OK so I rewatched Ravenous (1999) last night.
It's in my top 5 favourite films ever; the other two being Kairo, Paprika, The Prince Of Egypt and The Descent, in no particular order. So, I want to talk about it. There will be spoilers. If you haven't seen it, go fucking see it, it's a brilliant beautiful clever film that has become a cult classic for a reason.
To be up front, Ravenous is a film about the W*ndigo. (From here out, I'm just going to call it a W, rather than using the full word). Unlike, honestly, most other depictions, I think it does a pretty respectable job of depicting it. The filmmakers consulted with various native experts on the myth, and I think it shows.
The W is a ~ spooky ~ forest monster with antlers or something, it's a curse. You eat human flesh, and the curse slowly takes hold. It's invigorating, but also addictive, and your hunger for more drives you ever further into the curse.
It's a fucking thematically dense film. The central plot concerns America's expansion west into California in the 1840s, and follows Captain Boyde, a trauma-riddled soldier reassigned to Fort Spenser in the Sierra Nevada. Here, he encounters the W among other settlers.
And here's the thing, the film is very up front in drawing a parallel between the greed of the Ws and the behaviour of the American expansion. One of the villains outright states it towards the end of the film. The W is always hungry, never satisfied, has no regard for the lives of those it brutalises and devours. Its a cunning but inhumane force of endless bottomless consumption. And so, the film argues, is capitalism, is America. The W, it implies, isn't just manifesting in these individual cannibals on the frontier, but also in the vast impersonal forces of American society that will soon come to California to displace its native people, and rip up the land in search of gold.
I think it's telling that our protagonist, Boyde, is by his own admittance a coward. He finds himself resorting to cannibalism three times throughout the film; once unwittingly in the events that incite the plot and see him sent to Fort Spenser, once in a state of desperation at the mid-point of the film, and once when coerced to do so towards the films end. He doesn't kill, he seems to have little stomach for violence, but when presented with carrion and desperation, he succumbs. But he spends a lot of the film revolted by what he's done, resisting the urges its unlocked in him. Boyde is (albeit handsome), depicted as kinda unmasculine, kinda unamerican. His struggles to do the right thing and not give in to his hunger aren't seen by those around him as noble, but as a personal weakness.
I think it's telling that the order we see characters die in largely mirrors class privilege. The first person we hear of dying is an enslaved Black man. The first one we see die on screen is a native american guide. Then working class rank-and-file soldiers die, and only then do the officers and upper classes die. We think we see an upper class man - Colonel Hart - die pretty early, but it turns out that, no, he didn't. The upper class Hart gets mercy where the men under his command don't; rather than allowing him to die, the W nurses him back to health by converting him, too, to cannibalism. The W treats racialised and poor people as disposable but the privileged get either a clean, late death, or get to join it.
Though the central protagonist and antagonist are both white settlers, I find the film incredibly sympathetic to native americans and their situation. It's the films native americans who successfully identify what's going on, although they are not taken entirely seriously by anybody except Boyde until it's too late. What tenderness and kindness we see in the film is between the two natives - George and Martha - and their obvious friend and ally Private Cleaves. The only character who gets out of the whole thing untainted and unscathed is Martha, who has a certain moral clarity to her character.
I think Martha's words kind of form one half of the central thesis of the film: "You don't (stop it)! You ever give, yourself? Wendigo eats. Must eat more, more; never enough. He... he takes. Never, never gives! You stop Wendigo, you give yourself."
And then the other half is summed up by Ives: "Manifest Destiny. Westward expansion. ... This country is seeking to be whole. Stretching out its arms, and consuming all it can. And we merely follow."
I love Martha as a character. I think she's the most sympathetically portrayed character in the whole film. In what could be a very bleak message, I find myself very glad that she gets to walk away from the whole thing at the end.
The film is unashamedly about colonialism, about the way colonisation degrades and destroys and devours whatever falls within its grasp.
I find it interesting how each of the soldiers at Fort Spenser represent a sort of urge in American culture. Colonel Hart is a pseudointillectual, using the thinkers of the past to justify his current crimes. Toffler clings helplessly to Christian piety, and a bit boggle-eyed. Reich is a hypermasculine action-hero wannabe who can't stop taking his shirt off. Major Knox is a sort of alcoholic southern dandy, all easy charm and lies over a core of vindictiveness. And Cleaves, a common man who likes weed and slacking off, and is the only one to show any sympathy to the racialised members of the cast. The fort is a little microcosm of white american society that is, tellingly, built on the back of the labour of the racialised, indigenous George and Martha.
There are a lot of little allusions to Christianity. We see it in Toffler, who is well meaning, sensitive, naieve, and proves an easy victim to the W, being the first to be eaten on-screen. And then Ives himself displays the other, more prominent side of Christianity. It's pointed out that Christians eat the flesh of Christ every Sunday, and Ives presents himself as a man of god, marks himself with a bloody crucifix, talks about how cannibalism has let himself be reborn. We see Christianity as a vector for the W, as the meekness of Toffler in the laity contrasts against Ives's weaponising Christianity to gain power and consume.
There is a whole, understated, metaphor going on around the meat industry in there. It's less explored, but we see the way that the Ws dehumanise their victims, and then here and there we see the film draw parallels to the way a meat-eating society treats animals.
But the thing is, all these different themes get pulled together. You're left to conclude that it's all the same pattern. The W isn't just these individual men, it's a pattern. Enslave, destroy, consume. Individual men do, and society does it. It does it to the animals we eat, to colonised people, to the poor, to the vulnerable, to everybody it can. Because it will never be satisfied. It's all the same moral rot.
Now, I'm saying this as a white british person, so take it with a grain of salt, but I find this refreshing. The pop-culture image of the W - the spooky tall thing in the woods with a deer skull - bears little resemblance to the actual Algonquian myth, or the seriousness of what it represents. But Ravenous, I think, does it properly.
I think the use of a native american myth to tell a story about the colonisation of America and it's indigenous people here isn't thoughtless or accidental, it's very deliberate. I think the fact the film consulted with Algonquian cultural experts on how to depict the W comes across. It conveys not just the surface level of the myth, but what it represents underneath.
The W is used to represent the crimes committed against indigenous americans, through an indigenous lens, in a film where our final image is of an indigenous woman walking away from the carnage wreaked by white men.
The allegory is not fucking subtle, but it is complex. I don't think it could get made today, and if it was I think it would make a lot of people very angry.
You should watch Ravenous. It's that fucking good.
