It is rather pointless to start with a description of the importance of coffee in our lives considering that you are reading a newspaper about coffee in a cafe that uses coffee from its own coffee bean roaster. And if I can use a variation of the word coffee five times in one sentence (and still make sense), then it's equally pointless to explain why directors and screenwriters have featured it in some of the most memorable scenes from their movies or series. So we'll get right into the bread. Or coffee.
You wake up in the morning, turn on the espresso machine or put the kettle on, drink your morning coffee and go to the office. There you can drink a coffee or two, out of boredom, fatigue, or just to have a reason to take a break. Maybe you even have a coffee in the afternoon to fight the inevitable sleepiness of the short-day months.
Drinking coffee is a pleasant but automated ritual. I, for one, don't even notice when I've finished it, I look at the mug and wonder that it's suddenly empty. That's why if one day a colleague or kid threw a french press full of hot coffee in my face, I'd feel more betrayed than if they stabbed me. And if someone were to put poison in it, it would take me far too long to figure out where the problem was coming from, and even if I caught it poisoned, I'd rather blame it on those from the catering company downstairs than on cappuccino. It's easy to understand, then, why a director or screenwriter who wants to make you feel really bad would take something as pleasant and safe as coffee and turn it into a menacing object.
Alfred Hitchcock, the master of suspense, (or, more honestly, the person whose name is constantly used by people eager to prove that they have watched at least one black and white film at some point in their lives) used coffee in film in quite an inventive way at the time (1946) namely in an attempted murder of the sublime Ingrid Bergman in Notorious . She is an American spy, married to a Nazi Claude Raines for a mission. He realizes that his wife's intentions aren't exactly sincere, but he can't get rid of her through a simple bloody murder, because you know, the rest of the Nazis will realize that he's a bit incompetent. With the help of his mother (like I said, she's kind of incompetent), he decides to poison her by regularly putting poison in her coffee. Bergman realizes the cause of her sudden health problems rather late, when mother and son won't let the doctor come to help her drink from her cup. Note that poisoning wasn't so cliche back then (Agatha Christie was poisoning victims as young as 10), so the character has an excuse for the delayed revelation. It's also worth noting that the shots of the coffee cups in the film are so tense that you won't be able to look at your morning coffee the same way after watching it, at least not for a few days. That's even if it's as nicely decorated as the ones in Olivo. After all, if anyone can make an ordinary object seem particularly menacing, it's Hitchcock.
Another director who used the coffee mug as a time bomb, and who, in turn, many people call him when they want to sound more cinephile, is François Truffaut. La sirène du Mississipi (1969) is a noir love story. A plantation owner (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is waiting to meet his girlfriend whom he has only seen in a picture and whom he hooked from a matrimonial ad. When the moment comes, the cute and demure girl in the ad is replaced by Catherine Deneuve, the definition of mysterious beauty, who excuses the incompatibility of the images with a remark like "I wanted you to love me for who I am." Belmondo, who in turn lied, being much richer than he had implied, believes it for real, especially because he got a girl 10 times hotter than he expected. The first clue that warns us that Deneuve is much more dangerous than she seems is the fact that she likes to drink coffee in the morning, a much more varied drink than the modest tea she mentioned in her letters (what times!). After a series of betrayals on her part, including the theft of a handsome sum of money, Belmondo forgives her and runs off with her, even killing a detective for her sake - obviously, Belmondo is a ridiculously romantic man who had to see his of his business. Just as obviously, Deneuve begins to poison him in order to get rid of him and find another with whom she can have a more luxurious life. Well, this time the victim catches himself, but accepts his fate. Probably because she's the male version of girls who constantly fall for good-looking bad boys who they think they can change. I won't give away the ending, but I will tell you that from start to finish, the relationship between the two is both strengthened and almost destroyed by just a few cups of coffee placed appropriately in the narrative.
Long story short: If you want to kill someone in a way that leaves your living room relatively clean and you don't have to get rid of a corpse that's sure to be heavier than you'd like to carry, put some poison in your coffee him/her and pretend he/she had a mysterious illness. It didn't really work in the movies, but we all know that movies are fictional things that often have nothing to do with real life, so it's worth a shot.
If Hitchcock and Truffaut tried to assassinate characters with coffee in the same clean and downright elegant way, Fritz Lang had a much more violent and direct approach, but with less murderous intentions. His 1953 film noir, The Big Heat , is like an amusement park for lovers of violence, although it is not very explicit, because 1953. A policeman wants revenge on the mobster who killed his wife and starts a war of the type one person vs. an army of gangsters, that is, of the typical macho and American type. At one point, the boss gangster's girlfriend kind of befriends him, and because the boss gangster is a real man, when he finds out about it, he aggressively confronts her. He starts by talking about her beautiful face as she puts on her makeup in the mirror next to a pot of steaming coffee * spoiler alert * and then asks her increasingly annoying questions about the rebel-hero cop. The barrage of interrogations ends as I think you've already guessed: he snaps her and then throws boiling coffee on her, her face to be exact, disfiguring her and forcing her to wear a not-so- classy bandage for the rest of the film. It's ok, though, because towards the end the disfigured chick also throws a reasonable amount of hot coffee in his face, after which he dies, because a disfigured woman doesn't really have much reason to stay alive in a 1953 Hollywood movie. Anyway , the "boiling coffee disfigurement" method is by far the most original yet, because it uses the drink whose innocence we've been telling you about in the most gruesome way possible. But it's also original because at the time, graphic or not, such an act of violence was surprising and downright avant-garde. Also, ha ha, the name of the movie is The Big Heat and the girl is burned with coffee.
Long story short: When someone really pisses you off, a very good way to express your hatred is to disfigure the person in question with an erupting kettle. But we warn you that he will probably want to take revenge, so we recommend that you evaluate exactly how much you hate that person and either stick to the poison option or block him on Facebook and live your life.
Irina's description: Irina's greatest achievement was when she self-diagnosed herself with an adult form of ADHD that she insists is only hers. Which is why the sentence above is also her description.