ON THE NINTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Raw (2016) by Julia Ducournau. A young woman enters a prestigious veterinary medicine school and is subjected to a week of intense hazing. At one point, she is forced to eat raw rabbit innards and thereby break with the strict vegan regimen her family has imposed on her. This first taste of flesh awakens an undeniable craving for fresh human meat. We soon learn this condition is genetic, since it’s shared by her mother and older sister.
The script and the performances, with Garance Marillier (in her debut film role) and Ella Rumpf playing the ghoulish sisters, are razor-sharp. Together, they deliver plenty of incisive statements on sexual and social rites of passage within the frenzied rat-race for professional status under 21st century capitalism.
These things by themselves would make for a decent indie horror film, but what really distinguishes Raw as something special for me has nothing to do with either its literal plot or its subtextual social commentary. Rather, the reason I will definitely be watching this again is that its world is deliberately incoherent. It’s dreamlike in a way that is never overt but rather is only apparent upon reflection. This makes the experience of watching it and then thinking about it more like the actual experience of having a dream than traditional attempts to portray dreams through blatantly irrational imagery. When we are in a dream, we are convinced it is reality, but as soon as we wake up and think about it, we see what an absurd mishmash of memories and obsessions it was.
What I’m talking about is actually something that bad filmmakers create on accident all the time: plot holes. Say a particular movie version of Superman is supposed to be gritty and firmly grounded in reality. Okay, why then doesn’t the supposedly competent Lois Lane immediately recognize him as Clark Kent with his glasses off? The intended realism contradicts the cartoonish naiveté inherited from older iterations of the characters. It doesn’t add up. In cases like this, the writers either didn’t see the plot hole, or more likely, they thought the audience would be too dumb see it, and so didn’t do anything to fill it.
Instead of that, what Ducoumau does is purposefully plant plot holes in an otherwise highly consistent fictional world. Why is the college a school for veterinary medicine, given that veterinary doctorates are secondary degrees that usually require students to already have an undergraduate degree-- *and* given that the main character is clearly shown leaving her parents’ guardianship for the first time? If she has already been through four years of college, wouldn’t she have also already been to a rager and had her first sexual encounter, both of which are mind-blowingly new for her here? Not to mention that the hazing activities are cribbed from freshman fraternity and bootcamp initiation rituals and not the sort of pranks that jaded, possibly already married post-grads would pull.
However, this isn’t an ordinary plot hole because it’s not actually important at all for the plot that it be a vet school. It’s only symbolically important. This is how dreams often work; they mash together real situations that don’t rationally fit because of the charged symbols they contain. Another example is the protagonist’s relationship with her parents. How could she have gone her whole life without noticing that her father’s body is covered with huge open wounds from her mother’s bites? Again, it’s not important to the plot that the bites be in places where she obviously would have seen them. If they had been hidden under wraps on his thighs, the significance for the plot would have been the same. The father has to bare his chest to show the wounds because that is the way a revelation like this would appear in a dream, regardless of its incompatibility with one’s actual life history.
I noticed many other instances, and I’m sure there are many more I missed. These artfully placed plot holes create a sense of freefall into an unreal hell-world, which mirrors what the main character feels upon suddenly being dropped into the deep end of adult sexuality and cutthroat competition.
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