REVIEW: Meat

- By Allan Lear

The closest living relative to the human being is the chimpanzee, Pans troglodytes. The genetic relationship between our two species is said to be in the region of 1.2%, which is only ten times more than the relationship between you and me. So close is this genetic match that it is sometimes argued in taxonomic circles that Homo sapiens is not so much a separate genus of creatures but merely a highly-specialised offshoot of the chimpanzee genus.

As well as the chimps and us there is a third branch off this genus and that place is held by the bonobo (Pans panicus). This endangered ape is most interesting not for its physical variation, as it looks mostly like a chimp but smaller, but for its behavioural oddities. It is interested in fashion: bonobos have been observed to wear a dead rodent as a hat. Despite this, they are not tool-using, unlike regular chimps. Most of all, and most famously, bonobos like sex.

If you ever get into an argument with some crapulous old prude who maunders on about how sex is intended by nature only for procreation, introduce them to the bonobo. The bonobo is possibly the only species on earth more sexually adventurous than human beings are ourselves. They engage in sexual activity in the same way as we would nod at each other on entering a lift. Boy on girl, boy on boy, girl on girl – anything goes. Male bonobos settle disputes by “fencing” with their erect members. These chimps are pure filth, like little hairy medical students.

Encouragingly for HG Wells and other dirty old hippies, the consequences of all this libertine, unrestricted shagging about seem to be pretty minimal. Female bonobos are rarely overpowered and harmed in the process of mating. Young bonobos don’t get felt up by bonobo presidential candidates, because the adults have their hands full with each other (or themselves). Bonobo STDs are fortunately rare. And bonobos very rarely grow up to need therapy for sexual trauma, because they’re too busy fucking.

How different, how very different, from the home life of our own dear Queen. There’s a common misquotation that money is the root of all evil; as any Biblical pedant knows, it’s the love of money that is the root of all evil. Similarly, in humans sex seems to do a lot of harm; but it’s possible to contend that what does the damage is not sex, but the fear of sex. Repression and shame around discussing the subject, artificial guilt ladled onto the young by sexually regressive societies or communities, anger born from ignorance; these are the factors that lead to very real trauma and for which sex is as much the outlet as the cause. As anyone who’s ever watched a cop drama can tell you, even rape isn’t about sex; it’s about power, which is to say relationships, which is to say a psychotically broken approach to relationships.

Meat is a Dutch drama from directors Victor Nieuwenhijs and Maartie Seyferth, the unpronounceable bastards. It concerns a young student, Roxy, who works weekends in a butcher’s shop to make ends…meet. Her boss, the butcher, is a lascivious gentleman with a penchant for taking his sexual conquests into the meat locker for his afternoon delights. Roxy knows this because, like Wes Bentley in American Beauty, she has a penchant for filming everything she sees, however mundane, on her handheld camera (the film makes occasional forays into this viewpoint, though thankfully it is far from dominant). She spends her time when not assistant-butchering with a variety of godawful fellow youngsters, all of whom have the sort of deplorable attitude that Bret Easton Ellis spent twenty years satirising until he suddenly realised he was too old to comment on youth culture any more. Everybody, and I mean everybody, in possession of a penis has sex with Roxy. And without exception, the sex is horrible.

It’s not just that the sex is bad, although it certainly seems to be. Not only is Roxy not terribly enthusiastic about getting started, but she doesn’t seem to enjoy it very much when it is underway either. And that’s when she’s with the butcher, whose only crime is to be physically unpleasant and inconsiderate in the sack; the other characters variously lash her with a belt, ditch her out of a car miles from anywhere, smother her with her own shirt while having their way with her, and generally slap her about. She gets to piss on one of them, for what little sense of redress that might give her.

In amongst all the horrendous shagging the butcher turns up dead and a police inspector who’s played by the same actor as the butcher investigates his own death or the other way around or something. It’s all very grainy and shot quite grindhouse-style, and the actor in the dual role is good and the actor playing Roxy barely has any expression at all throughout. I think the flat aspect is meant to represent her despair at all things, which, with a social life like hers, is pretty easy to understand.

There is a mystery at the heart of the murder, and there are moments of black comedy, and the whole thing comes across as something like a very, very Dutch Donnie Darko on one thousandth of the budget and with an unrepentant sociopath for a writer. Meat has been released to various horror festivals on the Continent and appears to have been met with more or less absolute indifference, although it was nominated for an award for Best Poster (a shot of the butcher, naked, which is something you’ll become deplorably familiar with over the course of the film).

I don’t really know how to sum up my feelings on Meat, because I can’t really ascribe it a genre. I don’t know if it’s meant to be a horror or a black comedy or a psychological thriller or what. It didn’t scare me and it didn’t make me laugh and “thrilled” would be the least apposite word imaginable for my reaction. It just made me terribly, terribly sad.

- By Allan Lear