DEHUMANIZER
One day something is going to bite off your finger.
I think we’re dead meat.
-Friday the 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)
You could bite off your finger right now.
This is a Holzerism you might find projected in block letters onto the University of Chicago. It’s also the premise of a horror movie or twelve, maybe a Cronenberg. It’s both of those things because it’s a bizarre yet inalienable fact of life. You could bite off your finger right now. You don’t plan to, so that fact can be safely ensconced in conceptual art, a roadside sculpture masquerading as an LED construction sign.
But someone else could bite off your finger. They’d have an easier time, too: for most people, even recidivist self-harmers, the physiological impulse to stop short of irreversible autonomous injury is more overriding than the impulse to empathy. And so they might bite off your finger. This is the thought that’s going to keep you a little scared of your bedroom door at night. Probably no one will bite off your finger. But only probably. The Other is not reducible to guarantee.
One day, something is going to bite off your finger. Worms, or a carrion crow. And it could happen whenever, no matter who thinks your time’s not right. For an example, wheelchair-bound Franklin Hardesty spends most of his screentime being reminded there are things he can’t do without the absent help of his acquaintances, like move around rural bramble, and things he can’t do at all, like take a casual creek dip. Even with his tantrums, he’s the least rude character in his movie. He’s a worrywart who can’t bear the thought of others being in danger, and he gets Texas Chain Saw Massacred.
It’s terrible! It’s dehumanizing. Franklin’s difficult relationship with his caretaking sister Sally is severed in the span of three seconds. Nothing in the fact of flesh cares about his humanity. This is horror: a reminder that the worst thing that could happen is dying. Right now, without warning, painfully. That’s all there is. We make personality quizzes about our greatest fear, with cute answers like “everyone hating me behind my back”, because The Big One is too harrowing to confront without fictional assistance. Even now I’m unable to convince you of the real possibility that you’ll slip to your death in the shower. I’m not abject enough.
Neither is The Menu, the most pontifical pass at horror in what goes of the decade. Now, horror has long been injured by its parallax with moralism. Psycho was about how wearing a dress turns men into serial killers, and somehow it got worse from there, as moralism turned against the victims. Jason Voorhees kills girls for having sex. The aughts gave us all those fucking Sawquels. And now that something like class consciousness has begun to burgeon in an America fleabitten with austerity and insulted with instant access to the gentry’s dumbassery, there’s a new target in town: the rich.
The Menu is a table spread of rich people. A wine list, or a table d’hôte, something like that. You salivate for its cast. Aren’t they so lip-smackingly scrumptious to hate? God, yes: there’s an influencer, and three nouveau-riche bros with credit for brains, and, most damning, a critic. (You should be so lucky.) They all show a tendentious, vain, indifferent or otherwise sociopathic attitude towards food. How dare you, sir. Some of us gave up lunch to torrent this movie. Off with their fingers!
We are sated with the suggestion that no one’s going to bite our fingers off if we prove we don’t deserve it. The protagonist, see, she stands up and orders one normal burger. For her bravery in solving Ralp Fiennes’ Food Puzzle, she is rewarded with life, while everyone else, on some level asking for it, dies. Reups of this scene have three shittillion shares on social media, because we want to be the girl. We want to be the triumphant survivors of an act of violence that destroys our enemies with zero splashback.
We want to protagonize the genre about having our finger bitten off. Something has gone terribly human.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is also about class, about food. Depending on how you interpret some of the better scenes in The Menu, it might even share themes of cannibalism. But you would not, under any circumstances, want to be in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The final girl survives by accident. Her companions are dead, and she is only better off because, in a climactic execution, the killer’s hammer slips his hands. The Heroine’s Journey works only if there’s a Heroine, which is a human concept. Horror works best as the dehumanizer: the reminder that we’re meat first and last.
Horror’s dehumanizing role is more needed than ever. Our belief in the skeleton key of psychology has turned everything else into a Boston Molasses Flood of pathos. From a New Yorker review of Succession: “there was something noble in the choice to put the characters out of their misery and bring their toxic cycle to an end.” It was noble! There was an answer, after all! Thank the DSM we are smarter than Shakespeare’s fabulist tragedies about the exact same thing. Now we know all those kings were backstabbing each other to their own detriment because they were toxic.
Back when the Moralintern was slapping parental advisories on Mortal Kombat, horror and its associates (violent action, explicit music) were a bastion. Fans were crossed as morons because they refused the lie that epic humanity is invulnerable to having fingers bitten off. Now they’ve wised us up, in parallax to moralism, to our detriment. Horror is about how it’s good that certain people are punished, because they were the wrong kind of human. This is smart because it’s more complex than the dehumanizing binary of human-meat. Smart is good because it makes you think, and thinking makes you post, and posting makes people stream The Menu, which makes them smart too.
But a humanized horror story isn’t smarter, just pre-masticated. Easier to swallow the cud of justice than someone else’s fingers. Bad things happen to people that either choose bad or fail to swerve out of the way of bad. They are rich (yay!) or traumatized (boohoo!). Accidents don’t take lives, poverty isn’t a driving factor, and serial killers don’t victimize capriciously. The dead from Zach Cregger’s Barbarian: a male serial rapist, a female serial rapist, a slumlord and one-time rapist, and an innocent. That’s a 3:1 ratio of characters who, narrativistically, have it coming, to those who don’t. The final girl, of course innocent, survives thanks to a hug from the female rapist, who’s that way because of her own history of abuse, and who goes out with a heroic sacrifice. Are you eating comfortably?
