3 hours ago
Going ahead, I will never be able to unsee the dining dead. At restaurants my eyes will skip from the eager, carefully dressed couples wading through try-hard conversation, the comfortably jaded ones with their inside jokes, the exhausted ones coaxing their children to eat the spinach, and land finally on the pairs of faces tight with shame and irritation. Their fingers picking at the tablecloth, restless in discomfort and grudging boredom. The space between these couples is so thick and miserable that even disagreement doesn’t inject into it. Only the sounds of waiters gliding from table to table and clinking, clattering, scraping cutlery against dishes. The movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” demonstrates this dining dead phenomenon in a grim feat of mimesis — Clementine (the female protagonist) stabs her chicken and sips her beer at a Chinese restaurant. Her eyes dart around as she feels a dull, inexplicable humiliation that mounts into sensitive impatience. Her boyfriend, Joel, slouches and grumbles in front of her. She snaps at him — a scathing reminder to clean his hair off the soap in the shower. They have nothing else to say to each other. “Are we like those bored couples you feel sorry for in restaurants?” Joel thinks. “Are we the dining dead? I can’t stand the idea of us being a couple people think that about.”