food in film: the good, the bad and the ugly

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly / Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (1966)



a carnal vegan favorite! love those long doorway shots.

we've already seen how the table can invoke intimate, familial bonds, in either a positive or negative way. here, though, the table is stripped of all domesticity (the wife and child hastily ushered away pre-meal) and instead appropriated as the site of some deadly masculine business. in the hands of The Bad, eating becomes an act of intimidation, even invasion. he wordlessly infiltrates the home and seizes a place for himself at the table, consuming the food prepared by the victim's wife and then leaving not only a table of dirty dishes but a couple of dead bodies for her to clean up.

this moment of simultaneous-eating (one could scarcely call it a "meal") verges on the absurd. the victim clearly knows that he's about to die, but he mechanically continues to eat, though the food provides him with neither sustenance nor the indulgent pleasure of a last meal. this is a table where processes of life and death are uniquely and dreadfully proximate.