I Hate Fake Coffee (in film and tv)

One of my favourite newsletters, Deez Links, did a call-out for “hate reads” in January; I’ve never typed up one of my rants so quickly or mashed the send button so enthusiastically. While Deez Links did not, in the end, take my submission, I decided I didn’t want to deprive the entire world of my fury, so here it is. I hate a lot of stuff, and this was fun to write. I should do it more often.

I don’t know when I first noticed it. Perhaps when Gilmore Girls was airing on The CW; coffee features prominently in the lives of the Stars Hollow gang, a thing I always appreciated about the show. I, too, love coffee. I, too, drink a lot of coffee. I, too, have walked around small, east-coast towns in the autumn, drinking coffee from a paper to-go cup and chattering away about boys and pop culture.

But here’s the thing: there’s nothing in Hollywood’s coffee cups. And I freaking hate it.

Now that I’ve seen that paper cups of coffee in films and on tv are always empty, I cannot unsee it. Every single god damned movie, every tv show: if an actor is holding a paper cup of “coffee” or “tea” or whatever, and they wave their hands around while acting – with that ostensibly hot, full cup in one hand – it’s as though whatever they’re holding weighs less than a European wren (that is, next to nothing) and isn’t filled with boiling death-liquid. Because that cup is empty. It’s meant to be full of liquid; it’s meant to have heft; it’s meant to freaking slosh. It doesn’t.

Look, it’s one thing when the actor’s holding a mug and the camera is angled in such a way that we can’t see deeply enough into the mug to know whether or not there’s coffee in it. (Sidenote; camera people sometimes forget about this and let us see into those empty mugs! Stop this, camera people!)

To return to my point: mugs have heft; an actor holding a mug is going to act like that mug weighs something (and therefore has something in it), because the mug itself is relatively heavy. We the audience know it’s very unlikely that there’s anything in that mug, because no one involved in filming wants to have the mug spill and ruin costumes, sets and takes. But we can pretend that mug is full because the actor holding it is forced, by its inherent weight, to treat it like it weighs something. Like it's full of something. They may even try to take a convincing fake sip of the pretend coffee once in a while! (Those sips are rarely convincing.)

Now, yes, I grant you, the mug illusion is spoiled when the actors get excited about their tea-drinking stagecraft and mime steeping a tea-bag, dunking that saharan-dry bag in and out of the (empty) mug as lightly and casually as if the bag is not full of soaking wet leaves and therefore has some weight. Or worse, they pull it out of the (empty) mug long enough to make it clear to me, the hating audience, that the teabag is dry because the mug is empty.

It also doesn’t work when the actors forget that they mug they’re holding or pretending to drink from is ostensibly full of recently boiled liquid and would slosh on them if they gesticulated that much in real life.

But, ordinarily, when an actor is pretending to drink coffee from a mug, it’s okay. They fake the drinking, they fake the teabag usage, they fake the weight and the threat of sloshing. The camera people are careful not to let us see too deeply into the mug. It is, for all intents and purposes, a mug of hot liquid. The mug is the suspension bridge over my disbelief. The mug is not distracting. (Unless they really can’t fake a sip.)

Everything falls apart when the actors are holding paper cups. They simply do not act like there’s anything in the cup. You guys! We are all humans who live on this planet and know the difference between the weight of a paper cup full of liquid, and a paper cup full of air! And you, waggling your cup around like it weighs less than a dime, are not convincing us that it’s a paper cup full of coffee! Don’t wave it around like that! Don’t drop it onto a table-top, where it’ll land with a hollow “doink”, because your sound people won’t think to replace that doink with the correct noise of a full paper cup hitting a surface. Full cups don’t go doink! Replace that shit with a sound that doesn’t echo! Or don’t set the cup down at all!

AND ANOTHER THING, HOLLYWOOD: do you know what happens when you backlight a white paper cup? We can see that there’s nothing inside! If you MUST use paper cups in a scene and you CANNOT bring yourselves to put like a little sandbag or something inside a paper cup when the actor is stage-crafting around so that we can be reasonably convinced that it’s full of something, at least use a paper cup that isn’t opaque when backlit! I mean come on!

Look, I get that this is a ridiculous thing to get hot under the collar about, in an action movie or a romcom or just the freaking Gilmore Girls, but if you make coffee-addiction a central element of your two main characters’ profile, spend a little time getting the details right! Get your sound person on the case! Make the actors carry reusable to-go cups, something that actually weighs more than a literal piece of thick paper, and make sure that it isn’t opaque! Show them how to fake a sip convincingly! Don’t let them fuck around with the tea bags!

Or, I dunno, put some god damned coffee in those cups. 

Thanks for reading!