After
finishing season 3 of Fargo (which slaps, by the way), I moved
onto Netflix's latest venture into becoming the Xhamster of food
porn, Street Food. I was interested, not just because I'm an
enthusiast for street food the world over, but also because the first
episode featured the current doyenne of my adopted city of Bangkok's
street-food scene, Jay Fai, queen of the crab omelette.
I
should have known what I was getting myself into. You know exactly
how everything's gonna go down. Start with a dramatic drone shot of
an exotic Asian landscape or a vaguely cyberpunk Asian cityscape, all
fluorescent-lit slums and smog-spewing scooters, and then zoom into a
market scene of chickens in bamboo cages, elderly women beaming over
ropes of garlic. You'll have the local food expert (most likely
speaking in English) championing the working-class vendor (most
likely speaking in their native language), followed by the inevitable
story of personal struggle -- child abuse, poverty, beloved fathers
dying of cancer, addiction in the family -- with the vendor
eventually tearing up, cameras gleefully rolling.
By
and large, food TV is designed to be comfort food in every sense of
the word. And to watch it is an act of passive consumption, also in
every sense of the word. The high-class version is designed as a
marveling at the exoticism and luxuriousness of the products, lurid
shots of immaculate sea urchin, the riotous colors of a bowl of
Singaporean laksa, a Provençal grandmother lovingly making an aioli
in a mortar and pestle. Conversely, the low-class version is a fat
fuck shoveling triple cheeseburgers topped with crispy pork belly,
gorgonzola, and foie gras into his goateed mouth to guitar riffs (and
you can probably guess which fat fuck I'm alluding to here), or some
polite, chipper woman with a Colgate smile crafting chemically
enhanced product-placement atrocities out of Cool Ranch Doritos and
frozen gnocchi.
When
there is anything that disrupts the comfort, it's either giddy
reality-TV drama of the sort accompanied by dramatic judges' table
sound effects (the last place where vocal synths are still used
without irony) or maudlin descriptions of personal tragedy. You know,
prepackaged feels -- just add water.
Of
course, the producers could address how the personal setbacks and
disasters reflect social realities and the often unspeakable poverty
of urban-slum Southeast Asia. They come, at various points, annoying
close to actually saying something -- they could actually open the
discussion a bit, and talk even for a minute about the wealth gap in
Thailand, religious tensions in India, or the fact that Suharto,
who's mentioned as a big fan of the vendor in the Indonesia episode,
oversaw the murder of one million fucking people -- but that
would be a buzzkill, so any kind of larger issue is barely even
mentioned in passing. Jiro Dreams of Sushi,
perhaps the glossiest, most opulent food porn ever made, took a beat
to discuss how Japan's rapacious appetite for fish was draining the
ocean, and placed a critical emphasis on the pressures placed on sons
in traditional Japanese society. But in Street Food,
nope, instead you just have the tear-jerker story, the actual
tears, followed shortly thereafter by the story of individual
triumph, told with swelling strings and slow-motion, high-definition
onions sizzling in a wok.
The
great lie is that we live in the "golden age of television."
Sure, The Sopranos ushered in a new era of high quality
television liberated from network standards-and-practices doofuses,
and likewise liberated from the time constraints of conventional
cinema, and I love The Wire, Mad Men, and all the rest
just as much as everyone else does. But as more and more shows
compete for the "prestige" audience -- including the
"prestige documentary" audience, the Wild Wild Country
and The Jinx audience -- the result is more and more recycling
of prestige tropes instead of actually good television. You get
tired, recycled material -- shows like House of Cards and
Making a Murderer – that are filmed beautifully, but which
have no originality of purpose, no meaningful content, no soul, as
sterile and as packaged and as focus-grouped as brands of detergent.
Street
Food fits firmly into this rubric. It's like they took the more
provocative, more imaginatively produced, more socially conscious
food programming pioneered by Anthony Bourdain, David Chang, and
Eddie Huang, and turned it into a garish, melodramatic parody.
Regrettably, as occurs whenever I encounter any kind of low-caliber
creative work, it makes me question whether the things it's imitating
were any good to begin with.
This
is where I would normally implore you, the reader, to go out and eat
some good street food for yourself, and in Bangkok, this is a luxury
that we take as a given. My one, sole, remaining hope is that decent
food programming actually inspires viewers to go out and explore, but
I know full well that the vast majority of viewers who are watching a
sushi maestro place a single pristine piece of mitsuba on a
glistening pile of salmon roe will be staring at their flat-screen
between swigs of Pepsi Max, their television the sole source of light
in their living room as the sun goes down, the pixels reflecting off
of the half-eaten Chipotle burrito on the glass-top coffee table.
This
may sound like a cheap shot, but it's not intended to be one at You
the Consumer (and certainly not a shot at the street vendors of the world, bless their souls) so much as Them the Producers. I can't blame people for
wanting a bit of escapism, after all, we all do (however that may
manifest itself), but I also know that anything this brutally
symptomatic of late-stage capitalism is bound to depress the hell out
of me. And now that I've watched my five episodes, I'm ready to move
on.
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