Samantha wonders what's fuelling the bloody mayhem of the modern movie hero...

It seems amazing that a character can be on the run for forty-eight hours or more and never once feel hungry. It just doesn’t make any sense. How on earth do these characters run, dodge bullets, control reflexes and senses that are the difference between life and death or even have any stamina at all, whilst on an empty stomach? Clearly there are two schools of thought- exposition such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s where that morning Holly, dressed from the night before, munches a Danish and balances a cup of coffee as she peers longingly into the window. – so we immediately get the time (morning), longing, aspiration et al that builds a character arc.

There’s the other school of thought that it would be too costly, finicky and draining to have to redo twenty takes of the same ice cream cone being licked or the plate of food remaining intact despite repeated takes. So be it.

But sustenance is entirely another matter – for goodness sake, to not even feel hungry is pretty extraordinary for the average Joe Bloggs turned superhero/action man. America and the UK are full of obese people who clearly do not have a genetic defect but simply eat too much. But on screen everyone has superhuman powers of strength and mental acuity without consuming either food or drink.

This sends out the signal that food is pretty much alien to survival. The hero is a non eating, non drinking and even non-copulating egomaniac with mythical powers to transcend what the rest of us mere mortals simply cannot live without. That’s great if the plot is so thick with pure fantasy that we barely notice anything bordering on reality and completely lose track of time and everything else while consumed by the film. But the danger in this type of ‘reality’ is that the main character never develops beyond the point of the ‘vehicle by which to make the film move to the next car chase’.

Breakfast At Tiffany's (1961)

Inevitably human beings are complex– we do a whole lot of stuff that is not even filmable but it defines us as people. Mostly we do ordinary things most of the time and in our dreams extraordinary things. An action hero who almost never does anything remotely ordinary is just downright weird. The action genre is the most culpable of making the hero so one-dimensional that we’re not actually rooting for him but merely anticipating that he just doesn’t ruin the plot.

Times have changed: we no longer have family bakers, farmers, artisans who are the foundation for whole communities – these people operated on a rhythmical basis and instead of rushing around had clearly defined paradigms by which to measure their existence. Film doesn’t in the main portray these characters because they simply no longer exist. We shop in 24-hour supermarkets and live in an highly individualistic me--me-me culture. The characters we empathise with therefore are expected to be versions of ourselves.

Brief Encounter (1945)

But is wasn’t always this way: think back to Brief Encounter where Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard share a cup of tea – just stopping and gazing into someone’s eyes is more eloquent than any dialogue. He looks at her, she looks at him...an intensity is building up, and we look forward to watching it erupt.

Eating, like drinking, requires that the hero or heroine does something else with their mouths within the boundaries of decency. Babette’s Feast was a wonderful example of food equating sensual awakening.

Babette's Feast (1987)

We feel – and part of feeling happiness is pleasure, for example of consuming and savouring food. It wasn’t for nothing that the Romans gorged on feasts followed by orgies and general debauchery. All the senses were forced into life, whatever the outcome.

The present day hero is devoid of depth – he runs around, he shoots on target, he saves the day effortlessly, he gets to shag the girl by the end of the film but we don’t really see who he is. Like our throwaway society, the hero is a paper cut-out. Or worse yet, these supermen are designed to appeal to one demographic and not much else.

Imagine what a difference it would have made if 007 ate something (besides disgorging bullets) once in a while or Tom Cruise munched on a can of spinach in a Mission Impossible movie. Or ran out of energy from lack of food and really could not beat up or outwit another villain because he was simply too hungry? And pray tell who has ever enjoyed sex with a stomach rumbling, albeit screaming for something to eat? Who has even felt like sex with the man of one’s dreams (as all these heroes seem to be) on an empty stomach?

Psycho (1960)

Come on Hollywood, give us some reality peppered with fantasy – he eats cereal with cold milk for breakfast, he downs twenty expressos a day, he would die for his ma’s lasagna with the tiniest hint of parsley in the tomato sauce because the parsley brings out the flavour like ma used to say. And he really needs to eat something before sex (or after sex). Or even have a glass of water (now that he can’t smoke).

Which brings me to that old saying that one can live on love and water alone. Sadly I cannot recall one single character who was having such great sex or was so in love that he simply forgot to eat (prove me wrong if you dare).

Don’t get me wrong, there are entire films about food – think Eat, Drink, Man, Woman, where food is the metaphor for a whole host of themes – pathos, paternal love, finding one’s way in the world, even the brevity and futility of existence. But take out the big stuff, and the small stuff like needing to eat and see how the hero seems a bit flat because, in his chase movie, all he does is run.

© Samantha Van Dalen/Shadowlocked.com. Samantha also paints.