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#i am not immune to vampire hunter propaganda
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(I Always Kill) The Things I Love
a lil October 1st post of the man himself! I drew this a couple weeks back and it ended up doing some rounds on reddit, which was vaguely spooky.
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seasquared · 1 year
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Not on bread alone, or at all
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The Menu (2022).
The second time I watched "The Menu" (2022), I made myself dinner first. A salad from a premixed prewashed box, dressed with apple cider vinegarette bought in a bottle, red onions soaked in ice water to limit their bite, and candied pecans, slightly stale and leftover from months prior. A camembert that I didn't like and that I had baked, studiously glazing it with honey and olive oil and studded with sliced garlic, only to realize that I still didn't like it. I threw it away and ate store-bought hummus instead, with generic grocery brand pita crackers. I did not buy any bread—on purpose. What a meal!
Perhaps I thought if I could collect enough bad food things around me, I would be protected, a kekkai of poor culinary choices, when I finally re-entered the world of "The Menu." I would be the final girl, twirling a sprig of wilted frisee lettuce, a crumbled piece of pita cracker warding off Julian Slowick, like a vampire hunter with her tools. Or, even more pathetically, he would see me drinking a glass of vinho verde priced at under $10 a bottle and know I was unfit to die with him. I could not be afforded the glory.  He would leave me in the chicken coop without dessert. They'd find me in the smokehouse, "in the Nordic tradition," trussed and waiting to be let down.
But of course, fine dining is never about the food. Never quite. It is, as one of rich tech bros in the movie says also facetiously, also ironically, but wholly correctly, "buying the experience." I am not immune to propaganda—or the lure of "The Menu." I am, and have always been, a devotee.
(cw: discussions of mass suicide/murder in the context of Jonestown)
Last year I had declared rather facetiously that I was done with my tasting menu era. It was the conversational equivalent of an ironic tweet, because while I never had a tasting menu era, I knew I was the kind of person who should have. I had spent a good deal of my adult life in Chicago and never made it to Alinea even once, despite having multiple friends who have gone multiple times. I had gone to one or two omakases, but never anything notable, and came away from each a little embarrassed, as if my husband and I had been caught publicly roleplaying. I was in a book club with a woman who humblebragged about a 24-hour weekday trip to the French Laundry, and I've never quite figured out if I was jealous, thought it was gauche, or both.
If I knew about fine dining, it was as literature, or perhaps as myth. I committed certain passages from articles written about Guidara and Humm to memory, as if they were The Silmarillion and Eleven (elven?) Madison Park some fictional area of Middle Earth. I followed John and Karen Urie Shields' work at Town House ravenously, but through pictures on their blog. (Later I did have the tasting menu at Smythe, their restaurant in Chicago, and loved it—perhaps my only genuine tasting menu experience.) And oh, the Netflix shows! I once bored a dinner table to tears talking about an episode of "Chef's Table: Pizza." There's a scene where Bonci butchers a cow while talking about the excesses of his appetite and it represents him butchering himself, because we are now bored with static images of a person looking into a camera talking about food. "I don't think I've ever paid that much attention to my food, or to what I was watching on Netflix," one of my fellow diners said, very slowly, as if worried I was a rabid dog that may attack her for her confession. Slowick wouldn't lift a finger to butcher me, he'd be so revolted. He'd let me rot untouched for more than 152 days, until I was no longer fit for consumption.
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The perversity of modern life is that we know so much more than our counterpart selves would have 200, 300 years ago. But that knowledge remains mostly second, third hand. I know about fine dining the same way I know about saints: idolatry of iconography, signals I used for personal mythmaking and to detangle the mythmaking of others. But that also makes me part of the intended audience for "The Menu." Tyler impresses Margot for the first, and only, time in the movie with a monologue that reveals, among other things, that he has watched Slowick's episode of "Chef's Table" at least 20 times, and the movie rewards the viewer who recognizes how much the first 15 minutes are a parody of the tastefully dramatic and breathlessly orchestrated "Chef's Table" style, from the text overlays to the swelling classical music to a plate of food filmed slowly rotating against a black nothing background.
Because despite its cutting asides and its more-than-glancing resonance with "Eyes Wide Shut," "The Menu" is not really a movie about skewering the rich. It is a movie about fanaticism, cults (religious and personality), and the end of something powerful and destructive and, yes, even beautiful, that cannot exist in this world in this form anymore without poisoning everything it touches. It is a movie at least in part for us Tylers, who are looking for others to transform the ordinary into art, the elements of the everyday world into the divine.
Ralph Fiennes' Slowick is not a monster. He is not even the man in the kitchen we have come to expect in real life (widespread in Copenhangen beyond just Noma), reality TV (Gordon Ramsey), or fiction (Joel McHale's cameo as a nightmarish head chef in "The Bear", or even Carmy himself). He does not yell at his staff. He does not get knifed by a stagiaire in the buttocks, though he does allow a female sous chef he sexually and then just normally harassed to stab him in the thigh. When he calls Margot to his (tiny, austere, "shitty" per the script) office, his eyes are so doleful, the set of his mouth so mournful. He walks her through her cover story like a therapist—or maybe, more accurately, like a priest listening to a confession.
But Ralph Fiennes' Slowick is monstrous because of those things. He appears capable of such love, such tenderness, and yet only when he is about to teeter from that edge into violence. When Jeremy is about to bring The Mess to a close, Slowick kisses Jeremy on both cheeks like a benediction, a heavenly father forgiving whatever sins of inferiority Jeremy may still carry in his flesh, before his body is wrapped up like a human smudge stick, bundled inside a white sheet with sprigs of eucalyptus leaves, lavender, and grasses. The Mess is the first time the menu—and "The Menu"—truly goes off the rails, and is when you realize that this is not the culinary version of The Count of Monte Cristo or even "Glass Onion". Killing Jeremy, or letting Jeremy die, serves no larger purpose. Slowick is not there to expose his guests with razor sharp accuracy, to cut them down to size, or even to enact simple vengeance. He has, very simply, gone mad.
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There are times in the movie when Slowick appears close to divine revelation, and I think that is why so many reviewers seem to believe this movie is some commentary on capitalism or consumerism or wealth, and are disappointed to realize at the end that there is none. But that is the thing about madness: there are times when it can seem quite cogent, and it often starts with a kernel of truth. You can't initiate someone into a cult with insanity. You have to start with one true thing. So Slowick is right to put the toadies of his angel investor in their places, yet what he screams at Doug Verrick is that there are no substitutions at Hawthorne. So he dooms a woman to her death simply because she had no student loans. You can't initiate someone into a cult with insanity. You have to start with one true thing, and get there in the end.
How could this happen? "Why didn't you try to escape?" Simple: the guests are not supposed to. It would be, as Hannibal may say, rude. It is not proper. It is not part of the ritual. The ending of "The Menu" is about complicity, but not just in the sense of "I deserve to die." The guests are complicit in their participation -- in eating, in savoring, in relishing, as Chef orders them to do. They listen to him. They do not try to attack the staff or run away, because running away is not part of the ritual, any more than sitting at someone else's table, sending food back, not agreeing with the sommelier's descriptions of the wine pairings, or refusing to pay for your bill—with or without a side of murder—is part of the ritual. The guests are here not for the food. "Otherwise it just tastes good, and who cares?" You do not pay Rolex money to eat good food; you pay Rolex money to be gastronomically dommed by the world's best chef.
It's fun on Twitter to discuss Margot's escape as a sly joke, like she exploited a loophole we should have seen coming. But Margot is able to leave because she realizes the only way out of the death cult is to deprogram and reject its rules entirely. She doesn't need to be the high priestess, as perhaps Elsa could lay claim to. She simply needs to be a disbeliever. When Slowick calls Margot to the front of the house and asks her, "Are you one of us or one of them?", he is quick to clarify that it does not mean will she survive or die. He assumes her initiation, that she will become one of the bigger Us, his death cult. He is asking her to pick her place within the order, whether she will be wearing the white robes of the priests or stand naked like the congregation. But in the end, Margo denies him. Without faith in Chef God, he has no power over her.
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Perhaps if I had eaten at more tasting menus, or gone to a church when I was younger instead of learning about Catholicism in art museums, or hadn't been trying to air out an apartment kitchen with no windows after baking a camembert that smelled of rancid fat and chemical spills, I could have normal thoughts about "The Menu." But instead, what came to mind was the Jonestown massacre, where one man's folly resulted in the deaths (I consider them murders) of over 900 people.
There were over 900 audiotapes recovered from Jonestown following the massacre. The most famous of these tapes is, of course, the "death tape," a nearly hour-long recording of the events that directly preceded their deaths. In these final moments, Jim Jones sounds, disconcertingly, not unlike Julian Slowick (or perhaps it is more accurate to say that Slowick in the movie is disconcertingly Jones-like). He is apologetic, full of tender grief, as he calls for his congregation to submit to his vision of "revolutionary suicide." "I’ve practically died every day to give you peace," he tells them. "And you still not have any peace." Towards the end, as he worries that the cajoling and praises of the other church members is causing the process to drag on for too long, he resorts to grandiosity and exhaustion. "We’ve lived as no other people have lived and loved. We’ve had as much of this world as you’re gonna get. Let’s just be done with it. Let’s be done with the agony of it."
You can almost hear this in Ralph Fiennes' calm voice. The same voice he uses as he grabs an ember with his bare hands. We must be cleansed. Made clean. Like martyrs. Or heretics. We can be subsumed and made anew.
Among those who died at Jonestown were children and elderly family members who were fed or injected poison. In other words, they did not go willingly. Even those that did had lived through a blitzkrieg of manipulation and psychological warfare from Jim Jones, who could for example pretend to give his congregation tiny cups of poison as loyalty tests to see if they would kill themselves if called upon to do so. It's possible many of those who were killed on November 18, 1978, thought they were not actually going to die. (In light of this, there has been a concerted effort by relatives of those who died at Jonestown to eradicate the phrase "drinking the Kool-Aid" as an expression of someone falling without reservation for a crazy idea. Since falling down the Jonestown rabbit hole many years ago, I've tried to stop saying it as well.)
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In its place, I propose: "becoming the human s'more." Because Hawthrone's final guests did know they were going to die, and welcomed it. The final edit of the movie makes it obvious. In the script, Anne, the wife in the couple that has dined at Hawthorne eleven times, pleads with Slowick during the final course. "Please," she says, but the script cannot decide if she is asking for him to stop or to continue.
The movie itself offers no ambiguity. Anne tells him, tearily, "Thank you." And when Slowick shouts for the final time, "I love you all!" perhaps you thought he was speaking only to his staff, who respond with equal gusto, "We love you, Chef!" Perhaps you thought that for the whole movie. But in that final scene, in my rewatch, I finally noticed: Soren and Felicity shout it right back.
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Addendum:
Days after I watched "The Menu" for the first time, Noma announced that it would be closing its doors to diners in 2024. I had a very fun discussion with a friend (@genufa) about the themes that echo in both Noma's closing and "The Menu." Chef Slowick proclaims that the food at Hawthorn is "the best food in the world." But it is impossible to ever determine what is the "best food" in the world, what it should taste like, who should taste it. And more importantly, it is impossible to make the best restaurant in the world and share it with everyone, night after night. The human cost of such an experiment, as Slowick and Redzepi discovers, is too much.
But it is possible to make the best burger in the world, and maybe even to share the best burger in the world with everyone. (That's why I think this Twitter thread on how fine dining is presented in "The Menu" is absolutely correct, only they present it as a critique of the movie when I think it's the whole bottom line. The point of "The Menu" is that a chef's passion is real, and trying to turn that into ROI is grueling and, possibly, never sustainable or even moral.)
Anyway, I couldn't stop thinking of a quote Kim Mikkola, who worked at Noma for four years, gave to the New York Times about Noma's closing. Fine dining, he said, "like diamonds, ballet and other elite pursuits, often has abuse built into it. Everything luxetarian is built on somebody’s back; somebody has to pay."
Do you know what Mikkola is doing now? Apparently, "a chain of sustainable, equitably run fried-chicken sandwich shops." The cheeseburger, in 2023.
Further Reading:
"The Menu Gets That Fine Dining is a Cult," by Chris Crowley and Adam Platt in Vulture
"The Menu is an Apology from the Old to the Young for the Mess We've Made of the World," by Maria Bustillos in Popula
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I’m perfectly normal. No therapy for me. *goes to Barovia with a tiger at the ripe old age of Old*
Van Richten did well so I drew him again…… behave.
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vanhelsingapologist · 2 years
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Sometimes you’ve sinned too much to merit the sleep of the just and really, really want to kill the unrelenting creatures of the night.
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If I were hunting vampires, I would tattoo crosses and religious verses all over my body. I would then proceed to strip. That’s a build-in flashbang, baby. Seduce them back. RIP to the cowards in Dracula, I guess.
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