What do u think is being said about food and eating in phantom thread (2017)?
sent by Anonymous- answered by transmutationisms
eating is presented as a quintessentially physical function, which therefore makes it bothersome to reynolds: he doesn’t like hearing people eat, he perceives alma’s romantic dinner as an interruption of his cerebral work, his meal at the beginning of the film is specifically something he enjoys in between projects. reynolds arranges his life to serve his work, which, although revolving around other people’s bodies and the fashionable presentation of them, is detached and disconnected from reynolds’s own physicality. alma, on the other hand, enjoys eating, which reynolds finds crass (the noise) and she also views food as a means of connecting with other people: again, food signalling a break from the heady and contemplative world reynolds occupies when he’s designing.
the first time alma poisons reynolds is a critical experience for him because the illness is a heightened version of this function of food, forcing him to experience his bodily existence in an unpleasant and uncontrollable way. sickness is both humiliating and slightly thrilling for him because of the importance he ascribes to his ordered, tidy, suppressed physical environment and existence. food introduces an element of chaos that reynolds isn’t used to grappling with; the poisoning is not just an internal experience but also forces reynolds to connect with alma and his memories of his mother. this is also why it matters for the film’s character study that reynolds takes the poison voluntarily in the end: although he is probably going to continue to be finicky, domineering, and single-mindedly focussed on his work, he also embraces at least momentarily the vulnerability and physical presence in the world that alma brings him, using food as a vehicle.
the use of food and eating in this way is more than incidentally reactionary; you can see this most clearly in the sequence with reynolds’s hollywood-fat client (barbara rose? i forgor) who commits the mortal sin of existing in her body and then drinking at her own wedding—both, in reynolds’s mind, examples of overconsumption. this sequence is annoying because it’s resolved by alma parroting reynolds’s position in her (literal and verbal) dressing-down of this woman. the house of woodcock cannot stand for bodily excess and pleasure (cf. alma’s miserable nye party) because to reynolds, haute couture is a gruelling mental exercise existing on a cerebral plane elevated above the petty material concerns of the rest of the physical world. he is, after all, a designer and not actually a dressmaker in a labour-process sense.
- posted
- via
- origin
- tags
Loading...
