Taxidermia and Consumption

In no way could I have prepared myself for the horrors that I experienced while watching Taxidermia. I saw Taxidermia as a film that communicated the self-destruction of the human race through its over-consumption, as expressed through thematically repetitive images of body horror engrained within a plot that traces the effects of consumption through multiple generations. In my viewership I developed a focus on the representation of humans in an animalistic way; both in their encouragement and commodification of human consumption into a form of entertainment (the eating competitions), in their actual physical attributes that give them an appearance similar to that of animals, and in the conclusion of the film in which the taxidermist makes himself and his father an object for display, just as the taxidermied animals who decorate his storefront. In the beginning of the film, Morosgoványi’s sexuality is projected in a barbaric/animalistic way; he is unable to be satiated and very much expresses his sexuality through an animalistic deeply rooted necessity, which leads him to having sex with his lieutenant’s wife, who seems to oscillate between herself, an overweight, rugged woman, and a pig carcass while they have sex.

This hybridity between humans and products of consumption or animals is revealed in the birth of her child, Kálmán, who is born with a pig’s tail and becomes very much like a pig whose distinct behavior and purpose is to limitlessly gorge on food so that it can itself become a product of human consumption. He very much resembles a pig- his very purpose is to consume as much as possible with no restraint to provide entertainment for those who watch the competitions. In “Consumer Society” Baudrillard writes, “This repetitive and metonymic discourse of the consumer and of commodities is represented through collective metaphor and as a product of it's own surplus in the image of the gift and of the inexhaustible and spectacular prodigality of the feast” (33-34). The cycle of overconsumption is communicated through Kálmán’s cycle of overeating, regurgitation of food, and eating again; his method of regurgitation itself becoming a commodity to be used by future speed-eaters. This tragedy and cycle of consumption is reinforced through the passing down of consumption through generations. As Marx writes, “It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things….the fetishism of the world of commodities arises from the peculiar social character of the labor which produces them” (332). Taxodermia represents how we become “products” of consumption, and like objects in a factory line we become replications of our environments and of our relatives and their behaviors, and humanity seems to be predisposed through this consumption to self-destruct; consumption becomes almost a part of us, integrated into our genes, becoming so natural that it is almost unnoticed in our daily lives. The film ends with the representation of the all-encompassing consumptive drugstore, Balatony buying the same thing over and over and in bulk, his father consuming lard, again assimilating to a product of consumption as he shares the same meal as his cats, his prized objects, and Balatony transforming into a spectacularized object of study himself to be recirculated and put on display as an art piece. In his ultimate transformation Balatony symbolizes the preservation of humanity through production.