[via]
Central Services: We do the work, you do the pleasure.
From the Guardian:
Terry Gilliam, of course, was born in America, although he has been a British citizen since 1968. He escaped the tyranny of the British schooling system but he certainly seems, by the atmosphere in his short film The Wholly Family (which was financed by Italian pasta manufacturer Garofalo), to have caught a funny relationship with food off those Pythons. Or maybe it was a similar attitude to food that drew them together.
And food in The Wholly Family is undeniably nightmarish. Giant men-dollies cram rubbery spaghetti into their mouths, shaking strands aloft while making ghoulish noises. As the little hungry boy, sent to bed with no supper for being a brat, sits down at a table to get stuck in to some dream food, plates are snatched from under his nose before he can get any on his fork.
Huge silver domes are lifted off a platter to reveal, horrifyingly, the little boy's parents' heads, surrounded with parsley. At the height of his hysterical dream, the boy appears as a broken puppet and puppets, of course, don't need to eat. Food is thrown around and played with, the men-dolly waiters dance about carrying plates of this and platters of that, but the food is almost never seen – not even the apology breakfast feast the little boy rolls into his parents' bedroom in the morning (unless you count the chocolate smeared on his face) – and barely eaten.
Who knows, maybe this disrespect to food is, truly, Gilliam's idea of a nightmare; maybe he is the most terrific gourmand in his personal life and employs a Michelin-starred private chef to make him tricky little titbits for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day. But I doubt it. Like so many tortured by desperate mid-century catering (he is also a workaholic and therefore permanently in a hurry), he will love and eat, mostly, pasta.
[The whole of the wholly fucked-up The Wholly Family is viewable here.]
