1. Hurt Locker: the supermarket scene in Kathryn Bigelow’s 2008 film. (The muzak style soundtrack is “Your Smiling Face” by The Norman Candler Strings.)
“Sergeant First Class William James is back from his Iraq bomb squad tour of duty and he’s trying to cope with normality back home. His wife Connie asks him “Do you wanna get some cereal and I’ll meet you at the checkout stand?” Her patient smile tells us that William’s re-entry has been just as much of a challenge for her as it has been for him. William says “Okay, cereal,” and walks a few paces and says “Where…?” then keeps walking. We cut to William standing in the cereal aisle looking at the myriad of choices in front of him.”
–Jason, Alpaca Suitcase
(Two more cinematic supermarket scenes, after the fold…)
2. The Stepford Wives: the supermarket scene at the end of the 1975 film, directed by Bryan Forbes. (Filmed at a Grand Union in a Connecticut shopping center named, “Goodwives Shopping Center”)
“The Stepford Wives contains a number of timeless scenes that are the essence of women’s fears about the patriarchal society in which they live. The final scene, taking place in a supermarket with all the Stepford wives pushing grocery carts, beaming vacantly with perfect hair and make-up, dressed to perfection in pastel sun dresses and matching hats, is a kind of creep-inducing summation of suburban blandness—the ultimate expression of the modern woman reduced to the lowest common denominator.”
–James Kendrick, QNetwork
3. Tout va bien (Everything’s Going Fine): the 10 minute long supermarket scene in Godard’s 1972 film. The supermarket is ostensibly a huge Carrefour, although the store brand signage looks sort of ad hoc. (That’s Jane Fonda as a foreign correspondent, taking notes.)
The film’s centerpiece is a long, long tracking shot that takes place in what appears to be a supermarket. The camera moves down an endless, surreal series of checkout counters, all with long lines of people obediently queueing with big wagons of food, dozens and dozens of registers, hundreds of customers, a slow parade of consumption. Then the radicals come to liberate the groceries. They shout: “Free! It’s all free!” And the camera reverses, starts tracking back to the left, as all the shoppers run to fill their carts and try to charge out of the store. The police arrive (the camera keeps tracking), they try to subdue the crowd, and a comic war of all against all breaks out before your eyes. It looks like a collaboration between the Keystone Kops and Jacques Tati, overseen by Mao, but it’s Godard’s view of the way we live, circa 1972: a society hamstrung by its own political posturing (from all sides), thrown into a weird mixture of chaos and ennui.
–Les Phillips,
AGIT-PRANK Jean-Luc Godard’s underappreciated 1972 comedy, Tout Va Bien
See also: Piggly Wiggly
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