Culinary Semiotics: The Dinner Table as a Cinematic Site of Family, Power, Memory, and Performance

Jo Coghlan

The dinner table, an everyday object of domestic life, frequently emerges within cinema as a potent site of ideological enactment, familial tensions, memory construction, and performances of power and identity. Though mundane, the dinner table’s structure—a communal space around which family members or social actors gather—makes it inherently conducive to staging conflicts and hierarchies through carefully choreographed social rituals. Within cinematic representation, these rituals foreground not merely individual relationships, but the broader socio-cultural discourses and power dynamics that shape identities and institutions.

Pierre Bourdieu's sociological analysis provides critical tools to understand how dinner scenes embody and dramatise forms of social distinction and symbolic violence. Central to his theory is the notion that taste and consumption habits are never neutral acts but rather function as mechanisms of social classification and differentiation. Within film narratives, such notions of taste manifest prominently in representations of dining, where distinctions based upon class, education, and cultural capital become performative. Through these enactments, cinema not only highlights but also critiques the invisible hierarchies and exclusions inherent in everyday life.

Claude Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology complements Bourdieu's insights by emphasising food’s role as a mediator of cultural structures, kinship networks, and symbolic oppositions. Lévi-Strauss conceptualises food and cooking practices through binary oppositions—raw versus cooked, pure versus impure—arguing that such distinctions serve to articulate underlying social and symbolic structures. The cinematic dinner table, therefore, becomes a spatial and symbolic site through which filmmakers negotiate the deeper structures of kinship, authority, and taboo.

These theoretical frameworks illuminate the dinner table's function within cinema as a central symbolic and narrative element. Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972) epitomises this dynamic, using family dinners within the Corleone household to delineate strict patriarchal authority, structured silence, and performative rituals of loyalty. Here, the cinematic table reinforces familial power hierarchies and cultural obligations through ritualised gestures and strategic silence, thus enacting Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as unconscious but potent reinforcement of social order. The carefully choreographed interactions at the Corleone table invoke Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist analysis by reinforcing kinship bonds and cultural taboos, through rites of eating and subtle acts of omission.

In contrast, American Beauty (1999) dramatises the superficiality and alienation hidden beneath the veneer of suburban domesticity. The Burnham family’s meticulously arranged dinner table setting becomes an ironic mise-en-scène of performative taste and bourgeois aspirations. Yet beneath this façade lies an intense emotional void. Here, the dinner table serves to subvert the logic of bourgeois distinction, destabilising traditional gender roles and class-based performances through the very rituals that typically uphold them. The result is a critique of middle-class conformity and social reproduction, aligning closely with Bourdieu’s articulation of symbolic power as a form of social violence.

Similarly, Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019) explicitly positions the dinner table as a locus of class masquerade and aspirational performance. The affluent Parks’ dining scenes starkly contrast with the impoverished Kims’ subterranean eating spaces, making explicit Lévi-Strauss’s structural binaries—high/low, clean/dirty—while simultaneously illuminating Bourdieu’s concept of taste as a signifier of economic privilege and cultural legitimacy. The film’s now-iconic dish of ram-don (instant noodles mixed with premium beef) symbolically underscores these structural contrasts, manifesting the tensions and contradictions inherent within class identity and aspiration.

In Ari Aster’s horror film Hereditary (2018), the dinner table is transformed into a psychological theatre where familial trauma, grief, and unspeakable truths simmer beneath ritualistic silence. Here, food is secondary to the psychic violence communicated through tense exchanges and restrained performances. This portrayal mobilises Lévi-Strauss’s notion of taboo, suggesting that familial bonds rely upon carefully maintained silences, with the dinner table serving as the site where these silences begin to collapse into overt emotional chaos. Similarly, Bourdieu’s idea of symbolic violence resonates within the family members’ inability to address openly their collective grief and resentment, ultimately exploding in raw confrontation.

Michael Sarnoski’s Pig (2021) offers a radically different treatment of the cinematic dinner table, presenting it as a space of ethical reckoning and emotional authenticity rather than social distinction. Rob’s climactic confrontation in an elite restaurant explicitly subverts traditional Bourdieuian conceptions of taste as symbolic violence or social hierarchy. Instead, the film positions food and culinary skill as vehicles of emotional connection, memory, and personal authenticity, disrupting conventional structures of culinary distinction and power. In this sense, Pig uses the table not to reinforce class distinction but to dismantle it, promoting a conception of taste as empathetic practice and a form of emotional truth.

Collectively, these cinematic portrayals of the dinner table reveal its profound semiotic and ideological potency. The dinner table operates as a classed and gendered stage where power is explicitly and implicitly enacted, identity performed, and cultural memory contested and reconstituted. Far from serving as mere background, it becomes an essential cinematic space for examining the intersections between cultural practice, social hierarchy, and symbolic conflict. The cinematic dinner table emerges not just as furniture or a space of domestic realism, but as a symbolic structure that frames broader cultural anxieties and aspirations. It dramatises social tensions, encodes memories, lays bare the performative and ideological underpinnings of taste, class, and familial identity. In doing so, cinema underscores that what is consumed at these tables is never merely food, but the very essence of social identity and cultural belonging itself.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.

Counihan, Carole, and Penny Van Esterik, eds. Food and Culture: A Reader. 4th ed. New York: Routledge, 2018.

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 1966.

Ferry, Jane F. Food in Film: A Culinary Performance of Communication. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology. Vol. 1. Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969.

Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. London: Macmillan, 1989.

Probyn, Elspeth. Carnal Appetites: Food, Sex, Identities. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Williams, Linda. "Melodrama Revised." In Refiguring American Film Genres, edited by Nick Browne, 42–88. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.