A razor slicing through an eyeball, pliers yanking out perfectly white teeth, that famous supermarket-brand salami.
Meat, blood, bone. If it’s cooked, we’re fine; if it’s raw, suddenly it’s “disgusting”. And then there are the people who like their steak still bleeding, happily paying fifty dollars a portion. There’s something oddly satisfying about those who drink their coffee black and order their meat “juicy”. We envy them; we can’t help it.
Julia Ducournau’s Raw (2016), which premiered at Cannes, taps right into this irrational pleasure. We flinch while watching, we recoil. And yet, no matter what happens on screen, we can’t look away. At some level Raw pushes in our faces a disturbing version of the nostalgic pleasure we all once tasted as children, licking half-frozen ice lollies.
Raw, like many horror films, is packed with psychopathological motifs and, quietly but insistently, with taboo-breaking erotic hints that invite psychoanalytic reading. Yet before anything else, it is an ideological narrative. That’s what makes it so open to multi-layered modes of film analysis.
Plot Summary
The story takes place in Wallonia, the French-speaking southern region of Belgium. The film adopts as its focalizer Justine, a young woman just entering university. With some help from her family’s pressure, Justine presents herself to us as a strict vegetarian. The stated reason is a severe allergic reaction to meat.
Justine is about to follow her sister Alexia into veterinary school. Her transformation, and the abandonment of vegetarianism, begins at university. The trigger is a hazing ritual: as a “newbie” she is bullied into eating a raw rabbit kidney. This ritual is a tradition imposed by upperclassmen on first-years, but in Justine’s case it becomes real and binding thanks to the merciless insistence of her own sister.
Once she violates the family taboo, Justine experiences a brutal allergic reaction. With the help of the campus doctor she gets through it – and then develops an uncontrollable desire for meat. This process culminates in Justine’s becoming a cannibal and Alexia’s ending up in prison.
Analysis
After an opening car-crash sequence, the narrative’s balance is disrupted when Justine finds a piece of chicken in her supposedly vegetarian meal. This small intrusion is what initiates her transformation. Like her sister, she is headed to veterinary school.
If we cut the story right there and asked the audience to fill in the rest, they would probably predict an ordinary coming-of-age arc about becoming a vet. That would be the character’s “motivation” in terms of a conventional narrative. But her deeper need appears to be something else: to slip out from under the family’s law-laying authority and reach a state where she can eat meat at all.
This need will ostracize her and make her the cause of various catastrophes. Standing in the way of this need is the taboo of the law-giver; whoever breaks the taboo must suffer its curse.
Justine’s university adventure begins with Alexia failing to show up to welcome her. On her first night in the dorm she’s jolted awake by a raid from upperclassmen. Speaking from personal experience, I can say that in many Belgian universities this “dev” culture – hazing rituals imposed on “freshman” – is very widespread. That part of the film is not fictional at all. If the newcomer wants to join a student society, they will face a process that can be far more intense and astonishing than what we see on screen.
As an observer, one could generously argue that the point of these rituals is to help students overcome confidence issues within the protected space of the university. But things are not that innocent. At university, every student learns both how to be master and how to be slave. These rituals are the playful dress-rehearsal of that lesson.
Ideology, Institutions, and Cannibalism
Ideology can be described as the poison injected into society in the name of creating certain customs and conservative traditions – the poison that allows the capitalist state, grounded in idealist philosophy, to sustain its own image of itself. Ideology is “the representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (Althusser 2014, p. 68).
For the state ideal to exist, production must happen. And for production to continue, the conditions of production themselves must constantly be reproduced (Althusser 2014, p. 35). Along with them, the productive forces and existing relations of production are also reproduced. In this logic, production and its continuity become the state’s ultimate goal – its reason to exist. That logic is then reflected in the principles of “being” a state and injected into society through ideology.
According to Althusser, this reproduction process is taught and reinforced throughout the capitalist school system and other state institutions, in line with a “law of orientation” (2014, p. 39). He calls these institutions Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs). They include public institutions like schools and hospitals, the family, the legal system, the political system and its representatives, media, unions, and cultural systems. Universities are one of these apparatuses.
ISAs transform individuals into subjects. In Althusser’s formulation, the subject is someone who has submitted to another subject, bowed before a higher authority, and is deprived of any freedom beyond that submission. ISAs “hail” individuals into subjecthood: when a police officer shouts “Hey, you there!” at a citizen and elicits a physical response, the individual is interpellated as a subject (Althusser 2014, p. 125).
This example directly echoes Lacan’s mirror stage. Through that lens, we can subject the ideological elements of Raw to an Althusserian reading and see how ideology circulates like a toxin through the bloodstream of society.
Justine as Interpellated Subject
Before she ever sets foot on campus, Justine already carries an ideology given to her by the family apparatus: a strict ethic of not eating meat. At university, under the pressure of student groups and the encouragement of her sister, she gets the chance to break that ideological plane.
But what she steps into is simply another ideological plane. Her betrayal of the family-apparatus ideology triggers a curse and the punishment she must endure as subject. In the narrative this curse appears as her constant itching and the shedding of her skin – the painful process of becoming a subject in her own right.
In real state apparatuses, such complications are “solved” in hospitals. If someone cannot adapt to the ISA and loses their mental health, they are sent to a psychiatric institution; if they cannot adapt to social norms, they are sent to prison. Inside these institutions they pass through normalization processes and are then sent back into society as “proper” individuals.
Justine’s adaptation problem manifests as a skin disease. The remedy lies with the campus infirmary and its doctor, who prescribes her a cream. Once she uses it, the rash recedes and she begins to accept the ideology, now desiring meat.
But more adjustment problems emerge. The ISA has already divided meat into various ideological categories of “edible” and “inedible”. Rabbit kidneys: edible. Raw fish: edible. Farm animals: edible. Most other species – especially carnivores – form another group whose flesh is not to be eaten. And human flesh has been forbidden since long before the modern state, by countless societies striving toward “civilization”.
Justine’s hunger is non-discriminatory and follows the logic of libido. For Freud, libido is genderless; sexual hunger can be directed anywhere. Justine’s appetite, like libido, is omnidirectional. For her, any flesh is potentially edible. This omnidirectionality is underlined in the film by the discussions about animal abuse, interspecies sexuality, and her unsettling exchange with a dog during the waxing scene.
Justine’s final transformation into a meat-eating subject is sealed with a drop of artificial blood on her shoulder. Like the citizen hailed by Althusser’s policeman, or the infant who recognizes itself in Lacan’s mirror stage, Justine undergoes an initiation. When the fake blood hits her shoulder, time slows. She turns around and ends up drenched in artificial blood. The upperclassmen – the ISA in miniature – have succeeded in subjecting the newcomers to ideology.
Drenched in blood, Justine has now accepted ideology as a closed subject. The scene also functions as an image of the master–slave dialectic.
Totem, Taboo, and Sisterhood
In Totem and Taboo, Freud traces animistic beliefs and sacrificial rituals in ancient tribes to argue that the first sacrificial victim was the “father” – the tribal chief (Freud 2012, p. 203). The murder of the father is carried out by a coalition of brothers, united by their oedipal conflict. After killing him, they eat the corpse to identify with the father (Freud 2012, p. 204). For Freud, this is the psychic root of cannibalism in many so-called “primitive” societies.
If we read Justine’s hunger through this lens, we can argue that the ideology behind her desire is the wish to become like her sister. As part of the school’s rules, written by the law-givers (the upperclassmen), new students must dress “sexy” during the first week. When she fails to do so, a female upperclassman harshly scolds her. In response, Justine puts on Alexia’s clothes.
Her accidental cutting of Alexia’s finger – and then her devouring of it – can be interpreted in the same Freudian frame. Justine’s attraction to her gay roommate Adrien, her forcing him to kiss her, and the uncontrollable urge to bite him during their sexual encounter all point toward a desire to possess the male body. Ideologically, the school-ISA clearly promotes heterosexual relations: Adrien, despite being gay, has a straight experience and enjoys it.
The scene where Justine is painted blue, forced to have sex with a boy painted yellow, and told they cannot leave the room until they “turn green”, foregrounds the way gender roles are scripted by ISAs. Still, what remains constant is Justine’s urge to bite in every situation. Psychopathologically, this is an oral-sadistic act – a sign of insufficient satisfaction at the breast (Geçtan 2014, p. 33). From this angle we can infer a hidden, unresolved problem in Justine’s relationship with her mother.
Desire, Punishment, and the Limits of the Subject
Throughout the film, the ISA pushes Justine toward eating meat. But what she really needs, beneath the hunger, is to be desired, to be chosen. Her sexual encounter with Adrien can be read as progress along the path of becoming “Alexia”.
For Alexia, this is intolerable. She wants Adrien eliminated. Having violated the taboo and eaten him, she is cursed and punished: transferred from one apparatus (the university) to another (the prison) for normalization. Her imprisonment removes a major obstacle to Justine’s becoming the object of desire. As long as Alexia remained at school, Justine would stay the little sister in need of protection.
By devouring Adrien, Alexia violently wounds Justine’s desire to possess the male body and is locked away for it. The subject, unfortunately, is closed; it lacks the power to change the conditions in which it finds itself.
Conclusion
With a level of discomfort that, for me, even leaves Dogtooth (2009) behind, Raw stands out among recent independent horror films for its ideological edge. Often compared to The Neon Demon (2016) due to surface similarities, Raw distinguishes itself by relocating cannibalism to the student body.
In many cinematic examples, cannibalism is a perverse pleasure practiced by a mastermind villain. Push it a little further, and it becomes a dirty delight of bourgeois or aristocratic men. Raw, however, makes a young woman its cannibal, someone who has left behind the family that represents her class and is simply trying to get through her studies in a white lab coat. She occupies the lowest rung of the environment she inhabits, and the white coat grants her no status at all. In that sense, Raw does something genuinely new.
By building a convincing bridge between repressive apparatuses and society, and by staging the relationship between ideology and state apparatuses through cannibalism, Raw opens up the field for multi-layered film readings. Alongside The Neon Demon, it helps inaugurate a new narrative tendency – and offers viewers a deeply strange, unsettling pleasure. Everything suggests that Raw will be talked about for quite some time.
References
Althusser, Louis. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (2014).
Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo (Say, 2012).
Geçtan, Engin. [Psychoanalysis and After]. Metis, 2014.
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