Battleangel | Personal

So I picked up Ravenous the other day. Trust BitTorrent and P2P to find rare horror gems eh. Quite a decent movie nevertheless with an apt allegory that I thought I’d mention. I mean, being on such friendly terms with the US and everything.

Richard von Busack - The evangelizing head cannibal is a military officer played (unenthusiastically) by Robert Carlyle. His plan harmonizes with Manifest Destiny–God’s own plan for the expansion of the U.S. It’s right for him to be well fed, since “this country is stretching out its arms and consuming all it can.”

The cleverest part of Ravenous is its reference to the U.S.-Mexican War. In flashback, we see how our hero, Capt. Boyd (a sulking Guy Pearce), was subjected to a nasty shock: he was buried alive and accidentally ended up drinking blood.

Those forgetful of history always talk about this country losing its innocence in Vietnam. Yet the Mexican conflict was our first war of aggression against another country, and the intellectuals of the time–Webster, Thoreau and Emerson among them–recognized this aggression and protested.

It’s an interesting idea–a baptism of blood fouling a pure country. Ravenous should have gone further; after all, there are real-life stories of cannibalism in armies. The 1959 Japanese film Fires on the Plain is a classic about cannibalism in the Pacific in World War II; it tells how foot soldiers are selected as meat by their commanding officers. This true-life horror, in which soldiers became not just figurative meat but literal meat, could have been used to give Ravenous some teeth, some guts.

“We just need a home. And this country … is seeking to be whole. Stretching out its arms and consuming all it can. And we merely follow.” Cannibalism is perhaps one of the most appropriate, and novel, metaphors for the American condition I’ve heard in quite some time.