Writer/director Julia Ducournau’s "Raw" is certainly the most disturbing and distasteful film I've seen in a very long time. And, the most brutally honest and thought-provoking. It's both a horror and a coming-of-age story; if "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer" is a feminist parable on the hell of high school (we'll plop the school right on the Hellmouth), this is a feminist parable on the hell of a prestigious college's rush week, on steroids. The cannibalism can be challenging to watch (I had to turn my head in a number of places), but it’s strangely worth sitting through. Ducournau told interviewer Lara Berger that "With 'Raw,' I set myself the challenge of shifting the audience’s moral standards throughout the film. I wanted the audience to feel empathy for a character that is becoming a monster in their eyes. It sounds twisted, but I believe that the building of a moral identity comes with the acknowledgement of tendencies that we qualify as monstrous or evil. I often ask myself, for example, 'What’s the difference between me and someone who kills?' I wanted to disturb the audience in that way. I found inspiration in the myth of Abel and Cain."
She and the young actor Garance Marillier, who plays Justine, do succeed in creating empathy where we might think there could be none. But, the really important point in this statement by the filmmaker, and the crucial thing she succeeds at with “Raw,” is pushing the audience not just to acknowledge the philosophic point that the world is not constructed of an endless series of either/or dualisms, but to viscerally experience it. The point of the extreme and unrelenting corporal images is to force those of us watching—and refusing to faint (like some reportedly did at the Toronto Film Festival) or walk out—to grapple with these blurred boundaries: what is the difference between me (a vegetarian) and someone who kills people to eat their flesh (besides, hopefully, the killing people to eat their flesh part)? The film succeeds at dramatizing the blurred boundaries between a number of classic dualisms our society holds on to—particularly regarding food, conformity, and gender. And, fittingly, the boundaries between them are quite fuzzy as well. What we might expect from a film when we are accustomed to typical boundaries between what is accepted to be food and what is not; between conforming to familial and social norms and rebelling against them; and between “masculine” and “feminine” are all turned on their ears.
From the beginning, Ducournau establishes typical horror film scenarios: a young woman causing a car crash by walking into the street and getting hit, parents dropping their daughter off at veterinary college where her sister (already a student there) is supposed to meet her, but is a no-show; the parents don’t wait. Something is going to happen to this young woman. And, it does. But, not what we might be conditioned to think.
Before too long, Justine moves from being victim of the sadistic “Elders” of the school, enforcing conformity to their cruel—and at the same time ridiculous—hazing rituals, to being the aggressor. As Joss Whedon created Buffy to defy genre conventions that the cute, blonde, teen-aged girl will be done in by the monster or serial killer, Ducournau created Justine to make a feminist statement: young, idealistic women in college may have to put up with a lot of sexist and other kinds of crap, but they don’t have to be devoured and subdued by it. They can become the devourers, the subduers. They can claim and act on their power. And when the mode of claiming is extreme, and we want to recoil from it, Ducournau forces us to confront the question of why this is so shocking, why this cannibalistic behavior is taboo. Isn’t it, after all, just a logical extension of actions that so many in society find acceptable? Aren’t those rigid categories actually just on a continuum we choose not to see?
The veterinary students whom we might expect to have chosen their career goal out of tender, compassionate emotions toward the animals they are learning to care for, instead are dismissive and cruel. At Justine’s first meal with her new classmates, she is derided for her stand on animal rights. Young male students engage in banter about “fucking” monkeys and other non-human animals. They wish to treat these beings as they do human women—through their dismissal, through sex, and through making them the brunt of nasty jokes. So, when Justine turns it around and treats other humans the way most others only treat non-human animals: as food—why is that so different? They force her to eat meat, so she takes it even further and eats MEAT (human meat). Just a point further along the continuum, no?
She is raised a vegetarian and comes to college intending to hold fast to that ideal. Yet, one of her earliest experiences there, after learning her fellow students really don’t care about animals—non-human or human—is to be forced to eat a piece of rabbit kidney. When she calls on her sister, Alexia—also raised vegetarian—for help, she learns that her sister has rejected their family’s diet in order to fit in. The “Elders” tell the “Rookies” at the beginning of the initiation week that since they are likely only there because their parents want them to be, they will now be shown how to break away from those family dictates. They will learn to be non-conformists. This, of course, is bunk, since what the upperclassmen want is for the new students to now conform to THEIR norms. Justine is not to have ideas on animal rights different from theirs; she is not to have ethics regarding food different from theirs. She is to conform to the gender norms they set, dressing as they see appropriate for female students (wearing a cocktail dress to class; she has to borrow one from her sister), pushed into sex with a male student at a party (one of them doused in blue paint, one in yellow, they are shoved out of the party room and told not to re-enter until they are both green. She takes a bite out of him).
The “colors” are bleeding now across the boundary between the themes of conformity and gender, and sensibly so, since gender is one of the constructed aspects of human experience that we are most strongly expected to conform to—and among the norms we are most strongly punished for transgressing. Perhaps at one point in time, this veterinary school was all male, but it’s been co-ed for years; both of Justine and Alexia’s parents were students there when young. Yet, the gendering of veterinarians is still masculine, and the females among the “Elders” are made to conform to it. As they march into the arena early in the film, both male and female upperclassmen are chanting slogans about vets marching while waving their penises high. They are the masculine, sexualized conquerors, using their genitalia as tools of conquest, like so many conquerors before them have. The forced submission of the underclassmen is referred to in sexualized language as well (though I don’t remember the specifics). The “Rookies” are feminized as they go through the initiation; next year, if they survive, they will be the real men, regardless of whether they are male or female. At one point this is illustrated by Alexia and Justine, sitting on a roof drinking and talking. Alexia needs to pee and instructs her younger, rookie sister how to do so like a man: drop your pants, thrust your pelvis forward, and lean back so the stream goes away from you, over the edge of the roof. Justine doesn’t want to, but agrees to try. She fails at being the masculinized upper-classman, wetting her clothes and falling. She can’t conform to what her sister and fellow students want; yet, she also refuses to conform to traditional feminine norms .
When Alexia pushes Justine into her first Brazilian bikini wax, she fights back, terming the ripping pain she feels “torture.” “Beauty is pain,” Alexia tells her. Women all over succumb to this form of pain to rip away part of their bodies, modifying them in the name of beauty. Isn’t the decidedly unfeminine act of taking a bite out of people’s flesh just further along the continuum of such torture and forcefully ripping away a part of the body?
Justine is not the only character who can’t conform to the gender norms of the school and the society. Her roommate, Adrien, a gay man, lives in the blurred boundary between strict gender poles, too. At first, Justine is upset to meet him, as she’d asked for a female student to live with. “They gave you a fag,” Adrien tells her. “It’s the same thing to them.” They become friends, a refuge for each other, but also pull and push each other into places they don’t really want to go. I’m not going to offer spoilers, but the ending, both literally and symbolically, presents a strong message on gender conformity (or lack of it) at multiple levels. For all of the film’s barbarity, this and other messages are highly affirming of our personhood. As Ducournau articulates one of them to Lara Berger:
"I think I want people to feel important and meaningful. In French, the title of my movie is ‘Grave.’ Among many other reasons, I called it that because I realized that, when they confide in someone, people — friends, family, colleagues, me — tend to wrap up their story by saying, ‘Mais c’est pas grave,’ meaning, ‘But it doesn’t matter.’ They say this in order to alleviate the weight of their words. But it does matter. The humanity in each one of us matters, however flawed and sometimes inhuman. I want people to feel responsible for their humanity in the end, because freedom comes at the price of responsibility, I think. Boy, what a bummer!"
As I left the theater, I, too felt that the film was such a “bummer.” But, the wonder of this work is that, with discussion and reflection, this seemingly barbaric film is supremely full of affirmations for humanity. If we’re willing to take that look at ourselves and at society’s assumptions.
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