There's a scene in Ocean’s 8 where a bandit named Lou (played by Cate Blanchett) saunters across a street toward her boss, Debbie Ocean (Sandra Bullock), in a sequin jumpsuit, a heavy drip of diamonds in her cleavage and on her ears. She’s a scintillation given human form: a dark shimmer of greens and teals, like the glittery lovechild of David Bowie and a mermaid. It’s a moment of triumph, the culmination of their grand heist that oozes glamour and straddles a few numbers in the upper half of the Kinsey scale — basically, this victorious strut defines the movie. But it’s not the best moment.
That honor goes to a scene in Ocean’s 8 that takes place at Veselka, the venerable diner in Manhattan’s East Village. Debbie is eating from several plates of food on the table, explaining the heist to Lou, talking through bites of Ukrainian food. She pushes her fork around her plate to pick up some potato. Once a haystack pile of crispy-edged latkes sits on her fork, she swirls her knife around to scoop up sour cream and then pats at the pile, dabbing and spreading the cream around until she is satisfied with the forkful she’s put together. Her bite punctuates a sentence. For the entire scene her focus is split between filling her partner in on the details of a heist and having her lunch. The scene ends with Debbie offering Lou a bite. She pops out the gum she’s been grinding on throughout the scene and eats the potatoes, shrugs one of those universal “yeah, that’s great” shrugs, picks up a fork, and eats some more.
At its core, this is a humdrum scene, an unfailingly simple way to portray a natural interaction between friends — it’s just two people sitting at a table, eating. But, considering the way that women are typically portrayed in blockbusters, it is a wild moment, because this is a scene where women are eating. And they are eating for no goddamned reason at all.
People love to talk about food in movies. But when we talk about food in movies, we tend to be talking about writing, imagery, and narrative. Food drives the plot in movies like Eat Drink Man Woman, Chef, Volver, and Soul Food. It fleshes out characters, helping to define everything from morality to sexuality in movies like American Psycho, The Breakfast Club, and Blue Is the Warmest Colour. It pushes the story forward in movies like Phantom Thread and Snow White.
Eating in movies is different. The food doesn’t really matter, be it a sandwich or a bowl of soup or a chicken wing or an apple. Perhaps an apple is the best example, though, because eating in movies almost works like gravity: It brings a performance down to earth and helps tether it to reality. Whether it’s a fantasy or a mob movie, a romance or a heist, eating makes a character seem like a real human being.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that Ocean’s 8 has great eating scenes. Ocean’s Eleven, the Steven Soderbergh-helmed debut of the contemporary Ocean’s movie franchise, after all, is essentially a masterclass for eating in movies. Like Ocean’s 8, it’s just a heist movie, only the cast is all men — Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, and Don Cheadle, to name a few — and the Ocean is Danny, played by George Clooney. There is no real reason for Brad Pitt to be eating in every scene; he just is. Legend has it that he decided that his character, Rusty, was eating all the time because he was too busy with the heist to sit down for meals. So, he eats: a cheeseburger, a lollipop, cotton candy, nuts, and shrimp. In Ocean’s Twelve and Thirteen he eats some more.
Brad Pitt is essentially the poster child for eating in movies. He is so known for it that there is a Brad Pitt Eating: The Mashup YouTube video, a definitive — though outdated — food diary that spans all of his movies through 2011, and someone even wrote a cookbook based on his on-screen meals. When it comes to eating and drinking in movies, the only thing you can count on as much as Brad Pitt chomping his way through a scene is Leonardo DiCaprio raising a toast, as if every movie he is in is just part of a long, freeform video for Kanye West’s “Runaway.”
Whether eating on film is Pitt’s very natural answer to the question “What do I do with my hands?” or oral fixation run amok, the choice instantly humanizes each character, because we can all relate to eating.
Think of John Travolta crushing two slices of pizza stacked on one another in a classic fold as he struts down the street in Saturday Night Fever, or Chris Pine casually eating an apple while his James T. Kirk beats the Kobayashi Maru simulation in Star Trek. Or think about the kids in Harry Potter eating and talking together in what is essentially their school cafeteria, giving us a common ground in their magical surroundings. And family dinners humanize mafiosos in everything from The Godfather and Goodfellas to Pulp Fiction.
The banality of eating, though, seems to primarily be the dominion of men in the movies. It’s rare to see scenes where women eat thoughtlessly, in a way that is just a basic statement of a woman as human. One is the opening of Breakfast at Tiffany’s with Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly eating a pastry and holding a takeout coffee cup while wandering the street outside the jewelry store. Another is Julia Roberts as Vivian, the vivacious sex worker that Richard Gere’s character, Edward, picks up the night before in Pretty Woman, plucking at the crust of a croissant and then tearing the chewy innards out during the couple’s first breakfast together. And a third is Viola Davis chewing around her quips and frowns, punctuating sentences with bites of medium-rare steak as Amanda Waller in Suicide Squad. None of these scenes need to show women eating, and eating has nothing to do with being a woman. They are just eating.
More often, when we see a woman eat in a movie, we are seeing a reflection of the character’s sexuality or morality. In Marie Antoinette, Kirsten Dunst (the queen) and Rose Byrne (a duchess) cram pastel petit fours and piles of whipped cream in their faces in a scene that plays like a magazine spread about indulgence. Movies like Bullock’s own Two Weeks Notice and Miss Congeniality use eating as a shorthand for loneliness, while Bridget Jones’s Diary — and every other movie that shows a woman eating out of an ice cream container — uses eating to signify that a woman is pitiful. Movies from Bridesmaids to The Witches of Eastwick only really show women eating to set up punchlines. Woman on Top, Flashdance, and Fast Times at Ridgemont High use the hoary old Lolita chestnut of food-as-fellatio trope with a chile pepper, a lobster, and a carrot, respectively. And, of course, who could forget that scene where Kim Basinger basically has sex with the contents of a fridge in 9½ Weeks.
Perhaps the best way to show the difference between how men and women eat onscreen is to look at the famous Katz’s Deli scene from When Harry Met Sally. Harry (played by Billy Crystal) is eating the hell out of his sandwich, his mouth almost always full as he talks around each bite. Sally (Meg Ryan) spends half the scene slapping slices onto a pile as she disassembles her sandwich until it’s basically just two slices of bread, then takes a few nibbles and fakes an orgasm. The lady in the scene might want to have what she’s having, but it would be nice, even if just a little more often, women could have what he’s having: the sandwich.
This is probably why the eating in Ocean’s 8 feels exceptional — and it’s not just that scene at Veselka. Debbie Ocean and Nine Ball (played by Rihanna) eat hot dogs and fries. In the midst of a team meeting, the street hustler, Constance (Awkwafina), breezily snacks from a big metal bowl full of popcorn she has cradled on her lap. During the heist, there is a sudden cut to a plate of food that Lou tops with a liberal dollop of hot sauce before handing it off to Nine Ball. Daphne Kluger (Anne Hathaway) eats a bunch of soup, too. (Spoiler alert: There is a reason for the soup. Though there is no reason for it to be vegan!) And while there is no actual eating, there is a long scene recruiting one of the titular eight that takes place as a character places what is a very terrible Subway sandwich order.
There’s no rhyme or reason for any of it (except, spoiler alert cont’d, the soup). It’s just eating, just a shrug asking, who wouldn’t want to go eat some pierogi while they plan a bank heist? It’s easy to classify Ocean’s 8 as a cut-and-dry gender-swap reboot of a hit series — one that leans hard on the Jem and the Holograms feminine tropes of glamour and glitter, fashion and fame. But in the ways it obeys the conventions of the Ocean’s franchise, in not letting the fact that the characters are women interrupt the subtle through-line of the prosaic, thoroughly human act of eating that runs from Eleven to Thirteen, number 8 helps rewrite the rules for how Hollywood portrays women on screen. It’s almost like... despite our genders, we are all human. And if you spend five years, eight months, and 12 days planning a heist, it’s only human to plan dinner, too.
Melissa Buote is a writer who lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Editor: Greg Morabito