Have you ever consumed the think pieces and dissections of a piece of media before actually seeing it yourself? I’ve seen a good amount of Jenny Nicholson and Alizee Eezy videos on films, books, and fanfiction I have no intention of reading or watching myself. When I was younger and dumber, I’d do the same with CinemaSins videos. Sometimes those dissections bleed into the soul of the piece and you assume that’s what it is. It must be what the critics say about it. It must be what audiences say about it. When I saw Head Over Heels on Broadway, I was taking a theater criticism course. Based on the reviews, I assumed it was going to be horrible. It’s one of the only pieces of art to make me openly sob. Sometimes, people are wrong. You have to see things yourself.
Every now and then, I eat a film, a play, a manga, and I’m taken by the utter lack of media literacy. “This is what ingredients it contains,” said the sommeliers. But then you look at the wine, and no, it doesn’t contain those ingredients. There’s maybe a vague taste of it.
The Menu is a 2022 horror film directed by Mark Mylod. This year, I’ve been doing my best to exercise more. As motivation, I watch a new movie everytime I do. I finally watched The Menu in February 2024. Based on the conversations on twitter when the film came out, I expected it to be a movie about how the rich are dumb. Isn’t it funny? But I came away wondering why no one actually engaged with the film and its themes. It’s not about the rich. It’s about violence. More so than that, and maybe why people don’t want to engage with it, it’s about the violence of the oppressed and how it is still violence. Antithetical to humanity.
Course One: The Movie
For your first taste of the evening, may we present everyone’s favorite part of the cultural essay: the summary.
The film, beautifully shot in the equally beautiful Savannah, Georgia, follows Margot, a young woman being taken on a date to an exclusive, high class restaurant patroned by the elites of society. The restaurant is on an isolated island accessible only by boat. Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None comes to mind immediately. You know danger awaits. When the guests check in, we found out Margot wasn’t Tyler’s original date to the function.
The group of diners are taken on a small tour of the island. The workers at the restaurant live and breathe their work. They spend long days preparing ingredients and raising livestock. They sleep together in communal spaces. Their leader, Chef Slowik, has his own house, off-limits to all. They get to the restaurant and sit to eat.
Chef Slowik appears and explains the first dish. He goes into a monologue about the beauty and godlike superiority of nature over humanity. He next offers up a breadless bread plate, saying bread is the food of the poor, and these people are not poor. Therefore they will be hungry. Requests for bread are denied. When a food critic says one of the sauces served has split, the kitchen prepares an entire bowl of it for her, requesting she have it all. The third is chicken tacos. The tortillas, finally, bread, have things printed on them: evidence of fund embellishment, evidence of cheating, of breaking rules, of dreams and lives destroyed by critics. The fourth course is the sous chef, degraded by Slowik in his final moments, told he will never be enough. He shoots himself. The guests are served meat.
At the death, everyone panics. They try to rationalize it. Maybe this is just theatre. The threats issued are ignored. One of the men tries to escape. When he refuses to return to his seat, the staff chop off one of his fingers. Outside, the rich owner of the restaurant is lowered into the waters and drowned while everyone watches. Margot is called back by the chef. This isn’t the first time they meet. He wants to know who she is. Why is she here? She is no Margot. She’s a service worker, a sex-worker, hired by Tyler to be his date. Will she be with the rich or with the workers? When she asks if she has the choice to live, he states that no, everyone will die tonight.
A chef Slowik had sexually harassed stabs him in the leg. The male guests are told to try to escape. After a headstart, the staff will try to catch them. Meanwhile the women go back and eat. They’ve lost all hope. They know they are going to die. All of the men are caught and brought back. Tyler is brought to the kitchen and told to cook. He knew everyone was going to die tonight and hired Margot, real name Erin, knowing he was condemning her. He tries and makes an awful dish. Slowik convinces him to kill himself. Margot is sent to retrieve a barrel. She sneaks into Slowik’s house where she’s attacked by a member of the staff who seems to be jealous of the special attention Slowik pays to her. She kills the staff member, finds a radio and phones for help, and returns to the restaurant.
A member of the coast guard comes and the guests beg him for help. He turns out to be another member of the staff, destroying any last remnant of hope they might have had. Margot insults Slowik and his food, calling it pretentious bullshit. She requests a cheeseburger like Slowik made when he was young and happy, something made with love. He makes one for her and allows her to take it to go. Margot leaves on the fake-coast guard’s boat. The staff cover the guests in marshmallow, chocolate, and graham crackers before they set the restaurant ablaze, staff and diner all dying in the blaze. Margot watches from the show, eating the burger. She wipes her mouth with the menu. End of film.
Course Two: Onions
If Shrek has taught my generation anything, it’s that life is love, love is ogres, and ogres is onions. Around the same time that The Menu premiered, Rian Johnson’s second entry in the Knives Out series came out. Glass Onion, much like The Menu, takes a group of smug, asshole elites and sticks them on a stormy, isolated island. Both films are comedies of sorts. Glass Onion, though, sticks closer to the And Then There Were None vibes by being a whodunnit. Much like Christie novels, the reveal of who is more about the satisfaction of the journey along the way rather than “OMG that was so shocking” that some people pretend is the hallmark of good fiction.
With those similarities filling up the pantries of both films, there was no stopping the comparisons. In a Screen Rant article, Mark Herzog said, “At the end of the day, both The Menu and Glass Onion ultimately exist to poke fun at a class of people too privileged to understand the damage they're doing, but The Menu hardly does more than affirm that very point several times before simply killing off its characters. By contrast, Glass Onion draws direct parallels to specific influencers, self-branded "disruptors", and corporate giants of current times, highlighting the distinctly modern ways they go about hiding behind the appearance of innovation and insight. In respecting its audience's inherent and informed perception of its targets, the movie has a far easier time scoring laughs along the way.”
In her review of the two for the Huffington Post, Candice Frederick criticized both films at once, saying, “We have reached an awkward point in pop culture when roasting the rich on-screen, or even simply attaching the “obscenely” descriptor to this elite segment of the population, is considered a satisfying enough rebuke of corrupt capitalism that favors white people above all others. Add a kooky murder, an A-list cast, and bone-dry humor and you might even have yourself a blockbuster.” Though she later commends them for being very entertaining and competently gaining the laughs they wanted from the showings she attended. She further says, “There’s even a tasty excitement that comes from the expectation that these rich characters will surely get some sort of comeuppance. But as superior eat-the-rich films have shown us, we should also come to understand — and maybe even properly detest — the landscape that propped them up in the first place.”
Kimber Myers examines the two together along with Triangle of Sadness in an article for Mashable. She says of the three films, “We don't feel jealousy of their success; it's righteous anger at the unfairness in how they achieved it and delight at their fall from grace. The consequences they suffer in these films feel like the world is beginning to right itself — a triumph seemingly impossible off screen.”
So obviously Glass Onion and The Menu are telling the same story, right? And it seems to be consensus that at least one of them doesn’t deliver its message particularly well. If The Menu has an oniony taste, then surely it must be of the same ingredients attempting a near identical dish. But it’s not.
Until I watched the film, most of my ideas of it had come from Twitter. There were people talking about in comparison to Glass Onion. People were discussing Star Wars: Andor. Some of the leftist discussion was the Hollywood was telling vaguely anti-capitalist stories because capitalism consumes everything it touches in order to sell it, including its own opposition. So of course, given the consensus, I assumed going into the film that this would be a movie with an eat the rich message. I expected it to be a more shallow telling of that urge in society than Glass Onion.
So I was incredibly surprised by the actual film.
Course Three: Violence
In her video Envy, ContraPoints examined the film Us by Jordan Peele. Natalie rejects the idea that it’s a film about the working class. “If it was a movie about the working class, then the working class would be able to speak human languages. And would not be scary monsters who make animal sounds, and stagger around like zombies.”
Let’s take that basic premise and apply it to The Menu. If this is a movie about eating the rich, then it makes sense to make that into a literal metaphor. It makes sense, as Herzog’s piece claims, to lazily have the rich be simplistic plays into audience expectation: cloying, cruel, vapid. But, are they the antagonists of the film? No. Margot is our protagonist and, as Herzog notes, the “only normal person.” Tyler paid for her to die, so he’s her enemy. One of the rich men was a client of hers who once asked her to pretend to be his daughter, so he’s her enemy. But she doesn’t know most of these people, and they don’t interact with her. Who does she clash with most often? Chef Slowik.
In the Knives Out films, besides the fun goofy Daniel Craig detective, we get our young, innocent, non-wealthy female protagonists. They’re directly antagonized by the rich characters. The rich characters are almost all cruel to those women. We make fun of the rich, the rich receives a commupence, and that commupence is a result of how they treat the main character, our normal person girl.
In The Menu, Chef Slowik is the antagonist. He’s the threat to Margot. He’s who she butts heads with and must overcome.
If this was a movie about eating the rich, why are the ones doing the eating portrayed as a cult? The staff members working under Slowik live on the island under his control. They obey his every word and they stay away from the places they’re told to stay away from. They live and sleep in close quarters that look to have no personal or private space. When the chef enters, when he claps, when he orders, they quiet, move, and kill at his command. The first victim of the night is one of Slowik’s employees. Slowik breaks this young man mentally first. Breaking his spirit is integral to this meal. When the local coast guard man reveals himself to be another employee of the restaurant, it summons popular ideas of cults. Think of the horror show The Following. The cult is everywhere, waiting to commit violence.
Who is it who tries to kill Margot? Tyler maybe brings her to die, but Slowik is the one who promises to end her life despite that she’s there by mistake. One of his employees tries to kill her when she goes off script. To avoid death, Margot doesn’t have to destroy the rich people around her but must summon forth the humanity of the rebellion.
If The Menu is about eating the rich, it condemns the act of eating itself.
The film is actually about violence. Specifically, it’s about so-called righteous violence and how, contrary to what we might want to believe, our good violence is not good. It is not special. It is just violence.
The revolution in this film comes up against a snag: there’s an innocent in the mix. Rather than pausing their plan, changing their plan, or going out of their way to protect her in any way shape or form, they decide she must die alongside the rest of them. There is no escape for the violence, even if you’re not an intended target. In their eagerness to wine-drink blood, they decide it doesn’t matter whose blood it is. The message there is pretty easy to pick up on: Your violence will never contain itself. There is no material it cannot permeate. Your judgement will not turn you into a god who has self-control. Your bloodlust will always splatter the blood of innocents. Of allies.
Dan Olson of Folding Ideas once tweeted: Anyone who yearns for violent revolution is garbage.
In response to that tweet, many people tried to give Dan shit. How dare he critique the longing for violence? How dare he critique the dreams of the oppressed? How dare he question our holy need to feast on intestines?
There is almost a religious devotion to the idea of revolution to some internet LARPers who call themselves leftists. The Revolution will come, we will win, and then things will be better. We will harm the enemies. The people who deserve to be harmed.
In her video on Justice, ContraPoints spends a long time talking about reactionary ideas of violent justice which we all rightly mock. But she also points out that this reactionary tendency, this monkeybrained pleasure response to violence, isn’t strictly right-wing. It’s an infection of humanity. She says, “So this punitive, retributive impulse, no matter how righteous it feels is still basically a situational form of sadism, of schadenfreude. The satisfaction of justice served is the pleasure we take in inflicting or witnessing the suffering of someone who deserves it. Now the phrase "deserves it", is doing a lot of work here.”
And an infection it is. In The Menu, a member of the suicide-murder cult working for the chef looks at the innocent woman, the mistake, the one they didn’t aim to kill but are going to kill anyway, and she attacks her. In the struggle that follows, Margot murders the woman. The revolution takes an innocent woman and doesn’t merely threaten her life. It turns her into a murderer. They paint with blood, and they stain other people’s hands with it.
In a negative review for Consequence, Sam Rosenberg writes, “ …(T)he one element of The Menu that gets close to capturing a very real, very pertinent observation about the dehumanization of essential workers. If only the writing didn’t render that argument completely incoherent and moot by making Julian himself an enabler of that dehumanization, ruthless and clearly abusive toward his own staff.”
But I think Rosenberg’s problem with that moment is a misunderstanding of what the film is saying. Yes, Slowik is abusive and dehumanizing. That is the point. He’s a strongman, a cult leader. He quotes MLK and twists liberatory language to support his own desire for revenge. He is a sadist. He wants to inflict harm. That’s all her cares about. And that’s a message about the sadistic want to inflict harm on the “right people.” It’s never really about the cause. It’s about the want for blood.
I did a video on Noah Schnapp and how people used the Palestinian liberation movement as an excuse to throw homophobic bigotry his way. Is homophobia suddenly leftist because it’s deployed against the right people? There was then a viral thread claiming Timothee Chalamet is ugly because he’s supposedly a Zionist. In the quote tweets, someone called him the f-slur. We’re doing beauty-standards as morality, apparently. The point isn’t activism. The point is finding targets to attack that can get you stamped moral. It’s about evading critique. It’s about feeling like a precious little angel for stabbing someone in the gut over and over again while they lie dying in your arms. Cheer. You’re famous. Isn’t that what we all want?
There are people supposedly on the left who support the death penalty. For research for a play I wrote about debates on justice, I read reddit threads full of people defending and cheering on the killings of the Romonov family, including the children. Guillotine memes have been quite popular. When you tell people it isn’t okay to harm people, they ask, “Who are you to critique the oppressed?” It’s as if stating “the person doing the harm has been harmed” is a bulletproof defense for any action. “Hurt people hurt people” becomes a defense of hurting people instead of an examination of psychology.
In this way, I find The Menu pretty interesting. Despite what Nick Hilton at the Independent might say, the film is both a fun meal and an engaging one, if you happen to think about it for a few minutes more. It may be fun in a perverse way in how it brings ruin upon the elites, but it doesn’t invite us to sympathize with those who do the feasting.
A critical moment is when Slowik reveals that he sexually harrassed one of his employees. She stabs him in the leg. This is right before all the men are sent off on their little game of chase. I wondered about the chase. None of the men are harmed through it. They’re all caught and all brought back to die in the restraunt later. None of the women are saved through this. This chase was purely for fun on the part of the staff. They wanted to give the men hope and kill it. They wanted to play a game. This was purely an experience in escapism… Except for the connection to the harassed woman. When the men all abandon their female colleagues, their dates, their lovers, their fellow victims, we’re shown clear gendered lines. Rich men still believe rich women are beneath them. They’re not as important. With the reveal that Slowik harassed a female employee right before this, we see that sexism is not restricted to the bourgeois. The leader of the revolution is still a man. He can still inflict gendered violence upon his comrades. When the women ask that cook for help, try to build a bridge as women, she says she’s the one who suggested killing them all. Hurt people hurt people. They didn’t hurt her. But she needs blood.
The Party for Socialism and Liberation, PSL, is a socialist organization accused of consistently covering up abuse by members and attacking accusers. I read through several documents accusing the organization of mishandling allegations and documents accusing members of abuse.
Russian asset and founder of Center of Political Innovation, Caleb Maupin was accused of sexual misconduct including harassment pushing members out of his organization when they refused or actual did have sex with him.
Though I don’t care enough to read much into it, Stalin has been accused of having an affair with a teenaged girl. Stalinists regularly dismiss this idea. But it’s truth is sort of irrelevant to the point of the film here. PSL is still up and running. CPI is still up and running. People in love with Stalin are still up and running. You see it on the right, too. Abuse is not a disqualification in a leader, unfortunately. The film doesn’t lose meaning because it has Chef Slowik be an abusive man. It gains it. Abuses are glossed over and accepted if you pretend to have devoted yourself to the cause. Powerful people continue to exert their violences. They then turn their victims on others to exact their anger. In that way, you could even see him and the kitchen staff as analogous to Trump and MAGA, a misguided group sick with anger and violence that sees themselves as punishing the unwanted.
Course Four: Soup
I hate soup. I find it often tastes as if it has a grainy texture. It doesn’t have a grainy texture. But it tastes as if it does. So I don’t like soup. Whenever I say that, people get confused.
On October 14th in 2022, activists from Just Stop Oil threw tomato soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. I remember that day on twitter. The discourse that was born out of it thoroughly annoyed me. According to an article on ArtNet by Jo Lawsen-Tranced, the group said of the incident, “What use is art when we face the collapse of civil society? The art establishment, artists and the art-loving public need to step up into Civil Resistance if they want to live in a world where humans are around to appreciate art.” The same article says on of the protestors said, “What is worth more, art or life?”
I remember Twitter was particularly annoying that day. The discourse played out along these lines, paraphrased.
Person 1: “I don’t understand how this works as a protest.”
Person 2: “It brings awareness.”
Person 1: “We all know about climate change.”
Person 2: “But you’re talking about it again. The art world is just a money laundering scheme anyway. The art wasn’t damaged and if it was, who cares?”
Person 1: “Who cares?! People who like art.”
Person 2: “So art is more important than humanity? Art doesn’t have any meaning without humanity. You just don’t want to do anything.”
Person 1: “You think art is meaningless.”
Person 2: “It’s a distraction we waste our money on.”
Person 1: “I don’t agree.”
Person 2: “Capitalist bootlicker.”
Person 1: “Soulless asshole.”
And fin.
There was a long drawn out conversation that convinced nobody of anything because no one on the internet cares about convincing anyone of anything and based on the way they talk about protests, they don’t care about using those to convince anyone of anything either. The point is to antagonize each other, endlessly, while doing nothing. The results don’t matter. All that matters is the fight. You have to keep fighting. Get bloody.
I used to browse communist Reddit forums, curiously. There were a lot of people who, when discussing labor, continuously called art a hobby. Everyone could have their hobby. It seems to a certain section of the left, just as with the right, art is not work. Artists are not workers. We’re selfish, pointless existences. Believing in copyright of any sort, asserting that we should know who made things, claiming your work, is bourgeois individualism. That’s not the view of all communists by any means. I tend to believe most people aren’t morons. But some are.
The question, ultimately, is where does meaning come from? Is it inherent? Is it created only in the work? Is meaning a creation of time? Is it something vaguer, harder to understand? Well, that’s idealism. And we can’t have that, can we?
In The Menu, Chef Slowik tells the various guests why he has invited them there that night and why he wishes for them to die. The food critic has caused several restraunts to close with her harsh reviews. Tyler the foodie is so obsessed with food he has removed the art. The elderly couple pays no mind to his art. He resents his mother. The actor… Well, the actor signed onto a film that Slowik didn’t particularly like. It wasn’t just that he sold out to a supposedly-lame movie in order to cash in a check, it was that Slowik spent some of his precious little off-time watching that movie. And he felt like his time was wasted. Time theft. That’s a sin worthy of death.
Between this and the critique of the avant garde fine dining pretentiousness of Slowik’s dishes, Hilton’s review in the Independent concludes, “If the film’s raison d’etre is to show up the vapidity of modern art, then it produces no argument better than itself.”
Sure, it is funny, the film’s sendup of pretentious art. But it doesn’t call it meaningless. Or vapid, that stupid word critics love. There’s a lot of meaning. Through the island dish, we maybe get a taste for an ideology potentially behind the suicide cult: anarcho primitivism. We have destroyed nature. We have created capitalism and suffering. Justice is the destruction of humanity and the return to the state of nature. To get there, we shall burn it all down, innocents included. I’m not too familiar with anarcho primitivism, and I’m not going to argue that sort of extremism is common but… the basic idea sounds pretty idiotic to me. But the film tricks us. Margot doesn’t care about this sort of art. Because she’s the normal person surrogate, we’re invited to dismiss it as nonsense, too.
The problem, though, is if you take an eat the rich message from the film, like so many have misread into it, you have to assume the dishes are meaningful. That’s the entire metaphor. Without the final beautiful moments of the smores, the movie and the cult have no purpose. But then you would have to admit there’s a purpose to the film itself. You’d have to examine the text. And you’d realize what it’s actually about: the violence of The Cause.
When you assume art is generally meaningless, you take quite seriously the art you consume. It suddenly becomes a dire investment. You are being selfish, after all, and meaningless. To then have your time wasted is to have a dagger stabbed into you. Suddenly, your taste is no longer your taste. A movie can no longer simply be outside of your tastes. It has to have an objective good or bad quality. Not only that, but to be bad, to be something you dislike, is to be morally wrong. The artist who wastes your time has committed a sin. They are unclean. They are a sinner. They must be burned.
Following the release of Madame Web, YouTuber and film critic Chris Stuckmann put out a video discussing the film and, more specifically, the way Hollywood and studios treat writers and directors. Studio interference is his concern. In the light of the recent strikes, it’s always a fair concern to have. It’s clear that he doesn’t think Madame Web was a well made film or one worth watching, but he also doesn’t want to spend time bashing the creators. He doesn’t find that worth his time. His comment section on that video is depressing. They are angry at him for not giving them what they want: a lashing. They call him a coward. They do not care for positive film reviews like it seems his channel is focused. They want theater of the cruel. We need to see these people beheaded, metaphorically of course.
What’s interesting to me is that these people go on to say there can’t be growth without criticism. But they aren’t asking for constructive critique. They’re asking for excoriation. They don’t want to be told how to avoid a trashfire. They want someone’s face shoved in the flaming can. What’s the point of reading reviews if someone isn’t burning to death?
There is an art to criticism. I’m most partial to personal reviews, ones that transform into meaningful bounties of insight into the critic’s life and the world in which they live. This is how they responded and why. This is the meaning they found and why. A lot of people prefer reviews that drag things through the mud. It provides drama. Why tune in for Drag Race if someone isn’t being an asshole? But don’t you dare say that was mean. It’s boring if it isn’t mean, but we can’t acknowledge the cruelty of it or that would feel like we’re being judged.
This phenomenon of criticism, that getting a good dunk in is the most important thing, has stuck with me two times. One is a section of Lindsey Ellis’s video “Why is Cats?” where she shows all the funny reviews of the 2019 movie musical adaptation. Those reviews are, of course, quite funny. There’s an art to a good dunk. I watched that film recently. The reviews failed to capture it, really. The second was when I saw Head Over Heels. I mentioned that at the start of this video. A reviewer for the NYT, Ben Brantley attempted one of those fun, sassy negative reviews. He was transphobic in it, of course. When we talked with the New York Performance Arts Library, they implied they did not get archival footage of the show because they have to make hard decisions about what to record. Make sure to get the important things. Like a replacement coming in on a revival of My Fair Lady. Rather than the first show with a role originated by a trans woman. They didn’t like it, so it wasn’t important. It was only good for a dunk.
I reject performative cruelty. I think it’s dishonest. I think it worsens society. I reject the idea that artists are required to grow thick skin so everyone can throw as many abuses at them and their work as they want. There is a difference between critique and bullying. Most people only want the latter.
Of course, when we consume supposedly “bad” art, “time-wasting” art, we get angry. We want it destroyed. We want the makers of it destroyed. How dare they. No one is allowed a mistake. No one is allowed to grow. You must be amazing at all times or you are worthless and worthy of death. Dance monkey, dance.
If we’re keeping with the reading of The Menu as a critique of certain leftist views on violence, Slowik’s dismissal of the actor becomes a statement on the dismissal of art in general. During the Superbowl, Israel carried out a devastating bombing campaign in Gaza. Leftists flooded twitter, claiming the Superbowl was a distraction. Taylor Swift is a distraction. Beyonce is a distraction. Awards shows are distractions. Music is a distraction. Movies are a distraction. Art is a distraction. If you are spending time on art, you are being selfish. To be selfish is horrible. There is a cause to be fought for. How dare you not dedicate it all to the cause? Throw soup. Throw cans of soup. Destroy the arts.
In the film, this idea that everything must be The Cause consumes the staff. They die for the cause. Art was a waste. They sleep on the island, prepping for this destruction. Life must be for the cause. You may not be a person. You may only be a cog in the machine. To take a break is to declare that you do not care. You are not with us. Everything must be the cause.
And then they all die.
And, really, the world doesn’t change at all. They destroyed any chance of a life, of happiness, of a moment of break and freedom, to be replaced with sadism in the name of the cause.
Course Five: Scaly Things
There will be no bananas under socialism. True socialists will not consume art when there are fights to be fought. To discuss anything else is evil. You may not spend a moment outside of it. When you do not agree with the cause, you sacrifice your humanity. Our violence will spare no one. We will harm the innocents who are nearby, and we will cause them to harm others. Return, children. The good days are centuries past us. Subsistence farming will save us. The death of technology will save. There will no global shipping.
Immediately following the Hamas attacks on October 7, some people rushed to defend every aspect of it. There are no innocent Israelis. Settlers are not civilians. The concert goers sinned by going to a concert on those lands. The children sinner by being born there. The Romanovs were damned by their blood. What did you think decolonization meant? Vibes? Essays? Why yes, if the Native Americans decided to commit atrocities, I would not begrudge them for killing me. That is their right.
For a certain segment of leftists, politics, liberation, the future, it has nothing to do with creating anything better. It is not that there should be less suffering. Hurt people hurt people. No. Hurt people must hurt people. That is their right. They look at the scales of suffering and do not long to remove any of the weights. They want to balance the scales.
The staff murders the rich. The staff dies, too.
The death penalty must remain. The guillotine must remain. Heads must roll. It is not the boot that is bad. It is bad that I do not wear the boot.
I think we fundamentally want to believe in our own goodness. We prefer films where the bad guys are monsters with no redeeming qualities, because then we can pretend evil is other. It is a sickness, a creature, a sin. Evil violence, that done by the oppressors, is deserving of hellfire. Benevolent violence, that done by the oppressed, is holy. It is good. It is done by humans against monsters. Humans injured by that violence? They must have been monsters in disguise. It’s a child’s understanding of morality.
I think the reason it’s hard for people to engage with The Menu is our need to pretend that our violence is special. We will punish the bad guys. But we won’t. Our violence is not special. It’s a bitter pill to swallow.
Comments