"life's never a dully with Sully" - On Bones and All

I still think about Mark Rylance's performance in this movie

The trailer for Challengers, the latest film from Luca Guadagnino, came out yesterday and it looks pretty neat! From what I can glean of the plot, it’s about two friends being so obsessed with Zendaya’s character that they’re willing to have a pseudo-threeway with her, but, more importantly, learn to play tennis for her. I will never know a love so raw, passionate and uncontrollable that it drives me to figure out the rules to tennis. But, considering how much I enjoyed Guadagnino’s last film, the cannibal romance Bones and All, I’ll give it a watch.

The more I think about it, the more I consider Bones and All to be one of my favorite films of 2022. This might sound a little obvious, but I can still taste it, and as such, I’ve spent perhaps too much time rolling it over in my brain. On first watch, it seemed like a movie that was haunted by its own quiet moments. All of those driving montages through sun-drenched America felt like aimless diversions from the blood-soaked intensity of young love. The little diversions into crevices of the world - the murder of the adulterous father in the field, the hangout session with the cannibal and his “groupie,” etc. - I wanted more of those, and yet, somehow also wanted more of Lee and Maren exploring their own macabre connection. As you can tell, the rolling over in my brain continues.

One thing that’s remained constant, though, is my adoration for Mark Rylance in the film. He plays Sully, an elder cannibal whose whistling folksiness warps back and forth into deranged loneliness. For a little while, he seems like he’ll be a mentor to young Maren, someone who previously considered herself to be alone with her urges. In this role, he provides understanding but never comfort. There’s something off about him, aside from the obvious flesh-eating stuff. The way he speaks in constant third person indicates a inability to totally relate, no matter how much he wishes to.

Considering how much of the film is devoted to the trappings of dramatic young romance, to suddenly have a guy that would fit in with the family from Texas Chainsaw Massacre III showing up from time to time can feel more than a bit jarring. As such, Sully is used sparingly, showing up always as a surprise. Is he meant to represent the future for these youngsters - the inevitability of being an outcast? The cannibal community of Bones and All can obviously stand in as an outsized metaphor for any group that struggles to have their wider humanity recognized, but what happens when you go too long without it? Sully with his water-ey gaze, unable to comprehend the social norms that unites the world of Bones and All, “eaters” or otherwise, gives us few answers outside of his own sad being.

We are allowed reminders of his tragedy, even if we never come to realize him on a historically personal level, though. When he angrily says “I dried off with you, afterwards! I never done that before. It means something!” at Maren, recalling the time that they feasted on someone and then washed themselves of viscera, we get a hint of a man whose heartbreak is as ritualistic as his patterns. Lee and Maren brutally murder him when he physically assaults the latter, but not before Sully can tell her about how tired he is in ultimately defeated fashion. To exist on the fringes of society is exhausting, even more so when you can barely associate with the forms that seem inherent.

It all makes for a weird, doomed performance - the closest thing that the film has to villain, but that’s mostly because he’s its only consistent external push on the narrative once it forgoes its relationship to the wider population. His overstep of boundaries and the death it brings him is inevitable, but in a film that asks us to scrape our well of empathy, some is lent to ol’ Sully, too. “You never eat an eater,” he says in proverb style, but if we lose our grip on what little connection we have, the world will consume us instead.