The quiet companion

From Godard's swirling espresso to the 3 a.m. jazz standard: what artists keep seeing in a cup of coffee.

In 1967, Jean-Luc Godard pointed his camera at a cup of coffee and didn't look away. In 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle, a café scene slowly narrows until the dark, swirling surface of a single cup fills the screen. Bubbles drift and gather like galaxies while Godard, in a whisper, wonders about the world and our place in it. It is one of the most beautiful shots in French cinema, and it is, quite literally, a cup of coffee.

Most of the time, coffee isn't given that kind of attention. It stays at the edge of the frame: on the table between two people, in the hand of someone thinking, beside the notebook of a writer who can't stop. But once you start noticing it, you find it everywhere in the films, books and songs we love. And it is almost always doing the same quiet job.

Somewhere to sit

Film understood early that coffee gives people a reason to stay put. Jim Jarmusch built a whole film on that idea. Coffee and Cigarettes (2003) is a series of deadpan encounters: two or three people at a table, cups and ashtrays between them, talking past each other. Nobody cares about the coffee. It's there so that nobody has to leave.

The cup as an alibi: something to hold while you work out what to say.

Quentin Tarantino used the same table for something darker. Pulp Fiction (1994) opens and closes in a diner, where two small-time robbers plan their hold-up between refills. Halfway through, two hitmen with a ruined car and a very bad morning still find a moment to praise the "gourmet" coffee their host has made. David Lynch went further still: in Twin Peaks, Agent Dale Cooper greets every diner cup like a small revelation.

Whatever the genre, the cup slows the scene down. It gives the characters, and us, a reason to stay a little longer.

Fuel for the page

Writers have always run on coffee, and a few of them couldn't stop writing about it.

None more than Honoré de Balzac. He wrote through the night, cup after cup, and in his Traité des excitants modernes (1839) he described what coffee did to him: ideas marching into his mind like battalions of an army. He even recommended eating the grounds on an empty stomach for the strongest effect. We'd suggest a pour-over instead.

A century earlier, coffee had been the new obsession of the Enlightenment. When Le Procope opened in 1686, it was one of the first places in Paris to serve it, and the philosophers came for it. Legend has it that Voltaire drank dozens of cups a day. Later, in A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway remembered his Paris mornings in the 1920s: a notebook, a pencil, and a café crème beside them while the stories came.

From scandal to solitude

Music tells a different story: how coffee went from shocking novelty to old friend.

In the 1730s, coffee was still the fashionable new vice in Leipzig, and Johann Sebastian Bach had fun with it. His Coffee Cantata (BWV 211) is a miniature comic opera about a father desperate to stop his daughter drinking coffee. She refuses, of course. It was performed at Zimmermann's coffee house, where Bach regularly led concerts, so the audience was probably holding the very thing being mocked.

Two centuries later, the mood had changed completely. In "Black Coffee", the 1948 standard sung by Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee, coffee is the only company through a long, sleepless night of heartbreak. Bob Dylan's "One More Cup of Coffee" (1976) makes it the last pause before leaving for good. By then, coffee was no longer about excitement. It was about time: waiting, staying, not wanting to go yet.

The pause

Look back at all of these and the pattern is clear. Coffee shows up in art for the same reason it shows up in our days. It marks a pause. It gives people a reason to meet, to sit, to think, to stay a little longer than they meant to. Artists notice that, even when they aren't trying to say anything about coffee at all.

So next time you watch a film or open a novel, keep an eye on the cup in the corner of the frame. It's usually telling you something.