So you admit that a motivation was given, it’s just not one you buy?
Almost coincident with The Menu release, Noma announced it was closing down the restaurant portion of their business following a brutal takedown by the FT. One salacious detail that spread widely was that there was an intern there who worked for 3 months, completely unpaid and the only thing she did was assemble beetles out of fruit leather and learned no other skill.
Assuming a normal lifespan, she donated 0.35% of her entire life to play a trivial role in a single dish of a multi-course tasting menu of a single fine dining restaurant and learned no other skills or advanced in no other meaningful way beyond that. Similar allegations have been leveled in the past against El Bulli, Blue Hill at Stone Barns and tons of other fine dining restaurants that are built on mountains of abuse and human suffering.
300 of her and you have a human life, 20 of them and you have the brigade in the movie. Across the entire fine dining world, there’s probably the “death” of one of The Menu’s brigades weekly to collectively bring the artistic project of fine dining to life. Humans don’t like to make the equivalence between one life taken all at once vs 1000 lives taken 1/1000th of at a time but by literalizing the concept, The Menu invites us to ask, if you don’t find it believable that a kitchen brigade would kill themselves for the ultimate art project but you’re forced to accept as believable that someone would spend 3 months making fruit leather beetles for free because it actually happened in real life, where is that line and how absolutely certain are you that it exists as a hard line and not just a matter of degree?