The Kitchen Is A Hot Mess With Enough Flavor To Outperform Expectations, Just Like Its Characters
Although The Kitchen is, debatably, a hot mess, it is unequivocally resonant, rendering opining critics irrelevant, and leaving last night’s tantalized audience — whose expectations were mildly subverted, whilst their projections via revenge-fantasies of female self-actualizations in a male-dominated paradigm within existential facticities that circumscribe their sense of life-options were gratified — unable to decide about whether or not to clap, though they really wanted to, and many did, once a few started, making for a microcosmic case-study of female self-liberation amidst a newly-visualized terrain of empowerment. Some rather vocal folk in the audience just enjoyed the gangsta element and commented non-stop (I have a love-hate relationship with all-media screenings; great feedback-gauging, yet sometimes very annoying; last night was both).
And while this isn’t really a newly-visualized terrain, as there will be inevitable and correct comparisons to Fox Studios’ Widows, The Kitchen adds layers of self-emancipation that speak directly to the nature of male-female household relations circa ’78 (and in many cases, circa now). Like Widows, there are trailer-highlight expository dialogues that pretty much read as loglines — yet also exist as bedrock facts about womanhood-as-second-class-citizenship; things that still need to be said, and are well elucidated in, for example, McCarthy’s correction of her father’s endorsement of her liberation, as she quite precisely, and emphatically, well, calls bullshit on his superimposition of his view of her role and motives (reductively ascribed by him to protecting her children — in a church no less, making for rich semiotics), and in the process she indicts a suffocating way of life and explains her self-actualization, exemplifying the appeal this will have for many women.
Sure, a female revenge-fantasy might be considered — by definition — an un-feminist contradiction of terms, however, again, the aforementioned male-dominated intra-household dynamics’ horrific limitation of the females’ sense of identity, worth and efficacy lead to a self-actualizing that is arguably radically feminist. By way of a spoiler alert, one storyline flips the Medea script, sparing the children — and the shot-calling wife, in the process.
The appeal of this movie is wide, and its gangsta-days-of-future-past, female-dominated storyline will resonate strongly — from construction household wives in Staten Island, through money-fantasy-chasing Instagrammers and Tinderers for whom Hip-Hop gangsta tales are a lingua franca (across all ethnicities), to what are reductively called “urban” demos. Simply put: The Kitchen’s ’70s old-spice Irish thing is strong enough for the ladies, but guys will like it, too. One can envision Mel and Don screening it at the White House**, with the former cheering-on the action, and the latter claiming that his screening it with his wife is proof that he’s sensitive to women’s concerns.
Arguably, the usage of a powerful male crime-lord benefactor could be seen as undermining the female empowerment story — or it could be SOP in a gangsta movie (in any case, there is, again, expository dialogue stating exactly this dilemma). The ecclesiastic implications of an avenging angel named Gabriel are obvious-yet-wicked fun, though perhaps the killing-off of the most violent character makes for a moral corrective that you just knew a Hollywood flick would have to include.
In summary, sure, The Kitchen’s gear-switches are a little instant in depicting the quick rise of these queenpins, but the violence is admirably anti-climactic — and by this I mean immensely realistic, correctly gruesome in the service of manifesting how it’s easy to see a dozen bad guys get blown away, but quite a different experience to witness the forensics of carving a single corpse so that it is primed for a permanent disappearance in the river, in addition to the often close-range, single-shot episodes of murder that would do Valerie Solanas proud, by way of a S.C.U.M.-Gangsta flick. I could see this sequelized in a Peak TV series –or better yet, on The Lifetime Network — now that would be subversive.
Extra-credit viewing: my on-camera interview with Melissa McCarthy, which finds her sharing anecdotes from her early days as a broke actress in NYC. You can read the entire piece HERE.
* End note: Regarding my Mel and Don quip, this is the first and last attempt at humor I will make towards an administration which has me deeply troubled, to the extent that I find nearly all humor and satire counterproductive by way of normalizing extra-legal actions and also dead-ending valid action-requiring concerns amidst the citizenry.
That said, the last election, if nothing else, elucidated massive untenable hypocrisy and outright exclusion on the part of all parties, and has made the case for new political parties amidst a new political paradigm, an irreversible inevitability and a healthy steam-valve and bridge-builder. Remember, we are NOT a two-party system; we are an infinite-parties, petitionary democracy, and in most ways, both current parties are, well, fucked in the head and fucking us all in the process. And the preceding paragraph is not a political tangent, it is in the spirit of this film’s necessarily raw liberationary mechanics — and this is a blog; my blog. You can start your own HERE.
