Banksy’s Picnic (2005c.)

Banksy’s Picnic (2005c.)

Banksy’s satirical Picnic contrasts a group of indigenous African hunter-gatherers bewildered by the Picnic of a White middle-class urban family picnicking on the beach. The contrast between civilizations and technologies suggests irreconcilable differences...
Stephen Frears’s The Queen (2007)

Stephen Frears’s The Queen (2007)

According to Stephen Frears, the Balmoral picnic is a glum episode as the Queen and family deal with the grief and notoriety resulting from the death of Princess Diana. Having retreated to Balmoral, a glum royal family tries to find solace outdoors. When the Queen...

James G. Davis’s Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Unbound (2006)

Davis’s Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Unbound, is a picnic enigma based on the Greek myth of Prometheus. The best-known versions of which are Hesiod’s Theogony (700 BCE) and Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Unbound, and Prometheus Fire-Bringer (415 c. BCE). None...
Beth Henley’s Ridiculous Fraud (2007)

Beth Henley’s Ridiculous Fraud (2007)

Henley’s play Ridiculous Fraud climaxes with a family picnic in a cemetery. “Picnics in the graveyard! A great New Orleans tradition,” says Uncle Baites, “Why weep over the dead? We come, we go. We come, we go!” It is the annual Clay...
Sarah Gavron’s Brick Lane (2007)

Sarah Gavron’s Brick Lane (2007)

Gavron’s picnic in Brick Lane retells Monica Ali’s Bangladeshi family, outwardly happy but inwardly troubled in London’s East End. After twenty years, Nazneen’s arranged marriage to Chanu Ahmed is wobbly. The picnic is supposed to be a lark, but it’s a kind of torture...
David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007)

David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007)

Fincher’s Zodiac adapts Robert Graysmith’s obsessive reporting of serial killings killed in the San Francisco Bay area, named after the killer who identified as Zodiac. The murders began at a picnic in 1968 and did not stop until 1978, by which time 37...

Louis Gluck’s “Noon” (2007)

The setting for Gluck’s “Noon” is about lost innocence. It’s a  picnic at which two youths engage in a sexual act without considering what happens next. The unanswered question it whether this is an act of lust or love. Noon is meant to suggest the symbolic time...
David RussellTalbott’s Apple Pie Picnic (2008)

David RussellTalbott’s Apple Pie Picnic (2008)

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...