"Film Fatales."... 3BACK | HOME | NEXT4

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If the 1950's have come to represent man's desire to tame nature, domesticate women, and sterilize living environments (with inventions ranging from pesticides to household appliances), then Mary Beth Hurt, as Lily Laemle, is the perfect satirical cannibal in the 1989 movie Parents: a black comedy in which a boy's parents kill and cannibalize people in their community, behind a façade of 1950's smiles. Even though both parents are co-conspirators in the killings, it is the mother who cooks and serves the delicacies, with all the flair of a perfect housewife. The son, who is actually the main character, only subconsciously understands what is happening as he is plagued by vivid dreams of blood, as if the act of ingestion transforms the human flesh into subconscious awareness. This awareness becomes a commentary on the American family and the marketing machinery that sells images of it.

In some ways, Lily is Hannibal Lecter's female counterpart, showing us a sterilized/cooked culture. While the flawlessly polite Hannibal is all but hermetically sealed in a glass cell and fantasizes about human organs, cheerful Lily appears sealed in her 1950's home cooking up something that looks like meatloaf. While Hannibal is showcased as an aberrant beast, however, Lily is putting on a show as the perfect mother and wife, clearly satirizing traditional roles of both, and pointing to the secret discontent they can breed. Visceral desire, strikingly out of place in this setting, manifests in the consumption of flesh, which is relished as natural, pleasurable, and wholesome. Overall, the humor and satirical distance in the movie allow us to see the mother character as a social commentator, rather than merely a spectacle of gore.


Anne Rice's work, in contrast to Parents, depicts dysfunctional family structure in a cannibalistic environment that is anything but sanitized or cooked. In the 1994 movie Interview With the Vampire (based on Rice's novel by the same title, 1976), vampire characters are doomed by virtue of the patriarchal order that Lestat (played by Tom Cruise) represents as their original "maker" and ruler of the household. In this environment, the child vampire Claudia becomes a reminder of normal developmental needs that cannot be met, and emotional desires that cannot be experienced in a healthy way. She is the insatiable child who can never grow up or change and has an endless appetite for attention and food (in this case the human blood that she suckles on as readily as a baby would suckle a mother's breast). As in the movie Parents, the relationship dynamics in Interview with the Vampire remind us of the workings of dysfunctional families, but this time the female figures represent both the internalization of and rebellion against patriarchal order, with Lestat as the controlling father; Claudia as the delinquent daughter (emotionally stunted, deceptive and needy); and Louis as the nurturer who attempts to fulfill all roles for her (as brother, father, mother, lover). "Normal" relationships lie outside the boundaries of the vampire world, as death and desire become one. So Louis' desire to be a father and Claudia's desire to have a mother require blood sacrifice and are never fully successful. Meanwhile, the crossing of role boundaries, and the parallel crossing of flesh boundaries, are on one hand necessary for vampire survival and on the other hand impossible to live with. In this case, the patriarchal order can never completely be transcended (it is written in blood, in the physical body), and to challenge it is to challenge one's own flesh, or even to starve. Yet, Claudia does challenge and transcends Lastadt's order, first by seducing him to feed on a corpse (an apparently fatal violation of "normal" vampire biology) and then by "making" her own "mother," bringing home and sucking the blood of a willing victim who has lost her own child and longs to be Claudia's mother. In this act, Claudia becomes creator and innovator, meeting her own needs with an emotional alliance that she forges in blood, yet consummates in emotional bonding.

Obese characters add physical weight to cannibalistic themes, both supporting and breaking with traditions of woman as destructive devourer. In the 1993 movie What's Eating Gilbert Grape? the answer is: everyone in Gilbert's family, but especially his obese mother and the guilt she instills in him about taking care of his family when she cannot.

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