Are audience appetites for social satire being… | Little White Lies

Are audi­ence appetites for social satire being satisfied?

07 Jan 2023

Words by S.L. Page

Stern-looking man in chef's coat presiding over diners at a table.
Stern-looking man in chef's coat presiding over diners at a table.
A spate of recent films use food and fine din­ing to explore themes of injus­tice and per­for­mance – but do they have any­thing nov­el to say?

The Menu and Flux Gourmet take food, and the priv­i­leged few who can eas­i­ly afford it, and make them into mod­ern mon­sters. The same is seen in a glut of oth­er hor­rors released in the last six months, from indie eat­ing dis­or­der dra­ma Shape­less, to the Welsh lan­guage pro­duc­tion The Feast, and British super­nat­ur­al sto­ry A Ban­quet. Food-based hor­ror films have emerged from the waves of crises that have been hit­ting us since 2020, in every cor­ner of the genre.

Hor­ror films have always act­ed as mir­rors of soci­ety, from The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari reflect­ing the mali­cious unease of the inter­war years to Get Out expos­ing racism amongst mid­dle-class Oba­ma vot­ers. In this era of aus­ter­i­ty, food banks and the eat or heat” choice that many of us are being forced to make, it is under­stand­able that food has become a major focus for UK and US hor­ror filmmakers. 

Both direct­ed by British film­mak­ers, Mark Mylod’s pres­tige thriller The Menu and Peter Strickland’s exper­i­men­tal indie Flux Gourmet were cre­at­ed dur­ing a time of chaos in the UK. As well as the after­ef­fects of the pan­dem­ic, the UK has been hit by Brex­it and chron­i­cal­ly under­fund­ed pub­lic ser­vices final­ly hit­ting break­ing point, all presided over by suc­ces­sive inept governments.

With a report­ed bud­get of $30 mil­lion, Mylod’s work is stud­ded with stars, includ­ing Anya Tay­lor-Joy, Ralph Fiennes (who plays the restaurant’s renowned cre­ator Chef Slowik) and Nicholas Hoult. Although the film begins with the patrons will­ing­ly trav­el­ling to the elite restau­rant on a remote island, the sit­u­a­tion quick­ly devolves until they are impris­oned at Hawthorne. 

Mean­while Flux Gourmet does a lot with a frac­tion of The Menu’s bud­get. Its small cast includes Asa But­ter­field, Gwen­do­line Christie and Strickland’s reg­u­lar col­lab­o­ra­tor Fat­ma Mohamed, though sim­i­lar­ly to The Menu, the major­i­ty of the film takes place in one set­ting: the pres­ti­gious Son­ic Cater­ing Insti­tute. The film was shot over just 14 days, and this works very well; the film focus­es on a culi­nary collective’s res­i­den­cy, and you can feel the actors build­ing sim­i­lar rela­tion­ships to those their char­ac­ters would have devel­oped dur­ing this.

Despite very dif­fer­ent tonal choic­es, Flux Gourmet and The Menu have a lot in com­mon. They both explore food as an artis­tic per­for­mance, enjoyed by wealthy patrons, and satirise the absur­di­ty of peo­ple who have enough mon­ey to eat tiny por­tions by choice. Then there are the speech­es – both films have char­ac­ters wax­ing lyri­cal about food and their lives, often played for dark com­e­dy. None of these speech­es are about a com­plete lack of food, and the per­form­ers’ in each film have not expe­ri­enced star­va­tion for them­selves. Instead many of the speech­es dis­cuss the char­ac­ters will­ing­ly wast­ing food. Sev­er­al of the speech­es become psy­cho­sex­u­al, with sex seen as being more impor­tant than eating.

In The Menu the priv­i­lege of the char­ac­ters is referred to direct­ly mul­ti­ple times. After a speech about class and flour, and how the his­to­ry of bread­mak­ing is one of human sur­vival, Chef Slowik serves a dish com­posed sole­ly of condi­ments, say­ing You are not the com­mon man, so tonight you get no bread”. A group of tech bros’ response to this is to demand the bread. As their firm is an angel investor in Hawthorne, they believe that they own the restau­rant, along­side it’s staff, and should get spe­cial treat­ment. They don’t.

Mar­got (Anya Tay­lor-Joy) func­tions as a coun­ter­point to the oth­er cus­tomers. As soon as she steps onto the island she is marked out as wrong” by staff. Mar­got assumes this is because of her work­ing-class sta­tus, ask­ing Slowik You want the address of my mum’s trail­er park?” At anoth­er point, she is led to the kitchen of the restau­rant, and told You belong here with your own breed”. 

Flux Gourmet is much less direct. Strick­land prefers the dis­com­fort of sur­re­al­ism to out­right state­ments, and the result­ing film is dark­ly hilar­i­ous. We are laugh­ing at the awk­ward­ness of pri­vate­ly edu­cat­ed liars, who dress exclu­sive­ly in expen­sive design­er pieces, cre­at­ing aim­less, emp­ty art by stick­ing wires into cakes. Elle di Elle’s (Fat­ma Mohamed) troupe have been award­ed a valu­able spon­sor­ship by the Son­ic Cater­ing Insti­tute, but don’t want to take any of the institute’s advice on board. Whilst Slowik open­ly declares I am a mon­ster” in The Menu, Strick­land uses sub­tle, but build­ing, char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion to make us come to the same con­clu­sion about the artists in Flux Gourmet. 

How­ev­er, like Mar­got in The Menu, Flux Gourmet uses the tech­nique of hav­ing a coun­ter­point char­ac­ter to high­light the priv­i­lege of the oth­ers. This char­ac­ter is Stones, a jour­nal­ist brought in to doc­u­ment the res­i­den­cy. His lack of con­fi­dence and greed, as well as his gas­troin­testi­nal issues, mark him apart from every­one else at the Son­ic Cater­ing Institute.

A woman with curly hair wearing a white gown, standing behind a table filled with various vegetables and cooking utensils.

The mon­stros­i­ty of the wealthy char­ac­ters in both films is matched by the hor­ri­fy­ing nature of the food itself. They explore how an abun­dance of food, and the wast­ing of ingre­di­ents, is not only insen­si­tive but active­ly dis­gust­ing in these times. This is shown in Flux Gourmet when the nois­es of the squelch­ing, suck­ing and slap­ping of food become so exag­ger­at­ed it makes food seem deeply unap­peal­ing – and that’s before you get to the sec­tion where a real endoscopy is per­formed” on stage.

In The Menu, the food is gor­geous, but no one enjoys it. The wealthy cou­ple who have vis­it­ed the restau­rant 11 times can’t name a sin­gle dish they have con­sumed there. None of the char­ac­ters are there to eat food. As in Flux Gourmet, food is not seen as some­thing to enjoy and savour, or even some­thing to be con­sumed. The guests are there to pho­to­graph it, analyse it, or use it as a sta­tus sym­bol. This food is mon­strous because it takes some­thing vital to life, some­thing so many peo­ple are des­per­ate for, and makes it into some­thing use­less. It isn’t until Mar­got refus­es this mon­ster, and instead demands a cheese­burg­er for $9.95, that food is shown as some­thing worth eating.

The end­ings of both films rein­force this notion of food as the mon­ster, along­side the wealthy peo­ple that waste it. They each con­clude with a per­for­mance piece that ref­er­ences can­ni­bal­ism, in which. The wealthy char­ac­ters who we have come to hate, become the food. This unites the two mon­strous ele­ments: the repul­sive peo­ple become repul­sive food, whether in the form of a s’more or being fed into a blender.

These vio­lent clo­sures feel like acts of revenge. As Mar­got watch­es Hawthorne explode, she eats her burg­er, and wipes her mouth with the fan­cy menu sought out by the rich patrons. In this moment it appears that Mylod is allow­ing the audi­ence to live vic­ar­i­ous­ly through Mar­got. Like her, many audi­ence mem­bers will be strug­gling to find mon­ey to eat, and watch­ing the wealthy lit­er­al­ly burn offers a moment of catharsis.

Mean­while in Flux Gourmet it is Elle di Elle who is osten­si­bly made into food. Through­out the film she is con­trol­ling and abu­sive to every­one around her. Although the final moments reveal that she isn’t actu­al­ly in the blender, up until that point it is sat­is­fy­ing to see such a moral­ly ugly char­ac­ter be con­sumed by her own art­form. By clos­ing their films like this, it seems that Mylod and Strick­land are both allow­ing the audi­ence to have a moment of wish-ful­fill­ment, let­ting us iden­ti­fy with what is hap­pen­ing on the screen enough to momen­tar­i­ly defeat a mon­ster that is very real in our dai­ly lives: the need for food under austerity. 

How­ev­er, The Menu is a large-scale, Dis­ney-dis­trib­uted film, and its direc­tor is a suc­cess­ful film­mak­er. Although it has Mar­got as a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of work­ing-class real­i­ties, its pro­duc­tion and author­ship under­cut some of its mes­sag­ing around food pover­ty. Flux Gourmet’s bud­get may be mod­est in com­par­i­son, but its art­house aes­thet­ic is pri­mar­i­ly aimed at mid­dle-class audi­ences, who unfair­ly have more oppor­tu­ni­ties to access this kind of work.

As a result these two films have a dual­i­ty to them. Their use of lux­u­ry food as some­thing that is to be looked at rather than con­sumed results in them cri­tiquing a spe­cif­ic set of peo­ple, yet they are tar­get­ing their own films at a main audi­ence from that same group. Nei­ther film sets out to be a direct com­men­tary on food pover­ty, yet by look­ing at priv­i­lege through the lens of food, they both car­ry the bag­gage of our cur­rent sit­u­a­tion. Each film was made in the midst of sky­rock­et­ing food-bank use in the UK, and nei­ther of the two British film­mak­ers will have been unaware of that real­i­ty when mak­ing their films. Per­haps the next few years will see some­one tack­le the sub­ject of food pover­ty head-on in hor­ror – for now, we have to make do with the fan­ta­sy of bit­ing the hand that won’t feed.

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