From the Mignonette to Yellowjackets: Why We're Obsessed with Cannibalism

A Yellowjackets writer and cultural critic explores cannibalism from Victorian survival cases to contemporary pop culture.

Cannibalism in literature is as ancient as literature itself—in fact, we’ve been gnawing on it ever since the days of Homer. But in recent years, it’s become a downright cultural phenomenon, exploding from the page to the screen in vehicles like Yellowjackets, Bones and All, Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, Raw, Fresh, and many more. Audiences are eating it up, but the trope’s enduring popularity is a head-scratcher. After all, extremely few of us have eaten other human beings—so why are we endlessly fascinated by this ultimate taboo?

This fascination with cannibalism isn't new—and it's not just fiction. In 1884, the crew of the yacht Mignonette lived out this nightmare scenario, killing and eating their youngest member after weeks adrift at sea. Their story, which Adam Cohen tells in his forthcoming book, Captain's Dinner, became one of history's most famous legal cases about survival and murder.

To explain our obsession with cannibalism in pop culture, we brought in Emily St. James, a writer and cultural critic whose journalism and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Vox, and The A.V. Club. She is a staff writer on the Emmy-nominated television series Yellowjackets. Her debut novel, Woodworking, about the unlikely friendship between a trans teacher and her trans student, is available now.

ADRIENNE WESTENFELD: Take me back to the first time cannibalism piqued your interest.

EMILY ST. JAMES: When I was four or five, I lived way out in the middle of nowhere, and we had these evangelical Christian missionaries who came to stay with us. They had been in Papua New Guinea among uncontacted tribes. They told stories about headhunters, which I think were just racism—I want to be clear about that. But the whole concept was fascinating to me—that you could kill another person in a systemized, ritualistic way that also involved the consumption of flesh. I was a very young child, so I didn't quite grasp all of it. When I was an older child, the movie Alive came out about the 1972 Andes plane crash, where the survivors ate the corpses of their friends. That really got under my skin. There’s something about the way that when you eat another human, there has to be an element of almost ritualistic sacrifice to it. That made me feel like, “There’s something here about how we treat the sacredness of this act.”

A scene from the movie Alive. | Photo Credit: Netflix.

AW: Whenever I read about historical examples of cannibalism, it seems there’s often a ritual attached to it. Consuming the dead becomes about honoring those who’ve fallen in battle, grieving lost family members, etc.

ESJ: When you take another life, there is a deeply emotional component to it. There's an intimacy to it that is difficult to escape. Most murders occur at the hands of someone you know very well, often a romantic partner. I don't want to minimize how terrible that is. But there’s something intimate that's inherent in how this all works. There’s a reason the Zodiac Killer would put on a costume to mentally and spiritually prepare for this act. It's pretty rare that we ritualize other forms of violent human interaction—we don't see a lot of that around people who commit robbery, for example. But when you murder someone, there’s this element of intimacy to it, and then you add ritual on top of that.

AW: Does the intimacy of the act lend itself to how cannibalism is often portrayed in media, with sensual and erotic overtones?

ESJ: I think it grows so naturally out of the vampire story and the werewolf story. The vampire is a very sexual creature who’s seducing, consuming, and drinking the self. The werewolf is a bit more about our animalistic nature. But you know, part of our animalistic nature is wanting to fuck—it’s about getting in touch with the beast, in essence. Before I started working on Yellowjackets, I was working on a piece about the way the show’s wilderness functions as a metaphor for queerness. This is my critic brain talking; now that I’ve worked on the show, I don’t know that I would say the same thing. Watching the show late in Season Two, I was thinking about how, in any story, the wilderness functions as an exit from civilization. But in Yellowjackets specifically, there’s a sexual component to that. It’s not a show where everybody's queer, but it’s a very queer show. When you exit the bounds of society, what rules fall away first? In a certain way, going into the wilderness allows the girls to escape their religious backgrounds. That’s kind of a stretch, to be clear. We don't know a lot about their religious backgrounds. Outside of Laura Lee, it doesn’t seem deeply important to any of them, but it’s this thing that hangs over them when they're in society, and now that they're out there, it’s gone. In that sense, queerness is your only romantic option in that space, unless you're having sex with Travis.

Queerness and cannibalism are wrapped up in the same thing. It’s all sin—heavy air quotes around that—and it’s all happening because you're outside of society. You can indulge in it. It's always about death and sex wrapped up in each other, and usually violent death that somebody is committing upon you; cannibalism doesn't have to be involved. But it does seem like that tips it over into the next level. When I think about places where cannibalism in horror is a metaphor for something, it’s often a metaphor for queerness. The 1999 movie Ravenous is very gay; it’s about men who want to fuck each other, but instead, they eat each other. The 2016 movie Raw has an element where anytime the protagonist gets turned on, she has to deeply suppress it. Obviously that can be true of straight people, but it does feel like a much more common experience within queer spheres. So cannibalism and queer sexuality overlap in a way that’s fascinating to me.

AW: Why does pop culture keep coming back to cannibalism?

ESJ: Art is our way of banishing pieces of our subconscious that we don't entirely know what to do with. I think cannibalism is a thing many of us are fascinated by. There’s this frisson to it where we think, “What if I ate someone?” Then you have to ask yourself, “What's the permission structure I would give myself to eat someone?” Inevitably it’s something like, “I'm in the middle of the sea in a lifeboat and resources are dwindling, so we need to kill somebody to eat them.” Then you expand that permission structure outwards. I remember in the mid-2000s, somebody posted an ad on Craigslist saying, “I want to eat somebody” and found a taker. I don't want to say it was understandable, because I don't actually want to eat a person. I don’t want to die in a cave either, but I watch all these stories about people who get trapped in caves. I feel a similar way about cannibalism. I don't want to eat a person, but there’s a piece of me that’s very old and very primal that asks, “But what if you did?” And the solution, of course, is very simple. I will simply not eat a person. But there’s a part of me that wants to explore what it would be like, and that's why we invented art. Art is what we do to cope with the parts of ourselves that would blow up society.

AW: What you're describing makes me think of the High Place Phenomenon—the psychological principle about the intense desire to jump when you stand on the edge of a cliff. The human mind seems to love these “what ifs.”

ESJ: When we have those thoughts persistently, we call that suicidal ideation, but it's often hard to know the gap between the natural human curiosity about “what if I jumped off this building” versus “I keep thinking about jumping off this building.” There’s a gap there, but it's narrower than we think, and with cannibalism, we're not quite sure when we've crossed it. Horror is often a good way to deal with aspects of mental health that are hard to talk about without problematizing them. In horror, we can add layers of metaphor. Take Sawney Bean, the famous Scottish cannibal whose legend has been greatly inflated. Sweeney Todd started as this character in dime novels, then Stephen Sondheim found him and said, “Well, obviously, this is a story about how the rich consume the poor, and if the poor ever reverse that, then it becomes a metaphor for how capitalism functions.” When you see random cannibalism, it often tends to function in that fashion. It's often a critique of society and economic oppression. But most of the time, it's about the intimacy of our close relationships and how that can get badly warped.

AW: Kristi Noem recently claimed that a “cannibal” on a deportation flight tried to consume himself mid-flight. Personally, I think it's hateful fear-mongering, not a true story. But what do you make of her using cannibalism as a boogeyman?

ESJ: I think that’s just a bit of racist agitprop she invented on the fly because she couldn’t think of anything better than the most cliché thing you can say about “the other.” But I do think it’s interesting that she said he was trying to eat himself. That doesn't really exist in cannibalism stories. I know of a few examples of it—for instance, Hannibal Lecter makes people eat themselves every so often. But that's part of the fun for him. It's not like, “I’m going to be on this plane eating my arm.” Or we see situations like Aaron Ralston, the guy from 127 Hours, who cut off his own arm to free himself. We have a fascination with stories like, “I'm in a place, and I need to get out of it, and I will mutilate my body to survive.” When it's not a survival thing, it tends to be about gaining power over your victim. You don't get that if you eat yourself.

I don't want to speculate too much about the situation of this person who possibly doesn't exist. Kristi Noem is just riffing in a horrible fashion, I think. But I did have the thought of, “This is someone who knows he’s bound for hell on earth, and he's trying to end his life.” Maybe that’s gotten warped by Kristi Noem, who’s turned it into this guy trying to eat himself, as opposed to a very dark thing that I think just about any of us would contemplate if we were in that situation. She's trying to remove his humanity by making him seem other. But maybe he’s just a very desperate person in a bad situation, trying to escape it however he can.

AW: Speaking of alleged cannibals, what did you make of Armie Hammer’s cannibalism scandal? Why did that grab hold of the internet with such fervor?

ESJ: I always come back to his apology, where he said something along the lines of, “This is me trying to process trauma by role-playing.” I think it gets back to the sex thing, whether he was literally chewing on flesh or doing a cannibal roleplay for sexual gratification. To be clear, even if this was a consensual sexual relationship that then became a non-consensual roleplay, that's fucked up and should not happen. But the roleplay element is fascinating, because it gets back to the intimacy angle of, “We want to consume those we love. We want them to be with only us, and one way to do that is to eat them, and then they'll never go anywhere else.” There’s a need to deal with the idea of possession, of wanting someone so badly that you want to Bluebeard them. That’s so core to sexual desire. Because we're human beings and we have rational minds, we can set that aside. But we recognize it within ourselves.

I don't know what was going on in Armie Hammer's life, and it seems pretty clear that he violated a lot of boundaries with the people he was with. But I think I recognize within that impulse something that’s inside a lot of our brains, especially if you were affected by traumatic events as a child. His explanation that this was a way to deal with trauma made sense to me, as a trauma survivor myself. There's stuff in my brain that I can only deal with through channels like fiction, storytelling, and roleplay, like tabletop games. Of course, if you're going to explore that sort of thing in a sexual situation, you’ve got to be real clear beforehand about what's going to happen.

AW: That’s such a compassionate, empathetic perspective.

ESJ: When I was working as a journalist, I felt so much more comfortable being like, “This guy's a piece of shit.” I think that’s necessary in journalism, because you have to tell the truth, and to some extent, the truth has a moral valence. Now that I work as a fiction writer, I'm always like, “Well, maybe there's more to it,” because I have to get inside the brains of these people. I spend a lot of time thinking about teenage girls on Yellowjackets, all of whom are totally messed up people. As a fiction writer, you have to give yourself space to think about the worst people in the world. Often the way the Internet flattens everything into news makes us feel like we're supposed to be providing moral valence on fictional characters. Sometimes I think that's worthwhile—for instance, it’s worthwhile to say that Humbert Humbert is a pedophile creep, which a lot of critics were unable to say for a long time. But Nabokov has a lot of compassion for that man, even if he hates him. I think it’s important to remember that literature can have a moral valence, and it can also allow us to explore the ways in which that moral valence is more complicated than we might want it to be. But yes, if I were writing a news article, I’d say, “Seems like Armie Hammer did some really shitty things.”

AW: When you and your colleagues sit down in the Yellowjackets writers’ room, to what degree are you engaged with the reality of cannibalism? Are there any historical inflection points that inspire you?

ESJ: First, I’m going to say a long caveat here. I'm a lowly staff writer. I am a person at the very bottom of the corporate ladder of this show. I only started working on the show during Season Three, so I don't know what their conversations were like in Seasons One or Two. I know that for myself, it’s worthwhile to know a lot about historical cannibalism. The Donner party is one that I've gone back to often, because it’s proved to be a rich font for horror writers. There's that Alma Katsu novel, The Hunger, that imagines a horror element placed on top of what happened to the Donner party. Obviously Franklin’s lost expedition, the thing that inspired The Terror, is a similar thing where horror elements are combined with cannibalism.

It helps that these people are long, long dead. You can't write a horror story about the Andes plane crash because a lot of those people are still alive. I know for my wife [Libby Hill], who's my co-writer, it’s good for her to engage with historical events. There are people in the writers’ room who will bring up historical antecedents for what we're talking about, and then there are people who don’t need that to enhance their creative process, because to a certain extent, this is all made up. This probably couldn’t happen, at least to the extreme degree it does on the show. There are elements that slightly beggar belief, like the slim nutritional capacity of the human body as a food product. But then you just wonder if it's the wilderness that's keeping them alive to play games with them. That’s always the answer I tell myself when I start thinking too hard about the reality of it.

AW: What's the most shocking scientific fact you’ve learned about cannibalism?

ESJ: The thing I keep coming back to is that, unless you’re in an extremely dire survival situation in which there’s no way you're going to get other calories, human flesh is not a very good way to get the calories you need to live. The act of consuming is going to be very rough on you, especially if you're killing someone. My God, that wastes a lot of energy! You're not running at a caloric deficit when you do cannibalism, but the caloric profit is a much smaller gap than if you were to eat a rabbit or a deer. There's a reason that humans started hunting the animals we did for protein. If you kill a deer, that takes your energy, but in the act of consuming it, you get a lot of calories back. That's just not the case with a human, and the second you start hunting them and murdering them, you're probably not doing so hot. But if you're in an extremely dire survival situation, as the guys in the Andes were, you will get a little calorie boost from it. But if you have other options, eat the deer.

There’s something called Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, a brain malady that happens if you start eating people. We’ve seen it in tribes that engage in ritualistic cannibalism—it’s a condition that feeds back in when you’re eating human flesh. In other species that consume their own dead, it seems like the real reason there's such a taboo around it, beyond all the obvious ones, is that there’s a real health risk. It’s similar to how the incest taboo exists, because it’s not great for offspring and creates health risks down the line.

AW: One of the things that makes cannibalism on screen so fascinating is the nuts and bolts of how it’s depicted, from the way actors perform eating human flesh to what prop stylists use to stand in for it. What else can you tell us about how Yellowjackets navigates depicting the act on screen?

ESJ: I’m drawing from what some of our producers have said about this. In Season Two, before I worked on the show, there was a scene where the girls consumed a dead Jackie. Jonathan Lisco, the showrunner on the first three seasons, talked about how they had the body of Jackie made out of jackfruit, which had been styled to look fleshy. One thing that makes this process tricky is working with vegan actresses. Venison looks plausibly like human flesh in the sense that it’s not a meat we encounter all the time, so like we're like, “That must be what human flesh looks like.” In reality, it doesn't look like human flesh at all. But we know it’s not a steak, so it tricks our minds. We work with a number of actors who are vegetarian or vegan, so when they're consuming human flesh, they don't want to be consuming animal products. Jackfruit ended up being how they solved that problem. The episode that my wife and I wrote [Season Three, Episode Six] was an episode where there was cannibalism involved, so our props department threw together fake vegan meat. But honestly, it looks so real, I think we may have cracked the code.

The Yellowjackets prepare to eat Jackie. | Photo Credit: Kailey Schwerman/SHOWTIME.

AW: Are there any works of art about cannibalism that you feel are particularly well-done? What would you recommend to our readers?

ESJ: Obviously, I think people should watch Yellowjackets. Alma Katsu’s The Hunger is wonderful. Herculine, Grace Byron’s new novel, is great. One genre that has some overlap with cannibalism is the zombie story. Gretchen Felker Martin's Manhunt is a really great zombie story with some cannibalism elements in it, which I find really compelling. I think the 1999 movie Ravenous is underseen—it’s about guys living in the middle of nowhere, in this “Wild West” period of American history. It plays into some unfortunate and racist depictions of Native American mythology. But it leaves all of that ambiguous enough that I can let go and enjoy it. I can say, “This is just a story about guys who want to fuck each other and instead are eating each other.” It has those racist elements, but it’s a wonderful depiction of the queer sensuality inherent to a lot of cannibalism stories.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.