A brief history of food fights in the movies | Little White Lies

A brief his­to­ry of food fights in the movies

07 Aug 2018

Words by Georgina Guthrie

Two women, one in a sequined red dress gesturing, the other holding fruit, in a kitchen setting with alcohol on the table.
Two women, one in a sequined red dress gesturing, the other holding fruit, in a kitchen setting with alcohol on the table.
This messy, invari­ably enter­tain­ing cin­e­mat­ic sta­ple can rep­re­sent anar­chy, revenge and sex­u­al release.

Desert of choice for Amer­i­cans every­where, the pie is a beloved icon of home cook­ing: half pas­try, half fruit with a sprin­kling sug­ar, it’s a thing to be cher­ished, lov­ing­ly set on a win­dowsill to cool or smoth­ered in whipped cream and imme­di­ate­ly devoured. A pie should nev­er, ever be thrown at some­one – unless it’s for good reason.

Pieing – the act of chuck­ing a pie in someone’s face – is tra­di­tion­al­ly done with a crust­less vari­ety filled with cream, although shav­ing foam packed into a tin­foil tray may be used as a sub­sti­tute. The goal is to humil­i­ate the vic­tim and amuse the audi­ence, except when a polit­i­cal fig­ure is involved, in which case the attack moves into the realm of protest: an unso­licit­ed pie to the face is a pun­ish­able crim­i­nal offence.

Pieing has long been a main­stay of Amer­i­can slap­stick. The ear­li­est exam­ple record on film is Essanay Stu­dios’ 1909 silent com­e­dy Mr Flip, in which a sex­u­al­ly harassed wait­ress final­ly smash­es a pie in Ben Turpin’s face as just pun­ish­ment for his unso­licit­ed grop­ings. Twelve years lat­er, com­e­dy duo Lau­rel and Hardy set the bench­mark with a care­ful­ly chore­o­graphed 3000-strong pie fight for their slap­stick splat­ter­fest The Bat­tle of the Cen­tu­ry. The fight esca­lates after a pas­try chef slips on a banana peel and artic­u­lates his frus­tra­tion in the best pos­si­ble way.

Pieing has since gone on to become a stock com­e­dy punch­line. It makes for whole­some fam­i­ly view­ing, but it fast became some­thing of a cliché, a warm up act to a full-blown food fight, which has the poten­tial to say more than a sim­ple pie ever could.

Take John Lan­dis’ Ani­mal House, which fol­lows a group of bawdy, social­ly-inept stu­dents in a bat­tle against the college’s most pres­ti­gious fra­ter­ni­ty. Blu­to (John Belushi) sits down to lunch with the jocks, fills his mouth with ice cream, punch­es his swollen cheeks and pro­ceeds to spray the con­tents over his fel­low din­ers. He then yells those two words and the hall explodes into chaos. This food fight is a swift and effec­tive expres­sion of con­tempt for con­for­mi­ty – a sim­ple pie in the face would have been too per­son­al, and much too silly.

Food can also be a weapon. In Dan­ny DeVito’s Matil­da, the oppressed chil­dren of Miss Trunchbull’s school rise up and humil­i­ate their tor­men­tor using their lunch. And in Alan Parker’s pro­hi­bi­tion gang­ster film Bugsy Mal­one, the cream in the splurge guns’ was nev­er intend­ed for eat­ing, it was a genius alter­na­tive to bul­lets in the director’s bid to secur­ing the film its child-friend­ly rating.

At the oth­er end of the scale, an under­stat­ed food fight in 1931’s The Pub­lic Ene­my is a les­son in sim­plic­i­ty: Kit­ty (Mae Clarke) receives a grape­fruit half to the face when she tells James Cagney’s Tom he can’t drink alco­hol with his break­fast. His retal­i­a­tion is so sharp and so unrea­son­able that it sur­pass­es Lau­rel and Hardy’s pie fight in terms of emo­tion­al impact: a humil­i­at­ed Kit­ty left alone at the table makes for sober viewing.

Mov­ing into the realm of sex­u­al metaphor, the two female pro­tag­o­nists of Jon Avnet’s Fried Green Toma­toes throw and smear flour, ripe black­ber­ries and choco­late over each oth­er in a reck­less food fight which effec­tive­ly stands in for illic­it sex­u­al con­tact. This food fight is at once both an act of sub­ver­sion and con­for­mi­ty as their desire finds expres­sion in an uncon­ven­tion­al, yet cul­tur­al­ly accept­able act.

Food fights have become a famil­iar sta­ple of Amer­i­can cin­e­ma. But in com­mu­nist Europe, where food was scarce and wastage frowned upon, film­ing one had the poten­tial to become an act of rebel­lion dan­ger­ous enough to see the film banned, or worse, a film­ing ban for the direc­tor themselves.

Vera Chytilová, a key fig­ure in the Czech New Wave, direct­ed her 1966 film Daisies under a strict social­ist régime. Not that she con­forms to her nation’s fru­gal ide­olo­gies: her fifth fea­ture tells the sto­ry of two dan­ger­ous­ly bored pals who blaze through a series of abstract sce­nar­ios, play­ful­ly trash­ing their envi­ron­ment to cre­ate chop­py visu­al exper­i­ments. They final­ly break into a state ban­quet hall, dis­cov­er a table laden with food and pro­ceed to rip, smash, chuck and gob­ble every­thing in sight.

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, the film’s waste­ful indul­gence irked the but­toned-up author­i­ties, who banned it for its depic­tion of food wastage and gen­er­al non­con­for­mi­ty. The pun­ish­ment was sharp – not only was the film itself pro­hib­it­ed, but Chytilová was for­bid­den from mak­ing films in her native coun­try for almost a decade.

Mov­ing deep­er into art­house ter­ri­to­ry – and about as far away from a whole­some pie fight as you can get – is Yugosla­vian direc­tor Dušan Makavejev’s Sweet Movie. Already exiled from his home coun­try fol­low­ing his con­tro­ver­sial fourth fea­ture WR: Mys­ter­ies of the Organ­ism, his fifth was imme­di­ate­ly banned and remains barred, or heav­i­ly cut, in many coun­tries to this day.

In this stom­ach-churn­ing feast, a table of din­ers sink into ungoverned chaos, smash­ing food, spit­ting it out and lit­er­al­ly regur­gi­tat­ing it onto the table. The shock is the point: Sweet Movie aims to push ideas about cre­ative and indi­vid­ual free­dom to their lim­its. As Makave­jev lat­er claimed in a 1975 inter­view with film crit­ic Roger Ebert: That’s what I’d like my films to do – to bring peo­ple to see in them­selves things they might oth­er­wise nev­er accept.”

Food fights have the pow­er to amuse, humil­i­ate, relieve ten­sion, or – in cer­tain cul­tur­al envi­ron­ments – evolve into a potent artis­tic or polit­i­cal­ly-charged state­ment. Even a sim­ple pie, when thrown in the face of the right per­son, in just the right way, can com­mu­ni­cate a mes­sage far more effec­tive­ly than words ever could. As Stan Lau­rel once put it: It wasn’t just that we threw hun­dreds of pies. That wouldn’t have been very fun­ny… we went at it, strange as it may sound, psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly. We made every one of the pies count.”

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