If you haven’t seen this in the New York Times already, it is quite the sign of the times:
An image came to Chelsea G. Summers: a boyfriend, accidentally on purpose hit by a car, some quick work with a corkscrew and his liver served Tuscan style, on toast.
That figment of her twisted imagination is what prompted Ms. Summers to write her novel, “A Certain Hunger,” about a restaurant critic with a taste for (male) human flesh.
Turns out, cannibalism has a time and a place. In the pages of some recent stomach-churning books, and on television and film screens, Ms. Summers and others suggest that that time is now.
There is “Yellowjackets,” a Showtime series about a high school women’s soccer team stranded in the woods for a few months too many, which premiered in November. The film “Fresh,” released on Hulu in March, involves an underground human meat trade for the rich.
“Lapvona,” Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel published in June, portrays cannibalism in a medieval village overcome by plague and drought. Agustina Bazterrica’s book “Tender Is the Flesh,” released in English in 2020 and in Spanish in 2017, imagines a future society that farms humans like cattle. Also out in 2017, “Raw,” a film by the director and screenwriter Julia Ducournau, tells the story of a vegetarian veterinary student whose taste for meat escalates after consuming raw offal.
Still to come is “Bones and All,” starring Timothée Chalamet. The movie, about a young love that becomes a lust for human consumption, is expected to be released later this year or early next. Its director, Luca Guadagnino, has called the story “extremely romantic.”
Later on:
“I think we’re often drawn to the things that repulse us the most,” Ms. Lyle, 42, said. Mr. Nickerson, 43, chimed in: “But I keep coming back to this idea of, what portion of our revulsion to these things is a fear of the ecstasy of them?”
I’m sorry to be a broken record, but after 49 years of pitting a mother against her child, why would we have limits? We’re living at a time when people would rather get sterilized than consider having sex with someone they have a commitment to (and has made a commitment to them), and public-health officials can’t get themselves to suggest that not having anonymous homosexual sex with multiple partners would be good in helping to prevent the spread of monkeypox. So, hey, why don’t we throw in some cannibalism, because if you can think of it, you might as well go for it.
The conclusion of the Times piece:
As to what may be fueling the desire for cannibalism stories today, Ms. Lyle, the “Yellowjackets” co-creator, said, “I think that we’re obviously in a very strange moment.” She listed the pandemic, climate change, school shootings and years of political cacophony as possible factors.
“I feel like the unthinkable has become the thinkable,” Ms. Lyle said, “and cannibalism is very much squarely in that category of the unthinkable.”
(Is there a limit on how many things climate change can be blamed on?)
The unthinkable is not only thinkable, but the new 50 Shades of Grey?