OK, so obviously, not the snappiest title. But there’s this thing I’ve been noticing with increasing frequency in movies, and I don’t have any good name for it, and even TVTropes wasn’t helpful. So I wanted to gauge whether it’s just selection bias of if others have noticed it, too.
The basic setting is this. The hero/protagonist/sometimes just a random character meets the villain while the latter is eating. This is a pre-confrontation meeting; both sides are still playing their cards close to the chest, but both typically know the eventual confrontation is inevitable. The villain will tell the hero (or well, the audience: it’s not always the hero they’re meeting) something about the food they’re eating, how it’s specially prepared in some unique way, and invariably, issue a threat by that. Here’s a recent example from The Peripheral (spoilered in case you haven’t seen it yet):
Corbell Picket: You know the best way to tenderize meat? Well, most folks use a mallet. Its, uh, quick, easy. But messy, too. And the results aren’t guaranteed. That’s why I prefer a brine. A slow, controlled process that alters the very nature of what you consume so it suits your taste. And when you find that perfect brine, it’s almost always guaranteed. Now, recently, I have come to discover someone is in my kitchen fucking up my brine. And I want to know who it is.
It’s not a perfect case, but it shows the whole shtick of using food metaphors as a substitute to talk about some nefarious scheme. It also functions to set up the villain as somebody of a certain sophistication, refined sensibilities and the like. The entry is almost always, ‘most people do x to food item y, but I find…’, followed by some sort of process that’s both against the received wisdom and vaguely cruel. It paints the villain as both thinking outside of the box and willing to do whatever to achieve their ends, while showing some outward sophistication.
It seems to me that this has become exponential in its usage, but I can’t really find anything on it because it’s so vague (and yet, to me, instantly recognizable on screen). Has anybody else noticed this, or is this just an artifact of the sorts of shows I tend to watch? Can you think of any examples? Do you think it’s effective, or cliché? Part of me thinks it’s ripe for a trope reversal, where the hero encounters the villain while eating, going, ‘oh, right, now you’re going to tell me how the lobster doesn’t actually need to be burned alive, but first has to be rendered limb from limb to truly preserve the aroma’…