Something must have been in the air in 2022. In the same year that You Won鈥檛 be Alone came keening gloriously out of Macedonia, Bones and All loped its achingly beautiful way out of Hollywood. For those who haven鈥檛 seen it, a brief summary is in order.
A beautiful, strange teenager named Maren (Taylor Russell) lives in relative poverty with her father. At a sleepover party one night, she nearly severs the finger of her best friend鈥攚ith her teeth. When she comes home, her father is ready for them to move immediately, and we quickly learn that Maren is an obligate cannibal, and that her cannibalism is heritable鈥攕he got it from her mother. (If you are thinking of Julia Ducournau鈥檚 brilliant film of remarkably similar premise from 2016, Raw, you are in the right zip code for sure鈥攖hough this film will go in a wildly different direction.)
Soon, the father concludes that he can no longer care for Maren, so he abandons her, leaving her some money and a cassette tape (it鈥檚 the 1980s) in which he explains to her everything he knows about her condition, her mother, her mother鈥檚 condition, and why he chose to leave her. So we鈥檝e got a motherless mother, abandoned by her father; Frankenstein alarm bells should be going off in your mind already. And for good reason: Mary Shelley invented beautiful horror.
So, abandoned by her father, Maren goes in search of her mother, who she learns may still be alive. She soon meets a strange much older man, Sully (Mark Rylance!!). He reveals that he smelled her from blocks away鈥攕he is what he calls 鈥渁n eater,鈥� and he is one, too. Apparently, we鈥檙e in a world where a very small but very real population of obligate cannibals simply exists in the general population. Sully takes her in, teaches her about her condition, procures a dying old woman for her, and they feast together. The whole interaction between Sully and Maren is held in elegant limbo between seeming benignly avuncular and seeming like grooming. Soon, Maren gets creeped out by him, and leaves; on the bus out of town, she sees him staring at her from the sidewalk. At this point, every stalking-survivor reflex in my body was going haywire, and rightly so: Sully goes on to stalk Maren through the rest of the film, though we are mostly unaware of it, and she is totally unaware of it until the very end. As is all too often the case in real life.
Maren soon meets another 鈥渆ater,鈥� a sweet, strange, self-sufficient young man named Lee (Timoth茅e Chalamet). They team up and slowly forge a beautiful, trusting, intimate romantic bond, though it鈥檚 sorely tested by their respective prior traumas. In Lee鈥檚 case, he ate his own father, who was horribly abusive to him. Although a revolting notion on its own terms, I have to say that I just love this as a metaphor for how abuse can be internalized: even though Lee killed his father (i.e.: got the trauma and abuse out of his life), he nevertheless took it into his body and has been struggling to incorporate (in-corpor-ate: to make part of his body) his father ever since. In Maren鈥檚 case, her mother was such a voracious 鈥渆ater鈥� that she ate off her own hands and has been institutionalized ever since; when Maren goes to meet her, she tries to eat Maren. Another revolting but also amazing metaphor for intrafamilial trauma: Maren鈥檚 mother wants to eat her鈥攖o consume her, absorb her into her own body鈥攁nd honestly believes that doing so is in Maren鈥檚 best interest; for Maren, the imperative is to leave this smothering mother, albeit she knows in her heart that she will always long for her.
Despite their extraordinary traumas, Maren and Lee manage to fall in love, to help each other heal, to know and love and trust each other. All the while, they also eat people, often first by sexually seducing them鈥攖hough we see less and less actual 鈥渆ating鈥� in the second half of the film. Instead, we see beautiful vistas of Maren and Lee enjoying each other鈥檚 company on vast sprawling prairie landscapes in the unnamed middle of the United States. We see them building a life together, getting an apartment, beginning to feel safe not only in their own bodies, but also in a world that really cannot acknowledge them, or even know about them. Really, the film, at its core, is about the basic human desire to be loved not just in spite of but even because of what鈥檚 most ugly and repulsive in us. In a delicate and provocative chiasmus: it is both the sweetest disgusting film I鈥檝e ever seen, and the most disgusting sweet film I鈥檝e ever seen.
But this delicate balance between sweetness and disgust can鈥檛 last forever.
Sully tracks them down and assaults Maren while she鈥檚 alone in their apartment. Everything about the scene telegraphs sexual violence: he pins her down with his body on top of her, threatening to penetrate her body with a knife. The camera is tightly focused, but not so tightly that we can鈥檛 see his pelvis grinding down into hers, even with their clothes still on. Sully reveals that he is lonely; he鈥檚 jealous of her relationship with Lee. But he also can鈥檛 tolerate the fact that she knows his secret, so he has to decide whether to keep her or eat her. Lee arrives, and a huge, bloody, struggle ensues, during which Sully is killed, but Lee is also fatally stabbed in the upper chest. Maren laments that she can see the breath coming out of his body. As he dies, he begs Maren to eat him, bones and all, when he has died. She resists, but the sight of his pulsing arterial blood proves too much for her, and she begins drinking from his chest wound, breathing in the air directly from his lungs, with his face contorted in pain and pleasure, as he slowly dies.
I would venture to say that most filmgoers, and maybe even more horror afficionados, would classify this scene pretty squarely in the too much category. But not me. I loved it. And here鈥檚 why.
- Lee suffers because he鈥檚 got too much of his father inside him. He ate his father, so, somewhere in his body lurk the cells, proteins, calcium, and fats of the man who tortured him and his sister. By asking Maren to eat him, he鈥檚 asking her to take possession of both him and his father; she will now be both Lee鈥檚 physical guardian, holding what鈥檚 left of him inside her body, and his father鈥檚 warden, jailing him and freeing Lee from being his father鈥檚 keeper. Part of what鈥檚 hard about trauma is how isolating it feels; trauma survivors often wish that someone could truly hold their trauma with them, and for them. This film envisions鈥攙ery darkly鈥攁 scenario in which that can literally happen.
- Maren suffers because everyone in her life has abandoned her: mother, father, friends, everyone. Except Lee. By eating him, he becomes part of her forever. And weirdly, he also remains partially alive: his still-warm tissue is now going to be incorporated into her still breathing, still moving, still thinking body; his blood will join her blood, his muscles will join her muscles. You are, as they say, what you eat; henceforth, Maren will be part Lee, a chimera of her lonely self and his loving self. She will never be alone again.
But of course, that鈥檚 only a partial truth. The truer truth is that her integration and absorption of Lee will not allow her ever to kiss him again, to speak to him again, to engage with his mind or heart consciously again. So, even as she will never be alone again, she has also just locked in her aloneness potentially for ever more: one of the things the film has emphasized throughout is that 鈥渆aters鈥� are statistically few in number, and most of them are predatory psychopaths. Lee and Maren were unicorns: loving, faithful, unwilling obligate cannibals who found ways to move through the world doing as little harm as possible. That is, they had a shared code that they would only pick off and eat people who had no families, and who were in some other way 鈥渄eserving鈥� of death: cruel, abusive, sadistic, deceitful, power-hungry. Lee and Maren only killed the wicked. The other 鈥渆aters鈥� we meet in the film are something else altogether鈥攏ot just as embodied in heinous, rapey Sully, but also in another 鈥渆ater鈥� they encounter, who is manifestly stone cold crazy and ready to eat Maren and Lee, even though, generally speaking, 鈥渆aters鈥� aren鈥檛 supposed to eat other 鈥渆aters.鈥� Now that Maren has consumed and integrated Lee, he is with her forever, but she is also much more desperately and totally alone than ever.
The ending of this film thus reminds me of the ending of You Won’t Be Alone (see last week鈥檚 post), in which the witch ultimately converts her own baby daughter to witch-hood in order to have her with her forever. Of course, the difference is that in You Won鈥檛 be Alone, the witch and witch-baby both survive, presumably to have a happier life together, having killed their tormenter, the Burned Witch Maria. Here, the cost of offing Sully is Lee: Maren doesn鈥檛 get to both kill her tormenter and preserve her love. Except insofar as she eats him. Still, we鈥檝e got two films, both released in 2022, that center on the idea that the monster deserves our sympathy, our deep, wracking sympathy, and deserves it primarily because of her (or his) radical and intractable loneliness.
Something really must have been in the air in 2022. And of course, we know what it was. It was COVID. The worst of the pandemic was in the rearview mirror by 2022, but the films that were released in that year had been devised, shot, and wrapped in the dire forge of COVID-19.
COVID-19 taught us many lessons鈥攖he large majority of which the United States appears promptly to have forgotten. 1. Science is important in the preservation of human life. 2. International collaboration is important in the preservation of human life. 3. Wealth, power, and geographic isolation don鈥檛 protect you from everything, particularly in a globalized world because 4. The air you breathe has often literally been in someone else鈥檚 body before. This fantasy we have that we are truly individuals is a delusion of the highest order. We all share our bodies with each other, all the time, like it or not.
But fifth and maybe most important, we learned that our biophysiological closeness does nothing to mitigate the horrible agony of social isolation. I may be breathing your cells in and out of my lungs from across the street, but if you don鈥檛 get to talk to or touch or sit with or be intimate in some way with someone on any given day, your mental health will suffer. Bad. The lesson we learned from COVID was then dual: our bodies get into each other, like it or not, but if we have no opportunities for social communion, we are in agony.
My third-favorite living poet, Juliana Spahr, has a beautiful book about this, called thisconnectionofeveryonewithlungs. (Yes, it鈥檚 spelled like that, with no spaces; her point is that contiguity and interconnection are inescapable.) She says there,
Everyone with lungs breathes the space in and out as everyone
With lungs breathes the space between the hands in and out
She wrote her beautiful, beautiful work in the wake of 9/11, but it could have been about COVID. Her point is that what鈥檚 on your hands is in my body, because I鈥檓 breathing near you: what you have on and in your body is on and in mine, too. We deny that only at our peril: everyone penetrates everyone else, all the time. Our bodies exist on a metonymic ecosystemic continuum with everything and everyone else. This is the connectionofeveryonewithlungs.
When Maren breathes Lee鈥檚 dying breaths into her own lungs directly from his chest wound, the film literalizes this idea, as both a consolation鈥攈e will be inside her now, forever鈥攁nd a tragedy鈥攚e are all so mortal, so frail, so vulnerable in our physical interpenetration, and we all too often wait until it鈥檚 too late before we acknowledge our own porosity to other people.
This is essay is adapted from a piece that originally published on .
Eleanor Johnson is professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. Her books include Scream with Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism (1968鈥�1980); Waste and the Wasters: Poetry and Ecosystemic Thought in Medieval England; Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama; and Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve.