Hacker Cinema
Raw
Grave
2017 · Film · 99 min
Directed by Julia Ducournau
Stringent vegetarian Justine encounters a decadent, merciless, and dangerously seductive world during her first week at veterinary school. Desperate to fit in, she strays from her principles and eats raw meat for the first time. She soon experiences terrible and unexpected consequences as her true self begins to emerge.
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4 comments on Hacker News
>Raw is an extreme case of a an extreme horror movie
I was only commenting on the setup, not the movie itself. I didn't know what it was and when the horror started I stopped watching it. The other poster who considered it a recommendation was wrong.
And in fact it may be possible to interpret the horror as punishment for licentiousness, which is a common horror trope and undermines my point.
Raw is an extreme case of a an extreme horror movie, not insight into humanity's desires.
Closer to pop culture: the drama around conflicting interpretations of the song "It's getting cold outside".
I noticed this when I watched "Raw" recently [0]. It was remarkable because it portrayed horny young students hazing each other and desiring each other and plenty of unselfconscious peer pressuring, which was itself depicted as covertly appreciated and desired by the girls, by way of a license to let go and have fun for a night (like how people often blame alcohol). I kept waiting for the turn or the emotional beat that called out these heinous, sexist, abusive behaviors, but it never came. I noticed something similar when watching Berlin Calling [1] where sex is used in several realistic ways, as both exciting transgression to expressing warmth, friendship and love. Raw is French; Berlin Calling German.
Americans still deal with a great deal of Puritanical shame around sex, I think, and as a very fat country (the fattest ever to exist) where huge numbers are on SSRIs (with sexual side-effects) plus a divisive political climate, you get Disney Marvel sexuality.
BTW if you think Disney doesn't do horny, think again. I mean, look at the "love story" in any classic animated picture. She looks at him, thinks he's hot, he looks at her, he thinks she's hot, and it's on. In at least two cases (Sleeping Beauty and Snow White) that's "love's first kiss" that's given non-consentually -- and his transgression literally saves her life. The older I get the more I realize that this naive notion of what love is actually is the core of truth; the rest of what we add is risk mitigation. In big budget American cinema, the surest way to eliminate risk is to do exactly what they've done. They aren't stupid.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_(film)
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Calling
I've been considering going vegan after seeing "Raw":
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4954522/