By Lilah Craig, Rowan Killina, Grace Sawyer, and Leela Smelser
Bones and All is a 2022 cross-country road trip starring Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet and directed by Luca Guadagnino, whose other work includes Call Me by Your Name and Challengers. This movie is a violent and romantic journey across America in 1998 following Maren and Lee, two cannibals, or ‘eaters,’ driven by hunger, their fear of being discovered, and their desire to understand who they are. Bones and All examines the relationship between cannibalism and queerness and how marginalization and the road are linked, lending itself to comparison to other queer road trip films such as My Own Private Idaho.
In this film, cannibalism is correlated with the idea of queerness. However, it is not a one-to-one analogy. Rather, the idea of cannibalism – something (most) people believe is violent and wrong – is a metaphor for the othering of queer people (and people with additional marginalized identities) as outcasts. In other words, cannibalism in Bones and All is not a simile for queerness, but it could be viewed as one tool the film uses to expose the world in which it is situated. Although though both main characters were presented as queer (evidenced, for example, in Maren’s hungry, longing gaze toward her friend’s finger, and in Lee’s seduction of their carnival meal), the storyline also relied on their heterosexual relationship as a tool to render the metaphor of marginalization as understandable, and arguably obvious, without portraying queer people as analogous to murderers.
Although we see the metaphor for cannibalism as queerness as a recurring theme, it does not persist throughout all aspects of the story. One example of the film deviating from this idea can be seen in the two (very creepy) men who find Maren and Lee in the woods. One of them is forced to be a cannibal by nature, similar to Maren and Lee, but the other man eats human flesh by his own choosing. The eeriness of the interactions between other cannibals such as Sully, an older man who finds Maren by scent and trails her for the rest of the film, does not map onto queerness as clearly.
Cannibalism is thus not a perfect one-to-one metaphor for queerness–also because of its genetic nature–but it does fit more broadly as a marginalized identity. This manifests physically in the cannibals’ inability to live their lives in social centers and exist on the periphery, specifically on the road. This is true both when they are resisting their cannibal natures and when they accept it: at the beginning of the film, after Maren comes home from the sleepover, her father tells her to pack everything she can in three minutes, suggesting that this is something they have done before. Maren is also shown to have been moving from place to place constantly before this. Lee also is unable to stay at home. All of the other cannibals they meet live lives on the road as well: much like in other queer road-trip films like The Living End, the road has a practical benefit of anonymity and escape after committing crimes, and a more symbolic position as a place without boundaries and rules. Their inability to live stationary lives also puts them at odds with non-cannibals. Lee runs into conflict with his sister who wishes he would stay home. She wishes that Lee could assimilate into normative life, but the film takes a very anti-assimilation stance. When Maren and Lee attempt to start living in a normative way with jobs and a stationary home, it is short-lived and ends tragically. They cannot be together in a heteronormative way: they can either spend their lives on the road or exist in the way that they do in the very end. Maren’s consumption of Lee “bones and all” is decidedly incredibly romantic, allowing them to achieve the ultimate closeness. It is a connection that is borne out of tragedy, but is deeper than what they were experiencing in their relationship when they attempted to live in heteronormativity.
Besides the potential queerness of their cannibalism itself, the temporal and spatial positioning of the film likewise contribute to Bones and All’s queerness. In this regard, Bones and All feels similar to other queer road trip films we’ve watched this semester – in particular, My Own Private Idaho. Just like in My Own Private Idaho, Bones and All displays the geographic location of its main characters at every new place they arrive, both films cutting out the travel itself to cram in repetitive towns and states as they set out, search for family, and backtrack again. The underlying plots of each are paralleled in their same yearning for family; Maren’s search for her mother raises the stakes of their road trip just as Mike’s search for his own mother does. Both Mike and Maren discover unsatisfactory, horrifying truths upon finding their family members, and return to the road disappointed. Additionally, the opening stills of yellow fields under blue skies in the photographs behind glass in Maren’s high school hallway are visually reminiscent of the repetitive shots of yellow roadside fields, stormy blue-grey skies, and run-down barns in My Own Private Idaho. Bones and All ends with Maren holding Lee in a field that looks the same as the fields in the photographs from the start, calling back to the beginning of the film just like My Own Private Idaho’s cyclical ending as Mike ends up on the same road he starts the film on. Part of what makes My Own Private Idaho a queer film is the way it plays with these cycling visual motifs and temporal expectations, shot in a nonnormative way. Bones and All uses techniques that give it the same cyclical feel as My Own Private Idaho and even Happy Together, in which the characters are “trapped in a closed loop wherein their repeated attempts to ‘start over’ invariably end up returning them right back to where they began” (Rojas 512). The reason why Bones and All is not exactly a closed loop is the same reason why its ending varies from My Own Private Idaho’s: the film’s protagonists, while not entirely unqueer, are a teenage boy and girl in love, taking away the blurred boundary between homosocial bonding and homoeroticism that leads to disappointment and desertion in My Own Private Idaho. Just like in Happy Together, Bones and All breaks “the cycle of eternal recurrence” that holds their main characters, which Mike in My Own Private Idaho doesn’t get to do (Rojas 510). That Bones and All changes its ending, recycling the field motif but letting its characters grow and end up together, speaks to the biggest difference between Bones and All and My Own Private Idaho: For Lee and Maren, their future is together, their roads eternally entwined. Whereas Mike’s queer longing for Scott leaves him alone on his road, Lee and Maren’s heterosexual – albeit nonnormative – love story gives them a future together as one.
Bones and All can be seen as a sort of expansion of some common features of New Queer Cinema into more of a horror setting. In her introduction to a collection on New Queer Cinema, Michele Aaron notes one of the key features of several of these ‘90’s films is that they “are unapologetic about their characters’ faults or, rather, crimes: they eschew positive imagery. Swoon, Poison and The Living End beautify the criminal and (homo)eroticise violence” (Aaron 4). This comes from the general attitude of New Queer Cinema filmmakers that they did not have to sanitize their queer themes or make them appeal to a wider heterosexual audience: “films could be both radical and popular, stylish and economically viable” (Aaron 3). Bones and All carries a similar stance into the fantasy world where people are innate cannibals: Maren and Lee have guilt about the violence of their consumption, but it is neutralized as a necessity of their lives, and beautified at the very end through Maren’s consumption of Lee. Their marginalized, counter-cultural identities are shown with grace and neutrality, and the filmmaker does not feel the need to talk down to the audience about how murder and cannibalism are obviously wrong in real life.
So, while this film makes some truly fascinating analogies in regards to the marginalization of queerness through cannibalism, one cannot overlook the idea of searching for a sense of self by looking for Maren’s mother and the idea of a home and queer community being found only on the road.
Works Cited:
Aaron, Michele. “NEW QUEER CINEMA: AN INTRODUCTION.” New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader, edited by Michele Aaron, Edinburgh University Press, 2004, pp. 3–14. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctvxcrw2f.6. Accessed 14 May 2024.
Arraki, Gregg, director. The Living End. October Films and Strand Releasing. 1992.
Guadagnino, Luca, director. Bones and All. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures, 2022,
https://vimeo.com/video/938387763?share=copy. Accessed 8 May 2024.
Rojas, Carlos. “Queer Utopias in Wong Kar‐Wai’s happy together.” A Companion to Wong
Kar‐wai, 5 Nov. 2015, pp. 508–521, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118425589.ch23.
Van Sant, Gus, director. My Own Private Idaho. Fine Line Features, 1991.
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