Talbott’s Apple Pie Picnic is a send-up of the cliché “As American as apple pie.” Talbott jams as many icons as he can on the picnic cloth. Marilyn Monroe is on her knees next to a picnic basket, a steaming apple pie, a copy of Jack Kerouac’s...
Linhare’s picnickers, always women, are always naked. I’m not sure about the bee on the picnic cloth. See Judith Linares. Picnic Rock (2007). Gouache
Bright Star (2009), Jane Campion’s version of John Keats and Fanny Brawne’s love affair, invents two romantic courtship picnic scenes. These moments are poignant because we know the romance will end in heartbreak. The first is a picnic at which they kiss....
As sappy romantic novels go, David Nicholls’ One Day (2009) is about a one-night sexual encounter that becomes a life-long romantic heartache. Dexter and Emma’s picnic on Arthur’s Seat is never revealed, but we do know what each brings in their...
Kosashvili’s picnic is comic and glum, as Chekhov intended. While other picnickers enjoy the view, Laevski, the protagonist, says, “To be in continual ecstasy over nature shows a poverty of imagination.” Laevski is a man who cannot enjoy himself,...
Wallace’s The Pale King is an unhappy novel by an unhappy author who committed suicide before completing it. As is, a picnic, without food or drink, finds Lane A. Dean, Jr. and his girlfriend Sherri, “good people,” middle-American-Christian youth,...
Wright’s Anna Karenina takes liberties by inventing a picnic that the screenplay by Tom Stoppard suggests is “a lovers’ idyll, by a stream on a warm day.” The picnic episode isn’t Tolstoy’s. As far as I know, there aren’t any...
Gilliam’s Zero Theorem is a sexy, pleasantly ordinary picnic. Except it is virtual, taking place in Qohen’s computer program and placed there by his horrid boss to make him work, work, work. The picnic is a romp on the tropical beach with a virtual sex...
Chadwick’s picnic is perfunctory and idealized. Chadwick and his screenwriter William Nicolson liked the idea of a lovers’ picnic because the narrative needed a romantic interlude. Mandela’s autobiography does not mention a picnic during his...
Wardell Milan’s Sunday, Sitting on the Bank of Butterfly Meadow (2013) is an improvisation of Cartier-Bresson’s Sunday on the Banks of the Marne, 1938. A visual joke, yes?
