Long shot of a car moving slowly across a frozen landscape. Closeup of apples, sliced in a bowl, lingers slightly too long. Macaques relaxing in a hot spring. Man brandishes a beef rib, eyes wide, gestures at it with his other hand, boiling with enthusiasm. My housemate and I sometimes watch our local free-to-air food channel on mute. Weâve made some observations.
I think we started doing this because it was funny. Maybe we tried watching the Big Bang Theory so loud that it hurt. You take the sonic context away from food tv and youâre left with a disassembled collage of bizarre dreams. Itâs fascinating, the degree to which sound structures this kind of tv, and without it youâre left with activated men waving meat in the air, eyes wild mouths clasping, yet no clear emotion. Cut this with shots of farms and landscapes taken from drones, wildlife, tentative longing shots of fruit or meat, shots which linger just enough to be awkward or touching. Take away his voice and Jamie Oliver looks confused, lost in his set piece kitchen, piling seemingly random collections of foods on top of each other, wearing a vest which on the back says:
There is a lot of schoolyard humour about the pornography of cooking tv, especially about hosts like Nigella Lawson. People joke about her apparent seductiveness, her subtle underlying sexual gravity. They joke about her little exclamations of pleasure when she samples something delicious, or about the innuendo that lies inherent in food language. This is very basic misogyny. We think sheâs sexy, and we deride her for that, and for her autonomous, self-assured pleasure. Women canât be sexy and autonomous, yada yada, itâs very basic, vile, normal misogyny.
However, Nigellaâs cooking shows are erotic. I feel that ALL cooking tv is erotic. I believe eroticism is central to how this kind of tv works, because there is substantial overlap between our experiences of sex and food. They are both ecstatic and embodied multisensory pleasures. All the same shit is activated and employed; our mouths, our senses of touch and smell and taste, pleasures which flow over our whole bodies from localised centres, little chain reactions up and down our nervous systems, a little shiver shudder or moan. Our grasping hands and teeth and tongues and gasps.
Maybe this is our central observation â cooking, eating, sex.
Soft focus, closeup of a manâs hands as he breaks up butter in a bowl with a fork. Youâre so close to him you canât focus your eyes, like youâre half awake. Clearer focus, he holds a fillet of salmon aloft, presenting it to us and we come very close, we can see the shining wetness of the fish on his hands, we can see so intimately the way he tenderly probes openings heâs made in the flesh. The way he moves it around on a plate of vanilla oil. We watch an erotic performance; we see a presenterâs tactile experiences and sensory pleasures. We identify with these tactile, erotic pleasures, through the haptic nature of the images used.
Now, Laura U. Marks has been on my mind. But I think itâs noteworthy that the (fundamentally hollow) artform of network food tv has taken on (co-opted?) aspects of what Marks calls the haptic image. The specific aspects Iâm referring to are extreme closeness, a closeness which urges you to disidentify with the totality of the image and to let the identification spill over from the visual into your other senses. Haptic images, which might be indistinct, grainy, too close to identify, âdispersed over the surface of the screenâ, invite a look âthat uses the eye like an organ of touchâ. Marks writes of films where shots fade too fast for us to catch them, which obstruct identification through closeness, or otherwise tease our visual mastery, paraphrasing her, to frustrate our optical knowledge and invite haptic speculation. When we arenât able to distinctly grasp the image, we call on our senses of smell and touch, our perception of texture. Marks finds eroticism here, not just in the way this calls forth embodied and sensory experience, but in haptic visualityâs âgiving over to the otherâ, its invitation to come so close as to lose mastery, temporarily lose yourself in another.
Iâm not arguing that cooking tv is haptic cinema - itâs not. âAny out of focus or low-resolution image is not necessarily hapticâ. But in order to communicate the sensations of cooking and eating, cooking tv does invite âa lingering, caressing gazeâ, brings us close to the object (not just food, but also the experience of food), draws us into identification with it, and coaxes us into the sensations of these people behind the screen. This tactility and eroticism are how weâre brought into the sensory experiences and divine pleasures of cooking and eating. You can smell the sugar burning, you can smell the butter, vanilla, and orange juice in this closeup of a fizzing pan. You can feel the crumbling dough on your skin through the soft focus of her hands pressing into it gentle, firm. You can feel the wet of clean water and lemon juice on your hands, the shuddering pleasure of the fried donut in your mouth because in extreme closeup we see her place it in her mouth, close her full lips - we see her chew, smile, and gasp in delight.
