Food on Film by Hertweck Tom;

Author:Hertweck, Tom; [Hertweck, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2014-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

chapter 8

Food, Family, and History in Japanese Postwar Film

Four Cases and a Few Comparisons

Charles W. Hayford

Postwar Japanese films make regular, subtle, realistic, and thematic use of food and eating to move the plot, explore personal relations, reveal character, comment on history, and express moral and ethical judgments. In these films—whether it is front and center in the story or a taken-for-granted part of the characters’ everyday lives—food, and the ways in which it is thought about, obtained, prepared, and consumed serves as a significant source of cultural learning. This chapter looks at four Japanese films made for domestic consumption: Tokyo Story (1951) and The Seven Samurai (1954), two films whose use of food is all the more telling because they are not “foodie” films; Tampopo (1985), in which food plays a leading role; and The Family Game (1986), in which food plays a supporting role.

Hollywood studio films from the 1940s to the 1980s tend to ignore food, use it only in passing, or code it as ethnic or regional.1 Italian dishes are almost obligatory in the mob genre—famously, for instance, “Leave the gun, take the cannoli,” in The Godfather (1972).2 Perhaps the richest Jewish food joke in film is in Annie Hall (1977), when Annie exposes her sweet cluelessness by ordering “a hot pastrami on white bread with mayonnaise and tomatoes and lettuce,” a possible but unheard-of combination.3 It is also striking how often food is used transgressively, to break the rules of polite adult society, such as the airborne comestibles in Animal House (1978) and Blazing Saddles (1974) or the pies in too many comedies to name, none of which was in danger of being eaten. Those pies might as well have been Frisbees, not food.

Food appears on-screen more frequently in Hollywood films after the 1970s; nowadays it is even in the closing credits, where caterers are thanked and listed. Perhaps foreign and art house films widened audience expectations; the studio monopoly system weakened, allowing more niche films; and gender attitudes changed, allowing men who were not Italian to deal with food (sometimes).4 In Kramer vs Kramer (1979) two breakfasts define a father’s arc from uncaring to nurturing, one breakfast where he can’t make French toast for his son “the way mom did,” and they have to eat doughnuts, a second where the two make great French toast together. In Ordinary People (1980) a troubled son makes French toast which his even more troubled mother stuffs into the garbage disposal. The pater familias in American Beauty (1999), drained by his work and burdened by family, chooses the dinner table to announce to his wife and teenage daughter that he has quit his job in order to find himself. Silence. “Please pass the asparagus,” he says. Sullen silence. “Please pass the asparagus!” Food once again becomes airborne and transgressive: “Will somebody please pass the *%$!-ing asparagus!?” He flings his dinner against the wall and gets a job at McDonald’s.

These instances of Hollywood’s occasional and late-to-the-party use of food are intriguingly different from the sustained and creative uses of food in our four Japanese films.

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