02/27/23 - MM...FOOD
just wanna talk about The Menu real quick
Last month I visited Mags and at her place we sat down to watch The Menu. We ordered Sweet X for dinner. I, with the pompousness of Tyler Ledford (Nicholas Hoult), ordered a burger with peanut butter and jalapeños in it, saying some shit about complexity. Mags, salt of the earth that she is, ordered a cheeseburger, and was vindicated by Margot Mills’ (Anya Taylor-Joy) armor-piercing order in the film’s conclusion.
We joked that The Menu feels a lot like a very good thesis play by a college student in Creative Writing or Theater Arts. Its critique is bald-faced and overreaching, and it tries so hard to elicit a reaction. To me, the joke of upscale restaurants serving paltry courses is kind of overdone, about as overdone as jeering at vegans, so. The bread-less bread course was a weak narrative beat.
But The Menu is a movie for people (like me) who like to scratch a specific brain-itch with allegorical metafiction. People who read Animal Farm and found themselves gagged at each animal. It’s all those cheesy qualities that make it so entertaining. Cheese is a key ingredient. Yeah. See? Now I’m cheesing. [Lin-Manuel Miranda voice] hyeah
The Catapult has an interesting article that analyzes the specific quality of fear that the movie gets at, but for my part, I’m fascinated with the tantrums that The Menu throws regarding the creative process. In order for Chef Julian Slowik’s (played by Ralph Fiennes) artistic execution to be as ruthless and ideologically pointed as possible, he has to renege contracts, admit offences committed, self-mutilate, and go down with the ship he helped build. The courses are actually a sequence of confession and penance. It’s like a culinary version of that scene in Fight Club where Edward Norton decks himself in front of his boss. Am I making sense?
Slowik pursues ideological redemption to salvage his craft. In doing so he designates himself moral judge over those he believes to have tainted his craft. His plan is not cold and calculated but spiteful and last-ditch. It is both high concept and indulgent.
It is my misfortune that my Twitter feed will regularly feed me a piece of news or a shit take in which a comedian laments the modern dangers of his vocation. Y’know, Ricky Gervais types. That’s not the same as The Menu, of course, but I think both situations get at a contemporary artistic worry. It is easier, for an artist today, to feel the gnashing anxiety that their art cannot live up to their audience’s morals. The snooty critic, the capitalist dudebro clique, the insufferable stan. Thus the art is drained of its mystery. Tantrum!
In my opinion, art-makers ought to rid themselves of that anxiety as quickly as possible. The point of art isn’t moral regulation. The sooner one can take that to heart, the better. Why bother making bad faith critiques of your own process? You wanna self-cannibalize, that’s how you self-cannibalize.
That’s all I wanted to say! Mags and I are watching Gilmore Girls currently. Now, that kind of writing - chef’s kiss.