10.13125/2039-6597/2788
The career of British director Peter Greenaway, now more than four decades long, has often been animated by a profound interest in what one may call the aesthetics of death. This is particularly true for his 80s and 90s films, which explore a wide array of strategies for the staging and ritualization of death. In The Cook, the Thief, his Wife &amp; Her Lover (1989), for the first time, this interest takes Greenaway into the territories of the tragic.I propose to rethink the fundamental relationship that Greenaway’s film entertains with the narrative and aesthetic forms of the tragic. More precisely, I suggest to interpret The Cook in the light of the reflections on the Trauerspiel (mourning-play) that Walter Benjamin elaborates in The Origin of German Tragic Drama [Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels]. After giving a short account of the first macro-section of Benjamin’s essay, I will argue that the opposition between the Thief and the Lover mirrors the Trauerspiel’s opposition between Tyrant and Martyr, that Benjamin regards as one of the conceptual cores of this theatrical form. This, in turn, reflects the presence in the film of a more abstract conflict between two systems for the construction of knowledge and experience. By drawing on Benjamin’s study, I will trace this conflict back to the opposition between nature and books in baroque culture.The battle between the Thief/Tyrant and the Lover/Martyr takes the form of a succession of rites and counter-rites for the (un)making of social bonds, and the film constructs these rites by clearly referring to the Christian imagination and its subversion. I will contend that the motif of the subversion of the Holy Communion can provide us with a unifying key for the interpretation of the film. From a semiotic perspective, this manipulation consists in the substitution of what our culture constructs as food with its dysphoric counterparts: decay, excrement, and human flesh. 
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Mattia Petricola
Between
«I’ll kill him and I’ll eat him!»: Peter Greenaway and the cinematic Trauerspiel
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Contemporary Melodramas. Cinema, TV, Graphic Novels
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2017-05-22
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Mattia Petricola
2017/11/30
10.13125/2039-6597/2788
University of Bologna
2039-6597
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«I’ll kill him and I’ll eat him!»: Peter Greenaway and the cinematic Trauerspiel
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7
         «I’ll kill him and I’ll eat him!»
                 Peter Greenaway
         and the cinematic Trauerspiel
                             Mattia Petricola


The Cook, the Thief, his Wife, her Lover, and the tragic
     The career of British director Peter Greenaway, now more than
four decades long, has often been animated by a profound interest in
what one may call the aesthetics of death. This is particularly true for
his '80s and '90s films, which explore a wide array of strategies for
the staging and ritualization of death. In A Zed and Two Noughts
(1985), twin zoologists Oswald and Oliver Deuce, obsessed by the
study of putrefaction, commit suicide and film their own
putrefaction on a specially made stage. The protagonist of The Belly of
an Architect (1987), Stourley Kracklite, flings himself off a window
of the Vittoriano in Rome while his wife is about to give birth to
their first child. In Drowning by Numbers (1988), Smut, a child with a
passion for inventing bizarre games, hangs himself after putting on a
spectacular firework display. In 1989, Greenaway directs what is
probably his best-known work: The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and Her
Lover. Here, for the first time, Greenaway’s investigation of the
aesthetics of death ventures into the territories of the tragic.
     A history of love, infidelity, and revenge, with the four characters
of the title as protagonists, the film is a triumph of the melodramatic
imagination. Its main setting is the restaurant Le Hollandais, where the
head chef Richard Boarst (the Cook) serves exquisitely elaborate
French haute cuisine. A mobster, Albert Spica (the Thief), owns the



Between, vol. VII, n.14 (Novembre/ November 2017)
Mattia Petricola, «I’ll kill him and I’ll eat him!»



restaurant and dines there every evening, accompanied by a gang of
henchmen and his wife Georgina.
      One night, Georgina meets Michael (the Lover), a bookseller and
habitué of the restaurant, and the two start a love affair. Day after day,
helped by the complicity of the Cook, Georgina and Michael secretly
meet in the restaurant’s bathroom and pantries. When the Thief
discovers their liaison, the two escape from the restaurant and take
refuge in a book depository, where the Lover works as a cataloguer of
French history books. But the Thief finds out the lovers’ hideout and,
while Georgina is away from the book depository, kills Michael by
force-feeding him pages from his books. Georgina then takes revenge
on her husband by asking Richard, the Cook, to cook her lover and
serve him to Albert. After this cannibalistic dinner, Georgina shoots
and kills the Thief.
      In his introduction to The Cook’s published screenplay, Greenaway
cites as his primary source of inspiration for the film John Ford’s ’Tis
Pity She’s a Whore (1633), a Jacobean revenge drama centred on the
taboo issue of incest. At the same time, the film’s final scene cannot but
evoke the cannibal banquet served in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus,
which, in turn, looks back to Seneca’s Thyesthes and the tale of Procne
and Philomela in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
      Despite this impressive cultural genealogy, a reading of The Cook
as an allegory of the Thatcher government has often overshadowed the
fundamental relevance of the tragic mode to the film’s semiotics1.
Greenaway himself endorsed this reading in a number of interviews2,


       1
        Walsh 1993 is one of the earliest examples of this position. For excep-
tions, see Lawrence 1997: 165-188, Siegel 2001, Stetco 2008, Aebischer 2013:
66-76, and Bennett 2013: 100-105.
      2 According to Greenaway, the film is «a passionate and angry disserta-

tion […] on the rich, vulgarian, Philistine, anti-intellectual stance of the
present cultural situation in Great Britain, supported by that wretched wom-
an [Thatcher] who is raping the country, destroying the welfare state, the
health system, mucking up the educational system, and creating havoc eve-
rywhere» Siegel 2000: 81.


2
                                 Between, vol. VII , n. 14 (Novembre/November 2017)



thus favoring its proliferation and creating a sort of vicious circle in
which the critical interpretations of the film risk doing little more than
confirming the director’s view of the film itself.
      In this political-allegorical view, the Thief embodies the Thatcher
government, and haute cuisine represents «a displacement for a
Thatcher-era bourgeois sensibility or a metaphor for class ascension
and “tastes of luxury”» (Brinkema 2014: 154). This view also sees
cannibalism as the ultimate development of the consumerist society
that Thatcher favoured, which eventually cannot but devour itself
(Bartolovich 1998).
      This paper proposes to rethink the fundamental relationship
that Greenaway’s film entertains with the narrative and aesthetic forms
of the tragic. I will try to offer a different, perhaps richer and less
obvious perspective than the one deriving from the cultural genealogy
illustrated above. More specifically, I will give a ‘tragic’ interpretation
of The Cook by drawing on Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the
Trauerspiel (mourning-play) elaborated in The Origin of German Tragic
Drama [Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels].
      After discussing two essential concepts of Benjamin’s philosophy
of the Trauerspiel as described by Benjamin, I will argue that The Cook
mirrors the Trauerspiel’s opposition between Tyrant and Martyr in the
characters of the Thief and the Lover. I will then analyse the Christian
motifs thematised by the film in the light of Benjamin’s description of
the relationship between immanence and transcendence in Baroque
culture. In particular, I will focus on the Thief/tyrant and interpret him
as the Antichrist who subverts the ritual of the Eucharist. The conflict
between this threefold character and the Lover will be read as an
opposition between two systems for the construction of knowledge
and experience. With the help of Benjamin’s reflection, I will trace this
conflict back to the baroque opposition between books and food. I will
finally show how the polarity ‘books vs. food’ interacts with the
Christian imagination in the film’s most gruesome scenes, which I will
interpret as rites for the making and unmaking of social bonds through
the dysphoric use of food.



                                                                                 3
Mattia Petricola, «I’ll kill him and I’ll eat him!»




              Watching Greenaway through Benjamin
     Several convergences between the subject of Benjamin’s essay and
Greenaway’s film seem to make a reading of the latter through the
former not only possible but potentially productive.
     The Origin of German Tragic Drama deals with theatre rather
than cinema, and The Cook asks its viewers to experience the film
precisely as a play. It does so by emphatically thematising its
own theatricality: the presence of scaffolds and curtains, for
example, shatters the naturalistic illusion of cinema from the very
beginning of the film.
     From a historical perspective, the Trauerspiel is quintessentially
linked to baroque culture, and The Cook engages in a superb dialogue,
both thematic and visual, with this same culture. We almost
instinctively associate the film’s sumptuousness, violence, and excesses
to baroque aesthetics, and a monumental reproduction of Frans Hals’
Banquet of the Officers of the St George Militia Company in 1616 occupies
the back wall of the restaurant’s dining room3. Furthermore, the art
direction ceaselessly evokes the golden age of Dutch painting by filling
almost every scene with food arranged in the form of still lives.
     However, what allows us to read The Cook as a cinematic
Trauespiel, so as to apply Benjamin’s reflections to the film, are two
much more specific convergences. In order to pinpoint them, I will first
give a short account of the first macro-section of The Origin of German
Tragic Drama. It centres around two inextricably intertwined notions
that Benjamin regards as the philosophical foundations of the
Trauerspiel as a dramatic form opposed to tragedy: the figure of the
tyrant-martyr and the spiritual tension between the loss of eschatology
and the yearning for transcendence. I will then show how The Cook
mirrors these two notions and their fundamental interdependence.
     Even if the title of Benjamin’s essay makes explicit reference to
German drama, it is important to note that Benjamin himself
understands the Trauerspiel as an aesthetic form encompassing authors
      An analysis of the use of Dutch painting and still lives in The Cook can
       3

be found in Pascoe 1997: 172-178.


4
                                     Between, vol. VII , n. 14 (Novembre/November 2017)



from Shakespeare and the Elizabethan playwrights to Gryphius and
Calderòn. The Trauerspiel «presents itself as a ‘play for melancholics’
(Spiel für Traurige), in its meaning of Trauer (‘mourning, grief, sorrow’)
and Spiel (‘game or play’)» (Schiavoni 1999: xxix, the translation is
mine). It is «a sort of ‘mystery’ in which the disintegration of the post-
ancient man is staged» (ibid.).
     Benjamin defines the Trauerspiel as opposed to tragedy. He
describes the latter as a dramatic form whose function was to mediate
the relationships of a culture with the Olympian world. As such,
Benjamin argues, tragedy cannot exist after the end of ancient Greek
culture:

        Tragödie and Trauerspiel are radically distinct, in metaphysical
     foundation and executive genre. Tragedy is grounded in myth. It
     acts out a rite of heroic sacrifice. In its fulfilment of this sacrificial-
     transcendent design, tragedy endows the hero with the realization
     that he is ethically in advance of the gods, that his sufferance of
     good and evil […] has projected him into a category beyond the
     comprehension of the essentially ‘innocent’ though materially
     omnipotent deities. […] The Trauerspiel, on the contrary, is not
     rooted in myth but in history. […] The Trauerspiel is counter-
     transcendental; it celebrates the immanence of existence even
     where this existence is passed in torment. (Steiner 1998: 16)

     There is then a causal link between the excesses and violence that
the Trauerspiel features and a human condition that has lost its
eschatology and has precipitated into immanence:

        The religious man of the baroque era clings so tightly to the
     world because of the feeling that he is being driven along to a
     cataract with it. The baroque knows no eschatology; and for that
     very reason it possesses no mechanism by which all earthly things
     are gathered in together and exalted before being consigned to
     their end. The hereafter is emptied of everything which contains
     the slightest breath of this world, and from it the baroque extracts
     a profusion of things which customarily escaped the grasp of



                                                                                     5
Mattia Petricola, «I’ll kill him and I’ll eat him!»



       artistic formulation and, at its high point, brings them violently
       into the light of day, in order to clear an ultimate heaven, enabling
       it, as a vacuum, one day to destroy the world with catastrophic
       violence. (Benjamin 1998: 66)

     Benjamin's notion of the baroque as a post-eschatological culture
seems to shift to a significantly less recent time in European history the
transition to a post-sacred era that Peter Brook will pinpoint as the
cause of the emergence of melodrama in the late XVIII century:

          The origins of melodrama can be accurately located within the
       context of the French Revolution and its aftermath. […]
       Melodrama does not simply represent a “fall” from tragedy, but a
       response to the loss of the tragic vision. It comes into being in a
       world where the traditional imperatives of truth and ethics have
       been violently thrown into question, yet where the promulgation
       of truth and ethics, their instauration as a way of life, is of
       immediate, daily, political concern. […] We may legitimately
       claim that melodrama becomes the principal mode for
       uncovering, demonstrating, and making operative the essential
       moral universe in a post-sacred era. (Brooks 1995: 14-15)

     When the possibility of accessing transcendence vanishes,
the tragic hero of the classical world loses his cultural role. In its
place, a new tragic figure arises: the sovereign, «the representa-
tive of history» who «holds the course of history in his hands like a
sceptre» (Benjamin 1998: 65):

          [In the Trauerspiel] [i]t is not the tragic hero who occupies the
       centre of the stage, but the Janus-faced composite of tyrant and
       martyr, of the Sovereing who incarnates the mystery of absolute
       will and of his victim (so often himself).
          […] Behind this fusion stands the exemplum of Christ’s kingship
       and crucifixion. Baroque drama is inherently emblematic-
       allegoric, as a Greek tragedy never is, precisely because it
       postulates the dual presence, the twofold organizing pivot of



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                                Between, vol. VII , n. 14 (Novembre/November 2017)



    Christ’s nature — part god, part man, and overwhelmingly of this
    world. (Steiner 1998: 17)

     Even if «[i]n the Trauerspiel monarch and martyr do not shake off
their immanence» (Benjamin 1998: 67) and «the perfect martyr is no
more released from the sphere of immanence than is the ideal image of
the monarch» (ibid.: 73), the interaction between the ineluctability of
immanence and the yearning for transcendence posited by Benjamin as
the cultural core of the baroque may result in the pagan deification of
the monarch, exemplified by the famous image of the Sun King.
     In the light of this synthetic account of Benjamin’s theory of the
Trauerspiel, I would argue that Greenaway’s film mirrors the logic
‘tyrant vs. martyr’ highlighted by Benjamin. Albert Spica, the Thief,
rules over Le Hollandais as an absolute sovereign; his tyranny only ends
when he is forced to eat the body of Michael, the Lover, whom he had
tortured and killed. I would thus propose to read The Cook as the story
of the dethronement of a tyrant, the Thief, by means of the sacrificial
martyrisation of the Lover.
     The parallel between the film’s characters and the characters
described by Benjamin could be further extended to include
another figure, the intriguer, whom Benjamin defines in relation to the
spatial structure of the Trauerspiel:

       In contrast to the spasmodic chronological progression of
    tragedy, the Trauerspiel takes place in a spatial continuum, which
    one might describe as choreographic. The organizer of its plot, the
    precursor of the choreographer, is the intriguer. He stands as a
    third type alongside the despot and the martyr. (Benjamin 1998:
    95)

     From this perspective, the intriguer may find a double,
complementary embodiment in both the Cook, who hides the lovers
and cooks Michael’s body, and Georgina, who plots revenge on the
Thief. One may also be seduced by the possibility of interpreting the
«spatial continuum» of the Trauerspiel as analogous to the space of Le



                                                                                7
Mattia Petricola, «I’ll kill him and I’ll eat him!»



Hollandais, whose four rooms — the car park, the kitchen, the dining
room, and the bathroom — are «coextensive in a strong horizontal
linearity» (Brinkema 2014: 158).
     I will further motivate and analyse the analogies Thief-tyrant and
Lover-martyr in the next section. First, however, I will provide a more
complex framework for their study by describing another essential
convergence between the philosophy of the Trauerspiel and the film’s
semiotics, a convergence that concerns the relation between immanence
and transcendence.
     Like the world of the religious man of the baroque, the world of
The Cook appears to have irreparably fallen into immanence. The film
explores the precariousness of the natural world through strategies
that are more complex and articulated than those adopted, for
example, in A Zed and Two Noughts. In particular, The Cook reshapes the
obsessive interest for putrefaction which animates A Zed in a twofold
way. On the one side, it is transformed into an interest in food as the
edible form of the natural world; on the other side, it is transfor-
med into an interest in cooking as an art form that transports the na-
tural world to the realm of the aesthetic.
     Nevertheless, exactly as it happens in the Trauerspiel, being
trapped in the immanent does not imply renouncing the religious
imagination. In fact, the transformation of the Lover’s body into food
cannot but evoke the Eucharistic rite — even though the ritual eating of
a god, especially in the form of an animal, has obviously far more
ancient anthropological origins.
     This religious reading of The Cook’s final scene is confirmed by
the fact that the film explicitly refers to Christian themes through the
character of Pup, the restaurant’s kitchen lad. He presents a number of
features that are culturally associated with purity: he is a child--the
only one in the film; his skin and hair are perfectly white. More
significantly, he sings Psalm 51 on many occasions in the form of
Michael Nyman’s Miserere, thus embodying a plea for purification and
purgation constructed in indisputably religious terms: «Have mercy
upon me/Blot out my transgressions/Purge me with hyssop/And I shall
be clean/Wash me, wash me/And I shall be whiter than snow./Wash


8
                                    Between, vol. VII , n. 14 (Novembre/November 2017)



me thoroughly from my iniquity/and cleanse me from my sin». The
film’s soundtrack alternates Pup’s Miserere with Nyman’s Memorial,
which seems to connote the whole film as a mourning function.
     The thematisation of Christian motifs adds a further element of
complexity to the relationship between immanence and transcendence
in the world of Le Hollandais. This world not only appears to have
precipitated into immanence; it also seems to have made transcen-
dence itself precipitate into immanence.
     Now that I have highlighted the second fundamental convergence
between Benjamin’s reflections and Greenaway’s film, I will try to
show how the tragic dimension of the film resides right at the
intersection of the opposition ‘tyrant vs. martyr’ and the immanent re-
elaboration of transcendence that I have just described. More precisely,
I will focus on the character of the Thief/tyrant and his subversion of
the Eucharistic rite.

             Unholy communions, part one: the tyrant
      Albert Spica, the Thief, is the tyrant of Le Hollandais. But how does
this tyranny take concrete shape in the film’s narrative?
      Albert’s character lacks any subtlety or nuance: he is utterly
monolithic in his obnoxiousness. He is «sadistic, bullying, nagging,
crude, loud, callous, self-important, sanctimonious, anti-Semitic, racist,
misogynist, homophobic, drunken, unlettered, and possessed of a poor
French accent» (Walsh 1993: 272).
      Many interpretations of the The Cook see the Thief’s physical and
verbal violence as a reaction to his sexual impotence and repressed
homosexuality4. However, the analysis that follow will explore the
pragmatics of the Thief’s violence rather than its etiology. What is
particularly relevant to my argument is the fact that Albert’s tyranny
can be defined as a tyranny of orality. The Thief constructs a semiotic
system in which everything, to make sense, must pass through the

      4
          On this subject see, among others, Siegel 2001: 247 and Keesey 2006:
86.


                                                                                    9
Mattia Petricola, «I’ll kill him and I’ll eat him!»



mouth. More precisely, this tyranny takes two forms: the absolute
power over the act of speaking and the absolute power over the act of
eating.
      Every time that Albert is on stage, he talks almost unceasingly:
«Indeed, at times, the soundtrack is virtually a monologue of his
[Albert’s] ravings» (Keller 2006: 16). He hates to be interrupted or
contradicted and arrogates the administration of the verbal exchanges
during dinner for himself: he decides who speaks when5. Contrariwise,
Georgina and her lover never talk to each other at the beginning of
their affair. They will begin to do so only through the mediation of the
Thief, who, unaware of his wife’s infidelity, one evening invites the
Lover to his table and introduces him to Georgina.
      But more importantly, Albert presides over the act of eating: in a
world whose boundaries correspond with the walls of a restaurant, the
tyrant decides who eats what; that is, he decides the most important
thing in the world. The very first scene in the film makes the effects of
this form of tyranny gruesomely evident. In this scene, the Thief and
his thugs punish Roy, a local businessman, for not paying protection
money. They strip him bare, Albert shoves dog excrement into his
mouth, smears it over his body, and finally urinates on him.
      The relationships between the Thief and his subjects are thus
articulated through food and eating. The members of Albert’s inner
circle eat French gourmet food every evening; those who oppose his
tyranny are forced to eat what the culture excludes from the definition
of food: excrements and bodily fluids.
      We could interpret this act of humiliating force-feeding in the
light of what Benjamin writes about the cultural genealogy of the mad
tyrant. In an analysis of the figure of Herod, he identifies the
character’s religious origins as follows:

         [T]he figure of Herod, as he was presented throughout the
       European theatre at this time, […] is characteristic of the idea of


       For an analysis of other aspects of the Thief’s ‘verbal tyranny’ see Sie-
       5

gel 2001: 238.


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                                   Between, vol. VII , n. 14 (Novembre/November 2017)



     the tyrant. It was his story which lent the depiction of the hubris of
     kings its most powerful features. Even before this period a
     terrifying mystery had been woven around this king. Before being
     seen as a mad autocrat and a symbol of disordered creation, he
     had appeared in an even crueller guise to early Christianity, as the
     Antichrist. (Benjamin 1998: 70)

      If we draw on the parallel between the mad autocrat and the
Antichrist, we can see the Thief as a tyrant who gives his enemies a sort
of reversed holy communion, an anti-Eucharist that replaces flesh and
blood with body wastes. Significantly, while urinating on Roy, Albert
tells him: «Now I’ve given you a good dinner and you can have a nice
drink». The tyrant literally becomes the Antichrist by reversing the
very pragmatics of the Eucharist: he turns a rite of elevation and
communion, meant to reinforce the relationships among the members of
a social group, into a ritual for the humiliation and expulsion of an
individual from the community6.
      It is important to note that Georgina, the Wife-Intriguer, is
completely subjected to the semiotic system created by the Thief: she
constructs an object as good and meaningful only if she can eat it. After
entering the book depository for the first time, she asks her lover:
«What good are all these books to you? You can't eat them. How can
they make you happy?». As a consequence, she also constructs sex in
terms of food. If we draw on the parallel between the mad autocrat and
the Antichrist, we can see the Thief as a tyrant who gives his enemies a
sort of reversed holy communion, an anti-Eucharist that replaces flesh
and blood with body wastes. Moreover, at the moment of leaving the
book depository to visit Pup at the hospital, she asks her lover for a
kiss by saying: «Leave me something to eat».
      The study of the Thief’s anti-Eucharistic rite has provided us with
the first example of how the intersection of the Christian imagination


     6
       For a different interpretation of this and other episodes of «malign nu-
trition», see Armstrong 2004: 225. For a study of the uses of food in Green-
away’s films, see Woods 1996: 92-98.


                                                                                  11
Mattia Petricola, «I’ll kill him and I’ll eat him!»



with the conflict ‘tyrant vs. martyr’ in The Cook mirrors the intersection
described by Benjamin. The next section will contend that this conflict
implies a more abstract contrast between two classes of objects
embodying radically different sets of principles for the construction of
meaning: food and books.

                      An antidote to decay: the martyr
     The only character who seems able to counter the semiotic logic of
food established by the Thief is Michael, the martyr and anti-tyrant.
Michael owns a bookshop, always brings books with him to the
restaurant, and reads while eating, thus modifying the functional
character of the restaurant and the pragmatics depending on it. By
performing at the same time two activities that the Thief considers
incompatible, the Lover openly violates the Thief’s order of rules and
meanings, thus declaring his independence from it.
     The art direction renders the Lover’s violation of (or rather
impermeability to) Albert’s tyranny through the use of colour
and clothes. The film world is divided into six spaces, each defined
by a dominant colour: «the parking lot is arctic blue, the kitchen is
jungle green, the dining hall is blood red, the toilet is heavenly
white, the book depository is golden brown, and the hospital is egg-
yolk yellow» (Armstrong 2004: 223). When passing from one res-
taurant space to another, both the Thief’s and his wife’s clothes
change colour to match the dominant colour of the room. On the con-
trary, the Lover is immune to these chromatic changes: he always
wears a brown suit and a white shirt, as to provide visual evidence of
his immunity.
     Even more importantly, by taking the act of reading into a
restaurant and dining in the company of uneatable objects, the Lover
becomes the herald of an alternative semiotic order, of a new system
for the construction of experience and meaning that is not dependent
on orality. Thus, by creating a contrast between the Thief/tyrant and
the Lover/martyr, the film constructs an opposition between food and
books as the cores of two opposite semiotic systems for making sense
of the world.


12
                                 Between, vol. VII , n. 14 (Novembre/November 2017)



     Food belongs to the natural world, possesses a precarious
existence haunted by decay, and, once consumed, is destroyed and
then expelled. Its life culminates in a short moment of exquisite grace
in a gourmet dish only to precipitate in the indistinctness of body
wastes. This sense of precariousness generates a feeling of anguish that
seems to emerge during the next-to-last dinner at Le Hollandais, after
the death of the Lover. Having discussed the favourite foods of
history’s most famous tyrants, Albert is asked by one of the thugs what
Michael’s favourite food could have been. Irritated, he answers: «What
do I care? It all comes out as shit in the end».
     On the contrary, books are artificial objects that can exist for an
incredibly long time, thus remaining firmly anchored to the world.
Significantly, their use does not imply their destruction. The fact that
the books are stored in a depository rather than sold in a bookshop
emphasises their potential imperishability: for the most part, they are
absolutely static objects. Their polar opposite is the food which is
cooked and served in the restaurant, existing only in a continuous
process of transformation, ingestion, and expulsion. Moreover, the
books in the depository do not ‘contain’ fiction but history — more
specifically, Michael is cataloguing French history. We can thus view
the Lover’s books as objects that do not only project their existence into
the future; they also incorporate the past in the form of history. From
this perspective, the Lover becomes the herald of a sort of ‘complete’
temporality representing the polar opposite of the temporality of
organic decay.
     In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin pinpoints an
analogous opposition between nature and the book as a key feature of
baroque culture:

        The Renaissance explores the universe; the baroque explores
     libraries. Its meditations are devoted to books. […] The ‘Book of
     nature’ and the ‘Book of times’ are objects of baroque meditation.
     In them it possesses something housed and roofed. […] Not least
     the book served as a permanent monument in a natural scene rich
     in literature (Benjamin 1998: 141).



                                                                                13
Mattia Petricola, «I’ll kill him and I’ll eat him!»



     This new convergence between Benjamin and Greenaway seems
to touch the very heart of the reflection on the baroque, proving how
the world of Le Hollandais incorporates this culture not merely as a
postmodern display of artistic luxury, but also as a site for the
problematisation of deep cultural anxieties that are still active today.
The Cook is a baroque film not simply in a visual and narrative sense,
but in a much broader, cultural one.
     But how can one escape from the system of meanings created by
the Thief? The answer to this question will further investigate the
film’s semiotic construction of food by shifting the focus towards it
dysphoric counterparts: decay and excrement.

          A journey through indistinctness: the escape
      In order to escape the tyrannical and unbearably precarious rule
of the Thief and enter together in the Lover’s new semiotic order,
Georgina and Michael escape from the restaurant after the Thief
discovers their affair. Naked, they travel from the restaurant to the
book depository hidden in a van full of rotten meat, «their naked
bodies the same putrid yellow as the decomposing carcasses around
them» (Keesey 2006: 88). Once they reach their destination, the van’s
driver, Eden, washes them clean using a water hose; the lovers then
finally enter their new home.
      This scene, probably one of the most shocking of Greenaway’s
cinema, bears a close structural resemblance with a scene taking place
shortly after the anti-Eucharistic rite analysed above. After the Thief
has entered the restaurant, we are shown Roy through a series of cross-
cuts. Naked and humiliated, he crawls on all fours in the car park,
surrounded by the same dogs whose excrements the Thief has force-
fed him. For a few moments, before he finally manages to get up, his
silhouette becomes almost indistinguishable from those of the dogs. He
then slowly moves towards the restaurant’s entrance, where the Cook
and his assistants help him. One of them washes Roy clean using a
water hose and the Cook pours him a glass of wine.



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      Both scenes stage a ritualised breaking of the social communi-
on with the Thief in the first part, and the establishment of new
social bonds in the second part. The film articulates this physical and
symbolic journey into two phases: the first one involves sullying and
degradation; the second one requires cleansing and purification
throug water.
      The function of the first phase resides in the passage through a
moment of indistinctness. In the van, the bodies of Georgina and
Michael become indistinguishable from the rotten meat; in the car
park, Roy’s body becomes indistinguishable from the bodies of the
dogs, which are in turn associated with excrements (Roy has been
force-fed dog excrement). By journeying through indistinctness, the
three characters temporarily lose their individuality and precipitate
into two structurally analogous conditions, both located at the end of
the process that transforms the natural world into food: decay and
excrement. In order to break their social bond with the Thief, these
characters are forced to journey through the polar opposite of the
exquisite grace and distinctness of a gourmet dish.
      The cleansing shower though which the characters recover their
individuality thematises once again a Christian motif, this time in the
form of baptism. But whereas the Thief’s anti-Eucharist rite and the
journey through indistinctness have the function of breaking a social
bond, this (un)holy baptism acts as a rite for the establishment of a
new social community7. Georgina has abjured her role as Wife and can
now form a unique bond with the Lover; Roy is delivered from
the Thief’s oppression, joins the community of the enemies of the
Thief, and will participate in the final revenge scene.
      The conflict between the tyrant and the martyr is about to reach
its acme. I will now show how the polarity ‘food vs. books’ structures
the final, most violent stages of this conflict and argue that the final
scene represents a new anti-Eucharist rite.

     7
        Pascoe 1997: 181 and Elliott and Purdy 1997: 19 give a different inter-
pretation of the lovers’ escape in the light of the Christian imagination as a
Fall from the Eden represented by the restaurant.


                                                                                 15
Mattia Petricola, «I’ll kill him and I’ll eat him!»




            Unholy communions, part two: the revenge
      Faced with an alien and incomprehensible adversary in the form
of the Lover, the Thief cannot but reassert the only kind of power he is
capable of exercising: the power over orality. His revenge on the Lover
cannot but take the form of a feeding torture: he force-feeds Michael
pages from his books until he suffocates.
      However, the Thief cannot predict that the torture he inflicted on
the Lover is not a punishment but a martyrdom, that will transform the
Lover’s body into the sacrificial instrument of Georgina’s final revenge.
She, in turn, for the reasons explored above, can conceive of a
counter-revenge on the Thief only within the semiotic framework that
the Thief himself constructed. Therefore, she plots to turn Albert’s
twofold power over the acts of speaking and eating against Albert
himself.
      After discovering Georgina’s affair, the Thief goes frantically in
search of the lovers, wreaking havoc in the restaurant’s kitchen. Then,
in a moment of furious anger, brandishing a fork in one hand and a
knife in the other, he swears to kill and eat Michael: «I’ll kill him and
I’ll eat him!». Georgina turns Albert’s hyperbolical rhetoric against him
by literalising it:

          In the act of eating Michael, Albert does not receive the Word of
       God; rather, he is made to eat his own words, which have become
       flesh so that Albert might see, for the first time, just what he is.
       Albert, the man of metaphors, is made to take himself literally.
       (Elliott-Purdy 1997: 63)

     The film’s final scene imbricates with extraordinary ability a
funeral ceremony, a ritual meal of expulsion from the social group, and
a carefully staged homicide. Michael’s cooked and steamy body is
covered with a white shroud; a solemn procession accompanies it from
the kitchen to a table in the dining room set for just one person.
Richard (the Cook) and Roy, both wearing dinner-jackets, open the
procession. All the members of the restaurant’s staff and Albert’s


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                                Between, vol. VII , n. 14 (Novembre/November 2017)



former thugs follow them. By menacing him with a gun, Georgina
forces Albert to take a mouthful of Michael’s flesh, transformed into
meat. Albert immediately vomits it, and Georgina shoots him.
      If we analyse the scene from the perspective of its literary and
dramatic sources — Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Seneca’s Thyestes
and the tale of Procne and Philomela in Ovid’s Metamorphoses — two
fundamental differences appear in both the preparation of the cannibal
meal and the way of consuming it. In Shakespeare and Seneca, for
example, the human meat is baked into a pie. The unaware cannibals
gladly feast on their sons’ flesh, and the taboo nature of the banquet is
revealed only in a second moment. On the contrary, the body of the
Lover is perfectly intact and recognisable. Fully aware of the taboo act
he is perpetrating, Albert feels revolted and only eats a small forkful of
the meal.
      We can understand the relevance of such differences by moving
away from the classical construction of cannibalism on which the three
sources rely in order to focus, once again, on Christian culture. I would
suggest that the Lover’s body is prepared and displayed so as to evoke
an artistic practice devoted to the exploration of the relationships
between permanence and decay: funereal sculpture. After having
witnessed the subversion of the Eucharist, the viewer now confronts
the sabotage of the pragmatics of Christian tomb sculpture in the form
of the recumbent effigy or gisant.
      While the function of the gisant should be to preserve the dead’s
physical appearance in an eternity made of stone, Michael’s
paradoxical gisant is made to be eaten and rot like every other food: his
body is aesthetically sublimed for an instant before falling into decay.
We can further investigate this parallel by taking into account the fact
that Michael’s body has been literally stuffed with books. The film’s
semiotics associate books with history and permanence through time.
Therefore, Michael’s gisant turns the Christian gisant inside out: in the
latter, the perishable (the flesh) is hidden and protected by the
imperishable (the stone); in the former, the flesh (Michael’s body) hides
and incorporates the imperishable (the history books). By subverting



                                                                               17
Mattia Petricola, «I’ll kill him and I’ll eat him!»



the gisant, Michael transforms into a paradoxical monument to the
precariousness of the natural world.
      But the gisant is not the most crucial thematisation of Christian
culture that is at work in this scene: Georgina’s revenge mirrors the
anti-Eucharistic rite of the first scene while incredibly emphasising its
tragic nature. According to several interpretations of this scene8, by
eating the Lover’s body, the Thief would be able to absorb the Lover’s
qualities. I would contend, on the contrary, that expulsion rather than
absorption forms the basis of this rite: it represents the immanent
subversion of the Christian communion, a renewed and ultimate anti-
Eucharist. The Lover acts as an Anti-Antichrist who offers his body as
food in order to expel the Thief/Antichrist from the social body. The
cinematography makes the sense of this expulsion even clearer. In the
last scene, Georgina and all the characters who took part in the funeral
procession are standing on one side of the table; Albert lies dead and,
for the first time, alone on the opposite side.
      Once the ritual expulsion is accomplished, Albert can finally be
killed: his tyranny has ended, and the social order he had shattered can
now be restored. Thus, the film’s ending recovers one of the most
essential features of the classical tragedy: its supremely constructive
role, as opposed to the absolute destruction commonly represented in
the Trauerspiel.

                                         Conclusions
     The analysis of the convergences between Benjamin’s philosophy
of the Trauerspiel and the semiotics of Greenaway’s most famous film
has resulted in the emergence of a number of interrelated isotopies. I
have argued that the conflict between the Thief and the Lover mirrors
that between the tyrant and the martyr described by Benjamin. This, in
turn, reflects a more abstract opposition between food and books, that
Benjamin defines as fundamental to baroque culture.


       8
           See, among others, Elliott-Purdy 1997: 63 and Armstrong 2004: 230.



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     The battle between tyrant and martyr takes the form of a
succession of rites and counter-rites for the (un)making of social bonds.
The film constructs these rites by clearly referring to the Christian
imagination and its subversion, which consists in the substitution of
what our culture constructs as food with its dysphoric counterparts:
decay, excrement, and human flesh. From this perspective,
the subversion of the Holy Communion represents the isotopy that
could provide us with a unifying key for the interpretation of the film.
     I hope to have shown how watching Greenaway through
Benjamin may offer a ‘stratigraphic’ approach to the filmic text
that favours focusing on the interaction between several isotopies
and parallels, rather than on just one isotopy or literary source, in
order to better account for the film’s semiotic complexity.
     Finally, the ‘baroque’ perspective I have tried to develop could
help us see The Cook as a fundamental moment of transition in
Greenaway’s cinema. After portraying the conflict between food and
books, he will work on two films – Prospero’s Books (1991) and The
Pillow Book (1996) – that unsurprisingly centre on the conceptual
importance of the book as a tool for making sense of the world. The
Cook marks for Greenaway the passage from the natural world to the
world of books.




                                                                               19
Mattia Petricola, «I’ll kill him and I’ll eat him!»




                                         Works cited
Aebischer, Pascale, Screening Early Modern Drama: Beyond Shakespeare,
    Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Armstrong, Raymond, “All-Consuming Passions: Peter Greenaway’s
    the Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover”, Reel Food: Essays on Food
    and Film, Ed. Anne L. Bower, London, Routledge, 2004: 219-34.
Bartolovich, Crystal, “Consumerism, or the Cultural Logic of Late
    Cannibalism”, Cannibalism and the Colonial World, Eds. Francis
    Barker - Peter Hulme - Margaret Iversen, Cambridge, Cambridge
    University Press, 1998: 204-37.
Benjamin, Walter, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928), eng. tr.
    The Origin of German Tragic Drama, London, Verso, 1998.
Bennett, Susan, Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Con-
    temporary Past, London, Routledge, 2013.
Brinkema, Eugenie, The Forms of the Affects, Durham-London, Duke
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Brooks, Peter, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melo-
    drama, and the Mode of Excess, New Haven-London, Yale University
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Elliott, Bridget and Purdy, Anthony, Peter Greenaway: Architecture and
    Allegory, London, Academy Editions, 1997.
Greenaway, Peter, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Paris, Dis
    Voir, 1989.
Keesey, Douglas, The Films of Peter Greenaway: Sex, Death and Provoca-
    tion, Jefferson, McFarland, 2006.
Keller, James R., “The Allegory of Intemperance: Spenser and Green-
    away's the Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover”, Food, Film and
    Culture: A Genre Study, Ed. James R. Keller, Jefferson NC, McFar-
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Lawrence, Amy, The Films of Peter Greenaway, Cambridge, Cambridge
    University Press, 1997.



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                                 Between, vol. VII , n. 14 (Novembre/November 2017)



Pascoe, David, Peter Greenaway: Museums and Moving Images, Islington,
    Reaktion Books, 1997.
Schiavoni, Giulio, “Fuori Dal Coro”, Benjamin, Walter, Il Dramma Ba-
    rocco Tedesco, Turin, Einaudi, 1999: vii-xxxv.
Siegel, Joel, “Greenaway by the Numbers”, Peter Greenaway: Interviews,
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Siegel, Janice F., “Peter Greenaway's the Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her
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                            Filmography
The Belly of an Architect, Dir. Peter Greenaway, United Kingdom-Italy,
    1987.
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, Dir. Peter Greenaway, United
    Kingdom-France, 1989.
Drowning by Numbers, Dir. Peter Greenaway, United Kingdom-
    Netherlands, 1988.



                                                                                21
Mattia Petricola, «I’ll kill him and I’ll eat him!»



The Pillow Book, Dir. Peter Greenaway, Netherlands-United Kingdom-
    France-Luxembourg, 1996.
Prospero’s Books, Dir. Peter Greenaway, United Kingdom, 1991.
A Zed & Two Noughts, Dir. Peter Greenaway, United Kingdom-
    Netherlands, 1985.



                                          The author
         Mattia Petricola

Mattia Petricola is a Ph.D. student in comparative literature at the
University of Bologna and the University of Paris-Sorbonne. His work
focuses on intermediate states between life and death in literature,
cinema, and comics from E.A. Poe to today. His research interests
include speculative fiction, video art, death studies and cultural
studies. He is currently publishing articles on Philip K. Dick, Peter
Greenaway, queer hermeneutics, and the notion of spectrality in media
studies.
      Email: mattia.petricola@gmail.com



                                           The paper
Date sent: 15/05/2017
Date accepted: 30/09/2017
Date published: 30/11/2017



                              How to quote this paper
Petricola, Mattia, “«I’ll kill him and I’ll eat him!»: Peter Greenaway and
the cinematic Trauerspiel”, Maschere del tragico, Eds. C. Cao, A.
Cinquegrani, E. Sbrojavacca, V. Tabaglio, Between, VII.14 (2017),
http://www.betweenjournal.it/


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