'The Menu': The Lampshade, It Does Nothing!
Sometimes pointing out the flaws in your narrative is a clever subversion. Sometimes it isn’t.
NEW STANDARD DISCLAIMER: This newsletter aggressively spoils things.
FRIENDOS, I am not a fancy person1. As a youngster I thought Outback Steakhouse was the epitome of fine dining, and was deeply suspicious of any restaurant that didn’t have an hour wait on a Saturday night while you fondled a pager in sweaty desperation2. As I’ve grown older I’ve come to appreciate a really nice meal at a really nice restaurant, but fancier establishments still confuse and alarm me. The first time I came back from the bathroom to find someone had mysteriously folded my napkin I felt rebuked and I am still uncertain sometimes if I’m meant to eat the garnish on a dish3.
Which is all to say I am genetically the target audience for The Menu, a horror movie starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Fiennes, and Nicholas Hoult and a restaurant so high-end I can’t imagine actually eating there would be fun in any accepted sense of the term. Hoult plays Tyler, an obsessive “foodie” who drags a skeptical Margot (Taylor-Joy) to Hawthorne, the tony restaurant overseen by Chef Julian Slowik (Fiennes) on a remote island accessible only by boat4. Hawthorne is the sort of restaurant that’s impossible to get a reservation at, the sort of place where you can be served breadless bread plates (yes! really!) and not be surprised.
Margot is not Tyler’s original guest to this excursion—his date has canceled—and she is serious unimpressed with it all. Slowly, it’s revealed that Chef Slowik has basically gone insane, seeing his craft perverted by money and his life negatively impacted by every single guest at the dinner5. There’s the food critic who made his initial fame as a cook, representatives of the company that staked his restaurant and thus controls his life to a large extent, the regulars who are so wealthy and privileged they don’t even remember the food any more, and Slowik’s own mother.
And Tyler, the foodie who thinks he knows as much as Slowik and his cult-like kitchen team. Slowik makes it pretty clear pretty quickly that they’re all going to die before the night is over, and then proceeds to torture them all in various food-related ways. It’s a lot of fun6! I enjoyed the movie very much. But then writers Seth Reiss and Will Tracy make a mistake: They try to lampshade a flaw in the story, and it fails.
Cool Lampshade, My Dude
Chef Slowik has somehow assembled a kitchen staff of similarly crazy people, and they have gathered a guest list composed mostly of people they blame, in some way, for the corruption of the purity of their love for food and cookery. They intend to kill all of these people. This is text. Chef Slowik tells his guests this, and the sincerity of the staff is demonstrated through several very violent moments. So, okay, everyone in the restaurant knows the evening ends with their death7. The guests and the kitchen staff are pretty even numbers-wise, though in all fairness the staff have a lot of knives and at least one gun (and the blank-faced dedication to murder that you find in movie cults8), but it’s still remarkable that the guests make very little attempt to defend themselves. They sheepishly do as they are told long after it’s clear that compliance will buy them nothing9.
There’s one exception: The Movie Star (John Leguizamo) does make a brief attempt to rally his fellow guests into rebellion and does try to break the windows of the dining room (which prove quite unbreakable). But beyond this brief moment no one does a thing to fight for their lives. This is a bit of a horror trope, of course, the folks trapped in a hopeless situation who just go along with it, and it’s also in some ways a real psychological phenomenon, as people will indeed comply and comply and comply in the hopes that their obedience will spare them10.
But it’s a minor plot irritant: These people are rich. Some of them are relatively young and somewhat fit. Once they come to truly believe the evening ends in their death, wouldn’t at least some of them try to fight back? It’s a minor complaint—you can come up with plausible explanations or dismiss it as a convenience to get to the good parts.
Or, it would be a minor plot irritant if the writers hadn’t decided to hang a huge, garish lampshade on it in the mistaken belief that doing so would defuse it.
You’re All Worthless and Weak
At one point, during a stirring Why You All Suck speech, Chef Slowik calmly asks why no one even tried to fight back. This is what we in the biz call a lampshade—it’s when you take something that might be considered problematic by the audience and put a bright spotlight on it. In this case, it seems meant to defuse any stirrings of that precise question in the audience’s mind. Once you lampshade something, it can seem more like an organic part of the story, something intentional—why else would you draw a thick line under it if it wasn’t intentional?
Except, like all things writers use to fool you, sometimes it misfires. In The Menu, the lampshade just makes you pause and wonder, yeah, why didn’t they try to fight back11?
I mean, once you see a man dressed in angel wings drowned right in front of your eyes, or a man’s finger cut off because he attempted to leave the restaurant, why in the world would you imagine you have anything to lose? And yet at the end of the film when the staff is dressing everyone up as human S’mores (yes12) in preparation for being burned alive, everyone just sits there. I am not a tough man (I am frequently intimidated by my fat, middle-aged cats13) but I’d like to imagine that when insane people put a chocolate hat on my head because they’re about to set the place on fire I would at least try to save myself14.
The lampshade, in other words, was a mistake. What might have been a tiny detail no one thought about has turned into this essay, which at least five people will read, thus changing history. Such is the power of the written word, folks.
Next week: ‘Black Adam’ and a problem of stakes.
If anyone is surprised by this statement, you have clearly never gone out to dinner with me and watched me struggle to pronounce things on the menu.
Man, I miss those pagers. The sheer joy that suffused your whole being when it finally lit up like the holidays cannot be surpassed.
My strategy when faced with Fancy Times is to just smile and nod at everything. This has gotten me into trouble. I think I ate a centerpiece, once, smiling and nodding the whole time while the server stared in horror.
A lifetime of horror movies has taught me that the easiest way to avoid horror movie situations is to never ever go anywhere that is only accessible by one fragile form of transportation. Also, avoid clowns.
The fundamental lesson here is simple: Don’t take the money. I refuse to learn it.
Unlike what going to an actual restaurant like this would be.
Instead of what it usually ends in: The vague worry that the entire staff has given you a mean nickname like “Saggy Pants” or “McPiggy” and took turns farting on your food.
Man, movies make starting cults seem so easy, and yet I have tried and failed many times. Maybe if I looked like Jared Leto I’d be more successful.
I once saw Penn and Teller live, and they did a bit where Teller got into a tank of water and had to escape his bonds and get out while Penn told a rambling story, and behind Penn Teller was obviously in trouble and not getting out, and then apparently drowned, and then Penn turned in horror to the audience and demanded to know why no one tried to warn him that his beloved partner was drowning behind him and the sense of psychological panic I experienced for a split second when I thought he might be serious almost killed me.
Lord knows that’s me; if I were taken hostage by an insane cult leader I would basically join the cult in the hopes of surviving the experience. I was born to be a toady and it would be my time to shine.
Now, if Chef Slowik had trotted out several platters of fried foods before announcing the whole Death Cult thing, would have accepted that everyone was simply too bloated and hypertensive to mount a plausible rebellion. Instead, no one has eaten a thing, so the guests would have been on a knife’s edge of hunger-inspired aggression.
The little chocolate hats were amazing. I took notes for my own Death Cult adventures.
One of my cats once got caught in some netting and I tried to rescue him and that fat, middle-aged cat seriously fucked me up in his blind panic. If that was accidental I can’t imagine what he could do to me on purpose.
And, yes, inevitably slip and fall and stab myself with my own butter knife, but that is NOT the point, dammit.
And here I thought lampshades were for tabletop dancing, silly me.
Haha! The last statement. 🥹 You’re hilarious and I loved this. The Menu was super thrilling to watch, but this was totally on my mind the whole time too: “Ytf don’t they just kill the bastard and his minions?”.