The Arts:The sight of chocolate sauce gurgling down the plughole in the shower scene from Psychopiqued Feargus O'Sullivan'sappetite for foodie film scenes.
What is the most famous food scene in all cinema? Could it be Samuel L Jackson interrogating the men he's been hired to kill about European hamburgers and the metric system in Pulp Fiction? Or might it be Debbie Reynolds jumping out of a cake to do the charleston in Singin' in the Rain? Hannibal Lecter's serving suggestion for human liver in The Silence of the Lambsis among Hollywood's best-remembered lines, while dedicated foodies might plump for any of the scenes celebrating food connoisseurship or gluttony in Babette's Feastor La Grande Bouffe.
Ever since I learned as a teenager that the blood spiralling down the plughole in the shower scene from Psychowas actually chocolate sauce, I've been intrigued by the way food is portrayed on screen.
The moment you start keeping an eye out for what characters are eating and why, you begin to notice the myriad different uses to which directors put food in their films. In Taxi Driverand Annie Hall, for example, the characters' eating habits provide a helpful shorthand for sketching in their particular quirks. It is when we see maladjusted cabbie Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) making a bizarre order of apple pie topped with melted cheese that we first get an inkling that he might not be quite right in the head. Similarly, through watching Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) chasing wayward lobsters around a Long Island kitchen with Annie Hall (Diane Keaton), the audience sees instantly how perfectly matched the neurotic lovers are, both highly strung but with a gleeful enjoyment of their own absurdity. And in Ang Lee's Taiwan-set Eat Drink Man Woman, virtually the entire plot unfolds over a series of Sundays around the three sisters' dinner table.
Eating also crops up regularly as a metaphor for sexual appetite, or for simple relish of life itself. For example, previously prim Sally Albright's (Meg Ryan) operatically faked orgasm over a rather ordinary-looking pastrami sandwich in When Harry Met Sallyhints that she might after all make a viable sexual partner for the terminally libidinous Harry (Billy Crystal). In contrast, the grindingly bland fish soup that French servant Babette (Stephane Audrane) is taught to prepare for the austere Danish sisters she works for in Babette's Feastis a poignant example of how their lives have gradually become dead to pleasure.
SOMETIMES, SCREENPLAYS GOa step further and make food an essential cog propelling the plot's motor forward. The Satanist neighbours' plan to make Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) bed down with Beelzebub to spawn the new antichrist in Rosemary's Babywouldn't have come to much without the sleeping-pill-laced chocolate mousse her complicit husband pressures her into eating.
Likewise, gazpacho - laced yet again with sleeping pills - is an essential component of the mayhem caused by cracked actress Pepa (Carmen Maura), when her lover dumps her in Almodóvar's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. And in Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, the wife has her murdered lover roasted whole to perfection - crispy skin and all - before force-feeding him to her gangster husband, who had ordered his killing.
But while food crops up in films time and again as a plot device or metaphor, the actual business of eating is something the movies have little time for. While countless films use the dinner table as a handy means of corralling characters together, you hardly ever see an actor swallow something. You might see someone waggle a chip in the air or stab angrily at a wayward piece of lettuce for dramatic effect, but the amount of real grub going down is minimal. While this makes dramatic sense - I'd rather watch Humphrey Bogart talking than chewing - if we all ate as little as film characters appear to, we'd end up looking as willowy and undernourished as your average starlet.
Perhaps this is not surprising: on close inspection, many aspects of celluloid food display as skewed a take on real eating as Hitchcock's chocolate sauce. Take Hannibal Lecter's aforementioned claim to have eaten a census-taker's liver "with fava beans and a nice chianti". Surely an entire liver would be far too queasily rich for a single person, even a cannibalistic psychopath with a healthy appetite. And if you were really determined to eat human liver, wouldn't you make sure your victim refrained from smoking and drinking for at least a month before tucking in?
The same could be said of Harry Hill's (Ray Liotta) assertion in Goodfellasthat, when doing time, Paulie made up for the prison's lack of a crusher by slicing garlic with a razorblade so thinly that it liquefied in the pan. I dare say that if I was a wafer-thin slice of garlic, I'd liquefy in oil if a Mafia heavy persuaded me it was in my best interests to do so, but in real life, I have never found that razor-slashed garlic melts the way that Harry claims (though this time-consuming method still provides a deliciously delicate result).
BUT WHILE SOMEfilms aren't necessarily a source of the soundest cooking tips, many still contain fantastic portrayals of food, with scenes so magical that they make you want to run straight to the kitchen. My personal (rather obscure) favourite is fairytale princess Catherine Deneuve singing a recipe for an enchanted love cake while disguised as a mud-caked ass in Jacques Demy's musical fable, Donkey Skin. Not only is the sight of the famous beauty slipping from her pelt into a golden ballgown while singing about eggs and yeast one of cinema's most playfully bizarre scenes, but for once the simple recipe described actually works.
(- Guardian service)
•Pulp Kitchen , by Feargus O'Sullivan, is published by Pan Macmillan.
