Coffee and Noir: PERSON OF INTEREST #2
every instance of coffee in noir: 052
You can learn a lot about a character by how they take their coffee: sugar? cream? more whiskey than caffeine?
I’m cataloging every noir scene where coffee plays a role — rote and ritual, soul-dark or cream and sugar, served from dingy diners to shiny penthouses.
The first Coffee and Noir entry from tech-noir Person of Interest was a conversation in its final season coming due since its first episode: a laden meeting between man and machine in a stereotypical American diner
A full season earlier, episode 4.16 “Blunt” set two meetings around coffee. They’re different from each other in almost every way (the one similarity below), but then that’s the point.
To demonstrate how Team Machine relates to Harper (Annie Ilonzeh) and Dominic (Winston Duke), the episode stages both meeting at cafes, which setting serves to draw stark distinction between ally and foe.
Harper perches next to Reese and Fusco on stools along a formica bar, in broad daylight, using coffee to wash down their meal of fries and fixin’s.
The handcuffs leave Harper’s right hand free, the better to eat unlimited fries. Is this any way to treat an ally!? It is if you’re Reese and Fusco.
On the flip side, Reese meets Dominic at night in deep red sticky-booth seats, glowering across a table which conspicuously holds just one cup of coffee, sharing only naked animosity.
Eventually a few goons come in, threats are exchanged, and Fusco plays sniper from across the way. This is all facilitated by because a 24 hour cafe at that hour is empty as it gets.
(Which is a thing I miss about the US: grungy diners open all hours, including The Roxy and The Pine Cone along with chains like Waffle House).
Somewhere between those two tête-à-têtes, Finch tries to be hospitable by serving Unspecified Hot Beverage to Harper in Team Machine’s definitely-not-a-safe-house . . . though he’s the only one who drinks any.
Meanwhile do I think it’s a coincidence conwoman Harper is named after a noir detective who also lives an wayfaring lifestyle? Absolutely not; especially because she’s recruited via an alias of Thornhill, which is one of three explicit ways Person of Interest tips its hat to North by Northwest over the years.
This is a show which can do a lot while saying nothing, and the juxtaposition in these scenes does the heavy lifting contrasting Dominic and Harper.
The one thing which is constant between the scenes?
Reese’s way of avoiding a direct question and/or eye contact
