Cannibalism on Film, Empathy, and Eating Disorders

Season 3, Episode 2

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Emma and Christy watch Julia Ducournau’s first feature film, the cannibal coming-of-age body horror flick Grave (or Raw), 2016. In this episode, we cover cinéma du corps and New French Extremity, empathy and monstrosity, the horrors of being a girl, the horrors of being in a body, eating disorders, veterinary science, ‘being meat’ and becoming animal, vegan cinema, self control, desire, and what it means to be a moral cannibal — and a moral subject.

MEDIA DISCUSSED
Julia Doucournau, dir., Grave (Raw) (2016)
Julia Doucournau, dir., Titane (2021)
Marina de Van, Dans Ma Peau (In My Skin) (2002)
Eadweard Muybridge, Running (Galloping) (1878–79), animated here
Horse running on a treadmill (still from Grave)
Eadweard Muybridge, Male Running (1878–79)
Close-up of Justine during the monkey rape discussion (still from Grave)
Horse being tranquillised (still from Grave)
Students crawling over ground during hazing (still from Grave)
Justine eats Alex’s finger (still from Grave)
Hair vomiting scene (still from Grave)
‘Two fingers will make it come up faster’ (still from Grave)
Henry Van der Weyde, Patient 4, a and b (1882), image published in Sidlauskas, ‘Before and After’ (2017), courtesy of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia
Henry Van der Weyde, Patient 5, a and b (1882), image published in Sidlauskas, ‘Before and After’ (2017), courtesy of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia
‘C’est pas humain’ (still from Grave)
Justine waking up in the blood of Adrien (still from Grave)
Justine holds the rod against Alex’s head (still from Grave)
Justine washes the blood off Alex (still from Grave)
Justine and Alex’s faces blurring together on the prison glass (still from Grave)
The father’s chest (still from Grave)
Justine gets a nosebleed watching Adrien play football (still from Grave)

REFERENCES
Julia Doucournau, dir., Mange (2012)
Georges Bataille, Histoire de l’œil (Story of the Eye) (1928)
Marquis de Sade, Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu (Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue) (Paris: J. V. Girouard, 1791)
Pier Paolo Pasolini, dir., Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)
Oliver Kenny, Transgressive Art Films: Extremity, Ethics, and Controversial Images of Sex and Violence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023)
Rob Boddice, ‘Sympathy, Compassion, Empathy’, in Pain: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) pp. 53–64
Susan Lanzoni, Empathy: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018)
Anat Pik, ‘Vegan Cinema’, in Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture, ed. by E. Quinn and B. Westwood, (London: Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, 2018), pp. 125–146. (Emma wants the record to show they meant to say Simone Weil’s idea of looking as RESISTING consumption!)
Martine Beugnet and Emmanuelle Delanoë-Brun, ‘Raw Becomings: Bodies, Discipline and Control in Julia Ducornau’s Grave’, French Screen Studies 21.3 (2021): 204–223
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (NY: Vintage, 1995). See also Gilles Deleuze, ‘Post-scriptum sur les société de contrôle’, in Pourparlers (Paris: les Éditions de Minuit, 1990), pp. 240–247
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi (London and New York: Continuum, 2004)
Matthew Calarco, ‘Being Toward Meat: Anthropocentrism, Indistinction, and Veganism‘, Dialectical Anthropology 38.4 (2014): 415–429
Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch: A Novel (New York: Doubleday, 2021)
Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘We Are All Cannibals‘ (first published as ‘Siamo tutti cannibali’ in La Repubblica, 1993)
Beth A. Conklin, Consuming Grief: Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001)
Susan Sidlauskas, ‘Before and After: The Aesthetic as Evidence in Nineteenth-Century Medical Photography,’ in Jordan Bear and Kate Palmer Albers (eds) Before-and-After Photography: Histories and Contexts (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), pp. 15–29
Katie Engelhart, ‘Should Patients Be Allowed to Die from Anorexia?‘, The New York Times Magazine (3 January 2024)
Erin O’Connor, ‘Pictures of Health: Medical Photography and the Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa,’ Journal of the History of Sexuality 5, no. 4 (April 1995): 535–572
Han Kang,The Vegetarian, trans. Deborah Smith (London: Granta, 2015)

FURTHER READING
Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003)
Judith Butler, ‘Beauvoir on Sade: Making Sexuality into an Ethic’, The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, ed. by Claudia Card (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 168–188
Jude Ellison S. Doyle, ‘The Healed Body,’ in Joe Vallese, ed., It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror (New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2022), pp. 265–274
‘Fresh Meat: Interview with Julia Ducournau‘, Sight & Sound 27.5 (May 2017)
Merrall Llewelyn Price, Consuming Passions: The Uses of Cannibalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 2003)
Bernadette Wegenstein, ‘In My Skin and In the Cut: Two Accounts of Femininity,’ in The Cosmetic Gaze: Body Modification and the Construction of Beauty (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 164–74
Alexandra West, Films of the New French Extremity (Jefferson: McFarland, 2016)
Jada Yuan, ‘Raise a Fork to Raw, the French Cannibal Movie So Gross It Keeps Making People Pass Out‘, Vulture (15 September 2016)

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‘Drawing Blood’ cover art © Emma Merkling, image courtesy of the British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive, and Aesthetic Surgeons
All audio content © Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin
Intro music: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras, © BunHead Records 2019. We’re still trying to get hold of permissions for this song – Kim Petras text us back!!