Having a perspective is hard, especially when you don’t give a shit about anything.

And it gets worse: you may not give a shit, but you still desperately want the attention that comes with being involved in the zeitgeist. This kind of problem is to a wealthy person what a real problem is to a poor person.

So what’s a lazy narcissist to do?

Just say shit, padre. Never stop saying shit. Say all the shit, always; bury your audience in words. It doesn’t matter if those words mean anything – all that truly matters is that people are paying attention to you. You need the attention. You live for the attention. When this cultural moment passes you will simply shrug and move onto the next one. You care about nothing. You somehow believe in even less. Your voice is like a fetish that only you have.

The Menu

If the only way you can satire a community is by making the members of that community act in ways that no functioning human would ever act then you need to get better at satire. It undercuts whatever legitimacy your commentary may have if you’re waging a war against strawmen.

The Menu’s writers fancy themselves too smart to settle on a clean thematic through-line such as “workers should revolt, for the rich are a cancer.” The problem is that in their iron-clad confidence that they have something better up their sleeves they forgot to have something better up their sleeves. It’s not a great look to mock the other kids who are trying to solve the equation on the whiteboard, only to get up their yourself and suddenly remember you don’t know how to count.

Here is a list of incredibly dumb shit that makes me very angry:

• No explanation is ever given as to why Slowik’s employees have become a cult, or why they are willing to die for their boss. I thought the consuming class is draining the dignity out of the efforts of the producing class? But the producing class are all psychopaths anyway? So everyone is evil? Labor is both purifying and corrupting? What?
• Watching this movie whip out snark as a narrative get-out-of-jail-free card is like watching someone discover internet memes and think they’re blowing everyone’s mind. Snark isn’t a perspective. It’s an affectation. Just portraying everyone in the worst light possible doesn’t mean you have anything interesting to say about them.
• Slowik’s extended pontifications are so nonsensical I can’t even parse them all without this article becoming unreadably long. Almost everything he says directly contradicts everything else he says. This would actually work if this movie was just a fun horror-comedy about a chef who’s lost his mind. But, no – there are clearly supposed to be Compelling Arguments About Important Issues on display, here. We are supposed to believe he is at least making some logical arguments. He is not.
• OK, I lied, I’ll do one specific example: Slowik claim’s he’s murdering these people for having no appreciation of his art, but he also hates Tyler for trying too hard to have an appreciation of his art. See what I mean when I say this movie only really works if Slowik is just crazy?
• “We’ll never be able to escape – Slowik’s people have dinner knives!” is so idiotic that the screenplay feels compelled to throw in a handwave-y line at the end of the movie to explain that the real reason that the guests didn’t leave was some kind of collective will-to-death, a mindset never displayed by any of them at any point in the story. It’s an idiotic gap in the logic of the script papered over with an even more idiotic attempt at pseudo-psychology. I hate this movie.
• In the final moments of the movie the guests quietly accept their deaths. They seem to even be agreeing with Slowik’s arguments. Except in the scene directly proceeding this one, when the guests think they are about to be saved by the Coast Guard, they scream things like “He’s fucking crazy!” about Slowik. This movie is like having a stroke.
• It honestly feels like this movie realized how inane its supposed points about class distinctions are and at some point during production decided to pivot into black comedy and snark. It’s like telling someone you love them and then, upon receiving a blank stare in return, quickly yelling, “Haha! Just kidding!”
• Cashing in on the #MeToo movement by including a scene in which Slowik acknowledges that he made unwanted sexual advances on a female co-worker is beyond cynical. His predations are never mentioned before or again and inform nothing else in the movie. They’re only mentioned in one bizarre and pointless scene because the writers know that #MeToo is a thing, and they want to invoke it in the movie to appear abreast of social issues. These people chase the zeitgeist like a dog chases a car.

The End

Last Night in Soho, The Menu, South Park, Urinetown and so many others fall into this weird, obnoxious, cowardly sub-genre of storytelling whose writers want the feeling of taking a bold stance on an issue while not having either the courage or the understanding to stake out anything like a potentially divisive position. They want the accolades without the risk, which isn’t how that works.

I mean, fuck, there’s a lot of annoying shit you can do in life, but “talking without saying anything” is one of the most insufferable. It’s the douchiness of Hollywood at its worst: “I, a famous person, do not actually give a shit about this issue one way or the other, and fuck me if I’m going to read an article about it, but I must say something – people must always know what celebrities think! For heaven’s sake, we’re famous.”

Give me a break. Fucking believe in something!

(The restaurant that Slowik was working at earlier in his career is called Tantalus. Jesus Christ, this fucking movie.)