Eat Your Heart Out: The Bubblegum Body Horror of Eat (2014)
Editor’s Note: This article contains discussions of self-harm, disordered eating, sexual assault, extreme gore
To perform femininity in our Western patriarchal culture is often to be consumed. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Hollywood, which feeds upon a revolving door of young women who compete amongst each other for the privilege of being eaten up. This dynamic eats our energy, our labor, and our possibilities, but its favorite food is carefully curated images of our smooth, shiny, decorated bodies, which should hardly be fed at all. This same culture also mocks and vilifies the desperate energy this competition necessitates: idealized feminine perfection should (impossibly) be effortless. Don’t try too hard. Don’t end up a “pick me” girl. But most girls never get picked, instead just picking themselves apart. Are we supposed to die of hunger for the crime of being insufficiently delicious?
If cannibalism reflects a desire to completely rob the eaten victim of autonomy, eating oneself can be seen as a desperate act of radical protest. Jimmy Weber’s criminally under-seen, ultra-low-budget indie debut Eat (2014) explores the fraught embodied experience of performing femininity in our exploitative culture through the lens of auto-cannibalism. Like Esther in Marina de Van’s feminist masterpiece In My Skin (2002), to which Eat owes a great debt, Novi (Meggie Maddock) is reevaluating her relationship with her own flesh and blood in a time of existential and professional crisis. De Van’s Esther experiences a bifurcation between her public and private selves that begins to collapse as she rediscovers her corporeality through self-mutilation, eventually eating her own flesh. Eat takes this experiment a step further, presenting viewers with two incompatible cinematic realities that gradually collapse on top of one another. The center cannot hold.
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Good body horror has a unique ability to evoke extreme revulsion and discomfort in the audience like nothing else quite can. Explicit gore contributes to this effect, but even the most exquisite practical effects cannot act alone in this regard. The best body horror grounds us through the embodied sensory experience of suffering flesh, an arousing effect that comes from psychological attention to visual and aural perspectives. Eat is a masterclass in this regard, making it an extremely challenging watch not for the faint of heart.
In Eat, struggling actress Novi is 31 but feels much younger. She hasn’t landed a role in three years, and her bank balance is negative $678. Dropped by her agent and nearly evicted, she resorts to trawling Craigslist for gigs. The jobs that would take her keep turning out to be porn. She exudes an uneasy desperation to cling to youth familiar in our culture, which ostentatiously threatens to huck women into the discard pile upon reaching their third decade. Novi’s fake name probably sounded mature to her ten years ago, but now it betrays the many anxious fictions that have become Novella McClure, frozen in old headshots. Weber’s original screenplay puts it best: she “looks like the ghost of an 18-year-old sorority pledge.”
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Tanned and platinum blonde, Novi surrounds herself with bright colors and youthful patterns you might find in a Myrtle Beach gift shop: cheetah print, polka dots, lipstick kisses. Her aggressively colorful guest house apartment wouldn’t be out of place in a late 1990s-early 00s teen girl movie, which is clearly no accident. The film’s warmly lit intro sequence is a sad, hungover mirror of Cher’s get ready with me sequence in Clueless, and the title cards appear in candy-colored Mean Girls font. At first glance, it’s hard to imagine that Eat is a horror movie at all, and impossible to fathom the stomach-turning endurance test it will become. Director of Photography Jon Stevenson’s smart, stylish camera work soon hints that all is not as it seems.
After stepping out of the shower, Novi blow-dries her hair. Few places are as vulnerable as the bathroom mirror, the private place where we must confront the inescapable materiality of our appearance: never smooth enough, too mammalian, always aging. Novi’s reflection stares back at her in soft focus as her face angles towards the lens in slow motion, eyes sensuously closed, hair fanning out behind her like a Covergirl fantasy.
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The next tasks in Novi’s morning routine force her into closer contact with her own body, and the camera mirrors her experience. Shifting away from neatly framed, 3D-lit medium shots, the 100 mm macro lens transforms Novella’s morning beauty regimen into a spectacle of Brobdingnagian disgust. The neon yellow mascara tube is caked in viscous chunks of product. We’re uncomfortably thrust into the thicket of her eyebrows as she plucks, close enough to see the sickly white dead skin at the follicle. We’re too close as she brushes her tongue. The slow-mo that eroticized her blowing hair turns nasty as sloshes of mouthwash gargle overflow her mouth. She eats the last of the food in her fridge in overlit beauty shots: milk and yogurt, white like semen.
Towards the end of the title sequence, Novi teeters down a hallway in polka-dot platform heels. She doesn’t have the cool girl strut you’d expect from this visual framing; she teeters slightly, each step a little halting. We get the sense that Novi has never been exactly comfortable in heels, but she wears them to signal her status as a feminine object of desire. Later she’ll shove her swollen, bandaged foot, big toe stripped completely of flesh, into an even higher heel on a date with her psychiatrist, playing footsie with him under the table.
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The film’s dialogue frequently feels unnatural and strange, which at first feels out of place compared to the stomach-churning realism of Novi’s physical and psychological deterioration. The shallow, agonistic interactions between women in the film— like a soapy rendering of an early-aughts teen girl fight movie— can be particularly painful to sit through. In the waiting room for a casting, Novi is uncomfortable too, pretending to text. Tracy (Dakota Pike), Novi’s younger rival in the mid-tier Budweiser commercial circuit, interrogates Novi about her dwindling prospects. She seems to cross the line when she accuses Novi of being “nearly forty,” sending Novi flying off the handle into a slut-shaming, weirdly homophobic rage. The delivery feels brittle and awkward, forcing us into Novi’s ill-fitting skin.
Her reflex is to sexually objectify and humiliate other women who threaten her insecurities. She can’t meaningfully connect to most other women or doesn’t know how. However, this fleeting externalized aggression is soon directed inward. Tracy’s words echo in Novi’s head after she leaves the casting empty-handed, alone with her repetitive thoughts and negative bank balance in the car.
Novi never planned to eat herself. Her self-mutilation begins innocuously enough: nervous gnawing at the cuticle on her thumb at the bar where she numbs out with booze and boys, an angry red hangnail. This self-soothing behavior provides temporary relief as any stability she’d cobbled together enters free fall. After stumbling to the shower in a hungover haze like every other morning, Novi realizes that her thumb is gushing blood. Her distress grows alongside her hunger. Her stomach keeps growling, causing her to double over in pain.
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In a burst of panic driving home from another failed audition, Novi grips the hangnail in her teeth, tearing a strip of flesh down to the wrist and hitting the car in front of her. This car accident will become the pretext for the gaping wounds that travel across her limbs. Before biting off the ribbon of skin hanging from her wrist, Novi examines a dry patch of skin nearby. We see her pinching and poking at herself with a strange fascination: was this always here? Is this even me? The flesh hanging from her wrist is evidence that yes, she is there. She can grip herself in her teeth, feel herself in her mouth, taste her own blood: feel and be felt. She’s so hungry. And there’s nothing in the fridge.
Visual perspective and sound design alchemically transform Maddock’s fearless, animalistic performance into a wet nightmare of the flesh. Hypnotic alternating medium shots, closeups, and extreme closeups disorient the viewer in a deeply affective approach to the visual. Ideation oozes into action. Is she eating herself? She wants to. Now she is. This is not the conventional way of witnessing the dysfunctional female body self-destruct; nothing here is to be desired. Novi proves herself dangerous at her most vulnerable. The eating scenes refuse to aestheticize Novi’s conventionally attractive body. The high-pitched, grinding industrial score rings like a concussion. Novi wetly chews, smacks, and slurps, moaning into the deep red furrows of her meat: it’s nauseatingly loud. As she bites deeper, tissue crunches and rips. Her breaths through her nose are wet with blood. I’ve never seen anything like it.
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Eat delivers remarkable intensity for a first feature made in 15 days for virtual pennies. Weber himself wears many hats as writer, director, composer, production designer, and visual effects artist. Partially filmed in the Denver apartment he shared with his girlfriend and producer Annie Baker, the entire production was well-documented in the web series The Making of Eat, which follows the 17-person crew throughout the well-organized shoot. In stark contrast to Novi’s dehumanized isolation in the Hollywood meat market, Weber’s production radiates supportive collaboration on set. Close attention to lighting, framing, and photography allows “Monster” Midian Crosby’s superb practical effects to shine on screen in ways that could give more resourced productions a run for their money. Although not everything went according to plan, Weber’s meticulous pre-production process allowed for the creation of something truly extraordinary.
No one in Novi’s life seems to see her as a human being or like her for herself. All of her human relationships are somewhat transactional and based on a projected image of her. Everything that should be a support structure for her is a mechanism for consumption. If consumption is all there is, why not eat yourself?
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Starkly juxtaposed against its bubblegum tone and aesthetic, Eat is a sickening watch for even the most seasoned gorehounds and among the most distressing body horror films I’ve ever seen. While not a perfect film, it is undeniably spectacular. Its tonal disconnect reflects the fraught internal experience of embodied feminine gender performance under patriarchy, the pain of it leaking out onto the body. The remedies available to Novi—beauty products, booze, boys—are superficial, pink bandaids on sepsis. Her internal resources depleted in a hostile system, she begins to eat herself. Nothing adds up, and help isn’t coming. No one stops her or really asks why. Her suicide watch psychiatrist skips their session to take her out to lunch, then dinner, before literally fucking her. “Do you like tacos? How much?” he asks. What abuse are you willing to sustain in order to be fed?
Categorized:Editorials
