The elaborately prepared feast at uber-exclusive restaurant Hawthorne, the setting of the new gourmand-culture thriller The Menu, is so photogenic that snapping pictures has been expressly forbidden; food in general, however, doesn’t come off looking so good.
The dishes whipped up by self-serious celebrity chef Julian (Ralph Fiennes) and his militaristic fleet of obedient kitchen staff aspire to profundity rather than settling for the merely appetizing. As foodie douche Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) mansplains to his unimpressed date Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy), the sequencing of courses tells a story, elevating foodstuffs to the level of an artistic medium. She’s mostly just hungry, and so she’s disappointed when each plate bears a couple of bites’ worth of what she can only assume is edible material.
A couple of tables over, a catty food critic and her editor concur that one culinary creation intricately bedecked with sprigs and leaves has been “tweezed to fuck”, a handy encapsulation of the film’s take on haute cuisine as fussy and overly mannered. As the moral fissures in the evening’s collection of one-percenters open up to reveal their deplorable depths, the hoity-toity grub turns into a marker of their personality defects – deluded privilege, cooked to perfection.
Director Mark Mylod and writers Seth Reiss and Will Tracy resort to some cheap shots in their takedown of gustatory pretension (it’s 2022 and we’re still making “molecular gastronomy looks weird” jokes), but they’re working from a dog-eared recipe. The movies have long cultivated a distrustful relationship to the concept of fancy food, using upscale dining as a shorthand for the sanitized savagery of the bourgeoisie. The tongue’s sense of taste stands in for the brain’s, inviting damning statements about creativity, money and consumption that often short-change the joys and virtues of a nice meal. It’s all made out to be one big con, a hustle in which poseur saps spend out the nose for small quantities of sustenance better described as “interesting” than “good”. Going solely by received cinematic wisdom, one would have no idea that people splurging for an expensive night out do sometimes get what they pay for, and that appreciating the occasional dollop of miso foam doesn’t have to be a reflection on character.
Cinema’s fraught relationship to its own dietary habits starts with human civilization’s equally problematic understanding of fatness. Since the days when only nobility could afford the groceries required to pack on a few pounds, obesity has been treated as synonymous with excess and greed. An unforgettable scene – maybe not in the good way – from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life joins the rotund Mr Creosote for his customary binge of caviar, mussels and foie gras, which he then projectile vomits on to his server in a visceral metaphor for the tendency of the rich to take, take, take and leave laborers with their mess. The same broad bit was repeated in last month’s Triangle of Sadness, which also doused itself in a tidal wave of puke to make plain the grotesquerie of the mega-wealthy. (An influencer poses next to a plate of spaghetti without taking a bite; so divorced are these people from the pleasure of food that they don’t even need to actually eat it any more.)
The counterexamples, grateful and worshipful films like Tampopo or Babette’s Feast, share the crucial through-line of a focus on the making and serving over the gobbling. Part of the contempt for fine dining and its patrons comes from the estrangement between the grisly work and elegant rewards of cooking, a fitting analogy for the way capitalists do their worst in indirect ways without getting their own hands dirty. Chickens are decapitated and ducks force-fed to death by other people far out of sight, our sacred communion with the raw materials that become ingredients disrupted. There’s an inherent violence to the carcass-mangling wantonness of eating, translated into a literal fight club under the Michelin-starred restaurant industry in 2021’s superb Pig. Succession’s peek into the elite overworld included an explanation of how to eat ortolan, a fowl so rich that diners cover their faces with napkins so God can’t see their indulgence. The third season of Atlanta did something similar to more surreally satirical effect, with the plat du jour instead a panéed human hand.
As of late, traditionally bestial cannibalism has been more often portrayed to subversive ends as a shadow to the eater’s refined sensibility. The human body is plated with prestige on TV’s Hannibal, in 2017’s wickedly hysterical indie A Feast of Man, and at the demented finale of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, in all cases to expose the barbarism underlying the false sophistication of the moneyed class. The recurring association between haute cuisine and deformity of the soul is curious if only for its lack of equivalents in other luxuries just as segregated by socioeconomics. You don’t see many movies about some upper-crust sickos really into opera, perhaps due to artists feeling less animosity toward their own field, or perhaps for the sensory immediacy of food. Art requires unpacking, but we don’t need to think for a while to figure out whether something is tasty or not. It simply is, and any attempt to intellectualize beyond that can be easily angled as ostentatious puffing up.
This past summer, Peter Strickland’s wonderfully bizarre Flux Gourmet had its critical cake and ate it too. He cut out the conceptual middleman by imagining an insular world wherein food and art can be one and the same, as experimental musical groups use produce and burbling stews to create haunting aural compositions. He shares the common resentment for the donor class required to fund creative endeavors and a skepticism to artists high on their own ego, but unlike Mylod, he also reserves a deep affection for the eccentrics crushing cabbages and bashing beets. He’s one of them, after all, that kinship the secret sauce tying his exotic screen delicacy together. It helps to love something if you’re going to make fun of it. Anything else seems like sour grapes.
