Someone pointed this out in a YouTube video, and now I’m suddenly noticing it everywhere: Leonidas. Kirk. Jack Sparrow. Whenever you want a character to look especially badass, have them casually chomp on an apple.
The most recent sighting was just today, as I was watching the movie The Stanford Prison Experiment. Sure enough, there it was: The apple of badass. And that’s when I thought: OK, this is worth starting a thread about.
So: Is this a trope, or at least a mini-trope? If so, does it have a TV Tropes page? (I couldn’t find one.) Have you guys noticed any badass-related apple-chomping that you want to mention? Why does apples in particular make you look badass, rather than say, carrots? Or is this all my confirmation bias talking, and I’m simply missing all the casual banana- and peanut-eating?
I don’t know about TV tropes, but it is a sort of joke among fantasy writers, on par with having red hair or being the last of one’s kind. See here: How to Tell if You Are In a High Fantasy Novel. It’s a little below the picture, on my display.
It’s the crunch; it suggests that this is a guy who’s going to knock some heads and break some bones. The carrot, aside from being phallic, is unavoidably comedic among viewers old enough to have seen a lot of Bugs Bunny.
In the movie Shoot 'Em Up, uber-badass Clive Owen is constantly munching on carrots, and even uses them as weapons (for example, stabbing someone in the eye) from time to time. I never thought of it before, but it is probably a sly parody of the apple trope.
The TV Tropes page is The Snack Is More Interesting. Although it focuses on being more interested in the food than the action, it includes examples of the type you describe, where eating an apple makes someone look tough.
The tagline for the page is "“The director said ‘Here, eat an apple. It’ll make you look like even more of an asshole.’”
I think the implication is more like what SpoilerVirgin describes. It’s supposed to highlight the character’s superiority over the people around him. While everyone else is losing control, he’s having a snack and only giving part of his attention to the crisis. It’s a way of signalling “My abilities are so much better than yours that I’m not even getting excited by the situation that is putting you into a panic.”
ISTR seeing a movie or two where the badass ate walnuts. He’d casually crack two or three of them one-handed, so you got a nice crunch as well as a display of strength. I never watched The Sopranos – was that how Paulie Walnuts got his nickname?
Apples always seemed like a way to avoid using cigarettes for the 100th time. Just another prop for the actor to look cool with. It also takes more acting ability than a cigarette does to get right. If you do it wrong, you just look like a slobbering pig.
