Cavemen Among Us: Genealogies of Atavism from Zola's La Bete humaine to Chabrol's Le Boucher

Abstract

Although critics have rightly linked Claude Chabrol's film Le Boucher (1969) to Zola's novel La Bete humaine (1890), the two have yet to be considered in the context of the century-long tradition of thought about atavism that informs them both. This article reconstructs that tradition, examining how Le Boucher's modern-day caveman suggests twentieth-century cultural continuities with nineteenth-century notions of man's relation to his evolutionary forebears. Noting Le Boucher's debt to a Freudian conception of atavism — a conception heavily influenced by the very same scientific paradigm that shaped Zola's fascination with man's prehistoric self — I argue that Chabrol's film revives a nineteenth-century European anxiety of proximity whereby technological and scientific advances prompted unease about ever closer contact with the distant reaches of humanity. Chabrol achieves this by building on Zola's protocinematic vision, refracting it through a Freudian lens in which atavism and the cinema occupy common psychological space, and updating the thematics of atavism for a twentieth century chastised by the colonial experiment.