The Crier

What is “The Delicious”?

Hint: It doesn’t really matter

Alex Dziadosz · Amused · Mar 22, 2007

People love Scott Prendergast’s pantsuit. Nearly every week, the burgeoning filmmaker gets e-mails about it from fans as far away as Spain who identify with it, claim it illustrates their life story, and offer awkward confessions (one, Prendergast said, claimed to take his pants off when alone in elevators).

Sure, it’s a nice suit — bright red and tailor-made, it’s something Yves Saint-Laurent might have coughed up in the ’70s. And it must breathe well, because Prendergast can be seen dancing in it on his website, while snipping the air with scissors and mumbling nonsense. But the true spur to its (and Prendergast’s) rise to international celebrity is its role in the whimsical short film, “The Delicious.”

Over the past four years, the short’s popularity has snowballed in a rush that’s included more than forty film screenings, an appearance on the Sundance channel and inclusion on McSweeney’s quarterly “Wholphin” DVD. The pantsuit, the film’s main thematic thrust, has become a brightly colored cult symbol of idiosyncratic behavior and social alienation in the vein of Furthur, and Randall McMurphy’s hair.

“The Delicious” could be any number of things — a meditation on modern lifestyles, an indictment of bureaucracy, an allegory for drug use.

It’s probably best to