There’s Privilege in Cannibalism: A Look at Bones and All

Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All opens with a Black father who locks the outside of his daughter, Maren’s, bedroom door. His sole purpose being to protect her from herself. She escapes on a windy night to the house of a friend she made at school, only to end up almost biting off her finger. A blood-covered Maren returns home only for her father to end up leaving her behind, no longer feeling adequate enough to contain the cannibalism, to control her. She’s left to wander in order to survive something that was passed down to her from her mother, an inherited trauma. This coming-of-age film doesn’t bring up Maren’s biracial identity. However, when you look at those she meets along the way, there’s a blaring visual that cannibalism is a privilege. 

Cannibalism serves as a metaphor for various themes in Bones and All: shame, generational trauma, and otherness. Maren’s burden is heavy, one that her father tried to help carry until the weight became too much. On her own, she faces a new reality that she isn’t alone. Up until this point in her life, he sheltered her, but attempted to make her as normal as possible by sending her to school and teaching her to drive. But in all of that, she is fighting her hunger. And when she meets other Eaters, she finds that others carry that weight differently. 

There is a Lot to Chew On

Sully is an older eater that Maren meets first. He’s had a long life and a long braid of hair from his victims to prove it. When Maren asks about his first time, Sully was met with compassion from his mother, whereas Maren has only been met with fear. When Maren came home after biting her friend, her dad’s mind instantly went to cops coming for them and needing to move on to the next town. Sully chose to leave. They share the same hunger but don’t share the same ability to express it. Stay small, quiet, invisible. All things Black and Brown girls are told to be. Our hunger, our appetite for more, is conditional. You can ask, but not for too much. You can be yourself, but you can’t be too loud or draw attention to yourself. 

When she meets Sully, he treats her like a pet, an object he wants to keep for himself to teach and tame. This character actually reminds me of Remmick from Sinners. He’s after possession, not mentorship. So much so that he tracks her down weeks later and reveals himself to her when Lee is away. He stakes a claim on her. He feels owed for what he’s taught her and comes back for her in the end because white men have long believed that Black and Brown bodies are up for claiming. 

The Meat of the Matter

Screenwriter David Kajganich adapted the screenplay from the book by Camille DeAngelis. “Real empathy is an act of soulful education; it’s not projection, even well-meaning projection,” he wrote in a New York Times article on writing for the film. He writes that as a gay, White man who has experienced otherness, he had to have empathy for his characters. “Everybody’s gone through experiences where we’ve been pushed to the side, particularly people who have the monikers of being ‘other’ in our society,” he went on to say in an interview for IndieWire.

Maren’s “otherness” resonates with anyone who identifies that way, whether that’s race, gender identity, or sexual orientation. And I found that he thoughtfully injected empathy for a biracial 18-year-old girl who had to navigate the world differently. Marginalized groups inherently carry the impact of unspoken danger. And she reacts to the unspoken danger that occurs when she and Lee first encounter Jake and Brad. Jake tells the story of how he and Brad met, and how Brad chooses to eat people. Not against his will, but because he wants to. Because he can. 

Beyond the Hunger

When Maren finally reaches her mother, she’s told that she left out of love, to protect her. She’d eaten off her own hands and chose to be locked away in a psychiatric hospital rather than be a mother. And when Maren gets close enough to her, she attacks her and tells her to die. There is no other choice for her, no other “way out”. Maren wonders what her life would’ve been like if she had stayed, if she’d taught her how to be herself. She learned from her grandmother that her mother was abandoned, and she adopted her. This created a cycle of abandonment that shaped Maren’s future. She inherited more than just hunger, but she came from a lineage of women who weren’t able to fully exist as themselves. 

Yes, Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All is a film about all-consuming love, identity, and freedom. However, it’s also about the privilege to be who you are without consequence and move in the world without having to shrink. “I think you got used to being locked up, and invisible, and alone, and now you’re out in the world, and you’re seeing yourself for the first time,” Lee tells Maren. And maybe that is the real horror of this story, not the hunger itself.