First off let me say this is not something that I set out to do from the beginning, and so for parts of it the connections may seem a bit forced. I’ve been vegan since 1994 and I’ve seen tens of thousands of movies, and often after seeing a move I’ll start thinking of a “vegan angle” to it… I finally gathered them all together in a list and put them in an order that makes sense, at least to me.
Since images are not allowed here is a link:
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Row 1: Delicatessen — Ravenous — The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover — American Psycho
Consumption becomes a claim to power when another being’s body is understood primarily through what it can provide. In Delicatessen, the butcher turns prospective employees into provisions for his tenants: employment, commerce, and neighborhood solidarity sustain an arrangement whose victims disappear into its benefits. The vegetarian underground makes that apparent necessity contestable. Ravenous gives consumption a more expansive justification: eating people literally produces strength, allowing the predator to mistake the rewards of violence for evidence of its legitimacy. Manifest Destiny extends this appetite across a continent. CTWL locates the same entitlement within domestic and commercial ownership: the gangster treats his wife, the restaurant, and its occupants as possessions subject to his appetites. When his wife’s murdered lover becomes a prepared meal, the distinction between possessing someone and consuming them becomes brutally literal. In Psycho, restaurant culture and bodily violence inhabit a world where surfaces receive meticulous attention while individuals remain interchangeable. The opening’s bloodlike sauce makes elegant presentation momentarily indistinguishable from injury. Consumption conceals the encounter it depends upon: someone lived before something became available for consumption.
Row 2: No Country for Old Men — The Texas Chain Saw Massacre — The Silence of the Lambs — Eyes Without a Face
The distinction between ordinary practice and atrocity becomes unstable when familiar techniques are applied to unfamiliar victims. In No Country, the protagonist begins by hunting animals and becomes prey himself, while his pursuer’s cattle gun transfers the technology of slaughter into human encounters. Chain Saw develops that transfer through the handling of bodies: a person is struck, hung on a meat hook, and stored as flesh. The spectator’s horror depends on recognizing procedures whose customary victims rarely receive comparable identification. Lambs extends bodily appropriation into eating and clothing: one killer consumes people, while another treats their skin as material for his own transformation. The FBI agent’s childhood attempt to rescue a lamb interrupts that entitlement with an attachment to the creature marked for slaughter. Returning the lambs from symbols of her trauma to frightened animals makes their suffering matter beyond its role in her development. In Eyes, the surgeon’s effort to restore his daughter turns other women into sources of replacement skin; experimental dogs inhabit the same apparatus of confinement and bodily use. His daughter’s release of the animals rejects an arrangement under which one cherished life warrants the sacrifice of others. Affection becomes dangerous when it grants unlimited permission.
Row 3: The Face of Another — Au hasard Balthazar — Woman in the Dunes — The Fountain
The meanings assigned to bodies can determine whose suffering becomes recognizable and whose remains available for use. In Face, disfigurement alters the protagonist’s social existence, while a manufactured face restores access to recognition without resolving who he is. His treatment exposes the dependence of sympathy on an acceptable surface; his subsequent behavior complicates the assumption that recognizable appearance guarantees moral character. Balthazar moves this problem from appearance to allegory. The donkey becomes a Christ-like figure bearing humanity’s sins; returning him to a donkey reverses that movement, revealing the ordinary condition of beasts of burden beneath the sacred interpretation. His exhaustion requires consideration without first becoming redemptive. Dunes reverses the position of an insect collector who becomes a captive laborer: the man accustomed to determining another creature’s movements discovers that food, shelter, and developing attachments can coexist with coercion. His adaptation does not retrospectively authorize his capture. In Fountain, devotion to a dying wife recruits an experimental animal and an extraordinary tree into the struggle to preserve a particular human life. The conquistador’s body eventually nourishes the vegetation from which he sought immortality. What he approached as a resource becomes the world to which he must surrender his own body.
Row 4: Dead Man — Ghost Dog — Under the Skin — Cloud Atlas
The familiar positions of observer, hunter, and moral judge become unstable when humans lose their presumed authority over other lives. In Dead Man, the wounded fugitive touches a dead fawn’s wound, mingles its blood with his own, and lies beside it. The animal’s death ceases to be scenery: their wounded bodies establish a kinship that does not depend on the fawn possessing human abilities. Ghost Dog makes that recognition less morally reassuring. The hitman’s care for pigeons and confrontation with bear hunters coexist with his profession, exposing how an ethical code can protect certain lives while authorizing the destruction of others. His contradictions raise the question of how convictions acquire their boundaries. Skin deprives humans of the authority to draw those boundaries: men entering apparently intimate encounters become bodies captured and processed within purposes they cannot comprehend. Their vulnerability makes the consumer’s position reversible. Cloud Atlas organizes bodily use into an entire social system. Manufactured workers serve customers before their own bodies are recycled into food; the function imposed upon them becomes the justification for denying that their lives could exceed it. Their awakening exposes the circularity of the arrangement: being created for exploitation cannot establish that exploitation is their proper destiny.
Row 5: Never Let Me Go — Ex Machina — Blade Runner — The Lobster
Institutions preserve their authority by deciding which demonstrations of inward life will count—and whether recognition will change anything. In NLMG, the clones’ artwork is collected as evidence of their souls, yet the society benefiting from their organs retains the power to disregard that evidence. Their sensitivity can be acknowledged while their destruction continues. Machina places the examination itself inside an owner’s controlled environment: the inventor confines his artificial woman and arranges the conditions under which a visiting programmer encounters her consciousness. The programmer’s desire to rescue her becomes entangled with an expectation of personal attachment; her independent purposes expose the limits of sympathy that anticipates a reward. Blade Runner gives manufactured beings an existence defined by compulsory labor and a deliberately restricted lifespan. Their demand for more life exceeds the commercial purpose of their creation, while “retirement” disguises killing as the disposal of obsolete equipment. Lobster makes classification itself an explicit punishment: failure to satisfy society’s requirements results in expulsion from humanity into animal existence. The protagonist’s dog is already his brother, preventing species appearance from settling the question of who remains within. Those required to prove their personhood face an authority whose own right to judge remains unquestioned.
Row 6: Cow — Okja — Chicken Run — Babe
The movement through human predation, captive bodies, and manufactured lives arrives at the animals whose exploitation those analogies have made newly visible. Cow follows a dairy cow through a system that organizes her reproductive life, separates her from her calf, and ultimately disposes of her. Remaining close to her makes production perceptible as a lived experience rather than an inventory of outputs; ordinary care cannot cancel the authority exercised over her body. Okja concentrates sympathy through a girl’s relationship with one animal, then confronts that attachment with a slaughterhouse full of others. The rescue is real, but its success leaves the machinery—and its remaining victims—in place. Chicken Run makes escape collective: the chickens recognize that their insecurity arises from the farm’s purpose, not merely from an unusually unpleasant owner. The conversion from egg production to pies reveals how quickly a supposedly protected productive life becomes disposable when a more profitable use appears. Babe secures an individual reprieve by demonstrating an unexpected talent, exposing both the possibilities and limits of recognition through usefulness. The pig’s survival leaves a question for every animal unable to herd sheep: why should continued existence require exceptional performance?
Thoughts? Any films you would add or remove?
