A winding essay on food, fatherhood, body image, and one of the most famous movie stars in the world:
There are many options available if you want to watch a supercut of Brad Pitt eating. They range from three-minute collections of the obvious clips to the more satisfying 20-minute epics that trace his consumption across three decades. His two greatest eating performances, in my educated opinion, come in Moneyball and the entire Ocean’s franchise, primarily because nothing about the character or plot seems to call for food but Pitt makes the choice to turn food into a central component of both. Casing a luxury casino in your silver leisure suit? Eat an ice cream cone in violent lunges and gulps. Pacing the bowels of a baseball stadium during the late innings of a crucial game? Shove half a hero sandwich into your mouth, let mayonnaise and lettuce leak onto your trapezoidal chin, chew for an impossibly long time before delivering your line. These scenes blur into a sort of magical realism for me — this particular, painstakingly captured hunger incongruous with every other data point given by the movie.
What I’m talking about is watching a body that is made to be looked at, that is professionally looked at, behave as though it’s simply doing something natural, unconcerned with what we might see. It seems I’ve just described the concept of acting. What I mean, though, is when the incongruity feels gratuitous, or at least pointed, and the lack of acknowledgment of that pointedness becomes part of the pleasure or tension — the one nude person on a non-nude beach rolling over for an even tan, an act of defiance made nonchalant.
