I started this blog with the intention of reviewing all the canonical “cannibal” films. I began with the Adamic Man From Deep River and moved on, chronologically, from knock-off to knock-off (or, from innovator to innovator, as the case may be). My plan, when I had neatly disposed of these cinematic anthropophagi, was to take up other genres — zombies, hagsploitation, killer cars, that sort of thing.

I never made it so far. In fact, I never finished with the cannibals. When it came time to write about my favorite of these films — the one that made me want to write about cannibals in the first place — I found I couldn’t keep my opinions organized and consistent. I was stumped by a number of problems relating to the nature of art and criticism, language and metaphysics — problems which, ten years later, still stump me.

What you are reading now isn’t my long-awaited review of Cannibal Holocaust but simply an account of one of the many intellectual impasses that have prevented it.

An essential part of the Cannibal Holocaust legacy is the on-screen slaughter — and in some cases, graphic mutilation — of animals. From my first draft: “What’s disturbing isn’t so much that the animals were killed, but that they were tortured. You don’t see the swift, farmer-sure slaughter that preserves both the animal’s meat and the butcher’s soul from a ruin of adrenaline and cruelty. Instead, what you see is a slow torturous death, designed to elicit a performance from a creature and a response from a viewer.”

These scenes were stubborn stumbling blocks to my appreciation of the film. On the one hand, I can hardly justify the torture of animals. A vegetarian and longtime friend of certain small furry quadrupeds, it behooved me to stick up for hoofed creatures. But on the other hand, I wasn’t writing an essay on animal rights. This was to be a work of film criticism. And in that regard there seemed to me something entirely adventitious about these ethical concerns. They are pointedly off-topic.

In response, I imagined another film. This film is so entirely like Cannibal Holocaust that, scene for scene, frame for frame, from start to finish, no small detail, no snippet of dialogue, no abrupt cut, slow zoom, or lingering close-up, could offer a single distinguishable dissimilarity between itself and the OG Cannibal Holocaust. Though filmed separately, this imitation Cannibal Holocaust, cast with absolutely perfect doppelgangers, staged amongst meticulously well-matched set dressings, and framed with uncannily precise mis-en-scene, is absolutely indistinguishable from the already known, loved, reviled, Cannibal Holocaust. The two films are materially, visually, auditorily, identical. Now, given the precision of this replica, I think it’s fair to say that, formally speaking, we have not two different films but a single film, dually instantiated, created by two separate causal methods.¹ Furthermore. . . .

Furthermore, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this other Cannibal Holocaust has utilized sophisticated mechanical puppetry (of both the wet and dry variety) in rendering each lower life form tortured and killed in the film — and did so (as follows from the above) with such extraordinary verisimilitude that not even the most seasoned anatomist may tell the difference! Nevertheless, we have it on the unimpeachable assurances of the Humane Society that no animal was harmed, etc, etc.

Wouldn’t it seem now that much of the adverse criticism leveled against our real-world Cannibal Holocaust becomes moot in regard to this second film? And yet, isn’t it, as we’ve said, the same film?!

We can imagine the converse scenario.

Many people consider Psycho a masterpiece of filmmaking. (And imagine, for the moment, that you’re one of them.) Psycho is also a film that features a number of on-screen murders. All simulated, of course. But imagine (while you’re at it) that a dark secret about the production of this masterpiece has recently come to light: these on-screen murders were not, so it’s discovered, simulated deaths but rather — whether through a series of really unfortunate accidents, or perhaps somebody’s overzealous commitment to cinema verite — real, honest murders. Both the in-shower stabbings of actress Janet Leigh and the stairs-down-falling of actor Martin Balsam were, in fact, accomplished using the lazy “alzahad” method of SFX — which is to say, real knives and real stairs were introduced to real bodies — and real lives, not just fictional lives, were expended in the process². (Stand-ins, let’s say, remains neatly disposed of in a swamp, post-production.)

Terrible? Criminal? Morally reprehensible? — Yes, Yes, and, again, Yes. None of that I contest. But is the film itself — that is, the film qua film — also terrible, criminal, morally reprehensible? Or, should I say, any more nor less so than it was before the filmmaker’s murderous methods became known?

Keep in mind that nothing about the film itself has altered. Each frame remains the same. The celluloid remains inviolate. The aesthetic object — which is to say, the only fit subject of aesthetic criticism — remains ever the same as it was.

But something has changed, hasn’t it?

Such consideration have, for the last ten years, led me down the meandering and not always intersecting paths of philosophy, aesthetics, and art criticism. I have not discovered any certain answers but only a muddle of questions. As I get older I become more certain that wisdom consists not in a surer and surer knowledge of things but in a more and more scrupulous categorization of one’s ignorance. And so, in upcoming posts, with that motto to guide me, I hope to serialize the progress I’ve made both in unknotting the Gordian muddle of these weighty philosophical questions and also in composing a coherent, gushing appreciation of a film where a turtle is tortured to death and a pig is shotgunned in the face.

1. I should give credit to certain philosophical thought experiments where a pair of physically identical objects result from two totally distinct causal chains — Donald Davidson’s Swampman, for instance — but consider also Borge’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” ↩︎
2. I feel inclined to mention here something about the expendable lives of Roman slave-actors and a famous opium eater’s famous essay — only to say, yes, yes, I’m aware of these things, but neither quite pertain to the point just now at issue. It’s not a question of whether crime may be justified extra-morally, i.e. aesthetically, but of how — and if it’s even possible — to restrict the domain of a certain type of discourse. ↩︎