Midnight Diner: Food, Story, Liquidity
Below is an excerpt for my article on Netflix’s quiet masterpiece, Midnight Diner,which was published in the Centre for Christianity and Society’s Ethos blog. A link to the full article can be found at the bottom of this post.
Back in 2000, the late Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman wrote a book entitled Liquid Modernity. In two words, Bauman was able to provide a glimpse into what is a widespread cultural condition. It is a condition in which sources of stability no longer hold, and individuals are thrust into all manner of cultures, tasks, situations and relationships in which commitments have been replaced by the qualifier ‘until further notice’. Liquidity and flux are now the hallmarks of what might be called ‘global cities’, where industrial outputs have been whittled out and have given way to ephemeral services. Historical points of reference are less sources of reverence and more potential resources, to be appropriated for the next profit-generating sound- or pic-byte. Awash in this never-ending flood in these new global cores, a few might clamour for something, anything, to anchor and stabilise themselves. These can be artifacts, memories or communities. Yet, it seems that it is only in the peripheries that such anchors can be found.
The Netflix series Midnight Diner focuses on the owner of a tiny back-alley diner in one of these liquid cities, Tokyo. The diner’s owner, known to his patrons as the Master, has a very limited fixed menu, but is also willing to make anything his patrons ask, so long as he has the ingredients. Because the diner opens from midnight, it does not serve what we might call a conventional clientele of office workers or shoppers. Instead, the diner’s clientele consists of the various subcultures housed within the vast city of Tokyo. There are some office workers, retirees and public servants. Then there are the mob bosses, newspaper delivery boys, drag queens, taxi drivers, standup comedians, former pop music or movie starlets, food critics and the odd retired porn star. All of them have in some way been rendered disposable by the liquid city, and all of them find solace in the diner.
Each episode of Midnight Diner is organised around a dish made by the Master. In itself, the dish is unremarkable, but it is made remarkable because it is the favourite dish of one of the patrons. As each episode unfolds, the dish becomes… (read the full article on Ethos)
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