NO GPS | Guess Who's Comin' to Dinner? They're on The Menu! | Ep22

Originally set to release in January, this episode of NO GPS dives deep into the biting satire of the film The Menu, unraveling its critique of class, capitalism, and the art world. Mez, Matt and Aharon explore how the movie captures the widening gap between the rich and the working class, a world where the only time the "haves" and "have-nots" interact is when the elite are being served. It’s no wonder that the restaurant becomes the perfect scene for a class reckoning. The podcast also touches on the profound shift from labor exploitation to societal neglect—today’s workers aren’t merely exploited; they’ve become invisible, marginalized by a system that strips them of value.

The guys also discuss how The Menu mirrors our world’s obsession with scarcity and exclusivity, particularly in the realm of food and art. The film’s critique of hustle culture and capitalism's hollow promises is clear: the rich have time to become specialists in meaningless pursuits, while those who serve them struggle to survive. Both groups struggle with the same issue: a lack of meaning and purpose outside of production, circulation and consumption. Ultimately, The Menu offers a chilling reflection of the current Euro-American soul — a soul that has gotten itself lost in a Maze of profits and cheap thrills, leaving art, creativity, and human connection starving for meaning.

 

Time stamps for The Menu:

 

0:50 - Intro

2:33 - Ralph Fiennes is in this movie?!

3:00 - Spoiler Alert

3:35 - A post-Covid era movie that got turned into a cult classic

4:10 - A critique of the uneasy critique of the relationship between art & commerce

4:40 - Aharon is an artist? Yup, one that does it because he loves it, not because he receives sustenance from it

5:15 - The writers for the Onion wrote this? Everyone is a performance artist now, even New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

6:00 - This movie gives insight into the world of super scarce food that the global rich enjoy. Things like molecular cooking.

6:50 - the mega wealth and cultural gap between the super rich and the rest of us is symbolized in the movie by the austere and monastic lifestyle of the workers/servers and the restaurant’s patrons who live lifestyles Robin Leach couldn’t even fathom

7:57 - Fanboys are killing the mystery of art by exposing all of the secrets to greatness

8:50 - The consumer eventually becomes the consumed

9:20 - Scarcity creates value in this era of too late capitalism. The world is becoming a dessert

10:34 - This is a film that gives you insight into the current American soul

13:40 - Artist’s need the basics of life to be covered to create good art - but do they need the type of capital that big studios provide for this?

16:40 - Hustle culture - the global rich have an excess of time, hence they become specialists in things that do not give society, on a whole, value, at least for humans. And the meaning they derive is taken from those who must work endlessly for their daily bread

17:25 - We all need to get a life - we work to live we should not live to work

18:08 - The film examines subjects, both rich and poor, who live without meaning

18:50 - Working to enrich the soul, not one’s pockets (Poiesis) 

19:08 - The people that serve the global rich live nowhere near the places they work. They exist on the edge of the cities - hence, the only time they can address a class conflict is at the site, the work site, where one works

20:35 - Economic segregation - and why is Chef Slowik quoting Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham City Jail’?

22:00 - The workforce, the cooks, are themselves a cult because it is the only outlet of meaning in a world that stripped them of value so ruthlessly. The sacred has been stripped of meaning by capital

22:40 - The service class themselves are going through their own delusions and mythmaking to give themselves meaning - even if it deals with them getting revenge in the most heinous way against their elite overlords

23:15 - The situation the film reveals is one where workers are no longer workers but are serfs that pay rent and receive none of the value they create. Hence, the horror that is revealed is that Capitalists are no longer capitalists, but are rather feudal lords

23:45 - Venture Capitalists can get wicked with it. No angels in their investments

24:50 - Margo aka Erin figures it all out. The oldest profession and its practitioners see the truth and hypocrisy of the world before we all do

26:40 - Cheeseburgers with American cheese will Make America Great Again

28:00 - The Chef comes back to his roots - the place that makes America possible: Waterloo (Iowa). Historical link to the battle of Waterloo that ushered in a century of peace in the Euro-American world. A cheeseburger is the symbol for this return to the thing that makes one Great, again

28:50 - Losing the American soul

29:50 - Aharon gives his advice on how to make art that has soul

30:30 - Who will pay for good art in a middle-classless world? The real customers for elite art are the elites

32:00 - We’ve entered a truly Gilded Age - the public can no longer support art made by artists that make art for the public

33:30 - The difference between the performance, the labor and the work

34:35 - Shout out to the show ‘The Bear’

35:10 - We live in a time when a lot of popular media being made these days makes fun of the rich - the rich laugh at us laughing at them..

36:15 - Cultural anhedonia has taken hold - pain, in a world filled with fake smiling faces trying to sell you something, is the only thing that can mark you as being real. This is the real function of horror as a genre in this era of too late capitalism

39:00 - With this film Mark Mylod shows us the emptiness of his subjects

41:10 - The guys dream of returning back to Eritrea and making chic exclusive food from cactus pear

42:10 - The guys finally admit they are looking for venture capital to make their art full time lol

43:05 - Outro