A psychoanalytic exploration of the film Raw (2016), with special emphasis on the capitalist discourse

Abstract

The French film Raw (2016), written and directed by Julia Ducournau, has received critical acclaim as a contemporary female coming-of-age horror film with feminist and critically reflective leanings. The film is an unsettling account of a young woman whose subjective emergence into cannibalism occurs in a sadistic world of “Dionysian excess” at university. This paper assesses the themes of spectatorship, consumption, womanhood, sublimation, jouissance, and sexual non-rapport elicited by the film. “Non-rapport” is Lacan’s term for the real, non-representable gap at the heart of sexual relationships and is what causes discourses which delimit social bonds and modes of enjoyment (jouissance). Using Lacanian discourse theory, and specifically Lacan’s fifth discourse on capitalism, I assess the film’s gloomy meditation on the dehumanizing, anti-social, and dissatisfying nature of hypermodernity with its imperatives to enjoy a seemingly endless supply of object-commodities, and explore what the film articulates about contemporary modes of dealing with jouissance and the implications for the woman subject.