“Someday, you will ache from too much cake.”
rhavewellyarnbag
Over the years, I have written many pieces, oh, let’s have fun and call them ‘essays’, many essays about Ravenous. But those are long gone, because I didn’t think they were my best writing. The main ideas were sound, but the presentation was florid and bloated. So, I will now manicure and partially regurgitate some of the things that I have said about Ravenous, in bite-sized pieces.
Ravenous is a film that is very important to me for reasons too baroque and tedious to enumerate, so I will err on the side of dignity and mystery and say simply that: Ravenous is a film that is very important to me.
The Terror is a narrative about death, but it’s less about the fact of death, which is certain, immutable in a story told in the past tense, than about how a person lives, unto the last second of their lives. Ultimately, it is all futile, because almost every last character on the Franklin Expedition dies, but it’s not futile while it’s happening. The characters are almost always unaware that the end is coming; their lives to them are always immediate, always happening. Their choices matter, perhaps not in a larger sense, not in the sense that their choices will save them, but because they have to live with their choices. They are their choices. Inconsequential questions are of monumental importance, because inconsequential questions make up a person. The Terror shows us that there are no inconsequential people.
There is a choice at the heart of Ravenous, but unlike The Terror, there is suspense in Ravenous. We don’t know what choice Boyd will make, because there is no peek at the end of the story, and because Boyd has made the wrong choice so many times. I’ve described Ravenous as Boyd’s recurring nightmare: again and again, he’s put in the same dire situation, so that it begins to seem as though he’s simply not being allowed to die.
But that’s not the choice that Boyd has to make. If it were a matter of life or death, it’d be easy. Boyd can live, because he has things to do, because he’s thinking of others, because, to spite everything, without reason, he still feels the need to go on. Boyd can die, because he’s miserable, because he can’t go on. Either choice has its logic. The choice between life and death masks the real choice*. Ives offers Boyd life. Maybe even eternal life. Boyd has chosen that before, and he could choose it again, easily. It’s a little choice.
The film is aware of, even revels in its own homoeroticism, and in doing so, looks to the side of it, where the really terrifying stuff is. The juicy stuff. The stuff that makes one warm, makes one’s heart beat. Love. Behind the flash of sex and violence that make up Ives is love. Ives sees Boyd, knows him totally, knows his cowardice, his shame, guesses easily at what Boyd has done and what Boyd will do next. And Ives likes Boyd. Ives wants Boyd by his side. Boyd, who played dead on the battlefield and hid under a pile of dead bodies. Boyd who escapes death a second time by eating his fellow soldier. Ives has been where Boyd has been, facing down an ugly, painful death, and Ives understands. He understands the fear, the horror, and he understands the longing to consume another. Without being told, Ives knows the worst of Boyd, and… just doesn’t care. That’s all love really is. Knowing the worst about someone, and being able to live with it.
* There’s a neat little trick hidden away in Ravenous. Tucked in the general’s desk drawer is a Tarot card, most of it obscured, but the number of the top visible. Number six. The Lovers. Like many Tarot cards, the superficial meaning of The Lovers is not what it’s about. In some versions of the deck, the central couple is instead a man standing between two women, between whom he must choose. It’s a card about choice. Yet, the superficial meaning sticks, and upon seeing it, one thinks of only one thing. So that we have an interplay between image and meaning, the immediate response, and the richer significance to be uncovered.
