Month: August 2023

“Cannibal chocolates”: CONSUMING PASSIONS (Giles Foster, 1988)

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Consuming Passions is a black-comedy film directed by Giles Foster (Hotel du Lac). The film is based on the stage play Secrets by two of the Monty Python greats, Michael Palin and Terry Jones, which was filmed and shown on the BBC in 1973.

This is what I call entrepreneurial cannibalism, with a subgroup of accidental or fortuitous circumstances. A chocolate factory is preparing to launch a new luxury range, Passionelles. However, during production, the new management trainee causes three of the workers to fall into the giant vat of chocolate, where their flesh is mixed into the first batch.

The horrified boss tries to recall the chocolates, but they have already gone on sale. They prove a huge hit with the public. Market feedback says:

“Pleasantly nutty
subtle and delicious
addictive, compulsive
tasted full of goodness…”

They try to replicate the taste with meat from other animals, including a horrific scene where the guileless protagonist, Ian, orders a mountain of meat from the local butcher, including:

“three young porkers, with heads, ears and trotters”

But this bombs – only human flesh will give the chocolate that something special. As the secretary of the company (played by the wonderful Prunella Scales) says:

“People don’t want to eat chocolates with cows and pigs in them. People want to eat chocolates with people in them.”

They contemplate various ways to obtain dead bodies to use in their chocolate, including murder and/or chucking unemployed people in the vat. The new boss, played by the wonderful actor Jonathan Pryce (Brazil, The Two Popes, and many more) states the ultimate in neolib rationalisation:

“Think of all those millions and millions of unemployed school-leavers, yeah? A tragic, tragic situation. But we can give them a chance to do their bit for society yeah… think how it will shorten the dole queues.”

This seems to be based on Jonathan Swift’s 1729 pamphlet A Modest Proposal, in which he satirically suggested that the Irish, who were already being devoured economically by the landlords, should now sell the oppressors their children to make “a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome Food; whether Stewed, Roasted, Baked or Boiled.”

In fact, the whole film is a commentary on the neoliberal ideologies that were dominating political policy at the time under Reagan and Thatcher. This toxic reasoning, which is still rampant, aspired to free up corporations while crippling any resistance from workers. Profit became the only determinant of policy – here the new owner of the company rejects the idea of putting real chocolate in the product, preferring artificial flavours and colours. When the market demands human bodies, that’s what they must have. Ian has to trawl morgues, hospitals, funeral parlours and medical schools. When his girlfriend, the quality control chemist, discovers there is human flesh in the chocolates, he assumes she will leave him, but she tells him,

“doesn’t hurt them if they’re dead. They’d probably be glad to know they’re being useful, like!”

By the end of the film, Ian is chocolate man of the year, knighted by the Queen, and made chairman of the company. He is no longer disgusted by cannibalism, but in fact is appraising everyone he meets, including his fiancée, for their weight, fat content and likely edibility. In an extreme example of what Marx called commodity fetishism, we have all become comestible commodities. Nancy Fraser writes and speaks convincingly about the way Cannibal Capitalism systematically destroys and consumes the sectors of society on which its own survival depends. In order to sell more commodities to the public, corporations will consume any resource, including the air we breathe, and our bodies too.

The Danes used a similar plot device later with The Green Butchers, starring Mads Mikkelsen (yep, it’s Hannibal, but not as we know him) as a butcher who accidentally locks the electrician in the freezer overnight and finds his customers love the resulting offcuts. The French tried it more recently with Some Like it Rare, in which a couple who own a butcher store accidentally run over and kill a vegan who has been protesting against their store for selling the flesh of animals. They too find their customers love human flesh, but only if it is uncontaminated by eating the meat of other animals – they only kill and cook vegans, a consummation (or consumption) of which Annie Potts and Jovian Parry have found, on social media, many carnists dream.

Talking about human body parts in chocolates, do you remember choc fingers? I used to scoff them down as a child. I was somewhat surprised to see they were still available, and were subject of a scandal in the UK in 2015 – Cadbury had reduced the size of the packet by two biscuits!

The headline is somewhat unfortunate, and that’s not what this movie is about. But I’d forgotten their very existence, until a recent ‘news’ report that a Sri Lankan woman bit into a chocolate and found the inside rather hard. Thinking it was a ‘fruit and nut’ variety, she persevered, but when the nut still did not crack she decided to check it out by holding the piece of chocolate under tap water. 

In case her tweet has been removed, here is the photo:

It was a bit of a finger, and it reminded me of this long-forgotten (perhaps deservedly) movie. That news, story, like the film, reminds us that, like the ouroboros, our society is busy eating its own tail, it’s workers.

For me, the only really repulsive bit was the dead piglets being dropped into the vat. I’m going to assume they were very realistic models, perhaps made of marzipan, but I’m aware that in a world that kills 1.3 billion pigs a year, buying real corpses would be a lot cheaper for a low-budget movie.

Consuming Passions received a 20% rotten rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s a nice idea, but they play it as farce, hanging the comedy on the assumption that we will all be so disgusted by the thought of eating human flesh that we will ignore the often silly dialogue and the occasionally appalling acting, particularly Vanessa Redgrave who, totally unnecessarily, flounces through the film proclaiming herself a “loose woman” and butchering a Maltese accent.

But there are some interesting ideas about masculinist theories of meat-eating, with one woman saying she was going to buy those chocs for her husband to “put the lead back in his pencil”. The idea that men somehow need meat for virility is a basic plank of meat marketing, despite the clear links to heart disease, colon cancer, environmental crises, and of course appalling animal cruelty. And the film’s basic principle, that we are all edible in our consumerist culture, is apposite and well argued, as more and more bodies are sucked into that vat of delicious brown ooze.

“Just Darwin and shit”: THE HORROR OF DELORES ROACH episodes 2&3

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I’m spreading this out, one or two episodes at a time rather than binge-watching the whole eight, because I want to savour them, also because that would be like watching a four-hour movie, which I usually only do if Peter Jackson is involved. And I’m trying to finish my thesis, so no four-hour movies for this old student!

If you haven’t read my blog on the first episode, you might want to do that first, as it makes more sense if you know that Delores has just been released from prison after 16 years. Just click here.

Delores is living in the basement of an empanada shop run by Luis, but he is a dreamer, and is quickly going broke. The whole neighbourhood has been gentrified, and people don’t buy empanadas like they used to. Luis keeps inventing new flavours, but none have caught on.

Episode 2 is the setup for the cannibalism to come in episode 3. We know it’s coming, but Delores doesn’t.

Luis is feuding with his landlord, Gideon Pearlman, played by the wonderful comedian Marc Maron (the cranky entrepreneur from the TV show GLOW). Delores plays peacemaker, takes him downstairs and gives him all her money, which turns out to be negligible amount, due to the massive gentrification that has happened in Washington Heights in the last sixteen years while she was in the pokey. He sees her massage table and she offers him her “magic hands”, which of course he misinterprets as an offer of a hand-job. But Delores has learnt self-defence in jail.

“Got to break the C2 or C1 to kill somebody”

Which she does. Not knowing what to do with the body, she runs to the shop and buys spades, saws, gaffer tape and, to be inconspicuous, a whole load of birthday balloons. It really is a dark comedy!

When she comes back, she finds Nellie, who works in the empanada shop, giving away samples of the new taste sensation, MUY LOCO. What’s in it?

Yeah, it’s not pork, it’s long pig, and when she confronts Luis, he tells her he “took care of it”.

Luis is suddenly a huge business success. Everyone loves Muy Loco, including the local cops. And he wants to give Delores the credit, whereas all she wants to do is barf.

“But you, my Delores, you just changed the game for me. You have led me to a pantheon that very few of us who are called to this art are ever privileged enough to touch.
So now, that greedy son of a bitch will get chewed up, shat out and flushed down the toilet.”

The other reason I didn’t want to go past episode three is that Luis and Delores engage in a fundamental philosophical discussion that is key to Cannibal Studies, which we might summarise as “meat is meat”. When Delores refuses to taste Muy Loco because “it’s human fucking flesh in an empanada!”, Luis responds:

“Delores. Meat is meat. Flesh is flesh. The only reason that we eat a pig, or a cow or a lamb, like whatever, is because we are more powerful than them. So we get to feed off them. That’s how we survive, because we are carnivores. That’s just like Darwin and shit, man”

We’re actually not carnivores – that name is reserved for the true predators – tigers, sharks, that sort of animal. We are scavengers, like anchovies, or pigs.

We’re treated to lots of close-ups of meat being chopped, meat being cooked, meat being gobbled up. Viewers may at this point be consoling themselves by saying “it’s not human”, but it’s red meat, it’s from some mammal, and what difference does it make which species?

Luis has taken care of the body, removed the evidence, and become a successful business owner, all with one radical idea. The only problem is,

MIRACLE MEAT (yes, it’s baby cannibalism)

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Gregg Wallace is arousing the fury of the Internet for hosting a show in which human meat is grown for human consumption. Yes, engineered cannibalism.

If you haven’t heard of Gregg Wallace (I plead guilty), he is a host of the UK version of MasterChef, a reality show where people have to cook flesh in a way that – I don’t really know, I don’t watch it.

This show is called The British Miracle Meat, and is quite obviously a satirical documentary, set in a factory which purportedly manufactures ‘engineered human meat’.

Following its debut, 408 people complained to the broadcasting regulator. The majority of complainants objected to the theme being the consumption of human meat. Which is, IMHO, pretty rich coming from people who tuned in to a show about meat.

It seems to have been inspired by a work written in 1729 by Jonathan Swift (the author of Gulliver’s Travels), which was called:

A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick

Swift suggested that the Irish could be relieved of their destitute states by selling their children to the Landlords who “have already devoured most of the parents”:

A young healthy Child, well nursed, is at a Year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome Food; whether Stewed, Roasted, Baked or Boiled; and I make no doubt, that it will equally serve in a Fricasie, or Ragout

Since the British Empire was sucking the Irish populace dry and leaving them to starve, why not eat them as well? Satire has remained a popular form of political action ever since, and is used extensively, particularly in American politics (watch any late-night show).

Wallace is shown visiting a heavily guarded processing plant in Lincolnshire, which houses a production line and clinical facilities. He is told that, for the last eight months, they have been producing meat made from human cells. Line manager Mick Ross explains that it is a relatively new process. “Under EU law we couldn’t possibly operate machines like this.”

We see little shavings of flesh hanging in a nutrient-rich vat and quickly developing into huge slabs of meat. Wallace interviews ‘donors’ who sell their flesh to fictional firm ‘Good Harvest’ as a solution for cash-strapped families. One 67-year-old retired receptionist said she had agreed to have flesh taken from her buttock and thigh in order to fund two weeks’ energy bills. The flesh is then shown growing in labs into larger slabs of meat – which can be used to make steaks, burgers and sausages.

These can yield up to one hundred steaks, which— according to taste tests carried out with men and women in the street by co-presenter Michelle Ackerley—are remarkably fine substitutes for beef, and at a fraction of the price. Is this the answer to the cost of living crisis?

“Why human meat, why not animal meat?” asks Wallace, and Ross explains that we know more about humans, we have centuries of medical and scientific knowledge, so can more easily manipulate it.

Good Harvest’s chief executive revealed the firm’s premium range comes from the flesh of children aged six and below – with a promotional video which billed the womb as ‘nature’s oven’. Well, we already know from watching Snowpiercer that babies taste best. And Gregg – let’s try to remember that humans ARE animals, yes?

But apparently many of the British viewing public did not get Gregg Wallace’s joke. The show gave no warning ahead or during the broadcast to indicate that it was fictional. That was supposed to be, in British parlance, bleedin’ obvious. Interviewed after the show aired, Wallace said:

It’s satire – so I suppose that was the point. Everybody was an actor. I was acting. None of it was real… While it was a complete fantasy, we wanted to raise important questions about the nation’s relationship with food and what those struggling with the cost of living are being asked to do in order to stay afloat.

A Channel 4 spokesman said:

This “mockumentary” is a witty yet thought-provoking commentary on the extreme measures many people are being forced to take to stay afloat in our society during the cost-of-living crisis. Channel 4 has a long and rich history of satire and has often used humour as an accessible way to highlight society’s most important issues.

The problem was, it was not clear what the point was. Lab meat can be grown from any animal cell. Find a readable chain of DNA and it may be possible to try whale, dodo or dinosaur flesh. Of course, the easiest cells to source are human ones – we routinely hand them to pathologists and crime scene investigators. When clean meat becomes commercially viable, there is no reason (other than administrative) to assume we could not grow human steaks, livers or sweetbreads. The eating of lab-grown flesh from celebrities is the starting point of the film Antiviral. Eating human meat grown in a lab would technically be cannibalism, but it would not, as with traditional cannibalism, involve cruelty, murder or despoiling of corpses.

The show concentrates on the cost of living crisis, and clearly cheaper food prices would help. Would people sell their own flesh, and would other people eat steaks grown from it? A better point might have been to point out that humans currently breed and slaughter some eighty billion (that’s 80,000,000,000) land animals every year to eat their flesh, not counting sea animals, whose numbers can only be estimated but might be about three trillion. Although most people prefer not to see the appalling conditions of the factory farms or the brutal deaths in the abattoirs, they tune in by the millions to watch cooking shows like MasterChef which treat the consumption of this flesh as unremarkable, and often the butt of crude humour.

So why not add one more animal to the conveyor belt?

As Herbert M. Shelton said in his book Superior Nutrition:

The cannibal goes out and hunts, pursues and kills another man and proceeds to cook and eat him precisely as he would any other game. There is not a single argument nor a single fact that can be offered in favor of flesh eating that cannot be offered with equal strength, in favor of cannibalism.

I wonder if Jonathan Swift would have recognised the plagiarism of his book? His brand of satire is usually called “Menippean” and is characterised by attacking mental attitudes and beliefs.

The joke is not that Wallace pretended to visit a factory that pretended to pay willing donors for flesh. The real belly laugh is that over 400 people complained about that, while probably tucking in to the corpse of an animal who really did not want to die.

Deep tissue cannibalism: THE HORROR OF DELORES ROACH Episode 1 (Aaron Mark, 2023)

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibals on TV7 Comments

This is not only a fabulous story, but possesses a proud heritage in the field of Cannibal Studies, and is not afraid to flaunt it. Delores Roach is a young woman in a basement in Washington Heights Manhattan, who gives massages for a living, occasionally killing her clients and delivering their bodies to Luis, who runs the struggling empanada store above, to use as meat. Yes, it is unapologetically the offspring of the legend of Sweeney Todd, the “Demon Barber of Fleet Street”, who killed his customers instead of shaving them and then dropped them through a trapdoor to his colleague and perhaps lover, Mrs Lovett, who turned them into delicious meat pies. There is some controversy over whether or not Sweeney was a real person who was publicly hanged outside Newgate Prison in 1802 or just an urban legend of early capitalism. In any case, Sweeney appeared in a number of movies; in 1936 he was just plumb crazy, while in 2007 Tim Burton made him an honest man wronged by a corrupt power establishment. Burton’s film is based on a Sondheim musical that played interminably on Broadway and around the world.

In this version, Delores (Justina Machado) turns everything upside down; it’s Sweeney through the looking glass. We’re in New York instead of London, with a female serial killer instead of a male, and a male pastry chef instead of a female. Delores is downstairs killing people for Luis who is upstairs cooking them, again turning the Sweeney legend upside down. Like Sweeney, at least in the Tim Burton musical version of the story, Delores has returned from a long and unjust term of incarceration.

She finds her shabby neighbourhood, Washington Heights, gentrified after 16 years in the slammer, to the extent that she doesn’t even recognize any of the shops. A lot of the reviews seem to focus on gentrification as the main crime in this story.

Except for her favourite fast food store, Empanada Loca, run by Luis (Alejandro Hernandez), the son of the man who used to make the empanadas. He has a soft spot for Delores, who used to pay him in cash and spliffs when he delivered her lunches. Luis offers her accommodation, for old time’s sake, and maybe the odd massage.

There are plenty of stories based on butchers serving human meat to unwitting customers, turning them into innocent cannibals. Among them are Hitchcock’s Speciality of the House, Mielche’s The Butchers, Yau’s The Untold Story, Jensen’s The Green Butchers, Stjernswärd’s The Farm and Eboué’s Some Like it Rare. And of course our old friend Hannibal, who tells his guests “Nothing here is vegetarian”.

Burton’s Sweeney Todd was based on a Broadway musical, but Delores is a generation later, and so now her Broadway show is based on a more contemporary form of popular culture, the TRUE CRIME podcast.

Of course, it’s not true, but in the postmodern age, a true crime podcast needs a true crime, which is also confected for our narrative pleasure.

The podcast becomes a Broadway play, with the actor Jessica Pimentel (Orange is the New Black) playing Flora who is playing Delores in the play (stay with me here). Her performance is a triumph; in her final soliloquy she is covered in blood and holding a human heart.

The performance of the play, and the episode we are watching, both end with a song: Stanley Holloway’s “Sweeney Todd the Barber”:

“Sweeney Todd the barber,
by gob he were better than the play
Sweeney Todd the barber,
I’ll polish them off he used to say
and many’s  the poor young orphan lad
had the first square meal he ever had
a hot meat pie made out of his dad
from Sweeney Todd the barber”

For those of us who have been waiting for this series, or those who just saw the advance publicity, we are now in the omniscient position of knowing what is going to happen. We have seen the newspaper headline of the “real” murder and the review of the “real” true crime podcast, and seen the full house audience cheering the performance. In case we aren’t sure, a couple of friends pour drinks in Flora’s dressing room, chatting about the play and its reflection in the “real” world.

“…the café in Taipei serving human flesh dumplings?”
“Yes, yes, yes, yes and the human bone marrow in that bistro in Paris!”

Then the “real” Delores appears in the dressing room after the friends leave. No, not to murder Flora for impersonating her, but to tell her the true story.

“I’m gonna tell you shit you could never un-know.”

So now, we have a dramatisation of a fake true crime podcast about an actual crime that doesn’t exist, and the dramatisation is being applauded for creating a wave of actual cannibalism events (that also didn’t happen). They concern a female serial killer who is based on a male serial killer who also probably didn’t exist. An actor playing the (unreal) serial killer is telling her story to the actor playing the actor who is playing that serial killer. It plays (sorry) with the mind.

So does cannibalism. Except for a few rare cases where the cannibal is prepared to admit all his or her activities, such as Albert Fish, Jeffrey Dahmer and Issei Sagawa (who laid out the whole project in a manga), cannibalism narratives are very difficult to nail down. Some like Ottis Toole over-confess, leading to speculation that they are making it all up, helped by police who want to clear the cold case log. Others deny everything. And some just disappear and are never found, like Jack the Ripper. Cases of cannibalism are so sensationalised that the reports of the popular press are dubious in their accuracy.

But what we do know is that cannibalism is real, and is one of the primal drives among every type of animal from comb jellies to humans. Freud and Abrahams called the first six months of an infant’s life “the cannibalistic stage”. We all have a cannibal inside; it just comes out more readily for some people than others.

The series is a Blumhouse production on Prime Video and is so good that I am spreading this blog over all the episodes. Among the many great names to appear in future will be Cyndi Lauper as a detective.

Cannibals just wanna have fun.