Consumption, Desire, and the Black Female Gaze: A Psychoanalysis of Eating in Bones And All
For decades, Western Cinema has invited Black women to be swallowed up by the screen. From our Mammification in the Sirk era, to our Jezebel identity in the Lee era, to the tokenism of New Millenium cinema; the male gaze has routinely been encouraged to consume Black women and shit them out.
Though Black female representation has slowly begun to improve, with Black women like Issa Rae, Michaela Coel, Marsai Martin, Janet Mock and more trailblazing and bulldozing industry constructs for space to tell our stories – we somehow still get put into boxes. On top of that, we are rarely afforded recognition from prestigious bodies such as the Academy who apparently dictate the paradigms of good and bad cinema. And though we are aware of their bias and partiality towards certain talent, it still feels alienating to be left on the outside. They will give us little crumbs much like those that led Hansel and Gretel to their slaughter. They will make us feel like we are shattering glass ceilings and breaking down walls only in the name of appeasement. But I digress.
My true issue is that we don’t often see films that reflect the full spectrum of experiences, genres, emotions that Black people have and can experience. A lot of mainstream New Millennium films with Black female main characters, (bar a few exceptions) seem to centre themes of trauma, white saviorism, pan-Africanism, or “Black love”. A lot of Black Cinema is shaped around our Blackness, which is great because it’s an infinite resource and we have many stories to tell about it. But when it comes to main character representation in genres like fantasy, horror, sci-fi – there’s still a long way to go.
For this reason, Luca Guadagnino’s Bones And All, starring Taylor Russell stood out to me. I saw the film at London Film Festival 2022, having watched a teaser trailer a few months prior and knowing nothing about the film other than it starring Russell alongside Timothée Chamalet, and being directed by Guadagnino. Based on a novel of the same name, the film follows cannibalistic lovers Maren and Lee as they travel across early 1970s midwestern United States America.
The film took me by surprise with its supernatural-horror trope taken out of the context of a supernatural-horror world and put into a visually stunning indie romance starring a biracial Black girl. It was a fascinating casting choice to me, considering Maren in the novel is not racialised. It was refreshing seeing a Black girl in a supernatural role set in a historically racist location and era, even if she was biracial anyway.
This casting decision in fact implored me to read the film differently than if Maren was played by a white person. With having a Black girl star in a film about cannibalism, I saw the story as a representation of our complex relationship with symbolic eating as Black girls. The film intimately explored themes of desire, indulgence, consumption and the guilt surrounding it. I interpreted the characters’ cannibalistic urges as a metaphor for our deepest darkest wants, desires and drives. In fact, the film is a great example of The Freudian Id, Ego, and Superego all in conflict with one another. Maren constantly tries to suppress the Id in favour of the Superego - but her carnal desires as an Eater are too strong and she has no choice but to succumb to her appetites to survive. Ultimately she must find a balance.
As Black girls we experience a dichotomy of being left on the outskirts and edges of scopophilic desire or consumed by it, and I think this traumatic relationship with being (un)looked at gives us shame over our own looking and desiring. As bell hooks says, under the context of white supremacy and the white male gaze, it’s accepted for us to be looked at but a problem when we look back, and this is because there is power in looking. The relations of power shift when we develop an oppositional gaze. In liberating ourselves from one-way looking, we can establish counter-hegemonic narratives that tell you exactly who we are rather than that which is being projected onto us.
As it stands, we are still fighting to establish ourselves in the nuanced ways we exist. As unapologetic, imperfect, sexual, unsexual, powerful, weak, authentic, visible, invisible all under the leering presence of white patriarchal spectatorship. Black women are often told to tone themselves down, assimilate, perform, lower their expectations and be submissive. And are punished when we both accept and reject these demands. As a result, I think our relationship with desire and wanting and symbolic eating has been very complex.
This is represented in Bones with how Maren grapples with shame over her urges and her identity as an Eater for the entire film and tries to navigate the lifestyle with moral comfortability. It is Lee (who leans more into Superego) who tries to help her get over the shame.
Throughout the film, Maren’s friend-turned-stalker Sully, a lonely old white man and fellow Eater, has an obsession and desire to have her that becomes clearly all-consuming. In “Eating the Other”, bell hooks demonstrates how fetishistic desire from white people towards the Other reinforces racial power imbalances: ‘The overriding fear is that cultural, ethnic, and racial differences will be continually commodified and offered up as new dishes to enhance the white palate – that the Other will be eaten, consumed, and forgotten.’ By the end of the film when Sully realises he can’t have Maren, he tries to kill her. As the Other, we are constantly under threat of being eaten, so it’s essential to our survival that we eat back.
Thus, I love how, in the film’s ending, Maren has found a balance between Id and Superego and accepted her urges as I feel this is what ultimately saves her from consumption. Lee successfully encourages Maren to eat him ‘bones and all’; a concept that disturbed her prior to her newly exonerated shame. Lee has taught her that it’s okay to consume and not to be ashamed of what they are; but most importantly that it’s okay to consume in the name of love. By this point she is the only main character left, her white counterparts gone, and I felt it was such a powerful message that I read as Black girls being free to desire and free to Eat up space on screen, especially in genres that rarely look back at us. I think if we choose to interpret the film in this way—in a way that leverages our opposing gaze—it tells us that we are the main characters, and we deserve to Eat; Bones and All.