The Menu: A Brutally Insightful Satire
Mark Mylod's 'The Menu' understands the crisis of art like few other films
It’s a bleak world that Rotten Tomatoes has wrought. Hot takes and sick burns are the internet’s fuel, and what used to be called “pwning” (for whatever reason) is now the standard attitude that we all bring to all social media discourse. This sadly includes our conversations about art. The speed of electronic communication and the reward incentives of social media have deformed us into judgmental prudes with no sense of hospitality for an artistic experience.
When we watch movies now, they either present the world exactly as we wish to see it or they are trash to be burned. Consumerism has made us into monsters.
Lately I’ve even become convinced that we don’t deserve art anymore. Finally there is a movie that agrees with me.
Mark Mylod’s new film, The Menu, is brutally insightful about the current state of art in our world and I think it’s one of the rare movies I’ve seen in recent years brave enough to show us a true reflection of ourselves as we actually are.
Spoiler-alert (though that’s rather unnecessary, to be honest)
The Menu’s trailer pretty much sums it up. There you see what you will get. And yet even with foreknowledge of where the movie is going, it still surprises, horrifies, and delights.
Chef Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) is an famous chef and tonight he hosts a gallery of twelve specially-chosen guests at his elite and VERY exclusive island restaurant. The Chef has designed a sort of perverse “Last Supper.” An image of the Christian story of the First Communion in negative. So complete is the Chef’s inversion of the Last Supper, he purposefully serves his twelve disciples bread without bread. And I use the term “disciples” purposefully. Not only are their twelve of them, each worships The Chef, for reasons all their own.
As the trailer makes clear, he will definitely be murdering everyone. What makes the film brilliant is his reasoning and motivation.
They have ruined art, therefore they will die.
The Chef, after a lifetime of contorting himself, chasing the approval of increasingly elite and consumerist “taste” has broken and going to burn the whole thing down, customers and all.
As horrifying as his actions are, his logic is perfectly understandable. Essentially, The Chef’s critique of society has two components, Class and Cultural Elitism. And to be honest, his cultural critique is mostly about class as well. The one survivor of the dinner, Margot (played brilliantly by Anya Taylor-Joy, who seems to be in everything now and, well why not?) is revealed to be a sex worker hired as a date for the evening by Tyler (Nicholas Hoult). The Chef recognizes in her a fellow service worker and identifies with her. And in fact, her insight into the class issues that have driven The Chef mad is what saves her in the end.
All of his patrons are wealthy and spoiled, having reaped the benefits of late capitalism. Their lack of humility and perspective about their privilege is what makes them monsters. But if the movie simply settled on a simplistic moral critique of mean and callous individuals, it would have been mundane. Still fun, perhaps, but didactic and not particularly interesting.
The Menu shines because The Chef understands his role in this economic and cultural farce. His ire is aimed not directly at the individuals in the restaurant, but the entire system that creates such folly, himself included. He is, in fact, quite polite and cordial with his victims straight up to the end of the film. In fact, Fiennes’ portrayal of The Chef carries a real sense of love and caring for the diners he kills. This is one of the more unnerving and brilliant elements of the movie.
Consumption, Taste, and Cultural Distinction
The Chef has been made bitter because he has come to understand his role in an economic and cultural hierarchy. His complaint is fundamentally economic. His refusal to serve them bread is based on the observation that bread is the food of the poor and working classes. These diners do not get any because they do not deserve to eat such dignified food.
They have all consumed the culinary arts in the way they have consumed all art; their consumption is primarily conspicuous, that is, meant to demonstrate their cultural distinction. They have long forgotten the purpose of art — beauty and pleasure. (And this film, by the way is not only pleasurable, it is shockingly beautiful. The perverse meals the Chef serves are gorgeous in an of themselves, as are all the visuals in The Menu).
Their cultivated tastes have essentially turned class privilege into aesthetics and those aesthetics get cashed in for what Pierre Bourdieu might have called Cultural Capital. Art as a deeply human experience has been forgotten, traded in for brand-building — by artists and consumers alike.
The Diners Represent the System
The diners are a kind of cross-section of the “types” this system relies on and reproduces.
There is Lillian (Janet McTeer), the food critic for high-end magazines whose articles make or break chefs. Her character reminds me of most any magazine critic whose reviews are released before the films. Why do we still allow people like this to establish our conversations about art?
John Leguizamo plays a character simply known as “Movie Star,” a miserable sellout who uses the word “whore” to describe himself in an honest moment. He is accompanied (both willingly and unwillingly) by industry-climbing assistant Felicity (Aimee Carrero).
Three young men (Rob Yang, Mark St. Cyr, and Arturo Castro) are spoiled, arrogant patrons who are somehow ambiguously involved in the financial system underpinning elite art.
A wealthy, miserable older couple (Judith Light — what a delight to see her again — and Reed Birney) who have a loveless marriage but are wealthy and put it on display by appearing in such elite spaces.
The most pitiful and infuriating figure, however, is Nicholas Hoult’s Tyler. He is clearly an embodiment of what we might call #FilmTwitter. The self-made expert on his chosen art, who has memorized all the aesthetic jargon of the trade and employs it to give himself an air of aesthetic “expertise.” When given the chance to cook himself, he fails miserably, but he is all too eager to critique the work of actually-working artists.
Bread Without Bread
In season 3 of the incredible television show Hannibal, Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) philosophizes that “ethics become aesthetics.” As a sociopathic serial killer, what he means is that all human virtues are performative to some degree when enacted in society. His pathology is such that he has taken this to a nihilistic level, merely imitating a being living in a civilization — wearing a “person-suit,” as he is told. But what he describes is true and points at what we sometimes call (controversially to some) “virtue signaling.”
I would argue that often, the opposite is true as well. Aesthetics become ethics too. The Menu depicts a world in which a person’s position in society is intimately connected to the refinement of their taste; and this process is necessarily elite and classist. The justice The Chef enacts against this system is almost divine. His refusal to offer them bread, the fundamental element of communion is a truly brilliant way to separate the diners from the art their consumptive habits have ruined.
The film’s ending, in which Margot, the dinner’s one representative from the working classes, has escaped and enjoys an incredibly delicious-looking cheeseburger while watching the island burn is as satisfactory as any meal.
I watched this not long ago. At first I was pretty certain it was just based on one joke "chef cooks guests", the classic double-speak jest, "I'd like to have you for dinner" incarnate. This was pretty insightful. I still enjoyed The Menu on the first watch regardless, and this has made me feel somewhat justified in that feeling when others seem to not have liked it as much.