Dinner Theatre
What I've been eating during the pandemic and how it may or may not relate to Hollywood's current era of creative austerity
Hi! I started a Substack! It’s like LiveJournal but it comes to your inbox and some people pay for it! At least we kinda hope they do. Times are tough, I ain’t judging.
So for the past six months or so of this rolling global cosplay of 1918, my household has been eating lentils and rice for pretty much every dinner. This is not a complaint. It’s extremely fuckin’ delicious—a modification of a New York Times recipe that’s just a bland modification of any number of older cultural standards from around the globe that involve plopping pulses on rice. Billions of people have been happily living off this combo for thousands of years. It ain’t new. It’s as bog standard as it gets. Also also, it’s easy to make when you don’t have the energy to expend planning anything else at 10 PM on a Monday spent watching what’s left of your country’s internal structure erode. That’s a pretty important thing to take into consideration in such interesting times.
The recipe, if you’re really that interested:
1 big white onion chopped up into smaller pieces of onion
As many cloves of garlic as your heart desires, minced
Two to three jalapeños of powerful temperament, chopped or diced
A few teaspoons of kosher salt
3 tablespoons of olive oil
1 tablespoon of tomato paste
1 teaspoon of cumin
1/2 teaspoon of coriander
1 tablespoon curry powder
Cayenne pepper
A generous pinch of ancho chile powder
Black pepper. A lot of it.
2 cups of water
4 cups of broth or bullion, chicken or otherwise
A cup and a half of red lentils, slightly more if you like ‘em thicc
You put the olive oil into a pot. You put the onion, garlic, jalapeños, and salt into the olive oil and saute them at medium heat until the onions are translucent to colouring, which I will not give you a set length of time on because onions are like wizards and take exactly as long as they feel like taking to cook through and anybody who tells you otherwise is full of shit and also possibly undercooked onions. Once they’ve cooked to a consistency you dig, plunk your tomato paste in, swirl it around, and add the spices. Stir that around for a couple more, add water, broth, and lentils, cook at medium heat for 30. Blend a couple cups of the finished product ‘til smooth, pour it back in, stir. Serve over rice. Volia, one extremely standard daal recipe.
This has been our culinary bedrock for the better part of 150 days. So far we’re still not tired of it. All that said, you know what the best day of the week is? That would be Saturday, the day when we don’t have to eat lentils or clean up after cooking and allow ourselves a single glorious takeout order instead. Because no matter how good something is—no matter how delicious and easy and pleasing—you eat enough of it and you’re going to feel like grabbing something else after awhile if you’re able to get away with it.
(I can hear some of your practically tripping over your keyboards to tell me how you NEVER get tired of the same meal 365 days a year. Truly, madly, deeply: I do not care. That’s great for you! I’m happy for you! In the context of this discussion it does not matter.)
Anywho, the other day I found out that one production company has been responsible for almost every big budget prestige television opening over the past ten years. They are called Elastic. If you have a favorite set of opening visuals, from Game of Thrones to Westworld to American Gods to The New Pope to His Dark Materials to most of Marvel’s Netflix output, you probably have Elastic to thank for it. Their house style is distinct and striking and very, very shiny. Elements of the plot fly around and morph into other things! A bomb turns into a martini! Future plot points are teased! At its most basic it’s the most memorable design choices from the opening credits of David Fincher's Girl With the Dragon Tattoo adaptation on an endlessly cycling loop. Sometimes, as with The New Pope, they mix it up a little, but more often than not it’s plot hints flying around in various slick eye-catching ways. Perhaps a sonorous piano plays, or a thumping techno beat if the show is about computers.
Elastic didn’t originate this style, but they have damn well gotten it down to an algorithm, and if there’s one thing television executives love it’s making their thing look like another thing that was hugely successful. Nobody wants to take a real risk. They want their next big thing to be as close to a sure bet as they can possibly manage, and that extends from storylines and lead actors all the way down to the opening credits. People kvetch about the number of remakes, reboots, and franchises coming down the pipeline, but the more insidious markers of how calcified and homogenous popular culture is slowly becoming are the choices you don’t even notice slowly blending into one another—production design, film scores, movie posters, credit sequences. This has always been a business run by the same three to five companies, right from the very start, but the monopolization of every single aspect of production feels new and unsettling in ways I’m still trying to put my finger on. Drew Struzan did like 80% of my favorite movie posters during the ‘80s and they were all composed of the same five or six design choices, why is that okay to me while Elastic’s lock on today’s opening credit market skeeves?
I think—and I’m still unpacking all of my thoughts here, live, for your delight and amusement—it’s less the fact of Elastic being hired to do the same thing over and over and more what it represents, the aforementioned winnowing down of risk and the reduction of house style to an algorithm you can pick off a menu. The reason so much of their work looks the same is because that’s what execs are asking for. The opening credits of the New Pope look like none of the other things Elastic has turned in because the content of that show is like nothing else on television right now; if there is one thing you can definitely say about Paolo Sorrentino it’s that there’s not much going on in the papal bikini party of his creative boiler room that could be easily predicted or picked off a menu. Hans Zimmer's Remote Control syndicate of composers have a virtual stranglehold on the film score world and churn out mostly forgettable sturm und drang, but occasionally something like Junkie XL’s score for Mad Max: Fury Road struggles free of the morass and you remember that music is an essential, vital part of a satisfying filmgoing experience. The fact that these monopolies are happening is less on the artists fulfilling the demand and more on the miserable stifled environment that only allows the same five things to really thrive. It’s an austerity of creative expression, and as with all austerity measures it sucks pure ass.
I like a lot of what Elastic has done. I love lentils, but there are other foods I also enjoy and if I was at the mercy of someone who had decided I needed them three meals a day, seven days a week, cooked the EXACT same way every single time, I’d quickly find myself deathly fuckin’ tired of that particular dish no matter how solid it was. So it is with Hollywood. Basic-ass analogy, I know, but at least it came with a basic-ass recipe people already have vastly better variations on. Maybe next time I’ll go into how our current political climate is just like your grandma’s meatloaf (no).
How’s about you? Got any particular feelings on the ongoing calcification of popular culture?
I've been watching far too much mediocre anime at this stage of the quarantine and the sheer number of indistinguishable choices feels like the same problem. I'm choosing to watch these *because* I can turn my brain off while watching them, but I don't like the fact that I am seeking out mindnumbing drivel, or the fact that the mindnumbing drivel dominates the field. I keep telling myself I'll go back to rewatch something I actually like when I've reset my brain, but who knows when that will happen?
As for cooking, I've recently settled into the rhythm of frying eggs daily instead of trying to make an omelette/fritata and the simplicity has helped me relax. Minor variations every time, but always easy. Figuring out the difference between numbing and relaxing is a problem for when my brain seems less broken.