Pretty Meat

Is our body just meat? Is our flesh as simple as a permeable cover made to hold our organs in? Is violence sexualized is such a way that people cannot look away when it occurs? Jesse Stommel argues so in his essay Pity Poor Flesh. Stommel uses Hollywood film as an example. He uses slasher movies such as Halloween and Texas Chainsaw Massacre to prove his point. Also, zombie films such as Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later, and the legendary Night of the Living Dead. For year’s organizations such as the Motion Picture Association of America, or the MPAA, have used rating systems to keep us from this horrid site of “Undifferentiated. Liquefying. Pungent. Fetid. Oozing. Writhing. Pretty. Meat.” (Stommel)

The most interesting word in the montage of adjectives above is obviously pretty. Why put such a word in between a line up of wretched descriptions? Stommel says that “Skin is permeable”, to which I first responded; skin cannot be penetrated with water or gasses, so it is not permeable. However, Stommel uses the word permeable in relation to metal instruments. The situation of how metal penetrates the skin can be very extremely “aesthetic in the eyes of a murderer.” Or on the reverse side be incredibly non-aesthetic. Stommel relates this statement to the scene in Halloween where Michael Myers, the masked killer of the series, hangs his victim high with the use of only a knife. John Carpenter spares the gore in this scene, because it is not what is important. Very long cuts occur as Michael “views the body as though it were a work hung on a gallery wall.” As a killer Michael enjoys his work he sees skin as only an object and forgets what is behind it. We as viewers are forced to stare along with the eyes of the murderer and take his side. There is certain symmetry to this scene that relates this crime to art, the fact that we notice it catches us and enthralls the mind, and we force ourselves to watch more. This is very similar to the experimental film entitled Bears Den. The way the images, and audio, make us want to avert out eyes and cover our ears in horror and confusion, but we watch to complete the work, and are unable to look away.

Stommel then counters the aesthetic with the non-aesthetic with the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In this film the murderer in more unappreciative and inconsiderate in his methods. Stommel brings up a scene where Leather face hangs a female on the wall with a hook, and even before she dies he “turns around and chops up a body on the table.” In the mise en scene a female hangs splattered with blood as she squirms loosely on a hook suspended from the ground. Tobe Hooper gives us less time, as the audience, to gaze upon this creation, or maybe the word obliteration is a better term, before we are taken away to a different scene with a slower paced theme. He does not see skin the way Michael sees his first murder of his sister, nude and impaled with his knife.

Do we find the decaying skin of a corpse sexual? Stommel brings to our attention that our hair is a dead material; our outer layer of skin is composed of nothing but lifeless cells. This is where zombies come into play. In the original Night of the Living Dead, Barbara the heroine of the film, is displayed “in a very sexist [manner] for a women in the sixties.” She is helpless and silent, and when it is time for the decisions to be made it is left the males of the household. This is also a comment made by George Romero to illuminate the light on the, in his opinion, failed feminist movement of the sixties. However, as an attractive young lady, the audience’s gaze in set upon her femininity, which is generally a weak sexist image. To the zombies flesh is made to be permeable, and to them it is useless “as it decays with time.” “We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and death. In between we do what we can to forget.” (Roach) However, to zombies biology is useless their skin organisms fail and with time they suffer a completely organic death. Zombies know skin is useless so they take it. We, again as the audience, see a young female be torn apart as she screams in mortified terror as her recently deceased family member grabs her face before he takes her skin. Why are we not terrified of these films, why do we not lock them in a vault and throw away the key?

The answer to that is simple. We can relate. Movies such as Death Proof sexualize a motorized vehicle accident with four young women simultaneously getting their skin penetrated and ripped apart by metal. Tarentino even reveals this scene over and over in great detail to ‘turn his audience on’ to the movie. Indeed we are biology. We are born and from there we begin the process of death. Wonderful minds such as Michael Myers realizes the art and spectacle of a fatal situation as he places a lit pumpkin as an audience to watch over his installation he placed in the middle of the room sprawled out across the bed put into position, and still bleeding what life was in it. These views are the view of a sociopath. He has no regard for life and cannot understand it. None of us completely understand life. We cannot comprehend what skin is used to bind. Does skin encase the soul, or is it simply a wrapping of material that holds our internal organs in an organized fashion? We sexualize life and in reverse order we sexualize death. We sexualize violence, because we realize this pretty meat of our dying bodies is meant to rot.