Hello World!

For this blog post, I’d like to extrapolate a little bit on the distinctions made between cannibalism and parasitism in Crystal Bartolovich’s article “Consumerism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism.” First off, I think that it is a particularly productive distinction to make when we see these two terms operating in Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. Although I personally enjoyed the film very much, I agree with Bartolovich that there is a certain hypocrisy involved in the rift between the form and content of film, especially in relation to taste. As John Berger has famously argued in his book/BBC Television Series Ways of Seeing, the tradition of oil painting (concurrent with the early modern tradition of colonialism that Bartolovich describes) rendered objects in such a way that made them seem substantial, tangible, and ownable. Consider the above oil painting from Ch. 5 of his book, in which we get a pretty clear picture of what (or who) constituted a desirable object in this period:

In The Cook…, Greenaway approximates his visual design and camera movement to be very much in the style of this sort of oil painting – for instance, there is a definite, oil painting-like orientation to many of his horizontal tracking shots. However, while the viewer is invited to take pleasure in consuming the sensuousness of the sets, costumes, and props, the central allegory of cannibalism is still tied to excessive consumption. Thus, despite his critique of consumerism on the level of allegory, I find it interesting that Greenaway still subscribes to the deeply traditional notion that the sublime experience of encountering refined, works of high art somehow exists in a sphere outside consumption – even though original works are among the most valuable objects in the world. As Bartolovich points out, if the titular “thief” of the film truly is a cannibal because of his propensity to excessive consumption, than he is representative of a particular brand of mass, popular consumption which is distinct from the refined, civilized consumption of characters like Georgina, Michael, and the chef. When Bartolovich points out how western societies have historically constructed those subtle modulations between the excessive and savage consumption of the cannibal and the more refined, limited consumption of the parasite, I think she is pointing to the anxiety westerners have felt in seeing continuities between themselves and the “primitive” other.

On that note, I couldn’t help but remember an interesting passage from bell hooks’ “Eating the Other” which explicitly quotes the film. In one of the last scenes in the film, after Michael has been brutally slaughtered by Albert, Georgina has a conversation with a black chef about why black foods are so expensive. The chef responds that black foods are so desired because they remind the people who eat them of death, and to eat death is to conquer it through consumption, to assert one’s power. Perhaps it is on this level of refined, modern consumption that we get the clearest picture of its sinister undercurrent: how it exerts a relation of power similar to that of cannibalism and how it holds a desire to be excessive like it, but how it is also able to disavow that relationship under the banner of civilized taste and progress.