i want you to eat me
luca guadagnino u sick bastard
if you haven’t seen bones and all, and you don’t already know what it’s generally about, it would probably be in your best interest to go ahead and watch it now before you read this, because i am hoping that the temporary insanity it has caused me will be more understandable if you’ve experienced it already. that’s all i’ve got to say about that.
if you were going to make a film specifically to give me brain rot, and you knew me well enough—my obsession with mildewing american dream aesthetics, my love for long roadtrips and monstrous metaphors for vulnerability—you might get close to making a movie like bones and all. (probably not, because luca guadagnino is a SPECIFIC kind of freak, but who am i to assume.) there are so many things i love about this sick and twisted movie that i am hoping you will read this and then we can never speak about it ever again and i can regain my sanity.
there’s the poverty, just for starters. lee and maren grow up in shoddy little towns where they and their kind can go unnoticed. we watch as their hunger pushes them away from stable incomes, friendships, and steady lives, like the one maren’s grandmother or even lee’s sister have access to. other factors hone this lack of stability into something toothed and ever-dangerous; maren and her father are the only black characters seen in settings which are already eerily dangerous for them (when maren comes home dripping blood, her father knows exactly how fast they have to be gone before the police arrive, and the outward dynamic between lee and the two (sort of) eaters who follow them into the woods is markedly different than between them and maren). the crumbling settings of rural americana—under the interstate in kentucky, the bus stops of ohio, the loneliness of small towns where you are not loved—betray the fact that their country doesn’t have systems in place to care for many, not just them. watching their travels probably feels more like listening to ethel cain than lana del rey.
the references to lee’s queer identity also bring context to his place on the edge of his family and town. his interactions with other men are often framed with both intimacy and violence in the same breath, most blatantly when he seduces the carnival employee, but even in his interruption of the sexual harassment in the grocery store, and in the tangled guilt, love, and hatred he feels for his father.
of course, cannibalism as a metaphor for love isn’t really a transgressive storytelling motif, at least not anymore. it’s an easy motif to follow: real cultural/religious beliefs like eucharist and taking on the powers or wisdom of those you consume are practically begging to be interpreted and embraced by artists through visions of sex, love, and knowing the other. there’s plenty of popular examples in media (preacher’s daughter! jennifer’s body! interview with a vampire! hannibal!) but this is the one which has sucker punched me hardest.
it’s obvious lee and maren are starving all the time—in the perpetual hunger and the lean lines of their bodies and the sharpness of their words. they’re starving because they’re eaters, and because they’re on the outskirts of their worlds, but also because they are sick with longing. everything about them screams i need to be loved !! everything. they’re so hungry for love that sometimes it’s painful to look at them directly. they lean into each other the same way they lean into the bodies of the ones they’re eating. desire for closeness and fear of having that intimacy torn away hangs so heavy over their expressions and arguments and over the wide spaces which frame them that it doesn’t really matter if their desire is for flesh, or for flesh.
and in the end, it doesn’t matter what they’re hungry for, because when you’re doomed by the narrative, it’s all the same. they are so desperate to be good, to not be alone, to love each other well, and they do!! they really do. in the act of knowing/loving/consuming one another, they find exactly what it is that sully and maren’s mother were so marred by the lack of. bones and all carries the elements of a tragedy, but isn’t quite coded as one, because not only are they determined to escape their fates, but they love each other enough to want the other to eat, and in doing so they escape their fatal flaw as characters: the urge to be gluttonous. sully, their narrative foil in more ways than one, gives in to his selfish hunger for love and connection where he has been rejected, and insists upon trying to take it anyways. in doing so he dooms himself, and although his actions kill lee, they do not curse him.
in conclusion, while i am already an insufferable luca guadagnino fan (his characters are so evil and so heartbroken!! i will fall for this every time like clockwork) but i did NOT think bones and all would be worm into my mind like a parasite. in retrospect this was foolish since i am god’s weakest and gangliest soldier, but surely this will be the last time ?? right guys
related trinkets & baubles, if you aren’t already sick of my brainrot on this topic:
⁕ listen all the way through preacher’s daughter, by ethel cain, preferably in the dark (it’s scary. i warned you)
⁕ realize that someone feeding you is one of the oldest forms of showing love in the world, and certainly the one we receive the youngest
⁕ watch supernatural s1-5 if you are obsessed with the faded american dream aesthetics with queer coded characters. just know that like lana del rey it is far too stupid to realize exactly how hard it’s cooking