“Nothing in this kitchen is unplanned”: Food as performance in Mark Mylod’s The Menu
Gunjan Gupta and Arya Parakkate Vijayaraghavan
Christ University, Bangalore, India
e-mail: ggupta0429@gmail.com (corresponding author)
AGATHOS, Volume 15, Issue 2 (29): 275-284, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.13950052
© www.agathos-international-review.com CC BY NC 2024
Abstract: Cooking transforms raw food into cooked food and raw materials into an edible culture. It is a performance art that requires skill. This paper analyses a multi-genre film, The Menu (2022), and how food plays a performative role. The setting is a restaurant where the dining space becomes a site of performing food. A satirical horror-thriller, The Menu presents the efforts of the chef to prepare the food relished by the customers. But what happens when they fail in their purpose? The theatrical experience of the film draws from the social experience of food, especially the satire on haute cuisine served in posh restaurants. Food is not always what is eaten; the paper looks at the inedible elements in the food that contribute to the performative quality of the film. Thus, this paper contributes to establishing the performative aspect of food through factors associated with culinary experience.
Keywords: performance studies, haute cuisine, The Menu, Mark Mylod, satire, inedible food
Introduction
Food extends beyond its importance of nutritional value and is associated with tremendous cultural, social, political, and personal signification. Everything associated with food has been seen as “larger than life” (Gimblett 1999, 1) and is “always conditioned with meaning” (Mintz 1996, 7) and symbolism. Rooted in traditions and culture, it is a viable tool to highlight and discuss several issues pertinent to individuals and society. In addition to the symbolic functions of food, it is also a medium of storytelling and creative expression. One can narrate a story through food. One can express their identity through food. One can showcase their culture through food. One can highlight social inequities and other problems in society through food. Hence, both personally and socially, food has the power to examine the systems of the world. This transformation of raw materials into a symbolic representation of society is a performance.
Within the field of performance studies, there has been an ongoing debate regarding what can be considered performance and what does not come under this label. As Richard Schechner (2013, 2) puts it,
Performance must be construed as a ‘broad spectrum’ or ‘continuum’ of human actions ranging from ritual, play, sports, popular entertainments, the performing arts (theatre, dance, music), and everyday life performances to the enactment of social, professional, gender, race, and class roles, and on to healing (from Shamanism to surgery), the media, and the internet…Along the continuum new genres are added, others are dropped. The underlying notion is that any action that is framed, enacted, presented, highlighted, or displayed is a performance.
The act of preparing food, showcasing craftsmanship, and transforming the raw material into cooked edible food makes cooking, eating, and other aspects of food a performance. Cooks and chefs use technique and skill to present food deemed palatable by its tasters. Food as a performative art includes this display and presentation of food which satiates the eaters, symbolically interacts with them, and channelizes their memories to give them a memorable dining experience. Also, since “performance lacks a distinctive medium” (Carroll 1986, 78), food can be studied under this discipline of performance studies. As Andreea Micu (2022, 17) says,
All forms of human action with communicative purpose, whether conscious or unconscious, could be considered performance and therefore be included as topics to research in performance studies. Scholars and practitioners in performance studies not only study performances as staged practices and aesthetic objects, but also as expressions of broader cultural and social process…In other words, if an embodied cultural expression has social significance, it can be considered as performance.
However, the representation of food in films has long been disregarded, overlooked, and side-lined. Mostly, the food scenes appear “to help the plot along. These scenes were seldom about the food itself, and they were almost never intended to celebrate food” (Zimmerman 2009, 26). In the past, the films have either obscurely depicted food or used it for comic gags (as in Charlie Chaplin movies); seldom have they been used to depict the psychology of individuals and relationships or as a commentary on the socio-cultural scenario. Gradually, this change is seen, and food films (where food is at the centre) are increasingly being deployed as a genre. Mark Mylod’s The Menu (2022) is one film that keeps food at the centre, literally and figuratively. Food does not just occur as a technique to show progress in the plot but is the anchor of the film. Food is performed within the performance of the film, making it a meta performance. An analysis of this performance of food within The Menu would inform us of the symbolic, social, and cultural meanings embedded within the film. As Drake points out analyzing a film does not only refer to the analysis of the acting but also other elements on the screen. One of these elements studied in this paper is food. Performing food and satirizing the ways of the world makes The Menu remarkably significant to examine. Victor Turner and Edie Turner (2007, 334) agree with this power of food within a cinematic study.
Food, food taboos, and ways in which food is shared and exchanged make up a kind of cultural grammar and vocabulary which often give clues, when their symbolism is decoded, to basic attitudes and values of the group and to its social structure.
Therefore, this paper aims to study how food is performed in The Menu and how this performance informs the audience of the satiric depiction of haute cuisine in the contemporary world. Thematically, food is central to the film. It depicts the story of Julian Slowik, a high-end chef of an exclusive restaurant, Hawthorn, who is fed up with the elite clientele of his restaurant; the guests he has been serving with all his heart and soul are incapable of appreciating the food prepared for them, they fail to understand what it takes for the chef to present the food in front of their guests. The film presents food not just as a mere prop to the story; there would be no story if food is removed from it. Moreover, the paper also highlights the performativity of food and attempts to establish performance studies as an important lens to study food as a pertinent factor in society.
Discussion
An American comedy-thriller-horror, The Menu portrays Julian Slowik, the hauteur who gives long, pompous monologues about the production of the ingredients and creation of the impeccable dish. At times playfully and at other times fearfully, this film satirizes the haute cuisine and the guests who are disconnected and disinterested in the culinary process of the brilliant food served at his restaurant. As a chef, Slowik has risen to this level where his expertise surpasses all, but he is disappointed in serving guests who fail to appreciate his skills and the fine food served on their table. He repeatedly mentions a chef's purpose, and how disheartening it could be to lose that purpose as the dishes are “in a conceptual twist, an extension of the cook” (Farnell 2017, 24). Cooking, an everyday activity proposed by Schechner, is one of the eight ways of performance. This film, however, not only looks at cooking as a habitual ordinary activity but also lends a ritualistic feature to the factors associated with food. To enable an extensive analysis of the film as performance, this paper uses Barbara Gimblett’s concepts in context to the convergence of food and performance. Gimblett explains three junctures at which performance and food intersect: to perform is— to do, to behave, and to show. This paper examines The Menu through the lens of these junctures as laid down by her. Firstly, according to her,
To perform is to do, to execute, to carry out to completion, to discharge a duty— in other words, all that governs the production, presentation, and disposal of food. To perform in this sense is to make food, to serve food. It is about materials, tools, techniques, procedures, and actions. It is about getting something done. It is in this sense, first and foremost, that we can speak of the performing kitchen (Gimblett 1999, 2)
The site of the kitchen or, in this case, the island and the restaurant space become an integral part of the performance. Hawthorn, the immaculate restaurant, has a live open kitchen where the preparation of food takes place. Right opposite the pristine kitchen space is the beautifully arranged dining area, where all the guests are seated in a way that they all have a clear view of the kitchen. Along with various shots of food preparation for the film’s audience, guests of the restaurant are “free to observe the chefs as they innovate.” However, photography is not allowed to the guests as the “ephemeral nature” and beauty of the food is to be experienced in real life (The Menu, 00:10:11-00:11:15). The guests are a part of the cooking process instead of being disassociated from it. However, this proximity of the kitchen and dining space is not similar to the perceived proximity between the cooks and their guests. This film and Slowik, the head chef in the film, through his culinary genius, elevates the status of the dishes to that of art. Both— the technique of preparing the dishes and the subtext of the dishes— are rich and add to the compelling world of Hawthorn. This island restaurant in the film symbolizes a coercive force that shows the desires and aspirations of the people invited to dine. Not only that, it digs into their past rekindling some of the memories for them. All these engagements are done to bring out the hypocrisy, dishonesty, and insincerity of the guests’ past. Food prepared and served their comments on the social experience of the restaurant and of living in a society based on specific class divisions. Food becomes a window into the lives of the guests and the world they are a part of. Both the guests, receivers in the film, and the audience partake in this experience through the food presented in the film. Other cooks and providers in the film are elated to be a part of this performance along with Slowik and are even willing to kill and die on his command. Similarly, being invited to this island as a guest and experiencing the magnificent food at this exquisite restaurant is a matter of huge pride.
At the next juncture, performing refers to behaving. “Whether a matter of habit, custom, or law, the divine etiquette of ritual, codifications of social grace, the laws governing cabarets and liquor licenses, or the health and sanitation codes, performance encompasses the social practices…” (Gimblett 1999, 2). The guests’ dining experience at Hawthorn differs from the usual dining experience at any city restaurant as it converges into a performance where a strict code of conduct is expected of the guests, who do not have the liberty to deviate from it. The rules are fixed. Though served a six-course meal, what food is to be served, when it is to be served, how it is to be consumed, and even the reactions to it are all predetermined. The dishes are not only flavours and tastes to be experienced but a series of psychological manipulations on the guests. It becomes a tool of control. For every guest, the menu is the same. It is fixed. Generally, eating is a routine behaviour, which Bourdieu (1977) calls ‘habitus,’ but is destabilized and redefined in this restaurant through the dramatization of this performance (the theatrical way Slowik organizes the night) within a performance (acting in a film).
After the guests take their seats at Hawthorn and the dining experience begins, the curtain rises with Julian Slowik, the head chef, introducing himself and the concept of the night’s feast to the guests. The chef and the protagonist of the film, Slowik, is also the narrator who informs the guests time and again about the dish being served and the reason behind serving that particular dish. He keeps the conversation straightforward. It is candid yet rehearsed. He says,
Tonight it’ll be our pleasure to feed you…Over the next few hours you will ingest fat, salt, sugar, protein, bacteria, fungi, various plants and animals, and, at times, entire ecosystems. But I have to beg you of one thing. It’s just one. Do not eat..Taste. Savour. Relish. Consider every morsel that you place inside your mouth. Be mindful. Do not eat. Our menu is too precious for that. And look around you, here we are on this island. Accept. Accept all of it and forgive (The Menu, 00:15:50-00:17:02 )
A lot of what he says is instructional— steps that the guests have to take and guidelines that they have to follow. Slowik introduces each dish, and his disappointment with the world is dramatic. The emphasis on not eating but relishing every bite and every morsel suggests the importance of experiencing what is on the table. It is not just about the dishes prepared for the menu; it is the story that comes with this preparation. The narrative and the anecdotes with each course and dish are important to understand. It is not just the food to be eaten, but as Allen Shelton (1990) asserts, the codes of decorum are equally significant. The Menu creates a clear divide between the givers (the chef and his staff) and the takers (the guests). Slowik believes it to be the responsibility of the chef to present the best food to their guests, their sole purpose being– to make the guests happy. However, the snobby guests of the elite class, who fight hard to be invited to premium restaurants like this one, have no idea about the kind of effort it takes to present such dishes they devour. At this restaurant, they are not expected to finish their food carelessly but to mindfully enjoy and be thankful. According to Slowik, who himself is hinted to have risen from a nobody to a star chef, the struggles of the contemporary class and social inequities in the food industry are crucial problems. Through the gourmet food presented to them, the class of the guests and the power dynamics they assert are deliberately highlighted to bring out their thoughtlessness towards food and its providers. Slowik detests their haughty privilege and arrogance. Food, thus through “performance studies often act on or act against settled hierarchies of ideas, organizations, and people” (Schechner 2013, 4). Finally, the last juncture is that of showing. According to Gimblett (1999, 2)
When doing and behaving are displayed, when they are shown when participants are invited to exercise discernment, evaluation, and appreciation, food events move towards the theatrical and, more specifically, towards the spectacular. It is here that taste as a sensory experience and taste as an aesthetic faculty converge.
Slowik pre-planned everything in the film. He has set the stage for himself and his entourage of cooks, whom Lillian calls “the marching band” (The Menu, 00:17:06-00:17:10), to display the food, narrate a story behind every dish, and let the haughty, arrogant guests take the experience. The tour of the island, smokehouse, workers' quarters, and the seating at the restaurant— are all a part of the plan where these guests are merely performing their roles attributed by Slowik. They are illusioned to think it is their choice to be there, but it is due to the careful selection done by Slowik. After the sous-chef Jeremy shoots himself, Slowik announces that everything dramatic is a part of the night’s menu. He says, “It’s a part of the show, this is what you’re paying for…this is an exclusive experience.” All the guests, including Lillian, the famously dreaded critic, are left wondering if “this is just theatre, this is just stagecraft.” The silence and stillness of the characters and the background, the internal introspection that it requires the guests to go through, and with a focus on uncluttered frames in the visual storytelling, this performance is likened to “the Japanese minimirasuto style”, a theatrical but still minimalist in style (The Menu, 00:42:00-00:43:50). The atmosphere created henceforth, sets the reflective tone of the film.
In this theatrical performance, all the guests signify the discerning elite group of society. And their role is equally important to make sense of the rest of the show. “It matters because this menu, this guest list, this entire evening has been painstakingly planned…Nothing in this kitchen is unplanned”, he further adds (The Menu, 00:46:15-00:46:36). However, the presence of not-so-much-impressed Margot spoils the entire plan since she was a last-minute entry and does not fit into the snooty elite intended for the night. The “gastronomic actors” (Goffman 1967, 151), the guests, are reduced to mere ingredients within a degustation concept where some of them have been regulars at Hawthorn yet do not remember a single dish they enjoyed. He satirizes the people who are ignorant of the process behind the food and where the food comes from— how it is procured, who makes it, the time and effort behind the dish— these are some questions which all the diners are conveniently unaware of and indifferent to. The ending of the film is depicted as cathartic for the guests who accept their fate at the hands of the chef, who punishes them for their ignorant existence as a guest. As David Szanto postulates, “Food performance, however, can also reassure and nurture those who witness it” (2018, 230). This is true for the guests at Hawthorn, the cooks, and the audience of the film. Apart from the film's audience, consumed by the satiric portrayal of hierarchical divisions in society, the film's characters are reduced to ingredients of s’more, which, according to Slowik, is a pretentious dish just like its admirers. The restaurant becomes a stage where the guests are meticulously crafted into the dish to confront their aspirations and fears. All of them, thus, are subsumed, cleansed, and purified in the flames. However, just like a performance it does not resolve all the questions raised throughout the film; instead, allows the audience to engage with them further.
The film is very visual, and the centrality of food adds to its visual grammar. From the close shots of cooking the food to plating and readying it to display for the pretentious customers, the film has visually appealing shots and the sound of delicious food being cooked and served. Thus, cooking, presentation, styling, display, and eating are all activities associated with food, which contribute to further pushing the “black box model” to accept and embrace cooking and food as a performance art. (Parker and Sedgwick 2007, 200). The food exists on the multisensory level within the film, which adds to the overall performativity of food as “performances communicate on multiple sensory levels, usually involving highly visual imagery, dramatic sounds, and sometimes even tactile, olfactory, and gustatory stimulation…one is not being told or shown something so much as one is led to experience something.” (Bell 1997, 160). Unique to this film are certain foods which belong to the “case of inedible spectacle” (Gimblett 1999, 3), they may not be edible but are extremely visual and tactile. For instance, the breadless bread plate with savoury accompaniments. Every guest is equally surprised at being served a gorgeous-looking empty plate, which is described as “the bread that you will not be eating tonight was made from a heritage wheat called red fife, crafted with our partners at the Tehachapi Grain Project devoted to preserving heirloom grains” (The Menu, 00:22:25-00:23:15). It is served with “unaccompanied accompaniments.” In another instance, the kitchen scissors stabbed into the chicken thigh resound with Slowik’s horrific childhood story, which is served alongside the customized tacos printed with shameful facts from the guests’ lives that serve as reminders of their despicable deeds.
Conclusion
Thus, the entire film is symbolic, theatrical, and performative. Food becomes an integral part of the narrative and is as important as the actors following the script. Culinary artistry through the performance of food is mocked and satirized as a commercial product in contemporary times. Haute cuisine is a commercialized symbol of a consumerist world. The dramatic presentation of the six-course meal served with thunderous claps and blatant announcements to eat elevates the entire dining experience as art where “an art of the concrete, food, like performance, is alive, fugitive, and sensory” (Gimblett 1999, 1). Mark Mylod’s The Menu is among a few films like Babette’s Feast, Eat Drink Man Woman, etc which are effective ways of expressing concerns of the society which are rendered more visible to the world through food. Since the restaurants are “experience in codes” (Shelton 1990, 524-525), Hawthorn, the restaurant in the film, becomes a symbolic site of social decay, and the dinner table, a “site of sociological and cultural exchange” (Farnell 2017, 222). Therefore, social structures performed through food within The Menu enhance the performance of the film.
The film on screen becomes a seamless narrative of a lopsided society, a social and cultural phenomenon that finds its expression through food. While the restaurant becomes an experience of a lifetime for the guests, this film becomes an adventurous as well as a thought-provoking experience for the audience. A meta performance (a performance within a performance), The Menu, with its themes of power dynamics and extravagance associated with gourmet dining etiquettes,proves to be a social commentary and a cultural performance wherein all the agents are active instead of passive. Of course, they are active only when and to the extent that they are allowed to be. The film displays food as being performed both ordinarily and ritualistically. The medium of food and the form of cinema, maintaining a sensorial harmony, push to reinterpret the traditional boundaries of Performance Studies, making food an intricate vehicle for social critique through its storytelling.
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