By recreating classic movie moments that look so cathartic onscreen, Eliza Janssen hopes to improve her own life. This month, that involves indulgently wasting food to re-enact the harmless comic violence of great cinematic food-slinging scenes, à la Blazing Saddles and Hook.
I have always longed to be That One Kid. Not the main character, goodness no—I’m talking about the pleb in the sports movie who does the first awkward clap in the climax’s rousing round of applause. The cowardly comic relief henchman who just runs away from the action hero. Stoner Camp Counselor No. 2, who gets the most disrespectful, goofy kill in a horror movie.
But most of all, I’m extremely jealous whenever there’s a food fight scene in some high school comedy and one loser stands up to bellow “FOOOD FIIIGHT!!” right into the camera. Typically a freak, geek, or John Belushi in Animal House type. What a commanding thrill it must be, to watch the main characters going through their own personal drama, and to witness one of them tip a frosty cup of OJ on the bully’s head. To verbalise “hey, everyone else should get in on this too”.
Food + face has always provided a primitive, hilarious thrill in cinema. It’s the ideal way for characters to hash out their beef (and perhaps even launch some beef across a crowded cafeteria) in an utterly non-violent manner, often used especially as an outlet for child characters to get vindictive. It’s the pivotal comedic setpiece of many a Disney Channel Original Movie, and the imaginary food battle in Hook signifies the character turn of Robin Williams’ overgrown Peter Pan first tapping into his former childhood glee.
The food in question looks completely disgusting, less actual meals than just bowls of Teletubby Custard-esque coloured goop. But rewatching this scene was pretty advisory: nobody wants to cop a block of cheese, chicken drumstick, or heaven forbid a pineapple to the face. The food I would need for my re-enactment had to be as sloppy as possible: as a wise man once said, “who throws a cupcake, honestly?!”
With this OH&S-friendly point in mind, the cream pie is undoubtedly the king of food fight cuisine. Nobody actually eats these things in real life: they’re pure props, splattered across faces in the finales of everything from Bugsy Malone to Blazing Saddles. Although Chaplin and the Three Stooges would get pie’d a lot too, aficionados point back as far as Laurel and Hardy’s 1927 The Battle of the Century for the first great cream pie fight in cinema, a raucous silent scene warning us of the hollowness of revenge.
After slipping on (what else) a banana peel, the comics start a karmic battle of pie-slinging, with each cream-covered victim accidentally punishing some new passerby until an entire city block’s day has been disrupted by pastry mayhem. The clear MVP is a barber who gets folded into a garbage can at 7:51 into the clip.
In terms of scale, 1965’s The Great Race hasn’t been bested with its five-day-long shoot for a four-minute pie-fight epic. It’s a meh blancmange of a movie, released right in the midst of the Hollywood studio system’s dullest days, and there’s a bunch of behind-the-scenes misery associated with the stunt. Natalie Wood choked on pie at one point; Jack Lemmon complained that “a pie hitting you in the face feels like a ton of cement”; and when the cast and crew returned to filming after a weekend, they found all the dairy debris on set had spoiled.
All that pain and stinkiness seems mostly vindicated by the scene’s spectacle alone, and it has its funny moments. Tony Curtis wanders through the carnage in a stark white outfit, and adorable man Peter Falk stumbles upon the skirmish dressed as a monk, only to get pummelled with about 10 pies at once.
Anyways, enough about pie: I had to serve up a somewhat-diverse table of throwable dishes, and iN tHiS EcoNoMy I sought out expired foods or items that didn’t seem to be in demand. The Great Race‘s food fight allegedly cost $200k to shoot (a staggering $1.7 million adjusted for inflation!), but eggs cost like $10 right now, and I’ve seen too many gluttinous mukbang YouTubers and gender reveal party fools getting reamed out for wasting perfectly good ingredients on dumb social media antics.
I made plates of lime and purple grape jelly, taking care not to let them set too firm, and poured out cans of baked beans and spaghetti. A near-expired pavlova was on sale. I bought two cans of whipped cream on special, certainly making the supermarket cashier think I was about to have a wild night of nangs—turns out that amount yields only three or four “cream pies” on paper plates.
With inflation being what it is, a massive culinary melee with everyone I know seemed to be out of the question. But I knew my family would be willing to get gross, so with parents seated alongside me before the soon-to-be-projectile feast and my sister filming, it was time. Time to scream those magic words that I’ve yearned to announce for such a long time.
Once the battle had begun, we had no hopes of precisely recreating any of the iconic movie moments I’d researched: the classic pie-dodge resulting in the wrong person getting got, etc. We got lost in the sauce—literally—and generally felt that the sticky warfare was entirely worth it. It was a privilege in the most literal sense of the word to pointlessly waste food like this.
The only downside was the unmistakeable smell of vomit that set in as soon as peace was brokered. Dairy, sugary fruit, the richness of tomato sauce: as we rinsed the mess off the ground, the aroma strongly recalled the improperly digested contents of a kids’ stomach after a sleepover.
I’ve done nasty stuff with pasta previously in this column’s history, but chucking food around rather than quietly creating it was far more cathartic. A food fight is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, well worth the shame of picking beans and chunks of jelly out of the shower drain.
