Eat Your Heart Out: Love as Consumption
Throughout history, very little has stayed absolute, but human nature stands the test of time — not bending, but evolving. An unchanging factor of human nature is the ability, and the need, to love. Love infiltrates every aspect of life, and often, to love is to be greedy: to crave, to take, and to consume entirely. Another unchanging fact of human nature is the compulsion to share our every emotion, especially love, through varying and ever-evolving ways — religion, literature, film. These expressions reveal that love is completely noxious and overwhelming, and to portray this macabre feeling, some have spent centuries outlining it with equally repugnant imagery. When the hunger to love — grotesque and rapacious — meets the need to share it — conceited and vain — the result is sometimes equally so: cannibalism.
A daily representation of this carnivorous display of love is communion — the practice of eating bread and wine in place of Christ’s body and blood. The practice has continued for centuries, often without further dissection of its more cannibalistic undertones. In Christian tradition, Jesus himself is said to have permitted the act — feeding his disciples these more edible equivalencies during the famous Last Supper. The practice is an attempt to return the love they believe Christ to have left behind in his death. It is done in repayment to him. They establish a connection to him with this act of cannibalism done with placeholder flesh — it venerates Christ in his sacrifice and works to immortalize him within the bellies of his followers. In the end, communion is just an act to express love and complete devotion in the best way humans know how, a thing uniquely filled with both reverence and agony — consumption.
With the infiltration into religion, cannibalism enters art as well, especially the art of hyper-religious eras like the Renaissance. This era, like any other, is filled with expressions of all-encompassing love. With this, the imagery depicted can become that of consumption and cannibalism. These themes are depicted in religious and liturgical paintings, and shown through symbolic means — paintings of realistic cannibalism would have been found to be too disturbing for the various religious councils that monitored art production at the time. Nonetheless, within these representational portrayals, cannibalism appears as a major motif in art during the Renaissance. The many interpretations of The Last Supper exemplify this, the most famous being Da Vinci’s. Other paintings depict communion and the act of pseudo-cannibalism as well, like The Last Communion of Saint Jerome. These portrayals only become more complicated as the era of Mannerism emerges in and begins to push the boundaries of logic and realism in European art.
This mannerist portrayal of consumption can be seen in Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece, which features a sacrificial lamb in the place of Christ. The lamb sits in the middle-most panel, angels are bowing to him as he is sacrificed in front of a cross, with a glowing halo behind him and his pierced skin spurting blood into a wine chalice — all familiar Christ-like imagery. This odd lamb works as a Christ figure within the piece and paints an even odder portrayal of cannibalism. The other figures in the altarpiece are all approaching the lamb and are seemingly congregating to consume his body in sacrifice, if the wine chalice filling with blood is any hint. Similar to other depictions, the figures are to consume Christ through an indirect source — here, bread, wine, and lamb are all alike. The Ghent Altarpiece is convoluted, but it is a portrayal of cannibalism nonetheless, epitomizing the way that devotional and loving consumption often finds its way into art through representational means.
Coming in with a more modern lens, the use of cannibalism has only gained traction. The 2019 book, A Certain Hunger, follows the main character, a food review journalist named Dorothy who is obsessed with love, sex, and food, as she discovers that cannibalizing her lovers combines her interests into a singular disturbed, but satisfying, outlet. She finds that nothing else is as fulfilling as showing her love through consumption and eating the flesh of her lovers. She prepares and eats them with care and reverence, and shows little to no remorse in the act; love manages to bypass all her rationale and morality. However, without love, she finds the act to be completely impotent. It becomes no more just than any other act of violence. Dorothy does not crave violence, she craves love — an entirely greedy and self-fulfilling kind of love, perhaps, but love nonetheless. Thus, she begins to spiral out of control and becomes increasingly paranoid when she kills and eats someone she is decidedly not in love with. The lack of satisfaction she feels after consuming a stranger explains that her acts of cannibalism are purely done out of love — they are an act of overwhelming passion and the need to consume someone to feel connected to them. When done for any reason other than love, her guilt once again resumes. Without the science and logic defying power of love, cannibalism reads as senseless and vile even to the consumer. In this, love becomes the only justification and explanation for the act.
Movies and television have embraced the themes of cannibalism and consumption with open arms, as seen in the show Yellowjackets, in which cannibalism is the focal point. When stranded in the Canadian wilderness, a high school girls soccer team learns to cope through their horrors however they can. They ultimately resort to eating one another — not only to stay alive but in a manifestation of their more carnal teenage feelings, which begin to bubble over in the traumatic and isolated setting of the wilderness. The first depiction of cannibalism occurs when winter begins, as the girls slowly lose hope for their rescue and survival. The first character to commit an act of cannibalism in the show is Shauna — while mourning her best friend (and rumored love interest), Jackie, she spends weeks sitting with and talking to her already deceased friend’s body. When things come to a boiling point, she steals and eats Jackie’s ear. Immediately, she looks relieved, the first signs of calm since Jackie’s death. From this first instance, the girls spiral out of control and dive head-first into acts of cannibalism, exemplified when the entire team feasts on Jackie’s body in a haze of winter-induced starvation. As the captain of their team and the first to be subjected to bodily desecration, Jackie becomes martyred in her sacrifice. The moment she is consumed, Jackie becomes their symbol of hope, an innocence that died for them to survive; her spirit is called on in times of strife, working to connect the team through a collective guilt and a responsibility to her. Their shared consumption becomes an ever-present invisible string between them.
Each act is deeply personal to the team. It is ritualistic, and never done without purpose — each consumption means different things to the girls. Jackie had become Christ, dying on the proverbial cross for them to make it through winter. She is the purity that they cling to as they lose their own. The next, Javi, is not ravaged through starvation, but prepared gently — the last piece of decency and love they can give him. They ‘allow’ his brother to protect Javi’s heart in the only way he still can, by eating it. Being the youngest of them, Javi’s consumption becomes edible innocence — becoming one with him allows them to cling to the childhoods they lost in the crash. Like Jackie, they call on him. He is an ever-present bruise and a stone ever-heavy in their bellies. To eat him was a sacrifice for them as well. When they eat their coach, for the first time, their cannibalism could not be justified by survival or starvation. No longer winter, the act’s purpose couldn’t be framed as anything but emotional. For some girls, it was an act of revenge upon a man they had once loved but had come to resent, their anger best shown in swallowing it — and him. For others, he became a bridge home, a final piece of sanity and protection, consumed out of the need to cling to the safety and reminder of a parent. These practices do not change even as they age and escape the wilderness that once bound them all. Even after returning home, cannibalism becomes the best way for these girls to honor one another – to love one another. Bonded forever through their shared indulgences, it becomes all they know.
Each body had its own purpose and its own everlasting role within the Yellowjackets. The girls’ cannibalism of one another goes well beyond the walls of necessity and survival, taking a plunge into the completely unhinged love of the teenage girl — a love so powerful that it overcomes all logic and all science. Through the act of devouring one another, they can forever love and immortalize each other. It was never about the wilderness, and half the time it wasn’t even about survival. Unrestricted by the bounds of society, the girls found and expressed love in the most raw and authentic way they could.
There is an intrinsic human need to love and to express. The world is overcome with metaphors and symbolism for love, but rarely are they as candidly revolting as depictions of love as consumption. Both cannibalism and love alike show the destruction of all things human — science, the brain, morality — in that they are almost equally bewildering in their affects. Both are the defiling of everything that should be, and in that, they become completely intertwined.
Sources:
The Last Supper, Leonardo Da Vinci
The Last Communion of Saint Jerome, Domenichino
The Ghent Altarpiece, The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, Jan van Eyck
A Certain Hunger, Chelsea G. Summers
Yellowjackets