The Kitchen in Pain: (Un)Making Macbeth in the ‘Wrong’ Space, Dys-locating Emotion-related Metaphors
The Kitchen in Pain: (Un)Making Macbeth in the ‘Wrong’ Space, Dys-locating Emotion-related Metaphors

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines Peter Moffat and Mark Brozel’s film Macbeth (BBC One, 2005) from the perspective of ‘culinary’/‘digestive’ thought and passion metaphors, which appear to undergird its setting of the action in a restaurant kitchen. My approach draws on cognitive theories of metaphor such as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s and Earl Mac Cormac’s, on the one hand, and on neurocognitive studies of the cortical control of anger, vengeful thoughts and action, and appetite, on the other, to suggest the ‘inevitability’ that modern reinterpretations dis/dys-locate a revenge tragedy such as Shakespeare’s to the kitchen. The BBC Macbeth is studied, moreover, in relation to two short films, Martha Rosler’s feminist parody Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) and Enrico Giori’s revenge film noir parody The Last Supper (2016), for their shared dys-location of vengeful thoughts to the kitchen as the ‘natural’ space for concocting revenge.

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