Abstract
The violent coming-of-age of Justine in Julia Ducournau’s Raw (2016) grapples with questions of desire, choice, and freedom. In this paper, I provide a Beauvoirian reading of the film through her concept of freedom. Simone de Beauvoir posits that evil is necessary for formulating an ethics as it pushes us to redefine our commitment to our freedom and the freedoms of others. By positing two extremes of what I refer to as an ‘ethics of consumption’, whereby vegetarianism and cannibalism mark either end, Ducournau’s film has the viewer interrogate the very meaning of what it means to be human and calls attention to the fine line between the nonhuman and human that we straddle every day. Especially interested in the question of what it means to become a woman, this paper engages with ethical feminist vegetarianism and Barbara Creed’s ‘monstrous-feminine’ to argue for new forms of feminist relations between the human and nonhuman. I argue that in its portrayals of the nonhuman, the film offers an ambiguous reading of freedom, which has the viewer question their individual freedom to consume whether that is food, bodies, or images and the consequences of our digestions.
Keywords: Vegetarianism; cannibalism; Simone de Beauvoir; monstrous-feminine; coming-of-age; New French Extremity
An Ethics of Consumption
The screening of Julia Ducournau’s Raw (2016) at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival generated news and rumours of viewers vomiting and fainting in response to the film (Murthi 2016). These reactions draw forth a pertinent question: what is the point of depicting gory violence and what does it say about our (in)humanity and desires for watching such depictions? In her film, Ducournau recounts the violent coming-of-age story of Justine, a young vegetarian veterinary student who, in the course of the film, grapples with an insatiable appetite for human flesh. The film and its ethical dilemma bring about questions of desire, choice, and freedom; it has the viewer interrogate the very meaning of what it means to be human and calls attention to the delicate boundary separating the nonhuman and human that we straddle in our daily lives. In doing so, Ducournau has us interrogate our own role in consumption while also offering alternative modes of relating to one another. Barbara Creed argues in ‘Female Cannibalism and Eating the Other’ that cannibalism has been positioned as a ‘sign of abject primitivism that separates the proper human from the improper and the nonhuman other, the animal’ (2022: 130). By centring a female protagonist, Ducournau is particularly calling into question what it means to be a woman (as we learn that cannibalism is a matrilineal affliction) further pushing the boundaries of humanity through the concept of cannibalism as it relates to an abject monstrous femininity. In the film’s portrayals of its anti-heroines Justine and Alexia through the nonhuman, the film constructs an ambiguous reading of freedom, which has viewers, in turn, question their individual freedoms to consume food, bodies, or images. In this article, I begin by outlining two extreme poles of what I refer to as an ‘ethics of consumption’, those of vegetarianism and cannibalism, which draws on the work of Simone de Beauvoir. I follow with an analysis of scholarship on feminist vegetarianism as it relates to Justine’s burgeoning sexuality and, finally, I engage with Creed’s monstrous-feminine to seek a pathway for new modes of relation and kinship.
In her 1953 essay, ‘Must We Burn Sade?’ French feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, best known for her ground-breaking feminist treatise The Second Sex (1949), provides a critical inquiry into the purported value in the work of the eighteenth-century French nobleman and writer, Marquis de Sade. Her consideration of a misogynistic body of work such as that of Sade’s as a feminist is intriguing. She contends that evil is necessary to arrive at an ethics and that, through his written works, Sade provided an authentic defence of his life as it was lived and refers to him as a ‘great moralist’ (Beauvoir 1953: 40). She states, ‘the fact is that it is neither as author nor as sexual pervert that Sade compels our attention: it is by virtue of the relationship which he created between these two aspects of himself’ (Beauvoir 1953: 4). While Beauvoir does not find Sade to be a good writer, philosopher, nor original or unique in his perversions, she does see an originality in his act of combining his writing with his sexuality to arrive at an ethics. She writes, ‘Sade’s aberrations begin to acquire value when, instead of enduring them as his fixed nature, he elaborates an immense system in order to justify them’ (ibid.). For Beauvoir, Sade is a great moralist because he is attempting to justify himself, his existence, and actions in the face of larger society that conforms to the State’s definition of cruelty. Judith Butler calls out Beauvoir’s ‘incendiary’ title as the time in which it was written has us ‘recall the burning of heretics and saints […] the burning of books, mainly Jewish and heretical’ and further the way in which ‘human beings in the millions were destroyed by gas and fire […] and books were incinerated in ritualised efforts to purify the German Nazi state of its unwanted others’ (2003: 168). Butler provides an interesting reading of Beauvoir in that she has us recall other instances of book-burning used to systematically silence the Other, urging us to question whether we should engage in similar tactics of silencing. However, considering Beauvoir’s larger ethical project discussed in this essay and other writings, Marquis de Sade and his works provide an exquisite example of authenticity and embody a freedom taken to its extremes; however, this freedom ultimately results in the oppression of other freedoms, and this is precisely where Beauvoir locates ethical failure.
Beauvoir’s essay on Sade is important to keep in mind when considering her thoughts on ‘evil’ discussed in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1948). Beauvoir states ‘existentialism alone gives–like religions–a real role to evil, and it is this, perhaps, which make its judgements so gloomy’ (1948: 34). Beauvoir is responding to claims that existentialism is an egotistical philosophy concerned only with the individual; she refutes this characterisation by arguing that existentialism is the only philosophy apt for providing an ethics by its recognising that evil does exist and is even a necessary counterpart to good. She states, ‘since one cannot, with any peace of mind, separate good from evil and devote one’s self to each in turn, one has to assert evil in the face of good, and even as a function of good’ (1953:10). The relationship between good and evil in this case isn’t a normative one, but rather an ambiguous one. Beauvoir sees an existentialist ethics as an extension of Kant, Hegel, and Fichte in which the ‘the source of all values resides in the freedom of man’ (1948: 17). But Beauvoir doesn’t conceive of the freedom of man as one that is separate from the freedoms of other men:
The violent coming-of-age of Justine in Julia Ducournau’s Raw (2016) grapples with questions of desire, choice, and freedom. In this paper, I provide a Beauvoirian reading of the film through her concept of freedom. Simone de Beauvoir posits that evil is necessary for formulating an ethics as it pushes us to redefine our commitment to our freedom and the freedoms of others. By positing two extremes of what I refer to as an ‘ethics of consumption’, whereby vegetarianism and cannibalism mark either end, Ducournau’s film has the viewer interrogate the very meaning of what it means to be human and calls attention to the fine line between the nonhuman and human that we straddle every day. Especially interested in the question of what it means to become a woman, this paper engages with ethical feminist vegetarianism and Barbara Creed’s ‘monstrous-feminine’ to argue for new forms of feminist relations between the human and nonhuman. I argue that in its portrayals of the nonhuman, the film offers an ambiguous reading of freedom, which has the viewer question their individual freedom to consume whether that is food, bodies, or images and the consequences of our digestions.
Keywords: Vegetarianism; cannibalism; Simone de Beauvoir; monstrous-feminine; coming-of-age; New French Extremity
An Ethics of Consumption
The screening of Julia Ducournau’s Raw (2016) at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival generated news and rumours of viewers vomiting and fainting in response to the film (Murthi 2016). These reactions draw forth a pertinent question: what is the point of depicting gory violence and what does it say about our (in)humanity and desires for watching such depictions? In her film, Ducournau recounts the violent coming-of-age story of Justine, a young vegetarian veterinary student who, in the course of the film, grapples with an insatiable appetite for human flesh. The film and its ethical dilemma bring about questions of desire, choice, and freedom; it has the viewer interrogate the very meaning of what it means to be human and calls attention to the delicate boundary separating the nonhuman and human that we straddle in our daily lives. In doing so, Ducournau has us interrogate our own role in consumption while also offering alternative modes of relating to one another. Barbara Creed argues in ‘Female Cannibalism and Eating the Other’ that cannibalism has been positioned as a ‘sign of abject primitivism that separates the proper human from the improper and the nonhuman other, the animal’ (2022: 130). By centring a female protagonist, Ducournau is particularly calling into question what it means to be a woman (as we learn that cannibalism is a matrilineal affliction) further pushing the boundaries of humanity through the concept of cannibalism as it relates to an abject monstrous femininity. In the film’s portrayals of its anti-heroines Justine and Alexia through the nonhuman, the film constructs an ambiguous reading of freedom, which has viewers, in turn, question their individual freedoms to consume food, bodies, or images. In this article, I begin by outlining two extreme poles of what I refer to as an ‘ethics of consumption’, those of vegetarianism and cannibalism, which draws on the work of Simone de Beauvoir. I follow with an analysis of scholarship on feminist vegetarianism as it relates to Justine’s burgeoning sexuality and, finally, I engage with Creed’s monstrous-feminine to seek a pathway for new modes of relation and kinship.
In her 1953 essay, ‘Must We Burn Sade?’ French feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, best known for her ground-breaking feminist treatise The Second Sex (1949), provides a critical inquiry into the purported value in the work of the eighteenth-century French nobleman and writer, Marquis de Sade. Her consideration of a misogynistic body of work such as that of Sade’s as a feminist is intriguing. She contends that evil is necessary to arrive at an ethics and that, through his written works, Sade provided an authentic defence of his life as it was lived and refers to him as a ‘great moralist’ (Beauvoir 1953: 40). She states, ‘the fact is that it is neither as author nor as sexual pervert that Sade compels our attention: it is by virtue of the relationship which he created between these two aspects of himself’ (Beauvoir 1953: 4). While Beauvoir does not find Sade to be a good writer, philosopher, nor original or unique in his perversions, she does see an originality in his act of combining his writing with his sexuality to arrive at an ethics. She writes, ‘Sade’s aberrations begin to acquire value when, instead of enduring them as his fixed nature, he elaborates an immense system in order to justify them’ (ibid.). For Beauvoir, Sade is a great moralist because he is attempting to justify himself, his existence, and actions in the face of larger society that conforms to the State’s definition of cruelty. Judith Butler calls out Beauvoir’s ‘incendiary’ title as the time in which it was written has us ‘recall the burning of heretics and saints […] the burning of books, mainly Jewish and heretical’ and further the way in which ‘human beings in the millions were destroyed by gas and fire […] and books were incinerated in ritualised efforts to purify the German Nazi state of its unwanted others’ (2003: 168). Butler provides an interesting reading of Beauvoir in that she has us recall other instances of book-burning used to systematically silence the Other, urging us to question whether we should engage in similar tactics of silencing. However, considering Beauvoir’s larger ethical project discussed in this essay and other writings, Marquis de Sade and his works provide an exquisite example of authenticity and embody a freedom taken to its extremes; however, this freedom ultimately results in the oppression of other freedoms, and this is precisely where Beauvoir locates ethical failure.
Beauvoir’s essay on Sade is important to keep in mind when considering her thoughts on ‘evil’ discussed in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1948). Beauvoir states ‘existentialism alone gives–like religions–a real role to evil, and it is this, perhaps, which make its judgements so gloomy’ (1948: 34). Beauvoir is responding to claims that existentialism is an egotistical philosophy concerned only with the individual; she refutes this characterisation by arguing that existentialism is the only philosophy apt for providing an ethics by its recognising that evil does exist and is even a necessary counterpart to good. She states, ‘since one cannot, with any peace of mind, separate good from evil and devote one’s self to each in turn, one has to assert evil in the face of good, and even as a function of good’ (1953:10). The relationship between good and evil in this case isn’t a normative one, but rather an ambiguous one. Beauvoir sees an existentialist ethics as an extension of Kant, Hegel, and Fichte in which the ‘the source of all values resides in the freedom of man’ (1948: 17). But Beauvoir doesn’t conceive of the freedom of man as one that is separate from the freedoms of other men:
[…] for existentialism, it is not impersonal universal man who is the source of values, but the plurality of concrete particular men projecting themselves towards their ends on the basis of situations whose particularity is as radical and as irreducible as subjectivity itself. (1948: 17)
While Sade’s is a freedom where his ‘will expresses his genuine reality’, he may be seen as Beauvoir’s ‘serious man’, of whom she states, ‘dishonestly ignoring the subjectivity of his choice, he pretends that the unconditioned value of the object is being asserted through him; and by the same token he also ignores the value of the subjectivity of the freedom of others’ (1948: 49). While Beauvoir does see Sade as enacting a genuine moralism, he was unable to find a way to relate to others to act against the institutions which he found oppressive. She states, ‘He [Sade] knew only two alternatives: abstract morality and crime. He was unaware of action’ (Beauvoir 1953: 62). Due to this unawareness and inability to act for the communal betterment, Sade was unaware of Beauvoir’s assertion that ‘One can reveal the world only on a basis revealed by other men. No project can be defined by its interference with other projects’ (1948: 71). Sade, however, revolted against all even potential allies and ignored that ‘To will oneself free is also to will others free’ (1948: 73). Thus, as Beauvoir states, ‘A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied’ (1948: 91). It is important to remember that Beauvoir is revisiting Sade’s work two centuries later shortly after the end of World War II and the fall of the Vichy government to reconsider the role and appeal evil had at this time. Thus, the answer to her question—'must we burn Sade?’—highlights the value that artistic displays of excess have in the face of normative moral registers such as what we see in the work of Sade and, relevant to this paper, Ducournau.
I conjure Beauvoir because of her critical engagement with Sade, which seriously considers the value of his work in our society rather than simply dismiss it because of its violent and grotesque aspects. I find Beauvoir’s work useful for thinking through ethical extremes, which I argue are embodied by the dietary choices central to Ducournau’s film and the multiple readings that may be gleaned from it. I start with Sade because of Ducournau’s allusion to Sade in naming her protagonist Justine as well as the literary heritage of cruelty that he has been credited with founding. Jonathan Romney argues in his article ‘Le Sex and Violence’ published in The Independent that the origins of the film movement in France known as New French Extremity can be traced to the work of the eighteenth-century libertine Marquis de Sade (2004). After having considered the value of such works and the representations of violence, I would like to consider the film itself and its own ambiguity depicted through violence.
Other scholars such as Barbara Creed (2022), Patricia Pisters (2020), and Louise Flockhart (2019) have argued that Ducournau flips the trope of a traditional cannibal film. These films feature primitive exoticized images of the non-white Other as the figure of the uncivilized cannibal; some examples include the 1970s Italian cannibals of Umberto Lenzi and Ruggero Deodato, Man From the Deep River (1972) and Cannibal Holocaust (1980) respectively. We can, however, still see the vestiges of this civilised/uncivilised dichotomy through Ducournau’s protagonist’s vegetarian diet. In the Global North’s public imagination, a vegetarian diet is a marker of a liberal, upper middle-class lifestyle. Cathryn Bailey shows us how this conception of the vegetarian has been shaped:
[F]oodways are themselves a significant part of culture; part of how one takes on or claims a cultural identity is through the adoption of foodways. This helps explain why vegetarianism has sometimes been dismissed as a bourgeois lifestyle choice, one deeply reflective of a privileged identity. Certainly, to be able to turn away nourishment of any kind often says something about one’s level of privilege. (2007: 46)
Starting with the ‘over-civilised’ diet of vegetarianism makes Justine’s shift to the ‘uncivilised’ diet of cannibalism even more dramatic but it also provides us with two extremes of what I term an ethics of consumption following Beauvoir’s ethics. In formulating this ethics of consumption, I position vegetarianism on the pole of good, in that it is a diet which respects the freedoms of those usually denied freedom in our society (i.e. animals); and cannibalism on the pole of evil, as it is embracing the most taboo consumption of meat and denying the freedoms of the lives most highly valued in our society (i.e. humans). If we think of vegetarianism and cannibalism as opposite poles of this spectrum of good/evil in an ethics of consumption, we can see the way in which vegetarianism is an example of moral purity through its intrinsic politics of restraint. Its central tenet centres on recognising a harm to other living things, namely animals. Cannibalism, on the opposite end, is meat eating, a normal and accepted practice in most cultures, except that it is taken to the extreme by transgressing the delineation of acceptable species to consume. When considering freedom, however, vegetarianism is a limiting of freedom as one must practice restraint, while cannibalism is a full embrace of one’s freedom. By factoring in freedom to consume in this formulation of an ethics of consumption, we can recall Beauvoir’s idea of ambiguity:
The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won. (1948: 129)
In the case of Justine, vegetarianism and cannibalism are inextricably bound to each other through moral registers much like Beauvoir positions good and evil. For Justine, her moral registers embodied by her diets are never fixed but constantly won. Justine and her sister, Alexia, strive to challenge the limitations society has imposed on them as young women; however, in doing so they struggle with their excess desires and the way they may limit those around them in expressing them. By reading Raw through the lens of an ethics of consumption, we can see the way in which Justine’s ambiguous morality is paralleled with her vegetarianism and cannibalism but, further, her sexuality as well.
The Sexual Politics of Meat
Justine’s vegetarianism demonstrates her affinity and identification with animals and therefore the nonhuman. In many instances, she is appalled at how little regard her colleagues have for animals. Her naivety has her believe that the other veterinary students must hold the same beliefs and lifestyle choices that she does, believing that they must all care for animals in an equal extent given their choice of profession. Her fellow veterinary students, however, believe that there is a vast difference between humans and animals and that they are not equal. In an illuminating scene, the students are in a cafeteria, which serves vast quantities of meat products, discussing AIDS. One student badgers Adrien, who is gay and Arab, about AIDS and the myth surrounding its spread—that of someone having had contracted the disease through sex with a monkey. Adrien is bothered by the question as it is clear the student is particularly interested in Adrien’s opinion because he is gay and a person of colour. The image of the monkey here not only affects him due the history of the prejudice against gay men because of the stigma surrounding AIDS but also because of a history of equating people of colour with animals and monkeys in particular. Justine interjects stating ‘Who’d be so sick he’d rape an animal?’ The use of the word ‘rape’ in referring to the monkey triggers a response from the others. Adrien responds ‘Legally, I’m not sure monkey rape exists. The monkey won’t turn anorexic and see a therapist. It's not the same.’ Other female students are disgusted by Justine equating the rape of a human woman with a monkey viewing it as language which strips the female students of their own humanity through such a comparison. In aligning herself with the nonhuman animal, however, Ducournau depicts this as evidence of a childish Justine who has still not come into her humanity. In an interview, Ducournau shares, ‘She thinks that her body is the same as that of an animal, which means that she hasn’t become aware of her femininity’ (Sélavy 2017). In her fervent and ascetic vegetarianism, Justine is unable to connect with her female peers, distancing her from her femininity which she only gains control of through expressing her sexuality.
The aligning of women and animals is central to Carol Adams’ influential work, The Sexual Politics of Meat first published in 1990. Adams’ text has shaped not only scholarship on vegetarianism but feminism. Adams argues that women and animals are both ‘empty referents’ meaning they are stripped of their subjectivity and rendered imaginary in our patriarchal meat-eating society. She provides examples of language used by female victims of sexual abuse such as ‘I felt like a piece of meat’ and that of eco-activists using the language of rape to describe the depletion of the Earth’s resources. In these two examples, animals and women are taken out of the context of these forms of violence detaching the violence from those it affects the most. In appropriating the language of violence against animals to describe violence against women, Adams sees women as reinforcing and allowing violence against animals since one is essentially arguing ‘I am not an animal, I am not to be treated as such’ while ignoring the inhuman treatment of animals as tied to their own oppression. This is the issue that arises between Justine and her female colleagues in the cafeteria. Justine does not see a difference between herself and a female monkey while her female peers instinctively find that their human lives are more valuable than that of a monkey. This normalisation of the exploitation of animals is Adams’ main concern and she ties this violence to oppression of women. She argues that our meat-eating society is inherently patriarchal:
Meat’s recognizable message includes association with the male role; its meaning recurs within a fixed gender system; the coherence it achieves as a meaningful item of food arises from patriarchal attitudes with the idea that the end justifies the means, that the objectification of other beings is a necessary part of life, and that violence can and should be masked. (Adams 2010: 27)
For this reason, Adams argues that feminists are ethically obligated to be vegetarian as it is the moral answer to consumption at the hands of patriarchy. She argues, ‘vegetarianism does more than rebuke a meat-eating society; it rebukes a patriarchal society, since as we have seen meat-eating is associated with male power’ (Adams 2010: 231). A central guiding question for Ducournau’s Raw is not only what it means to be human but what it means to become a woman, specifically. In the cafeteria scene, the transgression isn’t only about conflating humans with animals, but a female animal with a female human.
While highly influential, there remain barriers to women’s liberation in Adams’ Sexual Politics of Meat. The most evident is her anti-pornography, anti-sex work stance. In these readings, Adams suggests that pornography and sex work are forms of consuming women’s bodies under patriarchy and suggests that women lose their agency engaging in these acts. Carrie Hamilton opposes her reading, urging for a reconsideration of such a conflation. She states, ‘sex workers can and do exercise varying degrees of agency depending on their situation; however, animals bred on industrial farms for human consumption do not’ (2016: 118). Justine’s agency is lacking at the beginning of the film—she ingests meat because her sister urges her to, she follows the herd of young students to the wild parties. It is her agency which she must recognize through the discovery of her own sexuality.
Justine’s vegetarianism is marked by her naivety and lack of sexual experience according to Ducournau. However, as Patricia Pisters argues in her 2020 book New Blood in Contemporary Cinema, Justine’s discovery of her cannibalism is synced with the discovery of her sexuality. She writes, ‘At the same time her sexual desire awakens; she feels the closeness of the flesh of Adrien’s neck’ (Pisters 2020: 107). Justine’s appetite for flesh is intimately linked with her appetite for sex. The two most climactic scenes which perfectly illustrate this relationship may also be read as ‘deflowering scenes’. Here, I use the phrase ‘deflowering scene’ to refer to the trope of a female character losing her virginity and the way it is depicted in film through cinematography, mise-en-scène, sound, etc.
The first and most notorious of these deflowering scenes depicts her first bite of human flesh. In this and the preceding scene, Justine and her sister Alexia are bonding for the first time. These scenes are coded highly feminine but also transgress the trappings of normative feminine bonding rituals. For example, while they are drinking on the rooftop, Alexia shows her sister how to urinate while standing flexing her masculine skills. In the next, however, they engage in a female rite of passage by waxing Justine’s pubic hair. As Alexia attempts to wax her sister’s pubic hair, the shot frames her between Justine’s legs. In the next shot, the viewer sees Justine’s pubic area in close-up and then there is a medium shot of her agonising expression along with groans of pain from an aerial point-of-view. The scene is uncomfortable because it is pushing the boundaries of sibling intimacy and veers into the incestuous and homoerotic. It also confronts the viewer with the question of consent in general as Justine begs her sister to stop. Much like film depictions of coercive sexual negotiations where a (often) male suitor pressures a woman or girl into having sex, and I think here of the 30-minute notorious negotiation scene in Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl (2001), Alexia coerces and forces Justine into the waxing procedure. The punishment in this case results in a form of castration symbolised by Alexia’s finger. In a graphic and nauseating scene, Justine squirms as Alexia tries to cut off a stubborn piece of wax with a pair of scissors, which causes Alexia to accidentally cut off her own index finger. At the sight of the bloody nub on her hand, Alexia faints. As Justine waits for help to arrive, she is seduced by her sister’s severed finger which is laying bloody on the floor. She picks it up and begins to lick the blood, then proceeds to suck it, and finally she gnaws on the finger holding both ends like a bone-in chicken wing. Her visage is animalistic, carnivorous, and completely enraptured by the act. Creed describes the scene as ‘a symbolic act of fellatio with queer/incestuous undertones’ (2022: 137). The scene marks a shift and shows us that Justine has lost all control over her desires. Justine begins the film naïve, frail, and submissive but switches to being assertive and animalistic. She has now fully crossed the line into a tabooed space of flesh consumption.
The second ‘deflowering scene’ depicts Justine losing her virginity to Adrien. Shortly before this scene, Justine is running away covered in blue and yellow paint and blood after having bitten another student’s lip off while playing a sexual game in which they are instructed to remain in a bathroom until they’re both green, insinuating that they must rub against each other sexually to mix their colours. In this scene, Justine is taking control of her sexuality and desire in a scenario where she is being coerced to conform to heterosexual ideals of femininity much like the first deflowering scene. She, again, pushes the limits of the boundaries allowed of the heterosexual act by consuming human flesh when she turns the kiss into a cannibalistic bite taking a piece of the student’s lip flesh with her. She flees the scene pushing past Adrien who has witnessed the attack and heard the scream of the boy in blue paint. After showering off the paint and blood, she cuddles up with Adrien who questions her about her sexuality, asking if she is into BDSM or possibly something more serious. She heads to bed but comes back out while Adrien is in the middle of masturbating to gay porn. She only utters ‘C’est grave’ or ‘it’s serious’ before her and Adrien begin to have untamed and animalistic sex. In this scene, she is not being coerced into sex but aggressively initiates the encounter. This scene counters common filmic depictions of a young girl losing her virginity, which features a docile and hesitant girl afraid of losing her purity such as in Cruel Intentions (1999), American Beauty (1999), and the aforementioned Fat Girl. Justine is not fearful of the sexual encounter or what it might mean in terms of her social standing. Her hunger for sex and hunger for flesh ultimately coincide and result in her biting her own arm at the moment of climax. It is at this moment that Justine also breaks the fourth wall and gazes directly at the camera as blood runs down her arm. In lieu of cannibalising her friend, she cannibalises herself. While Ducournau states that it is here where Justine discovers her humanity, I posit that it is in this sexual encounter where Justine finally harnesses her agency and accepts her ambiguous being lying at the thresholds of monster/human, good/bad, vegetarian/cannibal.
The Monstrous-Feminine
Barbara Creed’s important 1993 book The Monstrous-Feminine details the way in which Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection may be useful in thinking about horror cinema. She draws our attention to Kristeva’s analysis of food as a form of abjection, writing that food is ‘perhaps the most elementary and archaic form of objection’; but, further, that it only becomes so when it becomes a sign for a delineation ‘between two distinct entities or territories’ (Kristeva 1982, cited in Creed 1993: 11). As I argued at the beginning of this article, the two distinct entities and territories considered here are posed by the dietary choices portrayed in Ducournau’s film represented by vegetarianism and cannibalism. In this case, the abject is demonstrated through the distinct crossing from vegetarianism to cannibalism elucidating the very thin line separating socially acceptable and ‘civilised’ forms of meat-eating and the ‘uncivilised’ eating of human flesh. In the film, the consumption of animal meat opens a portal to a more abject form of consumption. Kristeva also notes that the abject elucidates not only the thin line drawn by society but also the ‘fragility of the law’. In her 1980 book The Powers of Horror, Kristeva writes, ‘any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject […] He who denies morality is not abject; there can be grandeur in amorality.’ But, later, states ‘Abjection… is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady’ (Kristeva 1980: 4). The ambiguity in this excerpt is central to abjection for Kristeva as Creed also claims (1993: 12). In the case of Ducournau’s film, Justine and Alexia embody the way in which the law deals with morality and the transgressions of the cannibal only resulting in ambiguity.
In interviews, Ducournau repeatedly claims that cannibals are human (Crucchiola 2017; Sélavy 2017; Shepherd 2017); her aim isn’t to align any of her characters with the nonhuman, but rather bring them back to the domain of humanity and to demonstrate that the fine line between cannibals and humans is virtually non-existent. In their article, ‘C’est Grave: Raw, cannibalism and the racialising logic of white feminism’, Rosalind Galt and Annette-Carina van der Zaag, echo Ducournau’s insistence that cannibalism is part of humanity. While they argue that the film succeeds in showing the way in which Justine harnesses her monstrosity as a gesture of feminist agency, they also show the way in which these depictions are more in line with ‘white feminist’ ideals. They write:
Justine enacts a punk feminism, a monstrosity in which her animality or nonhumanity resists patriarchal coercion (and it does). Below the surface, though, in the corners of the frame, a different narrative shows all the nonhuman bodies that have to suffer for Justine to stage her resistance and retain her humanity. (Galt & van der Zaag 2022: 292)
Galt and van der Zaag cite the family dog, Quicky, who is blamed for eating Alexia’s finger and is subsequently euthanised. Her father, with little sympathy in his voice, informs Justine that he had to be euthanised because, ‘An animal who has tasted human flesh is not safe. Once he develops a taste for it, he will bite anything that moves.’ In this quote, Justine is indirectly identified as the animal; however, to Galt and van der Zaag’s point, the nonhuman animal is the only one punished and the speciesist hierarchy is reinstated. Is there a way to exit this bind and formulate other ways of relation?
First, Justine must question her life-long commitment to vegetarianism and reaffirm her agency. Her vegetarianism was not her own choice, although she was devout. Justine and Alexia’s parents imposed a militant vegetarian diet to shield their daughters from their cannibalistic fate. We learn at the end of the film that this is a matrilineal affliction and that their mother also shares their appetite but has ‘dealt’ with it by slowly eating away at her own husband. One important theme in Creed’s formulation of the monstrous-feminine in horror slasher films of the ’70s is the cannibalistic mother. She describes the cannibalistic mother as a horrific mother who ‘threatens to cannibalise to take back, the life forms to which she once gave birth’ (Creed 1993: 81) and a ‘devouring mother whose cannibalistic, incorporating desires are the other side of her possessive, smothering urges’ (Creed 1993: 67). Raw challenges this depiction of the cannibalistic mother. After Alexia is released from the hospital and is now aware that her sister shares the same appetite, she takes Justine to an empty country road. They awkwardly ignore what happened the previous night when suddenly Alexia jumps out onto the road causing a car to swerve and crash into a tree. Alexia ‘plays dead’ to catch her prey. We can assume that this is a tactic she has perfected to satisfy her cannibalistic cravings as we had the same image presented to us at the beginning of the film framing the barbarity that will be depicted later. Justine, still unaware of her sister’s cannibalistic leanings, urges Alexia to spit out the flesh of the man she just killed to which Alexia replies, ‘I did this for you. You have to learn, no?’ In this scene, Alexia is taking on the role of the mother who needs to teach her hatchling or cub to hunt and fend for itself. Alexia thus departs from the cannibalistic mother who wishes to absorb and control her child and bring it back to the safety of the womb. Instead, Alexia wishes to impart her knowledge on her young so that they may leave the nest. It is at this nexus that Justine must finally decide for herself her own diet and move past her mother’s—cannibalistic or vegetarian.
The viewer can gather that Justine will choose to abstain from eating humans and find a way to repress her desires to continue living within society. This is evident from her horror at thinking she ate and killed her friend Adrien upon finding his bloody half-eaten corpse next to her in bed. We learn shortly that it wasn’t Justine but her sister, Alexia, whom we might’ve have already labelled morally corrupt from the car crash scene. Justine finds her sister in a catatonic state completely covered in blood. In another tender moment between the sisters, Justine helps wash the blood off her sister showing forgiveness and care despite killing and eating their friend. Alexia is subsequently imprisoned, and Justine visits her sister; for a moment the reflections of their faces merge into one. Here, we have the opposite poles of the ethics of consumption represented again, the one of a freedom taken to the extreme, and the one of complete repression. In combining them, the film shows that monstrosity still lies within Justine, who we’ve sympathised with for aligning herself with humanity and refraining from eating her friends. However, the ambiguous ending of the film merging sisters into one has us question whether Justine can find an apt avenue to release these repressed desires and demonstrates the ‘fragility of the law’ by punishing her sister who only holds the same desires as those around her.
How, then, can Justine reconcile her prior vegetarian life and her newfound cannibalistic desires? The former was marked by her naivety and lack of freedom while the latter saw her fully embrace her sexual and carnal desires expressing her full freedom. In Creed’s reading of Raw, she draws on the work of Evelyn Reed to talk about a form of community-building regarding ancient practices of cannibalism. She writes:
The ancient taboo [cannibalism] was not a universal one; it was placed on the eating of a member of one’s own totem clan, including animals and plants of the same totem […] There is evidence to suggest that early people practiced cannibalism, eating members (people, animals, plants) of other totem clans, but never their own. (Reed 1975, cited in Creed 2022: 130)
This suggests that there is a type of kinship that transcends the bounds that vegetarianism and cannibalism allow to conceive of new forms of relation that go beyond the human. The film suggests that Justine sees most animals as part of her totem clan. We only see Justine eat animal meat a few times in the film and it often makes her feel great shame or makes her ill. In the cafeteria, she tries to steal meat by putting it in her pocket so no one will witness her hypocrisy, as she is a very outspoken vegetarian already having aligned herself with animals. When she is coerced into eating the rabbit kidney, she is clearly allergic to this meat and develops a severe rash. Yet, she eats her sister’s finger without any physical complications; her body does not reject this meat. This suggests that one’s totem clan isn’t bound to patriarchal heteronormative kinship formations such as the nuclear family—one can eat one’s own family members, an act further displayed by Justine’s mother’s ‘solution’. She is, however, unable to bring herself to eat her friend Adrien. She opts to bite into her own flesh rather than hurt him. Adrien is part of her queer totem clan. This is a queer conception of kinship and shows that her digestions have created new forms of relating to other humans and nonhumans alike. The end of the film reveals that her mother has been cannibalising her husband for years. The husband shows Justine his chest as a symbol of hope, but the foreboding music suggests otherwise.
Throughout the film, we align ourselves with Justine despite our disgust. We understand her plight and sympathise because she is after all constantly trying to reconcile her humanity with her monstrosity. We, however, fail to see the way in which this monstrosity is central to her becoming (human, animal, cannibal, woman) which can never fully amount to humanist ideals. Rather, the film on several occasions calls upon the viewer to show us our complicity in the narrative by breaking the fourth wall and the direct gaze that Justine offers us in her moments of self-realisation and extreme freedom. On her analysis of the female cannibal, Creed writes, ‘In eating the other, the cannibal incorporates the other completely in an act in which self and other become one’ (2022: 132). This assertion echoes Beauvoir’s own assertion on freedom, ‘To will oneself free is also to will others free’ (1948: 73). Ducournau’s film foregrounds Justine’s shift from vegetarianism to cannibalism to offer extreme poles of a diet of good or evil. Through a Beauvoirian ethical reading, these poles aren’t on opposite ends at all but, rather, intertwined like good and evil where evil is a ‘function of the good’ and thus cannibalism a function of Justine’s vegetarianism. The shift of diet is paralleled with a discovery of her sexuality and by extension her agency. This agency is what will allow her to move forward, which is only possible by identifying her kinships or ‘totem clans’ (i.e. who to eat, who not to eat).
Our viewing does not exist in a vacuum but, rather, pushes us to interrogate our own relationship to our humanity and monstrosity. How do we relate to each other, and how do our consumptions have us relate to one another? To return to the question posed in the beginning of this article: why do we enjoy consuming violent media such as Ducournau’s Raw? In cannibalising this film and its violent images, we assume a responsibility for how we consume the world around us; by stepping outside of our humanity, Ducournau’s film suggests that we can find deeper points of relation to each other in recognising the burgeoning monstrosity in us all.
References
Adams, C. J. (2010) The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group.
American Beauty (1999) Directed by Sam Mendes [Film]. Los Angeles: DreamWorks Pictures.
Bailey, C. (2007) ‘We Are What We Eat: Feminist Vegetarianism and the Reproduction of Racial Identity’, Hypatia, 22 (2), 39-59.
Beauvoir, S. D. (1948) The Ethics of Ambiguity. New York: Kensington Publishing.
Beauvoir, S. D. (1953) ‘Must We Burn Sade?’, in: Sade, M. D. The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings. New York: Grove Press. 3-64.
Butler, J. (2003) ‘Beauvoir on Sade: making sexuality into an ethic’, in Card, C. The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 168-188.
Creed, B. (1993) The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge.
Creed, B. (2022) Return of the Monstrous-Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema. New York: Routledge.
Crucchiola, J. (2017) ‘Raw Director Julia Ducournau On Cannibalism as a Metaphor and Why Korean Cinema is So Great’, Vulture [Online]. Available at:
https://www.vulture.com/2017/03/raws-julia-ducournau-on-cannibalism-and-korean-cinema.html (Accessed 19 February 2024).
Cruel Intentions (1999) Directed by Roger Kumble [Film]. Los Angeles: Columbia Pictures.
Fat Girl (2003) Directed by Catherine Breillat [Film]. Paris: Rezo Films.
Flockhart, L. (2019) ‘Gendering the Cannibal in the Postfeminist Era’, in: Holland S., Shail, R. & Gerard, S. (eds) Gender and Contemporary Horror in Film. Bingley: Emerald Publishing. 67-81.
Galt, R. & van der Zaag, A. (2022) ‘C’est Grave: Raw, Cannibalism and the Racializing Logic of White Feminism’, Journal of Visual Culture, 21 (2), 277-296.
Hamilton, C. (2016) ‘Sex, Work, Meat: The Feminist Politics of Veganism’, Feminist Review, 114 (1), 112-129.
Kristeva, J. (1980) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press.
Murthi, V. (2016) ‘Raw: Cannibal Film Screening Causes TIFF Moviegoers To Pass Out’, IndieWire [Online]. Available at: https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/raw-tiff-2016-toronto-film-festival-pass-out-cannibal-julia-ducournau-1201726575/ (Accessed 19 February 2024).
Pisters, P. (2020) New Blood in Contemporary Cinema: Women Directors and the Poetics of Horror. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Raw (2016) Directed by Julia Ducournau [Film]. Los Angeles: Netflix.
Reed, Evelyn. (1975) Woman’s Evolution: From Matriarchal Clan to Patriarchal Family. New York: Pathfinder Press.
Romney, J. (2004) ‘Le sex and violence’, The Independent [Online]. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/le-sex-and-violence-546083.html (Accessed 19 February 2024).
Sélavy, V. (2017) ‘Fresh Meat’, Sight and Sound, 27 (5). 52-53.
Shepherd, J. (2017) ‘Raw director Julia Ducournau talks cannibals, humanity, and fainting’, The Independent [Online]. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/julia-ducournau-interview-raw-director-cannibalism-humanity-fainting-sick-a7658651.html (Accessed 19 February 2024).
Adams, C. J. (2010) The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group.
American Beauty (1999) Directed by Sam Mendes [Film]. Los Angeles: DreamWorks Pictures.
Bailey, C. (2007) ‘We Are What We Eat: Feminist Vegetarianism and the Reproduction of Racial Identity’, Hypatia, 22 (2), 39-59.
Beauvoir, S. D. (1948) The Ethics of Ambiguity. New York: Kensington Publishing.
Beauvoir, S. D. (1953) ‘Must We Burn Sade?’, in: Sade, M. D. The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings. New York: Grove Press. 3-64.
Butler, J. (2003) ‘Beauvoir on Sade: making sexuality into an ethic’, in Card, C. The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 168-188.
Creed, B. (1993) The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge.
Creed, B. (2022) Return of the Monstrous-Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema. New York: Routledge.
Crucchiola, J. (2017) ‘Raw Director Julia Ducournau On Cannibalism as a Metaphor and Why Korean Cinema is So Great’, Vulture [Online]. Available at:
https://www.vulture.com/2017/03/raws-julia-ducournau-on-cannibalism-and-korean-cinema.html (Accessed 19 February 2024).
Cruel Intentions (1999) Directed by Roger Kumble [Film]. Los Angeles: Columbia Pictures.
Fat Girl (2003) Directed by Catherine Breillat [Film]. Paris: Rezo Films.
Flockhart, L. (2019) ‘Gendering the Cannibal in the Postfeminist Era’, in: Holland S., Shail, R. & Gerard, S. (eds) Gender and Contemporary Horror in Film. Bingley: Emerald Publishing. 67-81.
Galt, R. & van der Zaag, A. (2022) ‘C’est Grave: Raw, Cannibalism and the Racializing Logic of White Feminism’, Journal of Visual Culture, 21 (2), 277-296.
Hamilton, C. (2016) ‘Sex, Work, Meat: The Feminist Politics of Veganism’, Feminist Review, 114 (1), 112-129.
Kristeva, J. (1980) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press.
Murthi, V. (2016) ‘Raw: Cannibal Film Screening Causes TIFF Moviegoers To Pass Out’, IndieWire [Online]. Available at: https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/raw-tiff-2016-toronto-film-festival-pass-out-cannibal-julia-ducournau-1201726575/ (Accessed 19 February 2024).
Pisters, P. (2020) New Blood in Contemporary Cinema: Women Directors and the Poetics of Horror. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Raw (2016) Directed by Julia Ducournau [Film]. Los Angeles: Netflix.
Reed, Evelyn. (1975) Woman’s Evolution: From Matriarchal Clan to Patriarchal Family. New York: Pathfinder Press.
Romney, J. (2004) ‘Le sex and violence’, The Independent [Online]. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/le-sex-and-violence-546083.html (Accessed 19 February 2024).
Sélavy, V. (2017) ‘Fresh Meat’, Sight and Sound, 27 (5). 52-53.
Shepherd, J. (2017) ‘Raw director Julia Ducournau talks cannibals, humanity, and fainting’, The Independent [Online]. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/julia-ducournau-interview-raw-director-cannibalism-humanity-fainting-sick-a7658651.html (Accessed 19 February 2024).