Eating with family: an analysis of the novel and film ‘bones and all’
Bones & All is a novel by Camille DeAngelis published in 2015. The story follows Maren, a young girl abandoned by her mother the day after her sixteenth birthday. The reason for her abandonment is not unjust - Maren is an eater. Throughout her childhood, Maren could not help but sink her teeth into babysitters, crushes, and friends, putting a great deal of stress on Maren’s mother, Janelle, who was forced to pack up and move around the country more than she would have liked to. Now on her own, with only $100 and her birth certificate, Maren sets off to find her birth father, whom she has never met. Along her journey, she meets Sully, a strange man who is also an eater. Sully serves as a father figure towards Maren, but after he eats a woman that Maren had been staying with, she strays from him. Eventually, Maren meets fellow eater Lee. Lee is nineteen, and eats only the people who deserve it. He sees how Maren struggles to survive on her own and takes her under his wing, as they travel together to find Maren’s father.
After finding her father in a mental hospital, Maren sees that Frank, her father, is also an eater, who was so overwhelmed with emotion by the way he was, he had eventually eaten his hand. Having also parted ways with Lee after an argument, Maren stays with Travis, Frank’s primary care nurse at the hospital, until he begs her to eat him because he is so depressed and lonely that he wants to die. Maren has Travis drive her to Sully’s cabin, where she would feel more comfortable staying, but after snooping around there, Maren discovers her father’s ID in Sully’s things. Sully finds that Maren has the ID and reveals that he is Maren’s paternal grandfather. Sully tries to kill Maren, but Maren escapes. Eventually, she reconnects with Lee, and they stay in a random dorm at the University of Wisconsin while they figure out what to do with their life, also hiding out from Sully. Sully finds Maren and tries to kill her, but Lee intervenes, eating and killing Sully. Maren and Lee, who have begun to develop a romantic relationship, spend the night in the same bed for the first time, but Maren, who cannot resist her urges, eats him.
The film does a wonderful job of following the general idea of the novel, other than a few key differences. The first, and most important, is that in the film, Maren’s dad abandons her, and she sets out on her journey to find her mother. Though this is swapped, it still emphasizes Maren’s longing for a loving maternal figure, and hits even harder when she sees that her mother is an eater who will not be able to save her from the life she is living. Also in Maren’s family in the novel, though Maren’s interactions with Sully are all the same, in the film, they are not related, just fellow eaters, and the first other eater she ever interacted with. Another main difference is that in the novel, Lee comes from a family of eaters (his father had been an eater), but in the film, he is the only eater he has ever met. The last main difference between the novel and the film is that in the film, Lee’s attempt to kill Sully leaves him injured, and Maren eats him at Lee’s request, because he would have already died anyway. However, in the novel, Maren eats Lee out of an inability to break her habit, emphasizing her naïve nature and the cruel reality that being an eater creates for her.
All of these changes still manage to display one of the story’s main themes: family. Though Maren and Lee might consider themselves loners, without real friends or family because of the lives they lead, their connections with each other are the most important thing. Through a lens of horror, DeAngelis tells a story that shows family is all around you, and you don’t need to be related to someone by blood to consider them your family.
Something rather consistent about the novel and the film they kept was the casual manner in which Maren and the other eaters find themselves eating. The act of consumption, shown in great detail on more than one occasion, symbolizes Maren’s need for connection. She and the other eaters, again and again, find themselves taking people that could have been long-time friends and eating them out of an irresistible urge. These are people that offered them food, shelter, or even human compassion, but something so dark, deep, and ugly about the nature of the eaters makes them so that they can’t help but destroy their chance at the thing they long for the most.
The cinematography in Bones & All elevates the presence of the story’s underlying themes throughout the film. Together, cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan alongside director Luca Guadagnino do a wonderful job of displaying themes of isolation and connection through their camera work and the physicality of the actors.
There are three scenes where this is especially present, with the first being the sleepover scene. The glass table that Maren and her friend sit under is a smokescreen of normalcy for the audience. Maren is without friends, and the lack of her mother’s presence in her life has made it especially difficult to connect with females, something we are reminded of again and again as the film continues. Shoving those girls into an intimate, crowded, yet isolating space like under that table makes audiences feel as though they are looking in on something special, something that maybe they shouldn’t be seeing. It also highlights Maren’s cannibalistic urges. To anyone who knows what is about to happen, they can take in the way Maren leans in, sniffs the girl’s neck, and gets as close to her as possible before choosing to go along with the act of eating her finger. Their relationship feels almost sexual, highlighting that any intimacy Maren feels for any person, she cannot help but use her teeth on.
When Maren is stranded in Frederick, Maryland, for the night, while her bus is stopped during her initial trek out to find her mother, she is stalked by Sully. His introduction is creepy, Khachaturan forcing the audience to look at a large stretch of street, taking seconds before anyone can even realize that a strange man is approaching Maren from the dimly lit distance. Throughout the film, light, or the lack of it, is used as a symbol for knowledge and yearning. For Maren, Lee is the only one in the story she can truly trust. Some come and go, such as her father or Sully, but Lee is consistently there for her. To show this to audiences on a physical level, Maren and Lee are shown together in light, even if that means they are in the dark, but beside a glowing fire. There is so much that the characters want to learn about each other, about themselves, about the world they live in, and about eaters, but because of the cruelty of the world and the lack of resources they have access to, they are often, literally, left alone and in the dark.
In the scene where Maren and Lee are first aware of one another, they are in a grocery store in the same aisle. A drunk man wanders down the aisle, harassing a random passerby. Though the audience sees Maren and Lee watching this and looking at one another, it feels like they are on opposite sides of the store, but as the camera moves around to take in different parts of the environment, it can be seen that they are pretty close together, and are also on the same side of the aisle. Lee yells at the drunk man and takes him outside to eat him. In this scene, the audience is gifted the growth in Maren’s appreciation and connection to this boy without having even spoken to him yet.
Aside from any specific scenes, there are also many tactics used to display the loneliness that Maren feels, as well as highlight any connection she has with others. The film has a staggering amount of isolating shots. Maren is often the only person in the shot, or she is by herself in desolate locations, like a motel room or a diner. These emphasize how disconnected from society she feels, and how much space there is, both emotionally and physically, from the world around her.
Framing-wise, there are oftentimes characters separated by physical elements, glass, or shadow. Even when they are sharing a frame, things keep them apart. This shows the loneliness the eaters feel, and this is compositionally broken as the friendship and eventually the relationship between Maren and Lee progress. They start to get closer and closer together on screen as their characters feel connected to each other, and, especially in the film more so than in the novel, they spend most of their time existing very close to each other, almost on top of one another, up until Maren eats Lee as he lays in her lap.
Arseni Khachaturan and Luca Guadagnino worked together to create one of the most visually shocking (beautifully and horrifically) films of the 2020s. The novel Bones & All is a heartbreaking story, and the film does a fantastic job of using its power of visual storytelling to emphasize themes and thoughts that would be otherwise lost in this form of media.