological disgust. Yet, by interjecting his trademark romance into the film, Guadagnino amplifies the horror of Bones and All to an even more terrifying level. In the horror genre, this is not exactly novel: the trope of eroticized cannibalism is most obviously found in the vampire. In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Christabel and Joseph Le Fanu’s Carmilla—two early works of 19th Century vampire fiction—the vampires Geraldine and Carmilla are portrayed as predatory seductresses. In Dracula (1931), one of the early and seminal depictions of vampirism in American cinema, the enigmatically attractive Bela Lugosi plays Count Dracula. Since then, the seductive vampire trope has pervaded film, with its most recently iconic instantiation in popular culture through The Twilight Saga (2008-2012).
While vampires do not engage in cannibalism per se, the act of biting is reminiscent of eating. As literary critic Ken Gelder wrote in his 1994 book on the topic, Reading the Vampire:
Only the vampire could produce such an intensely erotic panegyric: certainly, it is the most seductive of all the fictionalised monsters. Its proximity always, at some level at least, involves a sexual charge – as Richard Dyer has noted, ‘Even when the writing does not seem to emphasise the sexual, the act [of biting] itself is so like a sexual act that it seems almost perverse not to see it as one. (62-63)
But Bones and All is not necessarily a continuation of this trope. Importantly, the vampiric bite—from Christabel to Twilight—is not necessarily murderous. In contrast to a brutal cannibalism which kills its victims, a vampire’s bite can grant immortality; albeit one rendered cursed, enchanted, and monstrous. The deadly bites of Bones and All are more analogous to another horror convention, the zombie. While the zombie bite also extends a victim’s existence, it does not create an immortal life, but a prolonged death; one in which the body remains as an object of whatever social or apocalyptic force the zombies as a whole represent, but which has been stripped of all spiritual individuality or consciousness. Still, Guadagnino’s film is not a zombie narrative either. The horror of the zombie is always a symbolic threat of society-wide fears: the pathologized collective threat rising from its not-so eternal slumber and threatening to collapse the precarious structure of civilization itself. Such looming threats from above are far less important in the film than the psychic threat from within.
Thus, while Bones and All reflects the eroticism of the vampire and the gruesome lethality of the zombie, it extends mere biting to complete cannibalism, creating a new monster altogether: the eaters do not merely wish to infect or seduce their victims, but to literally consume them. In every grisly act of eating, the magical magnetism of attraction is transmogrified into cannibalistic appetitiveness. Guadagnino, through the metaphor of eating, advances a concept of human desire not as something leading to transcendence, but as something consumptive and fatal.
Though such a metaphor is relatively new in cinema, earlier horror narratives have toyed with the uncomfortable connection between desire and cannibalism. In Robert McCammon’s “Eat Me”—winner of the 1989 Bram Stoker award for Best Short Story—a man and woman facing eternity in a chthonic Dead World fall in love and, after eating one another, are able to transcend the material and float up towards the divine. Both “Eat Me” and Bones and All reveal a haunting and uncomfortable truth at the core of human desire: our yearning for physical connection is ultimately insatiable. In her seminal 1986 work Eros the Bittersweet, Classicist Anne Carson meditates profoundly on this intrinsic dissatisfaction of erotic love. A discourse stemming from Sappho’s—another master of portraying eroticism in art—description of Eros as “sweetbitter,” Carson writes:
Something paradoxical arrests the lover. Arrest occurs at a point of inconcinnity between the actual and the possible, a blind point where the reality of what we are disappears into the possibility of what we could be if we were other than we are. But we are not…We are not lovers who can both feel and attain their desires. We are not poets who need no metaphor or symbol to carry our meaning across. (75)
Implicit in desire is the magnetic urge towards unification, towards a supposed wholeness that will sublimate the self in some divine, eternal union. Yet no human can truly attain this desire. This is the aching contradiction Carson identifies at the core of Eros: the sweetness of love is always tainted by the bitter limitations on the possible connection between discrete, embodied individuals. What Guadagnino portrays with such uncanny effect is Eros taken to its logical conclusion. In the absence of a truly satiating metaphorical union, unification is instantiated physically, through actual consumption.
Ultimately, Bones and All stages an uncomfortable and irreconcilable tension between the boundaries of our bodies and the boundaries of our desires. Jake, Brad, and Sully are such terrifying and revolting characters because they represent predatory or paraphilic eroticism: the threatening and one-sided desire for consumption against one who is not mutually or consensually engaged in the same romantic tension. Similarly, Maren and Lee’s parents represent the Munchausen-like desire of the parent to render their child infantilized and dependent so as not to lose the parental connection. In the urge to transcend the body and fuse with the non-reciprocating other, these characters lose their humanity, their bodies, or both: Jake and Brad have become bestial beyond repair, Sully and Lee’s father are killed, and Maren’s mother is a psychotic and shattered fragment of her former self.
Maren and Lee represent the only remotely wholesome desire in the film, and yet even their love cannot lend true unification. After Maren eats Lee, the final shot appears on screen: Maren and Lee embracing, rendered miniscule in the midst of a large Midwestern plain they had visited earlier in the film. Even in consuming her lover, Maren cannot attain wholeness. She satiates her desire, but destroys it by doing so. The object of her love is gone, accessible only in memory. Maren and Lee take Eros to the very brink and yet their ‘true’ physical connection cannot liberate them from the mortality, the smallness, and the insignificance that compels human desire towards some ineffable immortalization. As Carson writes of Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Symposium:
Was it the case that the round beings of his fantasy remained perfectly content rolling about the world in prelapsarian oneness? No. They got big ideas and started rolling toward Olympus to make an attempt on the gods (190b-c). They began reaching for something else. So much for oneness. (68)
In digesting Lee, Maren, far from achieving oneness, loses him. If she lives on, her self is destined to remain fragmented in a vast plain of existence in which insatiability and limitation are endemic. The true horror of the film is that even literal physical incorporation cannot truly satisfy desire. Eros’ arrow still stabs.
