The Menu - A Response by Kit Power

Well, fuck it, The Menu seems to say. Fuck it all. Eat the burger, and watch the billionaires burn.

The Menu - A Response by Kit Power 

The film, penned by Will Tracy and Seth Reiss, "focuses on a young couple who visits an exclusive destination restaurant on a remote island where the acclaimed chef has prepared a lavish tasting menu. 
Release date: 18 November 2022
Director: Mark Mylod

Massive spoilers. I’m going to assume you’ve seen it. If you haven't, go see it. It’s brilliant.


Like with my recent experience with The Banshees of Inisherin, The Menu left me feeling just a little overwhelmed; like that movie, it’s a tightly focussed piece, with a relatively small cast, claustrophobic setting, and a crawling sense of menace and escalation. Also like that movie there’s an absolute ton going on under the hood; enough that I was somewhere at a loss to know where to start.


Twitter to the rescue; a friend and Patreon backer, seeing that I was planning an essay, asked me on that platform if I thought the movie was primarily a horror movie or a comedy. Their contention was that it was primarily a comedy, due to the delivery, pacing, and the structure of the reveals.


So let’s start there. The easy answer to ‘is The Menu primarily horror or comedy?’ is, of course, ‘Yes’, but that answer deserves a bit of unpacking.


Back in the Summer of 2021, I was lucky enough to interview legendary author Chuck Tingle, on the occasion of the release of his debut horror novella, Straight, and one of the topics we covered were the connections between horror, comedy and erotica. You can click through for the full exchange, but Dr Tingle said, in part, “But dang thing is ROMANCE and also jokeman way of COMEDY is a lot like way of HORROR because these are genres of tension and release and timing so if you understand these things you can understand them across all kinds of stories i think.”


So, yes, absolutely, The Menu is is a comedy movie; structurally, formally, it’s almost like the final, idealized form of a shaggy dog story; one that, like the menu itself, goes through a series of increasingly absurd iterations, each dish peeling back a layer of understanding, each delivering its own secondary gag (in either or both senses of the word) while feeding into the wider narrative and inevitable punchline. And of course, within that, it’s aware of the inherent pomposity of the films proposition; one of this things that really hit me about this movie was the interrogation of the relationship between art and commerce; particularly, the artistic drive to push oneself, allied to a system that values wealth and exclusivity above all.


Plus, you know, it’s damn funny in places. The movie does a great job skewering  the kinds of people wealthy enough to eat in a $1200 taster menu restaurant that’s located upon its own island, for crying out loud. So we’ve got the washed-up movie star, the obnoxious tech bros, the ultra rich regulars, the pretentious food critic and her obsequious editor, and the super-rich foodie-as-religion dude and his ‘girlfriend’. And as I type that out, does that start to feel more like a collection of modern archetypes than actual characters? Maybe, but the sad truth is, by and large, the ultrarich are a cliched bunch at this point. I remember watching Succession and occasionally thinking they couldn’t really be quite this awful… and then along comes the weapons grade idiocy of the Musk takeover of Twitter, and you realize that show was, if anything, lowballing it.


So, sure, the setup screams parable, and (as well as being comedy, as well as being horror) it absolutely is; but that doesn't mean any of the actors are playing it that way, I don’t think. Even Fiennes, who in some ways has the toughest part to play, and the totally-in-control-yet-increasingly-clearly-unhinged head chef, treats the role with respect, inhabiting this driven, incredibly talented and utterly broken man. I believed in him. I believed in all of them.


So is it comedy? Sure. But as Dr. Tingle notes, comedy and horror are both games of tension and release, setup and punchline. Elsewhere, I’ve opined that the only real difference is whether or not you wince or laugh when the punchline arrives.


And frequently, The Menu made me do both.


A great example of this is the sequence in course 4 when the sous chef shoots himself in the head. The last three courses have laid the groundwork, with the chef’s storytelling becoming increasingly disturbing, and of course the third dish featuring tortillas with laser printed images on them that expose various misdeeds of the guests. So as an audience we are, like the guests, already feeling the ground start to shift under our feet, a sense of unease at this isolated location, enclosed environment, and a perhaps not-entirely-stable host.


Still, the moment is exquisitely delivered; the monologue build, the arrangement of items over the plastic sheeting the men stand on. ‘He is good, but he’ll never be great’ intones the chef, and I felt that one down to my boots, you can bet… It’s funny, because watching it, I remember thinking simultaneously that he was going to kill himself and that he wasn’t, the two equally strong convictions based on the shape of what we’d seen, inevitability vs surprise…. And then, thanks to the brilliant way the shooting is delivered, with the sudden drawing of the curtains over the kitchen and some exquisite quick cuts in the edit, it made me jump anyway.


And yeah, I laughed. I also gasped. I was delighted and horrified, all at one.


Delighted because I’d predicted it, and because it meant I was in for that kind of story; a slow burn, but not too slow. This movie wasn’t just here to sneer or imply, it was here to slap, to bite. Good. Horrified, because even as I had very little sympathy for most of the customers of the restaurant, like a lot of my favorite movies and books, I was absorbed enough in the story that I felt in some way that I was in that room, sat at one of the tables; that I was both captive and witness. The dynamics at play here are absolutely elemental - power, control, isolation. An inversion of what the guests must have imagined their entire lives was the natural order of things; a situation and circumstance where not only is their money no good, it might even be what kills them.


So, is The Menu primarily horror, or comedy? Yes.


There’s a lot more we could unpick; this is a movie that has such a clear idea of what it’s doing that each scene, each line, each shot is as meticulously planned as the titular Menu. But I want to focus in on one character in particular, because she serves as both the key for the audience to unlock the story-behind-the-story, and creates an incredible moment of tension towards the films climax.


So, let’s talk about Anya Taylor-Joy’s Margot.


It’s a brilliant performance, let’s just start there. The exact nature of her relationship to uber-foodie Tyler isn't immediately clear, but what is clear is that there’s something off between them from the start; we quickly learn that she wasn’t his original guest, but even before then, from the way they interact, particularly when he leans on her to stop smoking out of fear of ruining her palette, it’s clear both that they don’t know each other well, and there’s a power imbalance between them. I can’t remember if it’s stated explicitly in those opening scenes, but it’s almost immediately apparent that he’s paid for her ticket. And once the boat lands, there’s an awkward moment when the greeter observes she wasn’t the original guest; it’s a moment that’ll have a lot of narrative significance later, of course (this is not a movie that create moments of weirdness for the sake of it, almost all of the initial scenes touring the island have some kind of wider significance or payoff later in the film) but even on it’s own terms, the moment underlines the point; Margot doesn’t belong here.


Initially, I think I’d imagined this was to give us an audience identification figure; someone who, like (99.99% of) us, doesn’t move in these kinds of exclusive circles, can comment on the absurdity, ask the awkward and/or ignorant questions. And sure, there’s some of that; especially with Tyler’s fanatical zeal for the project at hand causing him to overshare/geek out in dramatic fashion.


Actually, that’s probably with a quick closer look as well, because my default sympathies will normally be with the person doing the geeking out. Whether in fiction or nonfiction, give me a person or character who’s absolutely obsessed with some object‘d’art, be it a pop culture juggernaut or something utterly obscure, I am there for it. I don’t think it’s anything more complicated than enjoying someone else’s sincerely expressed joy; it’s a big part of why I make and listen to the kinds of podcasts I do. I generally find obsessive overenthusiasm kind of endearing and delightful


But Tyler? Tyler squiks me the fuck out.


And it’s not hard to see why; it’s the point where enthusiasm bubbles over into fanaticism, where engagement goes from personal joy to a kind of moral absolutism; this is not merely The Coolest Thing but has become The Way. Tyler embodies this throughout, long before he is revealed as knowing the planned ending for the evening; the way his condescending flattery in the face of Margot’s pointed and irreverent conversations crumbles, to be replaced with an increasingly furious insistence that she fall in line with his opinions. There’s a beautiful irony here, in that he repeatedly accuses her of ‘ruining it’, while all the time surreptitiously taking photos of the food, which is strictly against the rules of the restaurant. Tyler represents what seems to be the case for a lot of ultra rich people; a central void that can never be filled, no matter how much money is poured into it. This should be of little if any comfort to the rest of us, of course, to know that the billionaire class that are fast pushing the planet past the point where it will be livable are profoundly miserable people, as a whole; still, I can’t deny that Tyler’s suicide (following his predictably epic failure in the cook’s role) was one of the more grimly satisfying moments in the film. May all the tyrants of greed relieve us thus of their presence, while there’s still time to turn this sorry mess around.


But back to our Margot. What we learn, and it’s not a galloping shock, given the way her relationship with Tyler is portrayed, is that she’s an escort, paid by Tyler to accompany him in place of his girlfriend. It’s a further moment of revelation of Tyler’s overall character, especially when we get the reveal that he knew everyone is going to die at the end. What’s fascinating is what the movie does with that; she’s given a private audience with the chef, and he explains to her that they’re all going to die, but offers her a choice; does she wish to die with the servers, or with the eaters? It’s a fascinating exchange, both actors delivering exquisite performances, with the moment when Fiennes says ‘believe me, I know a bad customer when I see one’ falling with particular impact.


What I find fascinating is what happens after that; in one of the few ambiguous moments in an otherwise very controlled film, the chef, deciding for himself that Margot is one of the team, sends her out to retrieve a barrel from the smokehouse. It's an odd moment, because he blames Elsa, the Maitre D’, for the missing barrel, and it’s clear from her face that he’s done her an injustice. And I can’t quite work out what his motives are, in the moment, save it being, perhaps, a test of Margot’s commitment to her new role. Regardless, I found Margot’s decision to instead investigate the chef house exhilarating, if stressful; and of course, in doing so, she breaks the paradigm of guest/staff entirely, choosing instead the role of outlaw, which gives her the clues she needs for her escape.


In closing, I do want to talk a bit about Margot's escape, because I loved it narratively and I’m still picking over the symbolism of it. Obviously, it’s hella badass the way she puts together the story of the chef’s memorabilia in his house; in particular how she notices the bigger and more exclusive the restaurant, the more miserable he looks, and then leverages that knowledge ruthlessly to denounce the pretentiousness of the whole thing, hitting the chef where, despite all the postering, he still lives, by telling him she’s still hungry.


What I particularly enjoyed about the scene was the sense that the chef understands what Margot is up to; that he may even be rooting for her to find the way through. He does accept her as an equal, after all; one of the servers, and the way she gets through is by recalling their shared connection to poor peoples’ comfort food. I wanted to punch the air when she asked to make the burger to go; it felt genuinely uplifting, like she’d earned her way out of that awful room through a mixture of courage, deceit, and honesty.


But I also can't get away from the choice of the cheeseburger.


Because, absolutely, it’s street food, a tasty, fatty, calorie bomb of protein. And, to be clear, I’m a fan.


But it’s also one of the things killing us.


I don’t mean so much in the Supersize Me way, but more in the fact the current scale of beef production, and the associated carbon and methane footprint, is a non-trivial contributor to the climate apocalypse that is on track to kill billions, if not all of us, over the next 100 years.


And I feel like, in a film this good, that can’t be accidental. I feel like that final shot of the movie, with Margot watching the restaurant burning to the ground before taking another hungry bite from the burger is something both uplifting and melancholic; life-affirming and nihilistic all at once.


Because the industrial mass production of beef is absolutely a big part of the problem, even if, like me, you don’t have a particular issue or concern about the animal welfare arguments. But that infrastructure is far beyond the power of individual consumers to influence, at this point, and in point of fact is heavily subsidized by so-called democratic governments across the world ( do you remember voting for using taxpayer’s money to fund the destruction of the planet? Because I don’t). And yet. Here we are


Well, fuck it, The Menu seems to say. Fuck it all. Eat the burger, and watch the billionaires burn.


Might as well.


KP
12/3/23

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