Ravenous (1999)

This is an interesting little film--one I had never heard of before. It's got a lot of name-brand actors in it (Guy Pearce, pre-Memento but post-L.A. Confidential; Robert Carlyle, post-Trainspotting; Jeremy Davies, post-Saving Private Ryan; John Spencer; Neal McDonough; David Arquette), but it remains relatively unknown almost a decade later. It uses the Native American belief of the wendigo (which itself drove a terrible horror movie of the same name in 2001) arising from cannibalism.

It's interesting how the dualities play into this film. Cpt. Boyd (Pearce) ate some of his fellow soldiers in order to survive the aftermath of a battle...an animalistic act that compounded his cowardice in pretending to be dead in order to survive. Then he runs into Colqhoun/Ives who is a practicing cannibal and revels in it. What we get is Boyd confronting the Uncanny Other that is his own Id--no accident that Ives and Boyd head butt each other repeatedly in the final fight scene and then end up trapped against one another in the bear trap! (This motif also shows up in lots of other movies--the Blade and Star Wars series come to mind.) The really interesting twist, however, is that the military--what one would expect to represent the Superego or Ego--is not only complicit in the Id-drive cannibalism (Major Knox and Gen. Slauson protect Ives) but it is directly involved in it (Col. Ives, Col. Hart, Cpt. Boyd, and eventually Gen. Slauson are all cannibals)!

I'm not sure what this says--or means to say--about this struggle between Self and Other. I mean when a Col. screams "All you have to do is kill! You have to kill to live!" right after lamenting the loss of his Aristotle and Plato, you know something is bad wrong. But what is it that is wrong? The Id wants you to feed on others and grow strong, and it wants you to do this at the expense of the social structure--which, of course, is what the Ego is so concerned with preserving. So why is it that this is so closely tied to the military? Why is the military--the most structured aspect of that frontier society--the context in which the Id blossoms? Is it meant to be even more ironic? If so, then why does the Ego win out in the end? Why doesn't Boyd eat Ives? Or does the Ego win? Gen. Slauson is obviously going to become a cannibal.

It's not every movie that leaves you with more questions than answers, but this one has. Perhaps this movie will demand another posting. (I'm working on the Cloverfield follow-up, but I'm also doing some research into Alien and Aliens and Zizek, so it may take awhile.)