Taxing the Skin: Consumption and Death in Taxidermia

The title of György Pálfi’s film Taxidermia immediately draws attention to the film’s positioning of the human body as the site of conflicted historical and ideological battles. Human bodies in all their visceral, unpalatable materiality literally form the page on which the vagaries of the script are “fleshed out.” Food is a central metaphor through which Pálfi charts out the anatomy of three generations. This characterization of the body as both the site and object of consumption slips into particularly tricky terrain, as it is near impossible to achieve an objective dissociation from the object of analysis when one is essentially also part of the subset of objects. In other words, the discussion of the human body and practices of consumption are marked by the vanishing simplicity that Marx notes in relation to the discussion of the fetishistic character of forms of consumerist practices that become so pervasive that they begin to seem like “nature.”

The central character in the first story, Morosgoványi Vendel presents us with a figure that is disempowered and constantly in “want”. Whether it is through the sensuous play with fire, or the less than savory scenes with the pig, Morosgoványi comes across as an embodiment of the infantilized “lower” class that cannot control “hunger”, but is constantly constituted by it. On a side-note, I am wondering if the construction of this character, especially in light of the association of deviance/depravity has anything to do with older representative figures such as the character of Woyzeck rendered by Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog’s 1979 production with which Csaba Czene’s portrayal of Vendel bears an uncanny similarity.

Csaba Czene as Morosgoványi

Klaus Kinski as Woyzcek

It is in the second and the third stories that the connection to consumption becomes more intense. The characters of Balatony Kálmán, his son Lajoska, and the strained relationship between them is constituted by embodied practices of consumption. Kálmán's past as a speed-eater is particularly interesting to note as it brings in an angle of literal “consumption” in relation to the history of socialism. If we tend to connect constant consumption as an effect of late capitalism, Kálmán's “state-approved” cycles of public swallowing and regurgitation point towards a different sort of consumption that is more literal and more embodied than an abstract notion of consumption that is understood in more symbolic terms. Kálmán's speed-eating and his ultimate metamorphosis into a giant consuming mass of flesh resembling Jabba the Hutt, are a less-than-subtle nod to consumption as something that constitutes the body and its relationship to the social world.

Jabba the Hutt

Kálmán the eating machine

Finally with Lajoska we come into a realm of consumption that more than constitutes the body’s relation to the world. Not only does Lajoska’s “appetite” become the bone of contention between him and his father, it also constitutes itself as consumerist guilt. Not only is Lajoska not like his father in terms of appetite, he also does not conform to ideal body-type imagery that proliferates through advertising (here I am thinking specifically of the gymnasium and Lajoska’s desire to transform). Baudrillard’s idea that consumption now comes to be seen as a “citizen’s duty” is reflected in Lajoska’s finally sacrificial offering of his own body…if Lajoska is not the ideal “dutiful” consumer in life, in death at least he transforms into a consumable “object.” If anything, his machinistic suicide is a “ritual” act that allows him to redeem himself—perhaps one that allows him to access the only kind of martyrdom that is possible in a forest of consumption.

Andrea Mantegna's St. Sebastian (1480)

György Pálfi’s St. Lajoska (2006)