The Cook, the Thief, the Menu: A Brief

In 1990, I hosted a dear friend at my home on Dickinson Street in Philadelphia and suggested a videotaped movie for him to enjoy after my wife and I toddled off to bed. In those days, I was a copywriter for the national catalog of a major video retailer, and access to virtually anything on tape was a perquisite of my job. Thinking my guest would appreciate what I considered the best new release of the time, I slipped Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover (1989) into the Betamax, a well meaning choice that proved a complete miscalculation. My friend, a theatrical and world traveller, was horrified by the violent and repulsive opening sequence, and I had put him in the precarious position of frantically struggling in the dark to find the STOP button on an unfamiliar remote.

I was myself completely squeamish about moving images: I fainted watching the consequences of recklessness coming out of a 16mm projector in my driver’s ed. class; I nearly passed out at the exact same spot in The Exorcist both times I saw it in a theater. Despite my vasovagal syncope and depending on the cinematic genre, I was occasionally able to play an intellectual trick that overcame my fear of blood and gore, a capacity to become distracted from the dismembered hand by the hand of the artist. The switch in my head didn’t work so good on the average horror movie, when the filmmaker’s intention was to gross me out, but I found myself focusing on Greenaway’s artistry when he lushly depicted for satire’s sake the putrefaction of flesh and the vile corruptions of human nature.


“I don’t know much about you,” Greenaway told Catherine Shoard of The Guardian in 2010, “but I do know two things. You were conceived, two people did fuck, and I'm very sorry but you're going to die. Everything else about you is negotiable." This stark and practical principle provides the underlying rationale for the balance of the action in The Cook, the Thief.... Gangster Albert Spica either organizes or improvises unspeakable, violent outrages in the film starring Michael Gambon and Helen Mirren, yet his bloody, lurid handiwork merely adds a bit of panache to the eternal routines of Nature. Eighty percent of the movie takes place in Le Hollandais, a gourmet French restaurant Spica owns and where he dines every night, shouting his views on proper etiquette and good taste to the mooks in his crew and his much abused wife, Georgina, punctuating his tirades with foul language and physical assaults. The conceptual starting point for The Cook, the Thief… could be a pun about the difference between “taste” as in refinement and “taste” as in appetite. Greenaway’s beautifully filmed, trés elegant dining room and cavernous kitchen--all fire and copper pots--constantly remind us that eating, however refined, is fundamentally an organized slaughter. Spica demands our attention and spews most of the repulsive dialogue, but every creature kills to live.

The “negotiable” part of our severely circumscribed lives, which doesn’t alter so much as a pinch of salt nature’s basic formula of sex multiplying and death subtracting, is whether we conduct ourselves artfully, with style and grace, or brutally like the animals we truly are. Spica must have each extreme at once, manically pursuing a taste for refinement (a stylish wife in Jean-Paul Gaultier couture; a personal French chef) with the appetite of a wild boar. Reading from a menu, he mispronounces “poisson” so it sounds like something deadly; Georgina corrects him with the appropriate French word for “fish” and gets a series of brutal slaps for her trouble. Greediness in both its monetary and gastronomical connotations is the thief's defining characteristic. “My artistry,” Spica boasts, “is to combine making money with dining, business with pleasure.” Critics (and Greenaway himself) have called the movie a fierce satire of Britain’s Thatcher period, elevating raw consumption to a moral imperative and asserting (as Oliver Stone has it in 1987’s Wall Street) that “greed is good.”

An alternative justification for the movie’s violent depictions begins by noting that Greenaway belongs in the elite company of genuine film auteurs whose personal vision and technical prowess distinguishes their work in defiance of the collaborative sprawl of the typical studio production. A filmgoer might respond to the film’s cook as the singular composer of a work of art and the thief as representing the financial considerations demanding artistic compromises that steal from or outright destroy individual creativity. Like a chef and undisputed kitchen general, Greenaway marshals his production design team (Gaultier, Ben Van Os, Jan Roelfs, and Italian chef Giorgio Locatelli), the lavish cinematography of his long-time collaborator Sacha Vierna, Michael Nyman’s grand and operatic score (the composer also contributed to Greenaway’s A Zed and Two Naughts (1985) and Drowning by Numbers (1988)) to advance the formal construction of his own script, modeled after Oliver Goldsmith’s 1773 play, She Stoops to Conquer. (That five-act play contained a passionate dedication to Samuel Johnson. Have you read his book? 40,000 entries and not a single complete thought among them.) The result is a remarkable and remarkably disturbing film that serves up a full out rebellion of the arts against vulgar commercial interests. With such a losing formula, the dining room spectacle culture blogger Rhiannon Sian Wain called “the greatest British art house film” predictably earned less than eight million dollars in its initial U.S. release.

Hanging prominently in Le Hollandais, an upscale dining destination that is nevertheless infested with the rats and cockroaches who are Spica’s crooks and hangers on (alt-film regular Tim Roth and New Wave rocker Ian Dury among them), is a vivid reproduction of the vast canvas Banquet of the Officers of the St George Militia Company in 1616, a revolutionary painting in its own right by the Flemish master Frans Hals. The artist integrates recognizable portraits of the most powerful men of Haarlem within an animated scheme instead of showing them stiffly as a static collection of disconnected likenesses. This advance on the conventions of the 17th century group portrait stands apart from the mannered Baroque style popular elsewhere in Europe and earned its author a secure living. Other references to 17th century oil painting include a lavishly presented view of the back of a food-laden van, recalling Flemish still lifes of foodstuffs by Lauren Craens and others, often allegorical pieces representing the life--and death--preoccupations of earthly man. By the middle of the movie’s week-long time span, the gate of the truck is thrown open again to reveal a stinking bounty of rotten carrion.


The Cook, the Thief… in its notorious opening sequence does a cute little number using letters like Scrabble tiles to suggest the corrupting relationship between crude Spica and highly refined Boarst. After making the kitchen’s food procuror literally eat shit because he didn’t get the restaurant’s fresh meats through Spica’s racket connections, the gangster proudly shows his chef partner the new, monstrous neon sign he’s had made that reads, “Spica & Boarst.” When he throws an electric switch to turn the sign on, the thing crackles and smokes from short circuiting. All the lights in the kitchen go out, and only a few of the sign’s letters remain both illuminated and unoccluded by a human figure. (“The kitchen is dark!” a line cook tells the chef. “Thanks to Mr. Spica’s generosity, it’s dark everywhere,” Boarts replies in his elegant French accent.) What remains visible now says “P & A BO ARS,” which is letter play suggesting the initials for the scatological references with which Spica is adolescently obsessed and either a corruption of the words “beaux arts,” the academic architectural style of Paris, or “b.o. arse.” “The naughty bits and the dirty bits are so near together,” Spica muses elsewhere, “it shows the close relations between eating and sex.”

Greenaway dramatizes Spica's threat to the arts through Georgina’s affair with Michael (Alan Howard), her bookish lover. They meet under Spica’s nose, trysting in the washroom and the kitchen storage closets, and clearly they risk death to do so. The chef, wearing the white uniform of an accomplished artisté, is a co-conspirator, taking their side. Boarst needs the monster’s cash to operate a restaurant, but he revolts against Spica in secret and at the first opportunity. In a motion picture where a gangster’s vile insults and bullying comprise the majority of the dialogue, the first nights of the wife and her lover are wordless, tender, physical explorations of love. They undress together in a stall in the loo; they taste each other in a closet area where a dozen freshly slaughtered pheasants are hanging, Georgina computing the number of times their lovemaking will be interrupted if the dining room has a run on wild game birds under glass.

Spica invites the man reading a book by himself in the restaurant to join the sullen and stupid thuggee entourage at their long table. His courtesy is a form of offense, since he has noticed his wife’s interest in the poor schnook and wants to expose Michael’s powerlessness and disqualification as a romantic rival. It is only during this tense encounter that the lovers learn each other’s names. Afterwards, Michael tells Georgina that he once lost interest in a film after the first wordless scenes, when the dialogue began. The cliché of the beautiful woman who was charming until she opened her mouth underlies the anecdote, but Greenaway is also revealing his particular affinity for Samuel Beckett, who despised language’s propensity to conceal and its clumsy syntax and grammar that obscure communication more than they foster intimacy. Meaning is impossible, and all that remains is elaborate word play and convoluted self-references. Spica, we learn, uses his bullying and bluster to conceal the fact that he can’t have a fruitful erotic relationship. Georgina confesses to her lover that relations with her husband involve his painful futzing ‘round with kitchen implements, exercises that have made it impossible for her to conceive his children. He poses the threat of violence to command and control, but he is not capable of procreation, only death.

Greenaway’s personal history and 2007 film Nightwatching informs our understanding of the Hals painting’s function in The Cook, the Thief.... Significantly, Rembrandt, one of the greatest artists in history, was himself crushed by the patronage system of the guilds. In Nightwatching, about a civilian militia who want to have their group portrait done in the official style of Hals, Amsterdam resident Greenaway suggests that Rembrandt’s allegorical representation of a revolutionary conspiracy in his supreme achievement The Night Watch primarily alienated him from the establishment guilds and thus doomed his personal fortunes. The cook Richard Boarst (actor Richard Bohringer) has a patronage arrangement with the gangster Spica, who wears a red sash like the powerful men in Banquet of the Officers, that anticipates his doom since pure art must inevitably be crushed by money and social power. Meanwhile, the girls in the cheesy cabaret act a pimp acquaintance of Spica has requested sing, "We're only here for love!"


Greenaway’s films are full of conspiracies and submerged plots. The paranoid seeing story skeletons everywhere is probably a disillusioned atheist who misses the comfort and joy of relying on a manifest Prime Mover, some great immortal to give meaning to all this confusion and chaos. In The Falls (1980), A Walk Through H (short film), and The Tulse Luper Suitcases (2003, 2004), the director utters the secret name of a dark personage who steals artists’ creations and flays their souls. Greenaway’s incessant glossing of his own catalog from one film to the next and his appropriation of touchstones in classical art history parallel the work of that other postmodern auteur, Quentin Tarantino, who also revives his early characters and properties (Red Apple Cigarettes, Fox Force Five) in later films, while referencing the icons of mainstream culture (Madonna! Bruce Lee!) in his screenplays. These auteurs project an elaborate labyrinth of self-citations over their individual ficciones, anchoring the made-up present in the historic past, like Alfred Hitchcock’s cameos to kick off North by Northwest or The Birds. It must be an accident that Michael Gambon's character resembles that most independent of directors, Stanley Kubrick, mustn't it?

In Beckett’s work lies the contradiction between the urge to express oneself evocatively, and the cold certainty that no amount of artistic eloquence can overcome the practical realities of hunger, kitchen, and hearth, or offer succor against the inevitability of death and decay. The thief's revenge against his wife’s potent lover--suffocating him by forcing the pages of a text on the French Revolution into the victim’s mouth with a spindle--Spica hails as a masterpiece of murder, but only irony makes it so, and irony is merely an artifact of language. Contrarily, Georgina ritualistically force-feeding her husband at gunpoint the flesh of his murdered victim manifests the ultimate taboo and is the corporeal revocation of Spica’s humanity. The occasion is marked on the title card/menu as a “private function” (more scatological punning, there), and the entire, much abused kitchen staff turns out to witness it.

Don’t you hate people who abuse the wait-staff? Most of them are incognito artists, you know. Poor Pup, the kitchen boy, suffers the worst of Spica’s temper. He sings the melancholy minor key intervals of Michael Nyman’s brilliant score in a pure soprano (the dubbed voice of Paul Chapman), and Spica constantly mocks his innocence. “Come on, sing damn ya. I was a choir boy once. Women love choir boys.” In one of his rages, the gangster tries to force Georgina’s sexuality onto the child, to corrupt him and silence the beautiful voice. Eventually Spica mutilates Pup, who has to be brought to the movie’s final supper in a wheelchair.

The minimalist music of the Michael Nyman Band, like compositions by Philip Glass and Stephen Reich, eschews the false narratives of melody, alternately employing musical chord progressions and variants of a simple theme. One can argue these variations mirror the repetitions in Greenaway’s plots. Three generations of Cissie Colpittses murder their husbands in Drowning by Numbers, in which the director goes so far as to contrive the passing scenery to include individual counting numbers, 1 to 100, to help the audience find their place. Through the basic drama of the lovers and the cuckold, all of the action of The Cook, the Thief…, consists of repetitions of the same outbursts on etiquette by the always angry dinner host in his same, nightly spot at table, while the lovers arrange themselves in various softcore sexual positions in different outposts in the vast restaurant. Greenaway’s plot constructions are like the Rocky movies: numbered for your convenience. Menu title cards listing the specialty du jour preview each variant of what is essentially the same scene over and over, until the film’s cannibalistic climax. Cannibalism in the arts is when the artist recycles his old material because the promise of creating something new is physically and psychically impossible.

“Cinema is dead. I’ll give you a date — August 31, 1983, when the remote control was introduced into the living rooms of the world. Cinema is a passive phenomenon. All the really interesting visual artists are now webmasters.” That was Greenaway’s pronouncement to Peter Noakes in 2007. Not nostalgic about the demise of the motion picture medium at all, he sees the “illustrated books” of linear motion pictures giving way to the environment of the web, where the viewer controls the sequence and duration of encounters with a variety of media and even a variety of commentators. Lists, like the alphabetized words in Johnson’s dictionary, predict the Internet environment in which we all live. These experimental works have occupied the director in recent years, like in his multimedia presentation of glosses on Da Vinci’s The Last Supper or his Peopling the Palaces at Venaria Reale, installed on-site, that animated the palace with 100 video projectors. With new technology, the artist must reinvent his presentations and hopefully advance forms of expression that require the active participation of the viewer/explorer. So to my visiting friend whom I left with the Betamax in 1990, fumbling for the remote, let’s not think of you frantically turning off a cinematic masterpiece. Instead, let us consider you were part of the start of something big.

January, 2021