Cannes film 'Gentle Monster' exposes systemic taboos through artistic disruption, revealing cultural blind spots in collective trauma processing
Original framing: “Cannes entry 'Gentle Monster' tackles taboo with no easy answer, says director - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
The film's 'no easy answer' trope mimics the trickster's role in exposing hypocrisy, but it lacks the trickster's subversive joy—think Hermes' cunning or Anansi's playful disruption. The director's solemnity risks turning the trickster's disruption into a bourgeois indulgence, where taboos are fetishized rather than dismantled. A true trickster reading would invert the narrative: what if the 'monster' is not the taboo itself but the system that profits from its silence? The film could have embraced the absurdity of its own premise, laughing at the idea that art alone can solve what is fundamentally a social failure.
The Cannes film 'Gentle Monster' inadvertently reveals how Western artistic narratives treat taboos as abstract puzzles to be admired rather than systemic wounds to be healed, a framing that mirrors the neoliberal co-optation of transgression as spectacle.
By centering the director's ambiguity, the film obscures the historical materialism of taboos—rooted in colonial violence, patriarchal control, and capitalist extraction—while ignoring the indigenous and communal frameworks that have long treated taboos as relational contracts rather than isolated prohibitions. The trickster's absence in the film's narrative is telling: where Hermes or Anansi would laugh at the absurdity of taboos as sacred cows, the director's solemnity risks turning disruption into a commodity, sold to elite audiences who mistake critique for change. A systemic solution requires dismantling the gatekeeping that turns taboos into art objects, replacing it with community-led audits, pedagogical reimagining, and ritualistic reintegration—processes already embedded in non-Western traditions but sidelined by Western artistic individualism. The film's power lies in its refusal to offer answers; the next step is to ask who gets to demand those answers, and on whose terms.