I just can’t watch another freakin’ show about cannibalism

Yellowjackets is one of many shows, books, and films obsessed with cannibalism. | Kailey Schwerman/SHOWTIME

Welcome to Eater’s Weekend Special, an inside look at what our staff was buzzing about this week

Unlike everyone else I know, I am not watching the current season of the wildly popular series Yellowjackets. On its face, it’s a concept that should immediately appeal to me: A group of teen girls trying to stay alive after a horrible plane crash sounds like a perfectly good modern update of Lord of the Flies, but it’s what they have to do to stay alive that’s the problem. I just can’t watch another freakin’ show about cannibalism.

Yellowjackets is the latest in a recent spate of cannibal-obsessed series, books, and films. In 2022 alone, there was, of course, Yellowjackets; along with Bones and All, the much-hyped film starring Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell as a pair of young and ravenous human-eating lovers; and Fresh, which stars Sebastian Stan as a seriously terrifying dude who holds multiple women hostage in his home so that he can harvest their flesh. There was also the Jeffrey Dahmer discourse that followed the release of Monster, a biopic series that was criticized for glamorizing the horrific crimes that Dahmer perpetrated in the 1980s.

Our current socioeconomic moment feels especially ripe for cannibal content. “Eat the rich” is now a mainstream mantra, one you can see daily on Twitter or find emblazoned on leather jackets and mugs and jewelry. It’s a fragment of an 18th-century quote from French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one that feels especially prescient in an era of climate crisis and wealth inequality. “When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich,” Rousseau wrote in full.

But do we really have to make the metaphor so literal? Do we really have to watch people consuming human meat to understand that wealth inequality is bad? It seems like it’s entirely possible to explore these themes, even brutally, without actually eating anyone. In fact, Succession manages to torture an entire cast of people every week without a single drop of blood or jackfruit fashioned to look like human flesh. (That said, I would absolutely not be surprised if Logan or Roman Roy just spontaneously took a bite out of Gerri or Cousin Greg. It just seems fitting.)

This isn’t entirely a criticism of these films and shows. I thought Bones and All was a great movie, one of the best of last year, and I know many smart people who have praised the snappy writing and solid acting in Yellowjackets. But I think maybe now we’ve had enough content about eating people. There’s just something about watching people feast on flesh that looks eerily real — maybe too real! — that is an instant nope. It’s too much, especially at a time when there are so many immediate horrors to confront. — Amy McCarthy

Further reading: