Why are cannibal stories everywhere?

We were not in danger of being jaded about cannibalism just a few short months ago

January 31, 2021

For weeks now I have been dodging the volley of Armie Hammer, Cannibal? news items like Frogger trying to cross a three-lane highway full of car traffic only to find himself hitching a ride across a swift-moving river on an alligator’s back. Just when you think you’re safe from Hollywood’s Possible Cannibals news, you’re confronted with a new headline: Now even the “ethical cannibals” would like a word.

The Actual Cannibal (?) Armie Hammer narrative (made all the weirder by the fact that every time you say Armie Hammer’s name, you must stop and review its chicken/egg facts: he’s named after his grandfather Armand Hammer, an oil tycoon who eventually came to own part of Arm & Hammer after being asked about a possible family connection for years) includes serious allegations of intimate partner abuse, which are — perhaps unintentionally, but nevertheless effectively in the gossip headlines — undermined by the salacious “does he eat people?” angle, which sounds both absurd and like an inevitable celebrity end game for 2021. In this current reality, it is at once reasonable to ask how could Hollywood heartthrob Armie Hammer be an actual cannibal? and how could he not? The pure products of America, etc.

So much feels unreal these days. Anderson Cooper collected an apology on air from a former conspiracy adherent for thinking that he literally ate babies, a belief actual members of Congress also seem to hold, or at least encourage in their more lunatic bases, about a number of high-profile politicians, media professionals, and other targets of their right-wing rage. This particular cannibal storyline has malignant, antisemitic roots and is currently animating domestic terror and being manipulated to shore up support for a once and future American authoritarian regime. It is stupid, terrifying, absurd, disgusting, fantastical, and dangerous all at once.

In the midst of these dueling cannibal storylines comes the trailer for a movie starring and written/directed by — I shit you not — former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s wife Louise Linton, about a sex-and-shoe-shopping-addict hedge fund manager who, according to IMDB, “hunts down and kills men with crossbows, martini glasses, and kitchen knives in order to eat them.”

The trailer made me wonder how the Rushmore Players, or perhaps the kids of Loren Bouchard’s late great Home Movies, might stage a gender-swapped American Psycho.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that it does not look like Linton’s cannibal portrayal is of the ethical variety, not the least because the protagonist (?) advertises a room for rent in her Malibu Barbie Mansion as a pretense to lure erstwhile Gossip Girl star Ed Westwick into her Most Dangerous Game. Nor does this movie appear to be prestige cannibal fare, à la Hannibal. It seems closer to an answer to a question nobody asked, like Who can write the most deranged “so where’s Samantha now?” fanfic for Sex & the City: The Next Chapter? or a lengthy I’m not mad, I’m actually laughing! clapback to all the Cruella de Vil memes that circulated about Linton during her husband’s Cabinet tenure.

Tellingly, though, there’s no mention of cannibals in the commercial, so whoops, spoiler alert. Perhaps the Armie Hammer Cannibal Scandal is to blame for the whole “in order to eat them” detail being carefully excised from the trailer?

But back to Armie Hammer for a second: News just broke that his Call Me By Your Name director and co-star, Luca Guadagnino and Timothée Chalamet, are in talks to reunite for a film adaptation of Camille DeAngelis’ novel Bones & All, a coming-of-age horror novel about … a teenage girl who eats people hitting the road in search of the father she never knew and answers about her appetites.

Is there a PR scenario in which hearing So, Armie Hammer, actual cannibal or nah? at every press junket is desirable for Luca Guadagnino and Timothée Chalamet, but not Louise Linton?

I don’t know what to do with all this cannibalism.

Some of it is very dangerous. And some of it is metaphor and some of it is stupid and some of it is incidental, and it seems impossible to fully disentangle the absurd from the dangerous, the relevant from the tangential.

I miss the days when cannibal storylines didn’t trend so I didn’t think deeply about what it means to want to eat women possibly for sexual purposes, or men from Craigslist possibly for nympho hedge fund manager purposes, or Timothée Chalamet possibly for plot reasons, I don’t know, and how it all intersects with a weaponized conspiracy theory that’s threatening democracy at its very foundations.

(Bones & All does sound like a good book, for real.)

What is the universe trying to tell us with these cannibal plots? Because this can’t be a coincidence, can it?

Where I am:

  • February 2, 8 p.m. Eastern: Join me for a free Belt Publishing writer/editor panel on The Art of Ideas (RSVP here for a Zoom link)

  • February 8, 7 p.m. Eastern: The Louisville Anthology reading / Flying Out Loud reading series — email me for a link!

What I’m writing:

  • A new cocktails series for Salon called The Oracle Pour, in which a penny arcade fortune machine answers the burning question, What’s the perfect drink for today?

  • (And yes, the book, still.)

What I’m reading: