Luca Guadagnino’s films often deal with emotional complications people face in the turning points of their lives. In some of his latest endeavors, these complications have been set as coming of age stories, featuring characters who are dealing with issues regarding their sexuality and coming to terms with who they are.
Call Me By Your Name and We Are Who We Are brought to life the stories of young men dealing with love and change, and were met with commercial and critical success. These stories have placed Guadagnino among the most recognized filmmakers of today. His newest work, Bones And All, an adaptation from Camille DeAngelis’ novel, doesn’t stray from this familiar territory. Adding a horror layer to its romantic premise, the film works as well as a road movie, but underneath it all, it holds some complicated undertones that have hit home for a lot of people within the queer community.
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In his Silver Lion-winning romantic-horror mashup, Guadagnino allegorizes the experiences queer youths throughout the world might have in their daily lives. From cannibalistic hunger to a Joy Division/New Order sonic contrast, Bones And All finds subtle metaphors in horror, isolation, and conflict for the beautiful and hard process that is coming to terms with one’s identity. It’s something which queer individuals can relate to.
What Happens in Bones and All?
MGM
The film concerns Maren (Taylor Russell), a young cannibal drifting through middle America looking for her long-gone mother after being abandoned by her father on her 18th birthday. She meets Lee (Timothée Chalamet), another cannibal (“eater”) with whom she bonds and embark on a road trip where they develop feelings for each other.
Queer from the Get-Go
One of the first moments of bonding between them happen when Lee retells the time he first ate a human being. When Maren hears it was his babysitter, she enthusiastically replies “Me too!” This is one of the very first explicit instances in which an allegory to queer life is set. To grasp that you are not alone in this world, that your experience is not only validated but shared by others, will be caught up by queer audiences right from the start.
Even before that, one of the opening scenes finds Maren bonding extremely closely with a classmate at a sleep-over, which is followed by Maren devouring the girl’s finger after they held hands. As she flees the place, apparently confused by her own actions, Maren arrives home to a frightened father, who asks her to get her things as they are leaving town in three minutes.
Hunger here is an allegory for love and the desire for it, not found by people rejected by society for failing to fit into what is considered normal. The need to escape and drift from place to place, or group to group, is a common experience for many queer youths who find themselves displaced from their homes.
Drifting, Found Family, and Acceptance
After moving, Maren is abandoned by her father, who leaves her a tape in which he confesses to being unable to love her properly, for which he is departing. It’s not every queer person’s fate to be rejected by their household, but it is a sad fact of life that does happen, and some grow without the support of their parents or family. Many find themselves in the position of Maren, scared and alone, having to find a way through life in isolation from the rest of the world.
That’s why the appearance of others who live similar lives becomes such a profound relief, as a new-found family and safety net can arise from linking with people who understand your experiences. After knowing Sully (Mark Rylance) and Lee, Maren is very surprised that she is not alone, and slowly begins to feel more comfortable in her own skin, accepting that she is an eater.
Generational Trauma and Self-Hatred
Maren and Lee eventually get to Janelle (Chloë Sevigny), Maren’s mother who voluntarily turned herself in at a psychiatric hospital, as she is an eater too. Her self-hatred got her to eat her own hands and nearly kill her own daughter at the first sight of her. Janelle’s situation is a reminder that, even though not adhering to cis-heteronormativity is broadly accepted (or tolerated), in the past it was seen by many (even the medical industry and psychologists worldwide) as a mental illness. This societal imposition on queerness must have been grueling and gruesome, and makes total sense for it to instill the sense of self-hate that is found in Janelle.
An insight into this is made by fleeting moments in the film in which TV and radio snippets communicate real life dialogues by conservative politicians. Bones And All is set in Reagan’s America, a dangerous time for gender and sexual diversity. At the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, prejudice towards queer people was everywhere in the United States, and society was heavily homophobic, especially in the middle of rural America where the film is set.
This is also a heavy statement by Guadagnino; showing queerness in this part of the world normalizes their existence, which transcends socio-economic and cultural backgrounds. Rurality is both a contradiction and a validation — despite its many limitations and threats to queer life in these areas, it still exists and rejects extinction. This is part of the film’s portrayal of queer life as well. It’s not only about the horrors they face, it’s also about the beauty they can find.
Tenderness and Conflict in Bones and All
The scene where Lee and Maren go to the carnival and find themselves in the need for food holds several interpretations to its development. Lee flirts with a male booth worker, and later takes him to a corn field where he masturbates him before slicing his throat. The explicit depiction is the most evident portrayal of queerness in the film, which also sets the stage for more of the themes within the community Guadagnino chooses to explore. Even though there is a tenderness to it, the murdering of a gay man alludes to inner violence within the community.
That violence can also be seen in the character of Sully, and Rylance’s impressive performance is one of the highlights of the movie, as his acting is both chilling and moving. Despite his possessive attitude towards Maren, the character displays a lot of humanity and frailty as an older eater finding himself alone in the world. This hints to older generations that could not find a space to be themselves, and thus ended alienated and emotionally unable to convey their needs.
The lack of communication, validation, company, and love has sadly affected a lot of LGBTQIA+ elders, unable to handle rejection to their need for love with maturity, thus falling into toxic behavior that the societal order has ingrained in them as violence and domination. For a character like Sully, there is no middle ground; either you give them the love and affection they have not received for decades, or you disappear and spare them the pain of having to exist knowing one more person has denied their emotional needs.
Bones And All might be full of tragedy and loss, but it’s also life-affirming and encouraging. This story of two lost souls finding a home will forever resonate with queer audiences as it speaks directly into their lives, telling them that they are not alone. Bones and All shows that no matter how grim the present might be, and how uncertain the future might get, there will always be someone who is going through something similar and can relate, listen, understand, and embrace their feelings, bones and all.
