the beauty, the bones, the bloodshed (issue 12)
Bones and All has managed to capture such universal themes of love, but with cannibals???
Major spoilers for Bones and All
In Luca Guadagnino’s films, the opening scenes and title cards are often indicative of what is to come. Research images of ancient male statues and Elio in isolation signal the discovery of romance and self in Call Me By Your Name (2017). In Suspiria (2018), Susie’s mother dies within the first few minutes, referring to the mothers of the dance academy and the overall emphasis on women throughout the film.
In Bones and All (2022), the film opens on paintings of the town Maren and her father are currently residing in. The opening scene features Maren’s first eating in what is presumed to be a few months; she flays the finger of one of her friends at a sleepover she snuck out to be in. This incident, due to building pressure, results in her father abandoning her. Both the paintings and this orphaning point to Bones and All’s two biggest themes: the idea of openness juxtaposed with the idea of an all-consuming love.
First, the openness and expansiveness of Bones and All heavily relies on the aesthetics and visuals used. Taking place in the Midwest sans Virginia, the film treats its locations as a character, constantly changing yet rarely fully closed off. Never are there huge mountains or uncrossable rivers outside of the first scenes on the East Coast. As Lee and Maren meet and eventually fall in love, their environment is also open to them. Their roadtrip works in tandem with the opening of their relationship; there is nothing secluded. Everything is on the table for them. The couple or their car is most often seen going through cornfields or empty stretches of highways. They stop in small rural towns with small diners or gas stations with four pumps.
One of the most beautiful things about the Midwest is its familiarity. As a native Illinoisan who has spent years of my life in both Michigan and Indiana, everywhere begins to feel like home. I have often said to friends how nice I find it that places look the same. When in Ohio, I saw streets or buildings that reminded me of Michigan roads. Indiana highways look like highways I would take to visit family. It adds to this sense of warmth in the Midwest that often goes unappreciated; it surely took me years to appreciate its smaller beauties. Bones and All manages to capture and expand on this. It felt defined and poignant that the film takes place across the Midwest; it adds to the warmth and familiarity of Maren and Lee’s romance. This part is tangential, but the Midwest’s liminality is one of its key components and Guadagnino’s direction manages to remind me why I’ll always leave my heart here.
At the literal heart of Bones and All is the idea of that love that is meant to completely change who you are as a person, however temporary that love is. Every character in the film is either searching for or running away from a sort of love. Maren is searching for her mother to help her with her cannibalistic tendencies, while her father is running away from both because he is aware offers no help. Maren’s mother ran away from what her daughter would become. Lee is running away from his past and his dead abusive father, who lingers over him like a ghost. Even Sully is desperately seeking any sort of connection with a fellow eater.
Yet, Lee and Maren even have the push and pull in their relationship. Since their first conversation, it is clear that Maren and Lee are fated, both to fall in love and lose each other. Maren’s desire to find love or solace with another eater is her main motivating force while Lee’s is to escape himself and his life. They are going in opposite directions. Yet it seems for most of the runtime, they are running together, but there’s the slight whisper that it is not going to last. Their love pushes them on and once they decide to be regular people in that open field, to end their journey, it is both a sigh of relief and resignation of what has been built; a love built on their mutual desires for the flesh now gone. It won’t be the only thing to keep them going anymore, a rejection that this love has been all-consuming.
It seems all-consuming love is a force in this film that is meant to be felt in all of its pain and glory. After all, it is even named after this very concept. As explained by another drifter in the film played by an unrecognizable Michael Stuhlbarg, there is before bones and all and there is after bones and all. This is the first time an eater fully consumes another person as if to permanently keep them a part of themself. They discuss it as a sort of perversion, a twisted fantasy eaters can enact upon those they eat.
Yet, the film does not agree. When Lee is stabbed during Sully’s attack, he is in shock as he begins to die. He picks up Sully’s hair rope, a memoir of all the people he has eaten, to see Kayla’s hair freshly tied in. It is unclear whether this is the reason he begs Maren to eat him bones and all or if it is a cruel realization of his own mortality, the fact he won’t be commemorated outside of Maren. Maren’s initial resistance has more to do with disbelief, that there is no reason to eat him because Lee will survive, but this also passes.
When she does, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score is not its usual piercings strings with anxious undertones. It is soft, painfully somber, muting Lee’s screams and Maren’s sobs. It is the act of love, the fully consuming of one person.
The film ends by marrying both of these together. Maren and Lee sit silently, intimately, and idealistically on a hill, looking over fields. It is quiet except for the wind blowing before cutting to black. It ends as quickly as it began, from the glance in an Indiana grocery store to the great wide open.
Rarely have I ever walked out of such a film with such somberness. I remember when first hearing about Guadagnino’s cannibal love story, I eagerly anticipated visceral horror akin to Olga’s destruction in Suspiria mixed with the temporary, but life-altering love of Call Me By Your Name. I saw both, yet I also saw something so new.
Bones and All acts like a cathartic release of love, confusion, joy, and melancholy. It celebrates Maren and Lee before ultimately reminding the viewer it is a tragedy. Somehow, Maren’s abandonment of Lee stings just as much as Lee’s death. I find beauty, solace, sadess, and so much more in their tragedy, their desire, their love, and their effort to push on. It feels like a love story that is so eternal for featuring cannibals, gore, and blood as the main distinction amongst other stories. It managed to hit such a nerve with me that it is, like love, all-consuming. It certainly solidified Guadagnino as my favorite director of all time and I am anxiously awaiting Challengers. However, I know there will be nothing like Bones and All again and I’m so glad, because I doubt anything else could hurt, heal, and harmonize with my heart like it can.