I don’t know about you… but when I am enjoying the simple pleasures of the cinema, one of my favorite delights is witnessing: a Fridge Shot.
These are shots where the camera is already inside the fridge when a character in a movie needs to get something from their refrigerator. The moment is brief, but contains SUCH embodied satisfaction. The light goes on, spotlighting a the face. Features go curious or slack, illuminated.
These moments often overflow with clues around the world the film is presenting. What does our character eat? What’s been sitting there, waiting? These moments make me imagine the characters outside the realm of the film, having a snack in the time before their life was plot.
A great example? Bridget Jones’ Diary.
I love the way that she deals with cheese in this scene. I have also always died at her fridge. Ripe! With! Meaning!
Problematic, sure, but the faces she makes are SO funny. Bridget is strange and silly and sweet, and so are her belongings. Her fridge, weirdly cluttered and weirdly empty, reflects a realistic imperfection. A combination of objects turns into something quite embodied.
The more I think about Fridge Shots, the more I realize how few I’ve seen of them in recent years.
In this reel of Fridge Moments (that I have unfortunately now watched maybe one million times), the majority seem to land between 1984 and 2010. When I got to thinking more, I realized that maybe I have seen Fridge Shots more recently. But mostly from the outside looking in, on YouTube and random videos like Fridge Tours where celebrities hyper-organize their refrigerators and perform brand recognition. This feels indicative of the inversion from private space to public, to the democratizing of celebrity culture (anyone’s fridge is famous if you’re viral!), and the opaque line between products and quotidien objects. The camera is held from without, not within.
Isn’t it funny to imagine Bridget Jones having a Kris Jenner fridge? We would think she was a sociopath.
Fridges are containers with the design of preservation.
Duh! But still, worth remembering. They are highly-powered units that, after their invention in 1913, permanently altered our food system. Climate control meant that we could keep food stable for significantly longer than ever before. Suddenly, we could make things last.
Growing up, we would stop in the Fairway by the West Side Highway for groceries. There were jackets outside the Giant Freezer I would walk through with my parents, utterly mesmerized, loving my massive coat that many strangers had definitely worn already that day. Cozy! So cold! So big! So loud! When I started working in restaurants, I quickly learned how – for fleeting moments – a walk-in can feel like an oasis of privacy. Everything is cold and still. In the midst of chaos, meetings can be held. Sometimes you can go in there to gossip or kiss! Also, to cry.
Follies
In the summer of 2019 (that was a good summer), we went to Storm King and saw the Mark Dion exhibit entitled Follies. These were a series of installations within nature that depicted structurally intimate spaces (caves, cabins, enclosed rooms) that were uncanny in how organic they felt. An avid collector, Dion created memory boxes planted within the landscape, buried with meaning.
The one I remember best is called “The Field Station of the Melancholy Marine Biologist” (2017-18). It’s an laboratory nestled so close to a hiking path that we spent some time debating whether the structure was a Piece or a Literal Workspace.
Looking closer was the only way to really tell.
If you squint, you can discern a shelf of various alcohols. Not chemical ones for science, but drinking ones for humans. The space is Dion’s envisioning of a scientist who, in “studying the natural world realizes the future’s not looking so good…”. While this sentiment might feel grim, it lends energy in imagination; amongst the scientific discovery, the necessity for a drink.
I think I like a fridge shot
Because it is a moment in time, presented and preserved. It is the cheese left in the corner of the fridge for so long that it grows mold. With a little chiseling, perhaps it might still edible.