Deodato’s much-maligned Cannibal Holocaust is in many ways the ultimate exploitation film, and yet also much more. While the acting is at times rather stilted, and the violence seems gratuitous like most other exploitation films, this film rather enacts the desire of the spectator to see the unseen.
Cannibal Holocaust thus enacts and stages itself – it narrates the violence visited upon indigenous people, while itself being just such an act of violence (mostly symbolic, but still). Seen in this light, the actual killing of the animals is necessary, though certainly not defensible. On the other hand, if it is legitimate to kill animals to eat them, turn them into clothes, feed them to themselves and so on, why is it wrong to kill them to make a film? Is film worth less than a pair of leather shoes?
In this way, Cannibal Holocaust is a commodity which questions our commodification of everything – from animals to indigenous people’s culture. The plot of the film, is that a group of ruthless documentarists travel to ‘the Green Inferno’ of the Amazonas to show Western culture how some people still live, just a few hours flight away from what is cast as the greatest pinnacle of civilization – symbolically represented by New York. The Green Inferno thus stands in contrast, but also in parallel to the concrete inferno of New York. There are several shots of New York that are similar in structure to the shots of the jungle, thus inviting us to see the two places in the same way.
The documentarists disappear and an anthropologist is sent to learn what has happened to them. What he learns is shocking; they were killed, but they were killed because they raped (and filmed) the natives, pillaged and burned the natives’ village in order to enact a conflict between two tribes that did not exist. The film reels that are recovered seem extremely realistic, and is obviously the cause for much of the outrage.
However, despite the violence it documents and the fact that all the material (except the last when the documentarists are killed) is staged, the TV network wishes to air the documentary. The anthropologist shows them the horrors contained within the reels, and they decide to burn the reels. However, the reels are not burned, but instead sold – thus playfully suggesting that we have seen actual, real footage.
However, it is this last turn of events – that the material is too horrible – which poses a difficult question for the spectator. Not because we may believe that the footage is real, but rather because it questions the act of viewing and even making such material. The film unabashedly presents us with exactly what we want to see: barbarous natives, barbarous westerners, blood, gore, nudity, sex and it is all fascinating in its repulsive glory.
The film squarely shows us how much we want to exploit and commodify and consume such spectacles, no matter what the price. The actual killing of the animals is precisely one such price, and therefore could not have been faked. But if we want to see such things, can we blame the people who make it? I don’t believe that Deodato is trying to escape or deny his part in this exploitation/commodification culture, but he questions the difference between his film and various other products, be it documentaries, news or any other text which draws its fascination from showing that which is taboo or transgressive. Deodato reveals the hypocrisy by explicitly stepping into the hornet’s nest, so to speak.
Cannibal Holocuast is not offensive, I would argue, because of the depictions of violence, rape, gore and so forth – although to some extent this is part of it, of course – but instead it offends because it is what it represents. There is no abstraction, no metaphor, no critical distance or reflection. Instead, the film conflates its own material existence with its artistic subject of commodification and exploitation – it is exploitation and commodity because of a belief, I would argue, that it is not possible to exist or stand outside of the structure it wishes to criticize.
Such a view of criticism is implicit, I believe, of most exploitation films and is the reason why so many people turn away from them, and find them offensive – even if what they depict is no longer offensive. It is not ‘good taste’ in Bourdieu’s sense, to enjoy texts that revel in their own economics of desire and deny that any form of cultural expression can stand outside of the demands of cultural, economic, and political reality.