![]() This list is not as long or exhaustive as it could be-it could be a plastic diner menu of listings, with pages never-endingly-unfolding. ![]() Second of all, they have to be the absolute cream of the crop in the “crime/mystery” category. Sadly, there’s no Diner or When Harry Met Sally or Five Easy Pieces or Back to the Future, on here. What are the rules? Well, first of all, all these films have to be crime movies. We’ve ranked the thirty most memorable, most moving diner scenes in crime films. They are, by nature, places so normal and down-home that nothing exciting ever seems to happen there, except when it does. They can be sites of cheap crimes, hideouts from dangerous characters. How does the diner function in film? Generally? Well, most often, they are sites of crucial conversations: hushed threats, whispered revelations, casual flirtations. They are important to me, they are important to my editor who is allowing me to write this piece, and they are important to movies. Or maybe I’d go to EJ’s Luncheonette on the East Side, where I can get an egg white omelette so full of vegetables on a platter toppling with cubed, fried potatoes and peppers that it’s a wonder I can eat it all every time and still have room for two pieces of toast scraped with butter.Īnyway, diners are important. I’d go to the Soho Diner, which is a little more upscale than the diners I’m reminiscing about here and isn’t even actually a diner probably, but I don’t care because they serve deep fried cheese curds with hot honey, twenty-four hours a day (also, I only realized this after I made this list, but their website also showcases some stills from cinema’s great diner scenes, which is awesome). Have diners have played such a large part in the American imagination in part because of their indelible place in cinema, especially the cinema of past eras? But still, what’s the appeal? Is it something so specific as the mile-long menu or the promise of comfort food, of the safety of breakfast served every hour of the day? I don’t know, but I wish I were in a diner at this moment. What is it about the diner that is so appealing, so satisfying? Is it the cheapness, the accessibility of the diner? The local-ness, the nostalgia? That so many of the diners we encounter today are actually relics of earlier times and different aesthetics: roadhouses along interstates, breakfast places in small towns, spots of peace in busy cities, bastions of activity late at night when all other places are closed? This piece is not that, but I would like to write it anyway, because diners are my favorite things, but besides that, they also have a particular, elusive mystique. A separate piece, a more focused essay, would simply muse on the ontology of “the diner,” trace the history of the diner, evaluate the American-ness of the diner. There’s no place like a diner, nowhere at all like a diner. ![]()
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