Food in Film

A Culinary Performance of Communication

Jane Ferry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317793908
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

Using an interdisciplinary approach combining film, semiotics, social-anthropology and history, this book examines food sciences in selected films to reveal food's power to direct and impose values and beliefs, to understand how dining venues may become sites of social contests and to reveal how food communicated values and beliefs to individuals, to micro communities and to American Society.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

How do food and eating in American films symbolize and embody power and resistance in American culture?

Food scenes, a regular staple of popular films, are more than meets the tongue and function more significantly than to just nurture the body and satiate the appetite. Although depicted as a seemingly natural function, food scenes in film not only signify social class, identity, and nationality, but also provide insight into the complex ways in which food and eating are entangled with other aspects of social/cultural development. A close observation of food scenes within the narrative framework of film reveals its powerful, coded, cultural meanings that structure the arrangements of social life.

This book explores both the material and symbolic representations of food and eating in selected films to demonstrate food’s role in constructing meaning and in altering the complex nature of the social relations. Using an interdisciplinary approach combining film, semiotics, social-anthropology, and history, this book demonstrates food’s significance in creating patterns of interdependence, which bind people together within their different cultural/historical groups.

It explores how eating scenes articulate conflict or cooperation, inform an individual’s or group’s place in society, and express personal identity. By underscoring the culinary images, this study shows how film provides clues as to the power and meaning that food imposes both externally (social, economic, political environment) and internally (intrapersonal environment of an individual and interpersonal environment within a social group).

I have chosen film for two reasons. One, it is a powerful vehicle of communication both to the American population and to foreign audiences. To illustrate, seventy percent of the film receipts abroad are for American films. This positions film as a strong communicator of our national culture abroad. Second, films’ narratives and images are a legitimate means of observing the changing structures of social interdependence and shifts in cultural identity.

Cinematic images allow us to peer through the fracture of language into the psyche of people and observe the dynamics of their social interactions. These images provide clues as to how people make sense of their lives within the ongoing developmental transitions.

SCHOLARLY RESEARCH

Research reveals minimal scholarly discussions that deal exclusively with food as an essential film element. There are a few general essays, however, that focus on the importance of food and the significant role food plays in our understanding of the world it represents both on screen and in life.

Parley Ann Boswell’s article introduces a strategy for “reading” American film with a focus on eating and dining. Boswell suggests that Hollywood utilizes food in subtle and not so subtle ways to inform us that “Americans are forever uncomfortably hungry amidst an abundance of food.”¹ Examining scenes from Ordinary People (1980), Boswell draws attention to the significance of food-related scenes in understanding the escalating tensions within the family structure, but she does not bring out the conviviality that takes place in restaurants outside the home.

In The War of the Roses (1988), the prevalence and significance of food and eating position food as vital to the plot. As the main character’s catering business flourishes, food takes on the meaning of power and success, and meals within the home become the battleground where war is waged.

Boswell’s broad overview of these two films and others like them: (Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Kramer vs. Kramer (1989), To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), and Saturday Night Fever (1977) brings to light that many Hollywood dining scenes reveal a “healthy” American family that is anything but healthy. These films, for Boswell, represent America as a land of plenty but inhabited with a psychologically hungry population.

Jay Boyer explores how food, a central motif in Chaplin’s films, moved from a prop for slap stick comedy into an essential element for thematic expression that exposed the workings of human nature in the contemporary environment of the twentieth century. Boyer attends to five comic sequences in A Dog’s Life (1918) that deal with hunger, stealing food, and eating food. Using a homeless, starving, mongrel dog, Scraps, the scenes metaphorically illustrate the hunger, humiliation, and depravation that reduce people to the animalistic levels of life in a “dog-eat-dog urban environment”²

In films such as The Kid (1921) and Modern Times (1936), Chaplin uses food and feeding to underscore acts of human kindness, the human capacity for love and the ability to comfort another human being within an uncivilized, modern, urban jungle. The major role that food plays in Chaplin’s films, according to Boyer, articulates Chaplin’s early personal experience with poverty and hunger.

Dick Stromgren aptly draws correspondences between Alfred Hitchcock’s own “obsession with food and drink, his relentless pursuit of the best food and wine,”³ and the central role food and drink play in his films. Throughout his directorial career, Hitchcock intricately intertwined food in order to effect plot, character, and audience reception. Stromgren convincingly demonstrates how food and drink are pivotal elements both materially and metaphorically in “virtually all” of Hitchcock’s films, starting with his beginnings in silent films all through his British and American sound films.

In The Paradine Case (1947) and Rebecca (1940), Hitchcock links food with the darker, seedier aspects of humanity. And in his films Rear Window (1954), The Trouble With Harry (1956), and Frenzy (1972), Stromgren shows how Hitchcock “employs food imagery and drink to play with the character’s and audience’s sense of discretion by linking it with the ‘delicate’ subjects of sex and murder.”⁴

Examining the persistent images of eating and appetite in Film Noir, J.P. Telotte argues that these images represent a larger critique of American society in post World War II America. He posits that in the films Mildred Pierce (1945) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) food acts as a metaphor for the complexities of a culture whose consumptive appetites go unrestrained. He nicely illustrates how the dim, harsh, shadowy lighting of Film Noir supports the food sequences to symbolize cultural self-destruction, dimming any vision of cultural growth and development.⁵

Two scholars have examined food representation in Isak Dinesen’s book and Gabriel Axel’s film adaptation of Babette’s Feast. Esther Rashkin compared the celebratory feast to the psychological process of mourning as defined in Sigmund Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia.⁶ And Janet Farrell Leontiou looks at the analogy between food and speech. Using the ancient form of epideictic rhetoric (rhetoric that praises or blames) as a point of comparison, she argues that food and eating are akin to epideictic speech in that they can both be employed to celebrate and praise. Along with her scene by scene analysis of the film, Leontinou demonstrates how the convivial act of feasting in the film can engage the viewer in the experience of celebratory speech.⁷ My reading of epideictic speech will demonstrate Soul Food’s powerful voice in celebrating African American identity.

Analyzing the food imagery in Woody Allen’s films, Ronald LeBlanc compares Allen’s use of food images to those of François Rabelais and Russian comic writer Nikolai Gogol. Contained in Allen’s Love and Death, LeBlanc noted a smorgasbord of food imagery in which food is employed as a social critique, a paradigm for pleasure, or comedic use to deflate a pretentious character.⁸

This book expands the present body of knowledge by demonstrating how the cinematic use of food and dining provides clues to understanding how food performs as an instrument for communication within culturally defined systems of thought. It examines food imagery in representative films exemplifying different historical times and portraying diverse socio/cultural groups inhabiting the American landscape. Analyzing the food and dining images in these representative films should underscore how food’s meaning germinates from the patterned system of social life for each specific social and cultural group.

Close observation of the food-related scenes will peel away the material significance of food to reveal its symbolic embodiment of power. Food’s symbolic power assumes a mental force that dictates thought and action within social interactions and plays a significant role in shaping American social and cultural development.⁹

METHODOLOGY

In analyzing these films, this book applies elements of Charles Sanders Peirce’s theoretical orientation of semiotics as it is expressed in film and social-anthropology. These disciplines converge in this study to understand food as a sign that extends beyond food’s denotative meaning and becomes a symbol invested with authority that exerts power to motivate action. As Julia Kristeva so aptly posits, “man is less a ‘rational animal’ than a ‘symbolic animal’ caught in the process of symbolization, or semiosis.”¹⁰

SEMIOLOGY

Peirce’s triadic theory of semiotics, which extends the arbitrary dyadic code of Sassure,¹¹ incorporates a third element to the semiotic sign/object relationship called the interpretant. The form the sign takes (or Peirce’s term “representamen”) produces an object to which it refers (in this study, food). The interpretant (meaning or thought) activates the relationship between the object and the thoughts within the mind of the interpreter, constituting what Peirce calls semiosis:

… by semiosis I mean…an action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretent, this tri-relative influence, not being in any way resolvable in pairs.¹²

This dynamic process of semiosis results in an interpretation or sense impression. The sense impression (meaning of the sign) arises out of the social context and is mediated to fit the reality of each cultural system. According to Peirce, “The sign can only represent the Object and tell about it. It cannot furnish acquaintance with or recognition of the Object.…”¹³ Interpretation of a sign, for Peirce, depends on the store of knowledge generated from the experience of the individual’s or group’s collective knowledge.

Three aspects of Peirce’s sign that are relevant to this study are: icon, index, and symbol. The icon (for example, food) resembles its object. “I call a sign which stands for something merely because it resembles it, an icon.”¹⁴ Indices are brought into relationship with the object by correspondence in fact. “An Index is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of being really affected by that Object.”¹⁵

Indices “compel attention”¹⁶ to specific objects because they are directly connected to them. “The index asserts nothing; it only says “There!” It takes hold of our eyes, as it were, and forcibly directs them to a particular object.”¹⁷

Indices do not produce new knowledge by themselves, but when connected with icons and symbols assume a connotative meaning in conjunction with their denotative one. Indices then are a feed back loop “labeled perceptual cues and effector cues,”¹⁸ revealing themselves through the sign process of semiosis. Icons, indices, and symbols do not stand alone as static entities, but embrace each other’s qualities in varying degrees, depending on the context. Through habit and convention, cultural units select, abstract, and expand indexical signs with icons and present them as symbolic cultural codes.¹⁹

These symbolic codes that develop from human experience and “collateral knowledge”²⁰ mutate to meet the changing cultural/historical landscape:

We think only in signs. These mental signs are of mixed nature; the symbol-parts of them are called concepts. So it is only out of symbols that a new symbol can grow. Omne symbolum de symbolo. A symbol once in being, spreads among the peoples, In use and experience, its meaning grows. Such words as force, law, wealth, marriage, bare for us very different meanings from those they bore to our barbarous ancestors.

Accordingly, the meaning of the sign, a varied amalgam of index, icon, and symbol, represents the imaginings of its historical time.²¹ Following this line of thinking, Umberto Eco sees Peircian semiosis as interactive with culture. Eco views Peirce’s sign theory as a theory of meaning production whereby the culture produces signs and attributes meaning to them. With usage, signs and their meanings become custom and, therefore, culturally shared codes.²² Socially shared codes assume a social power that functions as coercion.

As Paul Tillich suggests, symbolic language becomes autonomous in that symbols “point beyond themselves to something else.” Symbols open up, he says, that which is hidden. They “participate in the reality and power” of that which they point.”²³ Film’s strength is that it manifests what Tillich suggests are symbols’ function and participation. This allows viewers to grasp symbols’ obscure meanings and method of communication. Film signifies the vitality of symbolic language and people’s response and adherence to their meanings.

SOCIAL-ANTHROPOLOGY

The semiotic universe has filtered its way into sociology. Sociology uses semiotics to the extent that it examines social structures and social interactions in order to find observable elements that structure a signifying system of communication.²⁴ Although sociologist Norbert Elias does not equate his work with Peirce, his studies articulate the signifying system of history and sociology. Elias examined the processes of social development in Europe since the Middle Ages. His “figuration” model charts the changes in so...