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...
Lynne Taylor-Corbett’s Picnic on the Grass (2007) is a choreographic adaptation of Claude Monet’s Luncheon on the Grass (1865). The music is from Francis Poulenc’s Sinfonietta (1947). Featured Image: Lynne Taylor-Corbett. Picnic on the...
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...
Discussing Chaucer and Shakespeare, Bloom coins the interesting but enigmatic phrase “picnic of selves”: “A critic addicted to what is now called “language” but might more aptly be called the “priority of language over meaning” will not be much given to searching for...
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
Sirbiladze’s Drug Picnic is unpicnicky. A nightmare. See Tamuna Sirbiladze. Drug Picnic (2008). Acrylic on canvas.
Charles Darwin’s struggle to complete and publish On the Origin of the Species (1859) is Amiel’s idea for a picnic. This picnic probably never happened, but Amiel thought it a pleasant way for Darwin to discuss his scientific observations. The jolly picnic...
The newlyweds, Carl, and Ellie Fredricksen, dream of their future at a picnic. Walking out into the countryside, Karl and Ellie spread a picnic on the grass. Then, looking at the sky, they dream of a family. Alas, their romantic dreams of visiting Paradise Falls are...
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...
“Killing time” is Atkinson’s euphemism for a picnic. When Tracy Waterhouse, a retired sixty-five-year-old police detective, inexplicably abducts Courtney, a child of five, she is unsure about entertaining her. In near desperation, she suggests,...
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,...
Corbijn’s The American is moderately faithful to Martin Booth’s novel A Very Private Gentleman. It’s the story of a gunmaker/assassin hiding from his enemies. Booth’s novel has three picnics, but Corbijn includes two. Hired to make a...
Benjamin Black’s picnic at Howth alludes to James Joyce’s Ulysses. The date is the same fifty-two years later, June 16, 1956, but the picnickers and their intentions are very different. In Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, and Marian “Molly,” Tweedy make...
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,...
Bourdos’ Renoir gives you the feeling of living in Renoir’s Cagnes-sur-Mer. It’s now a suburb of Nice, but in the summer of 1915, it was the country home of Auguste Renoir. The estate Cagnes-sur mer is still extant and still holds the picnicky aura...
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...
In June 1939, FDR entertained King George VI and Queen Margaret at a picnic in Hyde Park, New York, his “other” White House. The picnic is significantly fictionalized. Michell and screenwriter Richard Nelson add much to the story but omit Eleanor...
Vogue Magazine staged an Edith Wharton picnic with photography by Annie Leibovitz and text by Colm Toibin. The picnic was photographed on the grounds of The Mount, Wharton’s home in Lennox, Massachusetts. See “The Custom of the Country: Vogue Re-creates...
