Celebrities eating on screen
Taylor Swift, David Hockney, and more.
MISS AMERICANA
Lana Wilson
Watching Taylor Swift feels like catching sight of a snow leopard. For a solid 85 minutes I quietly marvelled at the access that I’ve been granted to a creature prone to secrecy and solitude. While I am behind on today’s poptunes, her popularity and celebrity are not lost on me. In the past, two of her songs have even burrowed into my brain, and rather than push them out, I sang along.
The opportunity to glimpse a star of her stature, even through the fake-real glow of a documentary camera, seemed worth the admission or time (it’s distributed by Netflix). But how natural or revealing could it actually be given today’s wealthy offerings of documented reality, varying from expertly contrived tantrums to the neo-grit of Instagram Live?
Miss Americana ends up another byproduct of the popstar, delicately crafted on her own terms. That it is lensed by a renowned documentarian known for a zen objectivity means a humble gravitas infuses the film, which shepherds us on an adventure—of Swift’s choosing. Lana Wilson, the director, dispenses with the formalities of bootstrapping towards stardom (no stagemom, no lost childhood, or sacrificed friendship), nimbly acknowledging, perhaps, that Swift never really faced such challenges.
Rather than fabricate obstacles, she focuses on a recent chapter of Swift’s life— the aftermath of a countersuit against a radio DJ who groped her. The monumental and harrowing experience, not just the assault but the ensuing legal process and system rigged against victims, impels her to reckon with politics personally and more generally. The awakening culminates in Swift’s first public political endorsement (Democratic candidates in Tennessee, including Congressman Jim Cooper who lost to Marsha Blackburn).
More interestingly, the film traces a line from this political awakening to a musical rebirth necessary to her career— encroaching thirty at the time of filming, Swift candidly refers to a dwindling critical period, during which her legacy will be cemented in the public’s eye and so Miss Americana will serve as both a relic and encapsulation of a star approaching its zenith. The notion of a political voice activating an artistic is compelling asserted while Swift records its anthem “Only The Young.” (When the film ended, the first thing I did was listen to reputation.)
During a recording session with one of her producers, a barefaced Swift pushes a tortilla chip into her burrito, shly explaining her caprice. It’s not an uncommon hack to the burrito-savvy, which Swift, who only had her first one relatively recently, is not. This small scene reaffirms more obviously that Taylor swift is basic, etc. but more deeply probes at why she has never had burrito. Far from shaming her, I for one would like to hear all about her burrito sheltering — was it means of access, fear, ignorance, restricted diet? She does for the first time publicly acknowledge her body-image struggle in this film. Taylor may be a girl-next-door to the point of boring oblivion, but she has unexplored corners of her formerly burritoless life that we aren’t looking into!
Swift appears to be the most herself when collaborating on and writing new songs. She bubbles over with a near-crippling enthusiasm when she finds the right words, forms the right hook. (She’s also a natural vocalist; how did I not know?) A true exemplar of the cold fusion of grit and innate ability, nary a frustration or meltdown (unlike Lady Gaga or others artists who get the living artist doc treatment), her best self is the one that’s working for her hard-earned success. But the film teases a more tantalizing facet of Swift captured by a paramour. She privately serenades someone (Tom Hiddleston? The Kennedy Boy?) in a huge den and cheeses for the iPhone camera looking back over her shoulder while running through some naturally beautiful landscape.
Despite everything, the MTV awards remains the closest we’ll get to an unguarded moment. When Kanye outed her on stage, he managed something the cameras could not, exposing her at peak vulnerability and personal nadir, shattering the veneer of celebrity.
A BIGGER SPLASH
Jack Hazan, 1973
This hard-to-find documentary is aggressively constructed, but not in terms of comprimised subjectivity. In what’s colloquially known as a piece of docufiction, David Hockney struggles to complete his most famous and expensive painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), which sold for $90.3 million two years ago at Christie’s, the highest sale on record for a living artist. But in more accurate terms, it is one of those art-performances comprised staged reenactments intertwined with real moments with the doughy painter. The result is an amateur effort, a dull meditation on the passage of time, and a most lovely success if it were director’s intent to drown the film in insufferable malaise with listing pacing. Otherwise A Bigger Splash may still be worth your time for its astonishing access, however superficial, to Hockney and his cohort. There are scenes of him at work, taking photographs, and most lasciviously, showering. The film was originally rated X.
Watching (famous) people eat
When it comes to food, celebrities fall into two camps. In one, those with an established love of food, cemented through home-cookbooks (Chrissy Teigen, Patti LaBelle, most reality tv stars) and even restaurants (Francis Ford Coppola) or the more recent urbane trend toward foodie-ism (Aziz Ansari). Gwyneth Paltrow and Eric Wareheim fall into both but in different ways. The second category is everyone else, who leaves their comestible habits up to hypothesis. The diets of these celebrities are unpublicized because they are uninteresting and/or largely predicated on restrictive diets, which may be, again, too boring, or inversely, bizarre for public consumption.
The act of watching someone eat can be a loaded moment. In the past, help and domestics tend not to eat in front of their employers, and in some Asian cultures you’d be if you started in before your elders. These hierarchical situations may no longer apply, but think instead of eating for the first time in front of a date. The act of eating is another way to comport yourself and like all other human habits, it’s an opportunity to invite judgement if not observation. The food-scenes in movies, too, duly convey class and culture, gender or personality. (The way Bridget Jones or Tony Soprano chomps, to name just two.) That is when they’re not just posh movie stars play-masticating with serene precision. An unsupervised celebrity mokbang might be the first crack at the gloss of well-groomed personae. (Hot Ones and other shows like Action Bronson’s or old Batali’s don’t count since they focus on eating as perseverance or eating to sate all that food lust built up in the first half of the show.)
We may never have that full-frontal footage of the famous and wrangling thick bucatini, but we are currently awash in celebrity cooking videos. But watching them exhibit their knife skills or inexplicably cook vats of borscht (pasttime of Lindsay Lohan, who has since scrubbed her instagram) is unequivocally less interesting — thanks to the slew of cooking competition shows that have raised the bar for what we can expect re:brunoising or julienning. Celeb homecooking clips function best as interior-design voyeurism instead, commercial ovens abound!
Some celebrities and actual food professionals to scrutinize
-Florence Pugh’s stories for ringing encouragement
-Laila Gohari’s instagram for a fashionable and rustic table
-Natalie Portman’s instagram, fascinating to see the Dior spokesperson’s coyness in-tact while boiling a leeks
-Paris Hilton cooking lasagna in what looks like the ONLY episode of her self-professed cooking show. Her commitment and ineptitude are unmatched. Watching this is like taking laughing gas, especially seven minutes with the ground beef.