This is such a great show. I was going to blog a couple of episodes at a time, but there is so much content in the short episodes that I had to do this one, the fourth, in splendid isolation. Also, I’m uploading it on father’s day (in Australia and probably some other places), and having a character eat some of his father just seems so pertinent!

If you haven’t read my blogs on the first episodes, you might want to do that first. In a nutshell, in episode 1, Delores has just been released from prison after 16 years. She heads back to Washington Heights NY but it’s all gentrified now, except for the Empanada Loca shop of her old friend Luis, who offers her a room and sets her up as a masseuse, a skill she learnt in jail.

In episodes 2 and 3, Delores kills the landlord who has been harassing Luis for his overdue rent, which he can’t afford because the neighbourhood is now fancy, and people don’t buy empanadas much. Luis creates a new empanada, MUY LOCO. It is hugely successful, like the chocolates in last week’s blog, because it contains, yep, human flesh, in this case, the landlord. Whose son, Jonah, appears in the shop at the end of episode 3, with two cops behind him.

All caught up, and now we’re at episode 4. It turns out Jonah does not know his dad is missing, and the cops are just waiting for their empanadas. But Delores does not want to go back to jail, having just got out after sixteen years, so you might think that finding Luis destroying (or actually cooking and selling) the evidence should be good news, but (call her old fashioned) she is horrified by the idea of cannibalism (although, funnily, not so much the murder she committed) and disgusted by the secret contents of the muy loco empanadas.

This dissonance between getting rid of the evidence of her rather serious crime and disgust at the fact that the evidence is being fed to an enthusiastic clientele is aggravated when Luis offers Jonah an empanada to try, a muy loco, reminding us of the lyrics of the old Stanley Holloway song about Sweeney Todd, on whom this story is based:

“For many a poor orphan lad
The first square meal he ever had
Was a hot meat pie made out of his dad
From Sweeney Todd the Barber”

Luis tells Jonah “the meat’s locally sourced” which is particularly true for him. Jonah loves the taste, asks if the meat is duck.

No, it’s no duck. We hear Delores’ thoughts:

Furious at Luis for feeding the landlord to his son, Delores takes the rest of the meat and sets fire to it, putting the muy loco off the menu. Luis is furious, and cannot see what the problem is, and then comes one of the great double entendres of the cannibal genre –

Luis barks at her:

“Hey, it’s edible! Like the Greek myth.”

Now we’re getting to the meat of the cannibalism debate!

Quick refresher: Oedipus was a mythological figure depicted in the play Oedipus Rex written by Sophocles some 2500 years ago. Oedipus became king of Thebes after unwittingly fulfilling a prophecy that he would kill his father, Laius (the previous king), and marry his mother, Jocasta (whom Oedipus took as his queen). It was more a case of mistaken identity and road rage than some deep psychosexual drive, but Sigmund Freud used it as the basis of what he called the Oedipus complex. This referred to a child’s sexual desire for the opposite-sex parent and hatred for the same-sex parent which, if not reconciled, leads to neurosis. Freud wrote that,

“It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that this is so.”

Oedipus didn’t eat his father, but Freud believed that cannibalism is a foundation of the human unconscious. He asserted that cannibalism is one of the two original prohibitions of humankind, the other being incest. Freud’s conception was that the origin of human civilisation was an act of incestuous patricide and cannibalism by a group of pre-sapien savages, which became the origin of cooperative civilisation. In Totem and Taboo, he speculated that a prehuman group of brothers in a “primal horde” had come to resent their father’s monopolisation of the tribe’s females (common among primates) and conspired to kill the father and take their mothers and sisters for themselves. “Cannibal savages as they were, it goes without saying that they devoured their victim as well”. A later wave of remorse led these conspirators to create “out of their filial sense of guilt the two fundamental taboos of totemism”, the proscription of cannibalism and incest. This father/son guilt, he argued, corresponds with the Oedipus complex, which he called “the nuclear complex of the neuroses”.

So Jonah, like Oedipus has unwittingly eaten human flesh, the flesh of his father, not knowing what it was. If Luis had said it was duck, he would have believed him, and accepted that contentedly, because social conventions say we can eat ducks, but not dads. Yet the taste is so close that he couldn’t tell the difference. And since his dad was already dead, was this worse than deliberately killing a living, sentient duck?

Meanwhile, the local drug dealer, Marcie, accuses Delores of selling drugs and stealing her customers, because of the long queues of people waiting for muy loco empanadas. Delores tries to persuade her she is running a massage business and takes her downstairs for a massage, where Marcie starts to vandalise her room looking for drugs, and mocks her for protecting her old boyfriend, revealing that he cheated on her and eventually turned her in to the DEA to save his own hide. They fight, and Marcie becomes the new supply for the next batch of muy locos.

Delores is determined to find the cheating boyfriend. When she does, she promises,