The Kitchen is a new Netflix movie, directed by Daniel Kaluuya and Kibwe Tavares. It’s an excellent addition to the genre of film in which a working-class London neighbourhood is invaded by hostile outsiders (see also Attack the Block (“INNER CITY VERSUS OUTER SPACE”) and Cockneys versus Zombies (“This city ain’t big enough for the both of them!”), both made around a decade ago).
The Kitchen in the movie is a housing estate in near-future London. Netflix bills The Kitchen as sci-fi, but the Kitchen’s invaders aren’t aliens, as in Attack the Block, or zombies: they’re the police enforcing the evictions that’ll allow the Kitchen to be redeveloped. Zombie and alien invasion films are often taken as metaphors for contemporary concerns: nuclear war, capitalist alienation. In the case of The Kitchen, though, the invasion and destruction of poor neighbourhoods by property capitalism is not allegorised in any way: it is made viscerally real.
This literalism reminded me of something NK Jemisin wrote about her two Great Cities novels. Those books are also about a city being invaded (New York), this time by an actual alien (you know what I mean), and the alien is both convincingly real in terms of the story and clearly metaphorical: white, tentacular, extractive, plugging into bodies and minds to render resistance useless. There are certainly many analogies at work in these two books: the first especially is a great, challenging read. At the end of the second book, The World We Make, Jemisin explains that she intended to write a third but by the time the first was finished, what was actually happening in New York had outstripped satire. “I had to change one of my initial planned plots for this book—a monstrous president waging war on his own hometown—because Trump got there first,” she says. “The Great Cities trilogy that I’d initially planned became a duology because I realized my creative energy was fading under the onslaught of reality”
While it certainly can’t be accused of lacking creative energy, I got the feeling that as a creative intervention, The Kitchen occupies a similar relation to urban change in cities like London and New York, and many more, as do the Great Cities novels. The movie clearly didn’t lack the budget to show aliens or zombies, because the digital visual effects are impressive, but it chose not to: economic, social and political relations and dynamics clearly understandable from our contemporary moment are frightening enough.
I can’t close without saying more about those visual effects, because they are both part of the film as it’s meant to be seen by us spectators – they visualise the near-future city of which the Kitchen is part – and also because onscreen digital images play a role in the film’s narrative. Lots of critics have remarked on the film’s VFX and they are very good. London’s existing built environment seems to have been intensified: the London Eye has been upgraded; the skyline has even more striking tall buildings; the Kitchen is a huge building over which drones hover and sweep. Watching on a tv screen I could see how that urban landscape would scale up impressively in a cinema. There are smaller pleasures too: the vibrant market of the Kitchen has lots of floating glowing signs which look rather lovely; bits of what I looks very much like the actual Barbican complex in London have been modified to become a crematorium (maybe that’s metaphorical).
Digitally-produced images of cities also feature in a key scene in the movie where one of the main characters finally accesses a new apartment provided by the company wanting to redevelop the Kitchen. There’s no actual window in the one-room apartment (the decor of which looks very much like what’s pictured in endless CGIs of new apartments now). Rather, there is a wall-size screen with a selection of aerial urban views of exactly the same kind that property developers now frequently use to sell their apartments: a view from on high of a city at dusk, lit buildings twinkling like urban fairy lights. And the streets of the London we see in the movie are full of billboards picturing new developments in just that style. So it’s not just the physical landscape of this London that’s being reshaped by big developers, but also its visual culture.
I’m probably a bit over-focussed on such things, but it did seem to me that there was a strong and interesting convergence between these computer-generated marketing images and how the city as a whole was pictured in The Kitchen. The VFX are good but they’re not quite at the level of Dune, say, or The Creator, or San Andreas. There was a slightly sketchy quality to them, a slightly washed-out, pale colour palette. While this did make me wonder that perhaps future London has at least benefited from being a low emission zone, I was also strongly reminded precisely of the computer-generated images frequently used by property developers, pitching their apartment blocks in the ever-sunny uplands of property-owning capitalism. Just like the characters are only offered CGI views when they leave the Kitchen, then, so too it felt that as viewers of the film, our vision of the city also has been infected by real-estate-VFX.
There’s a lot more to say about the film, of course. Fantastic acting, rather slow pacing but with some great set pieces, fails the Bechdel test. It’s a fascinating watch, and has certainly given me a lot of food for thought as I ponder the implications of various digitally-created images of urban life.
visual/method/culture 