Taxidermia

Presence is not effaced by a void, but by a redoubling of presence that effaces the opposition between presence and absence. Nor is a void effaced by fullness, but rather by repletion and saturation, by a plenitude greater than fullness. This is the reaction of the body by obesity, of sex by obscenity, an abreaction to a void.

                                                                                      -From Baudrillard's “Fatal Strategies”

Taxidermia

György Pálfi's Taxidermia is an interesting manifestation of Foucauldian conceptualization of power. Stripped of the possibilities of challenging the system, all three protagonists exercise their limited power of controlling their bodies. In other words, they counter the power exerted upon them by exercising power on their own bodies. These instances of exercising counterpower reproduce the fetishization and commodification of their bodies (and their labor). Therefore, they join their oppressors in the consumption of their own bodies. 

Morosgoványi's labor is exploited by his commander as he is forced to perform heavy physical tasks while also being subjected to physical and psychological abuse. He is exposed to surveillance of the state and the army through his commander and he has very little privacy. His living conditions are horrific and he simply survives on his fantasies. His body is owned by his commander and the army, so he mostly challenges that authority with his fantasies and masturbation becomes a way to claim the ownership of his body. As the lines between reality and fantasy gets blurred, he is first mentally destroyed by the system and then, his commander destroys him physically by shooting him. 

Unlike him, Kálmán is not a soldier. However, as a competitive eater, who represents his country in international eating competitions, Kálmán is also subject to state's surveillance and control of his body. His work causes serious damage to his health and even vomiting what he ate can't help preventing further damage. Despite, his collapse during the games, which is mirrored by his wife's premature labor induced by another unofficial performance, he goes on competing and ends up as a morbidly obese man. Kálmán's hopes for prosperity and fame are dependent on his ability to eat in that economic system, so his body becomes his only weapon of struggle. 

Although Lajoska sees the end of that economic system, his life is dominated by another type of exploitation. As he tries to escape his father's oppression, he exercises power over the dead bodies of animals. The only time he challenges his father's oppression leads to Kálmán's death. The idea of his oppressor’s absence makes Lajoska's life, which was defined by serving his father, devoid. His body becomes his masterpiece as he kills himself after attempting to alter his physique by bodybuilding. When one of his customers finds Lajoska's body and exhibits what's left of him in an art gallery, commodification of the third protagonist's body becomes visible. 

Therefore, all three men's bodies are commodified and fetishized in different ways. As they are exploited by their oppressors, the struggle to resist becomes a counter attempt to control and to exploit the body. Both the use value and the exchange value of the body are annihilated while Morosgoványi, Kálmán and Lajoska end up contributing to their consumption by the system.

As a conclusion, it can also be said that these stories of commodification supports Baudrillard's critique of Marx's essentialization of the use value (p. 39). Marx's definition of commodity fetishism refers to the erasure of the human labor in the evaluation of product's value. While Marx points out to the prioritization of exchange value for that evaluation, Marx's critique takes the use value for granted according to Baudrillard, who emphasizes that utilities and needs are as artificial as the market values (p. 339). Especially in the cases of Morosgoványi, who is an orderly, and Kálmán, a competitive eater, utilities are constructed artificially by the system for the purposes of governmentality. Lajoska's body as an art object appears in a similar artificial system of use value. Then, it becomes evident that the problem is not just about isolating the value from the labor and it is also important to think about why the labor is performed in the first place. When considered all together, these three different contexts of fetishization in the film depict that commodification exists across different time periods and political systems. Therefore, the essence of commodity fetishism and commodification is an issue of power struggle rather than a manifestation of a specific system of production and consumption.