Yeah, I liked the way all the people who had been waiting patiently in line for years happily made way to the talented rat-controlled mop boy. That’s gonna happen.
Gotta say that one didn’t occur to me either time I’ve seen it, and I’m a feminist from way back. It’s not only an adorable movie, but the animation is stupendous.
Might not be a stretch to say that it’s anti rote education, though. The passionate outsider beats the folks who work by the book–sounds a little too much like governing from your gut instincts, no? At least that’s more valid for cookery than war planning.
Roxanne, I’m with you. I’m an animation fan, and I really enjoyed Ratatouille, but really, other than the BS rule that All Protagonists Must Be Male, there’s NO reason that Remy couldn’t have been female (and I must say, if Remy had been female, that would have made for a better, more integrated story, as Linguini would have learned with Remy how to communicate/cooperate, thereby supporting the development of his relationship with Collette). In fact, did you notice that ALL the rats, thousands and thousands of them, were male? Had they mastered parthenogenesis, or what?
Ratatouille was fun, but its anvilicious Randianism was nearly too much for me. The point of the film seems to be that there is a small number of Talented Great People who are randomly distributed throughout the population. It doesn’t matter who your parents are — it doesn’t even matter what species they are. But certain individuals are Geniuses, and others are not.
The Geniuses must be allowed to fulfill their Destiny and Vision. The rest of us? We exist to be their puppets (literally). In fact, even if you’re a highly trained, talented individual, say, on the kitchen staff at a great restaurant, if you’re not a Genius you can be adequately replaced with an army of rats.
My guess is that Pixar really wanted to call it Ratlass Shrugged but it didn’t focus-group well.
I think you’ve misread the movie, Roxanne. It’s already been pointed out that the rat is not just better than the female chef, but better than all the chefs in France. It’s anti-human as much as anti-woman, on those grounds.
But what I think you’ve missed is that the female chef has a serious monologue where she excoriates her profession for the sexism that requires her to be twice as good as any male chef in order to even have a place in the kitchen. This isn’t presented as “Oh, what a crazy woman!” but rather as legitimate criticism. She is excluded from the kitchen because of who she is, just as the rat is excluded.
Maybe there’s something to this argument that I’m not seeing, but it seems to me that this criticism of Ratatouille ignores vast swaths of the movie. There’s much more fertile grounds for criticism in the boy’s relationship with the female chef–she puts up with more unsavory behavior than she deserves, even if he eventually wises up.
I’d just like my little girl to see a few blockbuster animated movies with girls as protagonists in which the main object of the movie is not romance. Girl movies = romances; boy movies = everything else.
There’s only so much cultural validation to be derived from “Spirited Away.”
If you have Netflix, I recommend renting “Chef”– the lead is male, but his wife/manager is smarter than him financially, and there a female who gets promoted to sous chef because she’s really good.
I certainly would have! I mean, there were a lot of things about the movie that I loved, but the gender distribution was not one of them. The single female chef who pointed out that the reason she was the only female chef was because of sexism was fine (though I would have prefered her being more of an independent thinker), but why did she have to be the only major female character in the movie?
Why no female rats? Why couldn’t Remy have been female? Why are characters like Remy always male? (And yes, the lack of racial diversity is a good point too.)
The part of the movie that bothered me was when the female chef is approached by the male ‘chef’ (the one controlled by the rat) and we are supposed to find it HUMOROUS that she reaches for the mace in her purse because he is acting so strangely. Yes, because being approached by weird guys in an alley is SO hilarious.
I gotta say, I come here to Pandagon every day and enjoy it very much, but I always keep in mind that the people who run the place are more than willing to jump on the man-hatin’ / caucasian-hatin’ / conservative-hatin’ wagon with only the smallest shred of evidence that may or may not actually be there (Duke Lacrosse, anyone?).
That said, I also understand that in the real world there often need to be people pushing farther in any one direction than they should be in order to get everyone else to get them to where they ought to be. Keep up the good work, everyone.
If people are genuinely interested in doing something about this other than whinging on the internet, the See Jane foundation is trying to make a dent in entertainment.
And Moby Dick was about a crazy guy chasing a big fish.
Whales aren’t fish, dipshit.
And if that’s really all you got out of Moby Dick, you didn’t read it closely enough.
Samantha:
If you have Netflix, I recommend renting “Chef”– the lead is male, but his wife/manager is smarter than him financially, and there a female who gets promoted to sous chef because she’s really good.
If you mean Chef!, the BBC sitcom starring Lenny Henry, I wholeheartedly second the recommendation.
The rat was the only chef in that restaurant (other than the dead gy) with the opportunity to cook for the critic. And what the rat prepared touched him on a level deeper than the mere taste of the dish. It was “home cooking,” which is also interesting.
The point of the film seems to be that there is a small number of Talented Great People who are randomly distributed throughout the population. It doesn’t matter who your parents are — it doesn’t even matter what species they are. But certain individuals are Geniuses, and others are not.
So how are those piano lessons going? Have you rivaled Mozart yet, or at least David Helfgott? Can you at least play as well as the guy in Nordstrom?
After all, anyone can become a great pianist with practice. Anyone who tells you that there are Talented Great People who are randomly distributed throughout the population who are better piano players than you is lying to you.
JW …there’s NO reason that Remy couldn’t have been female
Bullshit. We just went through this with the Jane Austen movie. If the puppet-chef had been female, then everyone would be bitching about how all female “success” has to be “owned” by men in modern fiction.
If the rat were female, then there would be some snide remark about how, of course, women are supposed to do all the cooking. I agree with the above posters who say “You are reading too much into this.”
I’m kind of with Petey. If Remy had been a female rat, there would have been complaints - maybe even from me - that, yes, of course the woman is doing the cooking, and the man can’t do anything in the kitchen without the woman tugging him around by the hair, and when all of the male chefs in France couldn’t win over the critic, the woman did it with her simple, heartfelt home cooking, while the man gets all the credit. I just thought it was a really sweet movie, and I didn’t notice the rat’s gender at all, while I loved the female chef’s monologue about sexism in her profession.
There could have - should have - been some female rats, though. I mean, there were about a billion rats on the screen at one point; they had to come from somewhere.
The rat was the only chef in that restaurant (other than the dead gy) with the opportunity to cook for the critic.
And your evidence that Gusteau’s restaurant was the only restaurant in all of France, and therefore the only one the critic ever ate at is … ?
As other people have pointed out above, the problem with Colette actually comes out of her own mouth, when she says that the chefs in the kitchen don’t create the recipes, they only make the recipes, and they follow them to the letter. That’s why she’s not a great chef.
My guess is that Pixar really wanted to call it Ratlass Shrugged but it didn’t focus-group well.
You must really hate The Incredibles. And, probably, every other story ever told where the protagonist is the special one with the fantastic abilities, like Star Wars, or The Odyssey, or Spider-man, or The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, or Happy Feet, or Die Hard, or anything about Sherlock Holmes. Sometimes, just sometimes, people write stories about fantastic heroes with abilities beyond the normal ken because that’s what they want to write a story about. People also write stories about ordinary people if that’s what they want to write a story about.
What’s the complaint, really? Protagonist is male? Yes, there are more male protagonists in movies than female ones. Could the story have been written better with a female protagonist? Possibly, but you weren’t writing it. It’s possible that the layers of politics caused by making Remy both a rat AND female would have made the task in front of him more Sisyphean than could be easily overcome within a story that is supposed to have an element of lightness to it. It is possible that splitting up the feminist argument into a sub-character was just easier from a narrative point of view. As a writer, I’d bet dollars to donuts that this is the reason Remy was a male. I put female protagonists in my stuff as much as possible because, as has been pointed out, some things are more interesting if there’s a woman doing them just because it’s a woman and this is a male-dominated world. It adds depth. But still, the last screenplay I wrote had a nearly all-male cast, because, frankly, it was mainly about three men. If it had been about three women, or two men and a woman, it would have been a different story. You can only go so far before the story you want to tell kicks the ass of whatever sensibilities you want to appease with your selection of characters.
Brad Bird hardly shies away from strong female characters - look at Elastigirl in The Incredibles, who went to rescue her husband and had an incredibly well developed partnership as equal head of a struggling family dynamic - but Pixar and Bird have, first and foremost, a keen eye for what makes a good story, and layering on all the politics in the world rarely works.
This, incidentally, is why comparing anything Pixar do to Ayn fucking Rand is a crock of horse shit. If Pixar were reading from Rand’s book, the stories would suck and half the film would be the writer’s personal politics delivered in achingly dull monologue. Rand is the perfect author if you hate stories and want everything the writer believes laid out in front of you so that you can analyse it philosophically. I, personally, prefer the more twisty and intriguing pathways of great storytelling and characterisation.
Since this is animation we’re talking about and not a documentary, I’m pretty sure the characters have all the talents and attributes the artists give them. Colette’s not adventurous because they don’t want her to be. The rat is “the best” because it works with the movie title. ETC.
It might have been a more interesting movie (for me, at least) if it were about an adventurous female chef who bucked the odds and became head chef at an M5 Paris restaurant. I know it’s very hard to imagine a situation like that if you work at Pixar in Emeryville and you can eat at Alice Water’s place anytime you like …
I’m not exactly sure what you’re getting at (that was snark, right?)…I’m not arguing that most people are geniuses — what bothers me about the film is the role assigned to the 99% of the population that aren’t geniuses: that of mindless servants doing the bidding of their intrinsically-superior masters (the image of Remy as Linguini’s puppet-master is so literal, and funny, that it’s easy to overlook what’s really going on).
Remember the NYT article (full article is hidden behind Times Select) in which multi-billionaire CEO’s justify their outrageous wealth in ethical terms? I remember one of them saying something like, “In any organization, there are one or two people who really make a difference,” and then asserting that he’s one of them, and thus deserving of his billions.
Ratatouille, I think, absolutely buys into that ideology.
You know, I married (twice) a fully professionally trained chef who happens to be female, and I gotta inject a note of reality into this: She would have been better off a male rat than a human dyke in terms of the access to other people’s money her Great Gift buys her.
And the restaurant biz is all about rich people who can eat choosing which talented trained chefs will get the chance to be famous. The rat using the man as his puppet differed from the woman in the kitchen in one vital respect: he had nothing to lose by expressing his talent.
So yeah, sorry to burst bubbles, but Roxanne had it in one.
We love the movie, have taken the kid to it twice, but it’s realistic in that regard. Not in the aspect of showing a Hobart full of rats, but in showing the real sexism of food culture.
It might have been a more interesting movie (for me, at least) if it were about an adventurous female chef who bucked the odds and became head chef at an M5 Paris restaurant. I know it’s very hard to imagine a situation like that if you work at Pixar in Emeryville and you can eat at Alice Water’s place anytime you like …
It would have been awfully boring animation. “Oh, look. A bunch of humans running around doing exactly what humans do … but they’re animated!”
I’m guessing that you think Dumbo should have been about the plight of mistreated elephants in the circus and not about a flying elephant. I mean, how stupid is it to write fantasy
If you think that a movie about a female chef should be written, go buy yourself a copy of Syd Field and write it. You’ll never sell it as animation, but I’m sure some indie producer would be interested in it as live action.
It might have been a more interesting movie (for me, at least) if it were about an adventurous female chef who bucked the odds and became head chef at an M5 Paris restaurant.
That’s called science fiction, because it can’t happen in our current reality. But yeah, I’d also pay $20 plus popcorn to see that movie…
I’m not arguing that most people are geniuses — what bothers me about the film is the role assigned to the 99% of the population that aren’t geniuses: that of mindless servants doing the bidding of their intrinsically-superior masters (the image of Remy as Linguini’s puppet-master is so literal, and funny, that it’s easy to overlook what’s really going on).
Of course, at the end, Linguini is released from his servitude to do what he’s really good at — being a waiter. You know, the same way that Remy is freed from having to have a “beard” who cooks for him. Unless you think that being a waiter is automatically a horrible, degrading job that no one should have to do since you’re a “mindless servant doing the bidding of your intrinsically-superior master,” I’m not sure I get your point.
Remy Linguini is freed by inheriting the restaurant. But I also don’t buy totally into the Rand thing. What was the title of the cookbook? Anyone Can Cook!
It’s true. Mulan, Pocahantas, Snow White and Cinderella were all about the animals.
Maybe try some Disney movies that didn’t have intelligent animals helping humans? Because all of the above have exactly that. Or do you not remember Gus and Jacques and the rest of the animals sewing Cinderella’s dress for the ball? Or the forest animals helping the Dwarfs build Snow White’s bed? The only difference with “Ratatouille” is that the animals get to speak to one another, even if the humans don’t understand what they say.
Sorry to leave in the middle of the argument, but G. is dragging me out for a healthy walk. I’ll be back.
My girlfriend and I both had that complaint while leaving, although we did still love the movie on the whole.
While the number of female characters would still be low, there was an easy fix available for the Remy consistently having better judgment than Collette. Remy’s ability related to smell and taste. I think it’s reasonable to just accept movie logic and say he can beat any human on that score. Collette could have simply once gotten a recipe better because she understood texture. (Collette wasn’t set up as having a superior understanding of texture, but presumably that’s an area where a rat wouldn’t have much experience.)
This is technically OT, but Mrs. F and I saw Stardust the other day, and while we enjoyed the film as and immediately after we watched it, the more we thought about it, the more we started to dislike it.
The story is about a star who falls to earth (as a means of establishing dynastic succession among sons) and incarnates as a lovely young woman. An adventurous lad, wanting to impress his girlfriend, sets off on a quest to retrieve the star. He doesn’t know at that time that the star is now a woman, but when he finds that this is the case, his first move is to bind her with a magic chain and lead her halfway across the country — while she’s limping. Later, of course, they fall in love.
Yes, “Anyone Can Cook” — which clearly includes rats and people with no control over their own limbs, as long as a Genius is controlling them. Remember, Linguini absolutely cannot cook on his own (don’t forget what he does to the soup as a plongeur). The critic, whose name escapes me at the moment — wait, is it Scar? — parses the phrase in his long “Critics are sniveling parasites, except when they help people recognize Geniuses” voice-over, when he explains that, while not everyone can cook, a great cook can come from anywhere, and the Greatest Cook in France comes from such humble origins that this reviewer etc. etc. etc.
Mnemosyne,
The Randianism fits in well with Brad Bird’s last big hit, The Incredibles, which, as pablo mentions above, was about how society holds back the Truly Great by not letting them be their true, superior selves.
Unless you think that being a waiter is automatically a horrible, degrading job that no one should have to do since you’re a “mindless servant doing the bidding of your intrinsically-superior master,” I’m not sure I get your point.
Alright, I’m calling strawman. I might point out that Remy’s talent as a waiter/skater is completely unjustified in the film — until he starts his Brian Boitano impersonation (sorry, I can’t come up with the names of any great roller skaters), he’s played over and over again as a klutz. His ability as a waiter is driven by the needs of the plot (all the small-minded kitchen staff need to leave in a huff at Remy’s unveiling, and someone needs to serve in the dining room) and of the movie’s physical comedy, not out of anything from within the character himself.
I think waiting demands tremendous talent and hard work. I think being a comis, or a sous chef, or a maitre d’hotel also demands talent. But I think the movie itself, and also Brad Bird, think that quality depends on (a) a Single Great Genius, who is just naturally better than nearly anyone else, telling everyone exactly what to do, and (b) everyone else just doing whatever the Genius says. Individualism is great for the Geniuses — everyone else exists merely to do as they’re told. In terms of the quality of food, it evidently doesn’t even matter if the food is actually cooked by trained, dedicated professionals like the human kitchen staff — they’re all worth exactly the same as a bunch of rats who can’t even tell food from garbage. All that matters is the Genius directing them.
My point is, I think that’s a ridiculous, reactionary, anti-democratic version of reality. And that the only people who really buy into it are members of the ruling class trying to justify their enormous power and wealth to themselves and their employees, and your local Objectivist Society.
Sorry to lower the intellectual tone of the conversation, but did anybody else have trouble getting over the shudder factor of watching rats flow over a kitchen?
Pesto, first of all, REMY IS THE RAT’S NAME. The human’s name is Linguini.
The Randianism fits in well with Brad Bird’s last big hit, “The Incredibles,” which, as pablo mentions above, was about how society holds back the Truly Great by not letting them be their true, superior selves.
You could read The Incredibles as an attack on mediocrities purporting to restrain their betters. An equally valid interpretation would be seeing it as an attack on those who want to stand forth and make society better.
After all, it is arguable that Syndrome only became Syndrome because he wasn’t permitted to be on the good guy side, which speaks against the snobbishness of the gifted elite of Supers, which speaks against a Randian take on the film.
Yes, you caught me one time typing “Remy” instead of “Linguini”. I blame the little rat sitting on my head controlling my hands as I type.
If you want the full run-down on Brad Bird and Rand, just google “Brad Bird” + “Rand”. You’ll find Randians extolling his virtues, normal people analyzing Bird’s politics, and even this review of Ratatouille by someone named Julian Sanchez that makes the same connection between the film and Rand as I do (I haven’t read this particular review until this exchange, and I swear I came up with Ratlass Shrugged all by myself — maybe I’m a Genius after all…)
Yes, you caught me one time typing “Remy” instead of “Linguini”. I blame the little rat sitting on my head controlling my hands as I type.
Actually, you did it three times. Hence the all caps.
And, yes, I am aware that some libertarians are convinced that The Incredibles is a Randian screed about how supermen should rule us all. I heard all of the arguments when the movie first came out. If you want to buy that argument, then Spiderman and Batman are also Randian screeds about Our Superiors. Not to mention Superman, the ultimate Randian hero. Therefore, Sam Raimi and Bryan Singer are Randians just like Brad Bird, right? After all, they also make films about superheroes who are forced to suppress their powers by their inferiors.
You didn’t answer my question: what was the name of the island that Bob went to? It’s very important to the themes of the film. Brad Bird even makes a point of discussing it in the commentary to the film.
Sorry to lower the intellectual tone of the conversation, but did anybody else have trouble getting over the shudder factor of watching rats flow over a kitchen?
At least they had to go through the dishwasher …
But, yeah, it was pretty unnerving to have the army of rats swarming the kitchen. At least they acknowledged what would really happen and had the restaurant shut down.
Sorry to lower the intellectual tone of the conversation, but did anybody else have trouble getting over the shudder factor of watching rats flow over a kitchen?
Yes, but mostly because I was worried that they would get hurt. I have pet rats, and they are not allowed near the stove when something is cooking.
The Incredibles may oppose creeping mediocrity in a somewhat smug way, but that doesn’t make it Randian. The heroes of the movie are unselfconsciously committed to sacrificing for the public good, and not just when they’re in their spandex — Mr. Incredible goes out of his way to assist policyholders at his insurance gig, and it costs him his job.
I’ve seen negative Objectivist reviews of The Incredibles that emphasized just that issue. Many Randians have big problems with the movie, and they should.
Without getting into the ideological battle lines being drawn here, let me suggest to Linden at # 17 that Miyazaki films in general are really good for their female protagonists: Kiki’s Delivery Service and especially My Neighbor Totoro are great for young kids, and as they get older they can watch Castle In The Sky and (eventually) Princess Mononoke.
I still only count one time when I wrote “Remy” and meant “Linguini”. Comment #14 — no names. Comment #36: “Remy as Linguini’s puppet-master” — got that right. Comment #47 “Linguini absolutely cannot cook on his own (remember what he does to the soup as a plongeur)” — also right. “Remy’s talent as a waiter/skater”: blew that. That’s one “Remy’s unveiling” — refers to the rat being revealed, got that right. But whatever. Why are we arguing over that again?
You didn’t answer my question: what was the name of the island that Bob went to? It’s very important to the themes of the film. Brad Bird even makes a point of discussing it in the commentary to the film.
I don’t remember. I saw the film with my kids when it came out. I only mentioned The Incredibles in passing. Why don’t you explain your point — if you want to discuss The Incredibles — instead of quizzing me about the movie?
I’m kind of with Petey. If Remy had been a female rat, there would have been complaints - maybe even from me - that, yes, of course the woman is doing the cooking, and the man can’t do anything in the kitchen without the woman tugging him around by the hair, and when all of the male chefs in France couldn’t win over the critic, the woman did it with her simple, heartfelt home cooking, while the man gets all the credit.
On the other hand, it would have brought the major female character count up to two. That would have counted for a lot, and if the female Remy had still had the male Remy’s innocent, enthusiastic, and nerdy passion for cooking, it would have portrayed an under-represented trait in female characters.
Would I still have complained? Hell yeah! I am always critical of the things I love!
I agree that part of the reason Remy was a better cook than Colette was because he had nothing to lose. Colette, as she explained, had to work twice as hard as anyone else in the kitchen, and probably focused on memorizing the rule book (cook book?) because that was the only way she could get ahead–any attempts at individuality would have been squelched because everyone was looking for any excuse to get rid of her.
I don’t know that this particular movie would have been better with a female protagonist, but we do definitely need more movies with female protagonists. This is a hard complaint to make because, no, I’m not suggesting Buzz & Woody should have been girls–I don’t think we need fewer movies with male protagonists, exactly, just a more equal ratio. And, for the love of the disco ball, yes, it would be nice–and this was my one slight complaint with Ratatouille (which I didn’t have with The Incredibles, incidentally, because The Incredibles didn’t have this problem)–to have relatively equal gender ratios within movies, too.
Would I still have complained? Hell yeah! I am always critical of the things I love!
I used to love people like you when I was a divorce lawyer. Such attitudes were a blissful guarantee of files and income from couples who otherwise wouldn’t have needed or wanted to be apart.
I only mentioned “The Incredibles” in passing. Why don’t you explain your point — if you want to discuss “The Incredibles” — instead of quizzing me about the movie?
Actually, I wanted to discuss “Ratatouille,” but you seem convinced that Brad Bird is a Randian in disguise, so I guess we have to debunk that first.
The island is Nomanisan Island. As in, “No man is an island.” Because the entire movie is about how Bob can’t do everything on his own and needs to learn to rely on the help of the people around him. He created Syndrome by rejecting him as a partner, so his stubborn insistence on doing things by himself literally comes back to haunt him.
Now, I’m not very familiar with Rand, but I seem to recall that she didn’t have many teamwork themes in her books or her philosophy. I don’t recall her talking about how The Supermen would need to work together to accomplish their goals. Maybe I’m wrong, though.
Yes, there are Randians who are convinced the film is one big libertarian valentine. Those people are idiots who paid attention to nothing other than the fact that there are superheroes in the movie, and superheroes are, like, totally what Ayn Rand was talking about, man!
Since the whole meme was pretty popular, I do think that Bird was playing around with it in “Ratatouille.” Again, though, you seem to have missed the whole part where Remy using Linguini as a front is a failure. It makes both of them unhappy and it can’t be sustained for the long term.
I used to love people like you when I was a divorce lawyer. Such attitudes were a blissful guarantee of files and income from couples who otherwise wouldn’t have needed or wanted to be apart.
Notice that I said “things” and not “people”. There a difference between the way one approaches relationships with people and the way one approaches movies and other forms of media. You can say whatever you want about a movie and it won’t get its feelings hurt or decide it doesn’t want you to watch it anymore.
The island’s name is Nomanisan, and you’re damn right that it’s significant. At the end of the day, the movie suggests that while some people are extraordinary at certain very specific things (their “superpower”), it’s only in tandem with each other, with ordinary joes and janes, and with their own basic human decency (the scenes with Mirage are especially telling here, as is the scene where Dash tries to come in second), that anyone can produce an extraordinary result.
Thanks for elaborating on your Incredibles analysis. Your reading of the island certainly cuts against the “if everyone is special, no one is” theme in the first part of the film, and the I’s’ unhappiness by their legally-enforced normality. FWIW, I was a lot less irritated by that film than by Ratatouille, though, paradoxically, I also found it less entertaining.
Now, as to whether the Remy-under-the-tocque (sp?) arrangement is a failure…well, they do manage to cook the sweetbreads successfully, which is a pretty important moment for them. And they do manage to launch the Linguini/Colette romance. Of course, part of the failure is due to the constraints the arrangement places on Remy, and the fact that Linguini starts to think that he’s better than he really is and argues with his Little Chef. The problem then, is that Remy can’t really run things when his Genius isn’t acknowledged, and Linguini can’t really follow him when everyone treats him as the genius.
So you’re right, neither of them is “being himself” until Remy is revealed as the real chef. Everyone is happier being honest in the end. If the restaurant had triumphed as a result of Remy encouraging Colette and the other staff to use their own creativity the way he had used his, to stop mechanically reproducing recipes just because someone wrote them that way, to trust their talents and taste as he had, then the film would have demonstrated different dynamics of creativity. But as it is, you evidently either have it (and can see all the colors and hear the symphony when you taste food) or you don’t (and can’t tell food from garbage). Even if you can taste it, you can’t necessarily create it yourself. And success in the restaurant relies on only one Genius to trust his instincts and taste — everyone else, who for some inexplicable reason aren’t geniuses, can contribute only to the extent that they serve the Genius’s vision.
I still maintain that this is a reactionary vision of a society with Leaders and Followers that functions only when everyone knows their place. Leaders need to lead. Followers are happier being led and not making decisions. I think the film could have moved in another direction at a number of points, but it is what it is and what it is is something that irritates me a lot.
I’m sorry to comment and run, but it’s 1 a.m. where I am and I need to get up and go to work tomorrow (where I can lurk here, but I really can’t post). But I can come back to this thread tomorrow to continue our part of the discussion tomorrow if you’d like.
It might have been a more interesting movie (for me, at least) if it were about an adventurous female chef who bucked the odds and became head chef at an M5 Paris restaurant. I know it’s very hard to imagine a situation like that if you work at Pixar in Emeryville and you can eat at Alice Water’s place anytime you like …
Even though Remy is pretty androgynous–or at least doesn’t carry much stereotypical masculinity into the plot–I’m not sold on the idea that such a gender change wouldn’t mean a radically different movie. As Petey points out, the movie becomes more objectionable if we keep everything the same but change either Remy or Linguini’s gender. If you leave things as they are, those objectionable aspects change the movie significantly. Addressing them adequately also changes the movie significantly.
That’s not necessarily a problem–it would be great to see a movie that addresses those issues–but that would be a different movie. Complaining over the non-existence of that different movie makes sense, but, while that’s a more than fair complaint against the industry, market, etc., I don’t see how it’s a legitimate criticism of this particular movie. We might as well complain that Ratatouille isn’t a good film because it isn’t about organic food or vegetarianism.
Give it another shot. It may just be that you don’t like the movie, or even the genre. But don’t confuse “I wanted to see another movie” with “The movie I saw is bad.”
I’m sorry to comment and run, but it’s 1 a.m. where I am and I need to get up and go to work tomorrow (where I can lurk here, but I really can’t post).
That’s why it’s nice to be on the West Coast — I can usually get in the last word when all of you Easterners go to bed.
If the restaurant had triumphed as a result of Remy encouraging Colette and the other staff to use their own creativity the way he had used his, to stop mechanically reproducing recipes just because someone wrote them that way, to trust their talents and taste as he had, then the film would have demonstrated different dynamics of creativity. But as it is, you evidently either have it (and can see all the colors and hear the symphony when you taste food) or you don’t (and can’t tell food from garbage).
Which is why I brought up muscial talent earlier. In this film, like it or not, cooking ability is shown as a talent, not a craft. Anyone can cook … but not everyone can be a great chef.
As I said earlier, not everyone has the same talents. I know you don’t like to hear it, but that’s kinda what life is like. Some things you can practice and get better at, but some things you can’t. I might want to become a professional animator, but I can’t draw and, more importantly, I can’t caricature. So an animator could encourage me all day long to draw at a professional level, s/he could spend years tutoring me, but I wouldn’t be able to do it, because I do not have that talent. I could become better at drawing, but I wouldn’t be an artist.
Does this set up a hierarchial world when some people have inborn talents and others don’t? Well, yes. But it’s better than the alternative.
I still maintain that this is a reactionary vision of a society with Leaders and Followers that functions only when everyone knows their place.
Actually, it sets up a world of Artists and Consumers. The Artist produces his/her art and gives it to the Consumers, hoping they will like it. That’s one of the reasons for the scene between Remy and Emile where he tries to teach Emile about better food. He’s not teaching Emile that he’s a Follower; he’s teaching him that he’s a Consumer who has a right to better nourishment than what he’s been getting.
There’s a reason why the most feared man in the entire film is not the chef, but the critic. The entire enterprise will be a failure if the critic doesn’t like it. Personally, I saw it as a wry commentary about Pixar’s position at the top of the animation food chain (pun intended) and the fear that this film that Bird took over from a longtime Pixar employee (who subsequently left the company) would be the first bomb from Pixar. Not to mention that the artist is positioned as a tiny rat trying to wrestle art from a full-size human, which I’m sure is what leading a team of animators sometimes feels like.
Mulan, Pocahantas, Snow White and Cinderella were all about the animals.
No, they were all about girls getting the guy in the end, therefore fulfilling their roles as females.
I have to admit I like Mulan better than the others, because Mulan gets to save China on her way to getting the guy. Pocahontas is the worst; I think that movie spends at least 30 minutes doing nothing but checking out her babelicious bod as she slinks through the forest.
Someone higher in the thread said a banana is sometimes just a banana. That might be true on the individual level — you can always find a reason why any individual protagonist in a movie “had” to be male. But when you look out over the larger landscape of kids’ movies, it’s hard to find any with female characters who aren’t there to serve as moms, girlfriends, helpmeets, or love interests in relation to male characters.
A friend of mine has a 16-year-old daughter who wants to be a screenwriter. Her imagination has been schooled almost entirely in male-dominated imagery. She idolizes Tarantino and all her screenplays are about boys or men. After she writes them, she decides she needs a girl in them somewhere and goes back and adds one. She’s a girl and she doesn’t even write about girls, and looking at Hollywood, why would she? We raise kids in a sea of gendered images and storylines, then wonder why there’s so little meaningful representation of girls and woman in popular media.
Slight clarification to my above rant: I’m not saying that there are Natural Artists and The Rest of Us. That annoys me, because it implies things like, Mozart was a greater composer than Beethoven because Beethoven had to work harder at it. Just that when it comes to art, some level of talent exists before one starts the laborious process of growing and improving one’s art.
A friend of mine has a 16-year-old daughter who wants to be a screenwriter. Her imagination has been schooled almost entirely in male-dominated imagery. She idolizes Tarantino and all her screenplays are about boys or men.
Did she even see “Kill Bill”?!?
More seriously, if she’s willing to watch it, see if you can find an Australian movie called “High Tide,” starring Judy Davis. Watch the whole film, and then let her know that the Judy Davis character was originally written as a man but was turned into a woman with only minor changes.
Personally, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with women writing action films, or crime films. My thesis was a modern film noir with a male protagonist … who learns that all of his macho bullshit actually makes things worse. See if you can get her to watch some Samuel Fuller films, who was one of Tarantino’s idols. Fuller has some really fascinating critiques of masculinity, especially in “Shock Corridor.” And as far as Fuller is concerned, there’s absolutely no reason a prostitute or a junkie can’t be the romantic heroine of the film — she doesn’t even have to be “redeemed.” A couple of other great Fuller films are “Underworld USA” (with a very young Cliff Robertson) and “The Naked Kiss,” where the heroine is a prostitute who becomes a pediatric nurse and discovers that “respectable” people are just as bad, if not worse, than she is.
This idea that The Incredibles is really about working together, or whatever, is such crap. The Nomanisan Island thing is cute, but it doesn’t really tie into the rest of the movie in any real way. Not only that, but Mr. Incredible working with his family doesn’t exactly democratize the distribution of power in the society portrayed in the film. Like, oh, it’s his children’s birthright to be powerful, and Mr I should have known that.
Syndrome being an example of the generous interpretation of the film (it’s actually got good politics!) when Mr Incredible doesn’t want to work with him is just silly. The reasons that Mr Incredible doesn’t want to work with him are clear for within the narrative - 1) he’s irritating and portrayed as fawning, 2) he’s weak and would be more likely an ad hoc hostage than a super team mate, 3) he’s a child that Mr I doesn’t want to be responsible for. And Mr I being a good person in real life at his insurance job doesn’t make him heroic, it makes him non-evil, and plenty of people without super powers act in selfless ways every day. To make a point about his character that he is different from the masses in that he is bucking the insurance system is both aiming low and dismissing the possibility of similar good being done by average people.
As for Syndrome’s threat “if everyone is special, no one is,” it only makes sense in a Randian reading of the film. If we take it seriously it means that power to the people in the form of technology to make them super is dangerous to the order of how things ought to be in the minds of the creators. It’s dangerous to the supremacy of the Incredible family. There’s a lot of support for this view within the narrative, like the sub plot of Jr’s desire to win running races. His frustration at not being able to compete isn’t based on his love of running, but about being denied his entitlement. It isn’t somehow noble to want trophies because you were born with ability.
As for Ratatouille, yeah, Roxanne’s reading of the film only makes sense in terms of the rest of the gender discourse in society. The description she gives isn’t by itself accusatory of sexism, if you take a second and examine the statement. That some some men will be better than some women at things even when those women work hard isn’t sexist, it’s reality. It’s just as realistic as some women being better than some men at things even when the men have worked really hard at them. So Roxanne’s statement is a pretty bad criticism of the film.
That said, does much of the popular media express the idea that some people are special, and far above all other people and we should get out of their way and let them be geniuses or whatever? Sure. Are these people more often men? Yep. Popular media does, by aggregate, reflect quite a lot of societal biases in favor of men and the elite. And, or course, perpetuates such biases.
This movie is fantasy. like on the order of lord of the rings.
the worst social flaws of people working in a kitchen are hiding a secret special rat and a head chef who’s a jerk. that’s it? No heroin junkies? no creepy 30 year olds who owns more porn than square footage in his apartment? no one who’s a registered sex offender? Kids watching this movie might get the idea that there are decent human beings who work in commercial kitchens. Which just isn’t the case.
Also, Remy didn’t really need to be male. But I’m not sure how I’d react to Patton Oswalt doing a woman’s voice (and there’s no reason for this movie without him.)
Also, Randians actually surpass Solipsists in pure irritating power. Brad Bird isn’t Randian. His body of work is generally readable as an anti-randian screed. His definition of a Superman is one who sacrifices themselves for the good of others, fer cryin’ out loud.
But when you look out over the larger landscape of kids’ movies, it’s hard to find any with female characters who aren’t there to serve as moms, girlfriends, helpmeets, or love interests in relation to male characters.
OMG! I make a point about over simplification of literature and you took it literally! I guess there really are people as stupid as you on the internet! You get the Ric Romero award of the day!
Yeah, but Phoenician, Miyazaki really is cheating — he’s not like our movies, he’s like movies from some other dimension. (The Utopian version of our world!) God, I love those movies. I raised the kid on them. Plus? Really pretty!
And Mnemosyne, isn’t that like the smurfette principal? By which I mean, just because some movies exist that have female leads, or female characters in them, that doesn’t mean it is, nevertheless, untrue that the landscape of movies still trains us to expect male protagonists — that we still, therefore, visualize a world where men always take the lead, are at the center; men are who the story is (by default) about? (As this thread demonstrates, I think.)
Which means, and this is why it matters, that’s going to be our worldview as well, mostly.
KM Munshi was a follower of Gandhi, freedom fighter, the “father of modern Gujarati drama”, novelist in Gujarati and English, the founder of a university, the governor of an Indian state, one of the authors of the Indian Constitution, etc., etc.
I guess we can ask the standard feminist literature questions here:
1) is there more than one female character?
2) do they talk to each other?
3) … about something other than men?
I haven’t seen Ratatouille yet, but if those questions are answered with a “no”, at least in the sense of not questioning the patriarchal privilege of having movies being “all about the menz”, Amanda’s right and there’s a problem with the movie from a feminist perspective. Doesn’t mean it’s not a good (or great) movie, but it’s not a feminist one.
I still maintain that this is a reactionary vision of a society with Leaders and Followers that functions only when everyone knows their place. Leaders need to lead. Followers are happier being led and not making decisions. I think the film could have moved in another direction at a number of points, but it is what it is and what it is is something that irritates me a lot.
I’ll repeat - to the extent that this is true about Ratatouille, it’s true about pretty much every hero story ever told. It’s a narrative format, Remy has a form of “protagonist power” that gives him an edge over the other characters in the story because it is about him. It’s a story. You could write a story about a rat who wasn’t the greatest chef in France or who was a female or who turned out to be not as good as the female chef who had been slaving away for years but these stories would not have been Ratatouille and, honestly, wouldn’t have been as compelling if the central character had still been the rat. You could have written the story about Collette, but then Remy would have been much harder to make into anything other than a superfluous Disneyesque animal helper. It would have been a different story.
Brad Bird didn’t want to write a story about the power of supermen to rule us. He wanted to write a story about a Rat who wants to be a chef. That story, to be told well, needs certain things that may, if you’re geared towards it, come across as Randian. This, I would say, says more about your own personal hot buttons (as well as, it seems, a belief that movies have one big simple political message which is their entire raison d’etre) than it does about the director.
His frustration at not being able to compete isn’t based on his love of running, but about being denied his entitlement.
Bull. Shit. There aren’t any trophies in the scene where Dash finally cuts loose - he’s running away from robots that are trying to kill him. But he realises that he’s so fast he’s running on water and the immaculately Pixar-realised expression on his face is total joy and excitement at finally being able to do what he’s good at. For a moment he forgets the robots. He doesn’t sulk earlier in the film because he’s denied his entitlement, he sulks because he’s a child.
mnemosyne: As I said earlier, not everyone has the same talents. I know you don’t like to hear it, but that’s kinda what life is like.
Actually, there has been quite a bit of research into what makes a good or great artist, and “natural talent” is much less important than the time spent practicing the art. It certainly is possible for you to become a professional artist. However it would require spending the time equivalent of a full-time job, with overtime, for the next 12 years to get there. (Actually the bar for making a living off your art is probably quite a bit lower. Most art jobs don’t require that one be the next Kahlo.) Mozart and Beethoven may have had an advantage of perfect pitch, and a good physique for the instruments they mastered, but they also had dominating fathers who filled every minute of their day with theory, technique, practice and rehearsal.
Another myth of “artistic/scientific genius” is that great artists produce overall high-quality and memorable works. Mozart in particular composed hundreds of lesser known works with considerable plagiarism and self-plagiarism. Twyla Tharp also dismisses the notion of her success as due to some magical talent. Rather she claims that her obsessive habit of documenting and storing every idea, no matter how trivial or relevant to her current projects. Retrospectives of Einstein point out that he published rarely, spending years chasing down dead-ends. (And when he was wrong, his reputation set Cosmology back by a decade.)
Certainly, natural talent is a factor, but it’s not an overwhelming factor, or even the primary factor. And the “talented hero” narrative in which the protagonist comes from nowhere with no formal training or practice to get the better of more experienced people in the field is also a myth. (And of course, everyone here knows that Amadeus is fiction, based primarily on a play by Pushkin and 19th century nationalist propaganda?)
I think that concerns that Pixar is becoming a Ranoid propaganda front are dismissed by Cars, in which McQueen gets success by learning that he can’t win on his own, and sacrifices his own short-term success in the interests of integrity and fair play.
Still, I do think that Pixar has a bit of a blind spot in regards to gender. Granted, it perhaps is a reaction to the whole Disney princess phenomenon, but how many movies have they done in which female characters are marginalized?
And Mnemosyne, isn’t that like the smurfette principal? By which I mean, just because some movies exist that have female leads, or female characters in them, that doesn’t mean it is, nevertheless, untrue that the landscape of movies still trains us to expect male protagonists — that we still, therefore, visualize a world where men always take the lead, are at the center; men are who the story is (by default) about?
My very first comment on this thread was a link to the See Jane Foundation, which is dedicated to getting a better gender balance in chldren’s films. So, no, I’m not arguing that “Ratatouille” is a feminist film. I’m arguing that complaining that it was about a male rat and not a female human is a stupid argument. It’s like saying, “You know ‘The Godfather’ would have been a much better movie if it had been about migrant farm workers instead of gangsters.” The movie is what it is, and the specifics of it should be criticized on their own merits, not what you wanted it to be.
That said, if we want to start criticizing the children’s entertainment industry as a whole and pointing out that “Ratatouille” is just another small cog in the machine that forces gender roles on children, I’m with you.
Certainly, natural talent is a factor, but it’s not an overwhelming factor, or even the primary factor. And the “talented hero” narrative in which the protagonist comes from nowhere with no formal training or practice to get the better of more experienced people in the field is also a myth.
I tried to pull back on that a bit but, yes, I’m sure that if I worked 12 hours a day for 12 years, I could eventually draw reasonably well. That doesn’t invalidate the fact that there are people out there who don’t have to work as hard at it as I would have to. It’s like saying, “Oh, anyone can be a mathematician if they work hard enough at it!” Sure, probably, but you get to the point of diminishing returns if you have to spend all day, every day, trying to develop a skill that comes more easily to some people.
Still, I do think that Pixar has a bit of a blind spot in regards to gender. Granted, it perhaps is a reaction to the whole Disney princess phenomenon, but how many movies have they done in which female characters are marginalized?
Pretty much … every single one of them. I think the only two where the female lead is at least important to the story are “Finding Nemo” and “The Incredibles.” Otherwise … “Toy Story”? “Monsters Inc.”? No women in sight, even if Roz does turn out to be the head of the monster equivalent of the FBI.
This idea that “The Incredibles” is really about working together, or whatever, is such crap.
Yes, it’s such crap that it’s CONSTANTLY DISCUSSED IN THE MOVIE. It’s such crap that several plot points turn on it.
Seriously, did you at least see the movie first, or did you go in deciding that the secret message of it was “Aryan Supermen Are Our Superiors”?
And, again, if anyone can point to me where Rand said that her elite has a responsibility to anonymously serve the rest of humanity, please point it out to me, because I never saw it.
He wanted to write a story about a Rat who wants to be a chef.
Which, of course, in order to avoid being “political,” must be male. Because a female rat–and really, go through the text, other than changing pronouns, the story can remain as is, unless you’re enough of a gender essentialist to think that a human male would speak differently to a female rat, fercryinoutloud–could have taken the exact same role: wanting to be a chef, dealing with and eventually standing up to parental disapproval, having to struggle against those in positions of power who make essentialist judgments, but ultimately following her dream and achieving some level of success. Making Remy a male IS a political statement. It says “the default is Male.” Which is the default position, even, it seems, among many of those posting to this thread.
mnomosyne: I tried to pull back on that a bit but, yes, I’m sure that if I worked 12 hours a day for 12 years, I could eventually draw reasonably well. That doesn’t invalidate the fact that there are people out there who don’t have to work as hard at it as I would have to. It’s like saying, “Oh, anyone can be a mathematician if they work hard enough at it!” Sure, probably, but you get to the point of diminishing returns if you have to spend all day, every day, trying to develop a skill that comes more easily to some people.
The basic point is that it never* comes easy. If you look across fields at the people regarded as celebrated geniuses, almost all of them have devoted years of their life, spending all day, every day at their skill. It’s true of artists, chess players, mathematicians, and great chefs. Celebrated geniuses are celebrated geniuses primarily because they are obsessive workers who started at a young age. They also tend to be obsessive workers as adults, investing a lot of time and energy on mediocre work to find the few gems.
Except the rat spent a whole 15 minutes being a chef and not a lifetime. Enter echo-boomer angst about being in the workforce for 15 minutes and not yet achieving “vice-president of the world bank” status.
Star Wars, as someone mentioned in jest above, is seriously and truly a manifestation of the Übermensch myth; it’s an endemic problem throughout fantasy, and though it’s not as universal, it’s also a big problem in science fiction. David Brin wrote extensively on the topic here. Not all heroic figures need to be inherently heroic.
So, any takers on explaining how The Iron Giant was Randian?
All of this debate over Remy’s maleness would make a whole lot more sense if his maleness were ever actually known by the other (human) characters in the film. When does Linguini or any other human notice that Remy is a male? They don’t even know he has a name at all, let alone that it’s a male name. Only his fellow rats are aware of his sex.
And I really, really don’t understand the complaints towards the top of the thread that all of the hundreds of rats are male. How do you know?
Actually, grendelkahn, you dear, sweet sugarbeet, I *commented briefly* that Remy COULD–not should–have been female. What I got in response was the equivalent of “but then you’d just bitch about about *that*,” which is not addressing the relative truth or falsity of the matter, but rather, a shutting down of the line of questioning. If you’d like to actually engage the issue (giving me a reason why Remy MUST be male, or dealing with the fact that there’s a whole lot of blind gender privelege being tossed about haphazardly) I’d be more than happy to read your response, rather than your thinly veiled STFU.
“The basic point is that it never* comes easy. If you look across fields at the people regarded as celebrated geniuses, almost all of them have devoted years of their life, spending all day, every day at their skill. It’s true of artists, chess players, mathematicians, and great chefs. Celebrated geniuses are celebrated geniuses primarily because they are obsessive workers who started at a young age. They also tend to be obsessive workers as adults, investing a lot of time and energy on mediocre work to find the few gems.”
That’s something I would agree with but also something different than what you were saying earlier. I don’t think anyone seriously believe that great artists or other talented individuals’ talents or skills solely come to them naturally. The ‘amadeus’ myth that great music just flows from the genius composer’s fingers or the great prose just flows effortlessly from the great writer’s pen. But the idea that “genius” is merely a product of intense grooming and effort and relative disparities between people in terms of talent or skill is due to the relative differences in “effort” they have put into their work is wrongheaded, and potentially pernicious in it’s own way depending on what context it’s used in.
Art of any kind is probably too subjective to make comparisons so instead I’ll use professional sports, and I apologize if the subject is unfamiliar. Kobe Bryant and Brent Barry are both men of similiar physical proportions and economic backgrounds. They both had fathers who were successful NBA players and they both spent the bulk of their respective childhoods and time as young adults immersed in basketball, playing basketball and being groomed for a future professional career in basketball by parents and related parties who spent a great deal of time and money facilitating their children’s development in this area. This ambition was shared by the children and they spent a great deal of time and effort honing and perfecting their individual basketball skills. The efforts paid off and thanks in large part to the time and interest their father’s devoted to their basketball development, the unique expertise they were able to impart to their children, and the fact that they had sufficient economic comfort to devote so much time, effort and money, not to mention all the work put in by the men themselves to improve and refine their own skills, they were both able to make it to the NBA (no small feat) and of this writing are both veterans of the league who have enjoyed steady careers. However, while Brent Barry has always been at most an average player at his position by NBA standards, Kobe Bryant is a bona fide superstar, among the elite players of the league and has been for quite some time.
This is not to say there weren’t actual differences in how well each were groomed as players or how much work they put into their own development. But I don’t think the (rather large) gap between the quality of basketball play exhibited between Kobe Bryant and Brent Barry is accounted for by measurable differences in their grooming as players or the individual work involved. More succinctly, I don’t think Brent Barry isn’t or never has been anywhere near as good as Kobe Bryant because he didn’t practice enough.
Wait, I figured the lead rat was female, based on the promo posters. (Haven’t seen the film yet.) I mean, has anyone here spent much time with rats? It’s incredibly easy to tell whether a rodent is male or female. (hint: GIANT BALLS)
JW: I’d be more than happy to read your response, rather than your thinly veiled STFU.
It wasn’t a thinly veiled STFU; it was a request to engage the response you’d already gotten rather than repeat yourself. The response was that, in short, making Remy female would have led to a more objectionable movie rather than a less objectionable one. I assume you didn’t just mean “COULD”; the story COULD have included a Magic Negro, but I don’t think you would have considered that an improvement.
Is misspelling my name (honestly, it’s written right there) and referring to me with diminutives supposed to be a “thinly veiled STFU” to me?
Phoenician — As I mentioned before, there’s a big difference between Japanese import movies and a movie like “Ratatouille.”
Ratatouille = big budget, big release American movie made by guys, about guys. Currently you can walk into just about any movie house in the U.S. and see it at any hour. See also: Cars, A Bug’s Life, Aladdin, Lion King, Meet the Robinsons, Wallace and Grommit, Tarzan, Pirates of the Caribbean, Monsters Inc., Shrek, Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Spongebob Squarepants, etc., etc.
Japanese anime = lower budget, small release import movies made for adults but which happen to feature children and appeal to children. You might catch one at an art house theater, but you’ll probably have to wait until it comes to video. You have to know they exist and deliberately seek them out. See also: well, that handful of movies you mentioned, which were all made at least five years ago.
My overall point remains. Boys get to see themselves as protagonists in a wide variety of stories that are plentiful, well-financed, and easily accessible, even when it wouldn’t make a difference to the storyline whether the protagonist is a girl or a boy. Girls get variations on the theme of how animals will help you get your prince if you’re pretty and kind, except for certain import movies that are not well known or readily available.
Would have rendered the film more objectionable to whom? That’s the central question, friend, and one that you still have not answered. Fortunately, Linden has spelled it out for you, in the first sentence of the last paragraph there. Way to hammer on OT.
Also, there are far too many “magic negroes” in films already. And you know why? Because the same white dudes who finance films and relegate female characters to love interests or ball-busters can’t imagine black people any other way.
DRR: But the idea that “genius” is merely a product of intense grooming and effort and relative disparities between people in terms of talent or skill is due to the relative differences in “effort” they have put into their work is wrongheaded, and potentially pernicious in it’s own way depending on what context it’s used in.
But of course, I didn’t say that. What I did say was “Certainly, natural talent is a factor, but it’s not an overwhelming factor, or even the primary factor.” Quite a bit of research has been done on this, and pretty consistently “natural talent” is not the primary factor behind career success.
Art of any kind is probably too subjective to make comparisons …
Nonsense, while there may be some disagreement in terms of raking those people within the top 1% of their field, it’s not that hard to separate the top 1% from the rest. And of course, you can say that there is some kind of inherent difference in talent between Bryant and Barry, but the nature of professional sports is such that both Bryant and Barry are, for all practical purposes, the “cream of the crop.” Barry may be mid-ranked by NBA standards. But compared to the population of all athletes, he’s a member of the elite.
In addition, professional athletics probably shouldn’t be compared to the arts (including haute cuisine) because athletics is so physically selective. Not that the arts are not physical, but Cole Porter, David Baker, and Julie Andrews are three examples of artists who were able to continue their careers after a serious injury limited their performance ability.
JW, at no point did I state that a typo made your point moot. Very deft sidestepping the issue of using diminutives toward me, though–does your typo render my point moot?
If you read the comments to which I’m now referring for the third time, the film would have been more objectionable to the same audience that is finding it objectionable that Remy was male. Please actually read the comments.
I’m certainly not denying that movies, especially children’s movies in this case, portray a stunningly gender-biased world which sends very different messages to boys and to girls. I do deny that flipping Remy’s gender would have made it a better movie, or would have addressed the central concerns here.
And yes, the whole point of my “Magic Negro” example is that adding one doesn’t improve a movie. How was that not clear?
Clearly the “casting” in Ratatouille conforms to the male=default standard that’s so common in pop culure. And clearly that tradition is a sexist one. But Roxanne’s post seemed to agrue that there was additional sexism operating in the way Colette’s character was presented, and that strikes me as be a bit of a stretch.
If Colette’s character were itself a part of the problem, then presumably the movie’s treatment of gender would be improved if she were made male and some other character were made female instead. As folks have suggested above, there doesn’t seem to be an obvious candidate for such a swap.
So yes, the genre convention that dictates that all but one or two of the characters in a story be male is a sexist one, absolutely. And yes, Ratatouille is guilty of that brand of sexism. (Though interestingly, The Incredibles wasn’t. Wonder why not?) But I’m still not buying Roxanne’s original argument.
I’m not arguing that “Ratatouille” is a feminist film. I’m arguing that complaining that it was about a male rat and not a female human is a stupid argument. It’s like saying, “You know ‘The Godfather’ would have been a much better movie if it had been about migrant farm workers instead of gangsters.”
Hear hear.
JW–I’m not saying that you shouldn’t complain that Remy is male because you would have also complained if Remy had been female. I’m saying that the complaints raised if Remy were female would have been right. Female has inborn cooking talent. Objectionable gender stereotype. Female wins over critic with food like mama used to make. Objectionable gender stereotype. Female controls male by pulling his hair and making him dance like a puppet. Highly objectionable gender stereotype. And so on.
Like mnenosyne said, this isn’t an argument that Ratatouille is a feminist film. I think that Collette’s speech about her exclusion from the kitchen is reproduced in Remy’s exclusion, and it’s quite frank about sexism, privilege, and adaptive strategies, but those are part of the larger theme rather than the theme itself. More problematic, there’s only one female character who exists primarily as the love interest for a mostly unlikeable male lead.
It is, however, an argument that “Remy could have been female!” is not a good criticism. If anything, Remy’s gender is used to play against gendered expectations. It would have been an interesting movie if it had been more female-focused, but it would have been a very, very different one as well. And while nothing says we can’t or shouldn’t have that different movie, there is an infinite number of different movies Ratatouille could have been.
I’m put in mind of a Washington Post review of “Batman Begins” that complained the movie wasn’t campy like the TV show. Sure, it wasn’t, that doesn’t tell us anything about the merits or demerits of the film. It might tell us something about the industry–Hollywood isn’t making enough campy films!–but that’s a separate issue.
Roxanne: Actually, Remy spends a lot of time reading the chef’s book and watching the television show. It’s not on-screen, but he knows the recipes and things like what Gusteau says about saffron.
This is, and I can’t imagine it actually could be, even sillier than the “Velma is gay” and “Incredibles is about Ayn Rand” lunatics.
How, exactly, is Collette dismissed any differently in ability than any other chef in the movie? The point is they were ALL afraid to take the risks and present the drive Remy did. The reason Remy was depicted as a better chef than the others was because, well, he WAS.
Roxanne, if your claim that the message is a rat is a better chef than a woman, I’d expect at least a casual example from the movie where that’s implied. Your statement says Remy makes a better chef, and yet it doesn’t explain WHY he does. WHY does Remy make a better chef than Collette, and then WHAT does his gender (which is, by the way, never even disclosed to the characters in the movie, only to the audience) have to do with it?
If there’s no explanation here, then the anger appears to be solely that Patton Oswalt happened to be cast in the role and therefore the lead character was male.
I love you guys here but people grasping for “hidden meanings” in cartoons is a lifelong pet peeve of mine and I’m going to call you on this silliness. Sorry.
The Chief - First things first, go fuck yourself. Your point was about over simplification, and my point was that Roxanne’s whole post was bad, not because it oversimplified but because it didn’t give any context to its criticism. If you’re saying the context I suggested that would have made the criticism valid is wrong, how about some evidence or argument as opposed to insult. Hm, how about engaging in the ideas?
mnemosyne - Yeah, I’ve seen the movie, more than once, and I get your point, I just disagree with you. For one thing, I gave a lot of evidence in my post as to why the message of that movie was somewhat Randian. Allow me to adjust my claim, and let’s see if we both agree with it. Ok, how about this: the message of the movie is at various times various things, and for a substantial portion of the film is not about the virtues of working together. In an attempt to give motivation to various characters to make the plot work VERY BAD WRITING was done. The intent of the film may have been to show that working together is important blah blah blah, but the result incorporates a lot of other ideology because the script is shoddy and the creators thought no one would notice. So you not only have people working together as a plot driver at multiple points, you also have characters developed as entitled brats and a villain whose message is not entirely menacing, a0nd to fight against that message isn’t exactly an ideological battle that makes a super hero look good.
But when you look out over the larger landscape of kids’ movies, it’s hard to find any with female characters who aren’t there to serve as moms, girlfriends, helpmeets, or love interests in relation to male characters.
Not that this justifies the glaring lack of female characters in cartoons, but Disney to their credit has made four animated daytime series in the last five years with female leads- Kim Possible, Brandy & Mr. Whiskers, The Proud Family, and Lilo & Stitch. In all four, a female character is depicted as the strong, self-assertive heroine, in only one (and only the last season) is there any romantic association with a male co-lead, and in the latter two the main characters are not only female but non-white, which is amazing given the standards of cartoons only twenty years ago. Disney has a load of problems but they deserve recognition for that.
In contrast, Disney has made only two- TWO- feature animated films with a female lead not supplemental to a male lead: Lilo & Stitch (the movie) and Alice in Wonderland. They were made over fifty years apart from each other.
Daniel, The Incredibles is to a great extent a movie about family — about the bonds of love and obligation between spouses, and between parents and children. These are not questions that Ayn Rand ever showed much interest in, and they are not presented here in a particularly Randian way. Beyond that, the movie is grounded in the superhero genre, and takes as a given the genre convention that heroes are heroes not because of their powers alone, but because they use those powers for the common good. No, the Incredibles aren’t self-abnegating, but that’s precisely the point — the filmmakers see self-realization and public service as mutually reinforcing.
All of this is at odds with Rand, and all of it must be addressed in an argument that The Incredibles is an Objectivist tract. Yes, there are moments that Rand would have liked in the movie, but if all it takes to make a movie Randian is a few such moments, then the claim is virtually meaningless.
Brooklynite - My point is that major portions of the message in the movie are Randian. And I’d disagree that the movie is *about* those bonds of love and obligation more than it includes those bonds. Heck, I’m going to watch it right now though, I’ll look for that too.
Which, of course, in order to avoid being “political,” must be male. Because a female rat–and really, go through the text, other than changing pronouns, the story can remain as is, unless you’re enough of a gender essentialist to think that a human male would speak differently to a female rat, fercryinoutloud–could have taken the exact same role: wanting to be a chef, dealing with and eventually standing up to parental disapproval, having to struggle against those in positions of power who make essentialist judgments, but ultimately following her dream and achieving some level of success. Making Remy a male IS a political statement. It says “the default is Male.” Which is the default position, even, it seems, among many of those posting to this thread.
Fact: real kitchens in real restaurants are really, really male oriented.
Fact: Remy was
Of course the rat is a better chef than the head chef who has been it at for 3 times as many years as the female chef, but hey
Yeah, I liked the way all the people who had been waiting patiently in line for years happily made way to the talented rat-controlled mop boy. That’s gonna happen.
Cute movie, though.
Naw, the head chef was a corrupt asshole who didn’t do much in the way of cooking during the film.
To be fair the movie suggests that the rat is the best cook in all of France, when he wins over the tough food critic.
Not only that, but I’m pretty sure the male rats spend the entire movie with no pants on.
I really enjoyed the movie. The rat was a good cook because he took risks, risks the other chefs wouldn’t take, including the woman.
Hey! The rat was also better than the black chef who’d busted his ass there! But would you have felt better had it been a female rat?
And Moby Dick was about a crazy guy chasing a big fish. You can mimimize anything you want, especially if it helps support the chip on your shoulder.
Come on, the movie was adorable. My sons and I just watched it tonight. You are reading much too much into this thing.
Gotta say that one didn’t occur to me either time I’ve seen it, and I’m a feminist from way back. It’s not only an adorable movie, but the animation is stupendous.
Might not be a stretch to say that it’s anti rote education, though. The passionate outsider beats the folks who work by the book–sounds a little too much like governing from your gut instincts, no? At least that’s more valid for cookery than war planning.
Well, at least it isn’t speciesist.
Roxanne, I’m with you. I’m an animation fan, and I really enjoyed Ratatouille, but really, other than the BS rule that All Protagonists Must Be Male, there’s NO reason that Remy couldn’t have been female (and I must say, if Remy had been female, that would have made for a better, more integrated story, as Linguini would have learned with Remy how to communicate/cooperate, thereby supporting the development of his relationship with Collette). In fact, did you notice that ALL the rats, thousands and thousands of them, were male? Had they mastered parthenogenesis, or what?
I thought it was clear that Remy had keener senses than most rats and all humans and that is why he could cook.
Interesting question - why no female rats?
Ratatouille was fun, but its anvilicious Randianism was nearly too much for me. The point of the film seems to be that there is a small number of Talented Great People who are randomly distributed throughout the population. It doesn’t matter who your parents are — it doesn’t even matter what species they are. But certain individuals are Geniuses, and others are not.
The Geniuses must be allowed to fulfill their Destiny and Vision. The rest of us? We exist to be their puppets (literally). In fact, even if you’re a highly trained, talented individual, say, on the kitchen staff at a great restaurant, if you’re not a Genius you can be adequately replaced with an army of rats.
My guess is that Pixar really wanted to call it Ratlass Shrugged but it didn’t focus-group well.
The Chief, why don’t you go back to your own little MRA blog and leave the nice feminists alone?
Oh, and “Crazy guy goes after big, white whale” would about sum up Moby Dick, in my oppinion, anyway.
I think you’ve misread the movie, Roxanne. It’s already been pointed out that the rat is not just better than the female chef, but better than all the chefs in France. It’s anti-human as much as anti-woman, on those grounds.
But what I think you’ve missed is that the female chef has a serious monologue where she excoriates her profession for the sexism that requires her to be twice as good as any male chef in order to even have a place in the kitchen. This isn’t presented as “Oh, what a crazy woman!” but rather as legitimate criticism. She is excluded from the kitchen because of who she is, just as the rat is excluded.
Maybe there’s something to this argument that I’m not seeing, but it seems to me that this criticism of Ratatouille ignores vast swaths of the movie. There’s much more fertile grounds for criticism in the boy’s relationship with the female chef–she puts up with more unsavory behavior than she deserves, even if he eventually wises up.
I’d just like my little girl to see a few blockbuster animated movies with girls as protagonists in which the main object of the movie is not romance. Girl movies = romances; boy movies = everything else.
There’s only so much cultural validation to be derived from “Spirited Away.”
Does the short brief contain errors, or are people just projecting their own assumptions onto the summary and onto the intent of the author?
Interesting.
You know, sometimes a banana is just a banana.
If you have Netflix, I recommend renting “Chef”– the lead is male, but his wife/manager is smarter than him financially, and there a female who gets promoted to sous chef because she’s really good.
Hey, where did the blockquote in my previous post go?
“Hey! The rat was also better than the black chef who’d busted his ass there! But would you have felt better had it been a female rat“
The part of the movie that bothered me was when the female chef is approached by the male ‘chef’ (the one controlled by the rat) and we are supposed to find it HUMOROUS that she reaches for the mace in her purse because he is acting so strangely. Yes, because being approached by weird guys in an alley is SO hilarious.
How do we know the rat was the best chef in France?
How do we know the rat was the best chef in France?
You mean other than the part where the most feared restaurant critic in all of France was won over by a single bite of ratatouille?
It’s in the title, fer chrissakes.
I gotta say, I come here to Pandagon every day and enjoy it very much, but I always keep in mind that the people who run the place are more than willing to jump on the man-hatin’ / caucasian-hatin’ / conservative-hatin’ wagon with only the smallest shred of evidence that may or may not actually be there (Duke Lacrosse, anyone?).
That said, I also understand that in the real world there often need to be people pushing farther in any one direction than they should be in order to get everyone else to get them to where they ought to be. Keep up the good work, everyone.
If people are genuinely interested in doing something about this other than whinging on the internet, the See Jane foundation is trying to make a dent in entertainment.
The Chief:
Whales aren’t fish, dipshit.
And if that’s really all you got out of Moby Dick, you didn’t read it closely enough.
Samantha:
If you mean Chef!, the BBC sitcom starring Lenny Henry, I wholeheartedly second the recommendation.
The rat was the only chef in that restaurant (other than the dead gy) with the opportunity to cook for the critic. And what the rat prepared touched him on a level deeper than the mere taste of the dish. It was “home cooking,” which is also interesting.
The point of the film seems to be that there is a small number of Talented Great People who are randomly distributed throughout the population. It doesn’t matter who your parents are — it doesn’t even matter what species they are. But certain individuals are Geniuses, and others are not.
So how are those piano lessons going? Have you rivaled Mozart yet, or at least David Helfgott? Can you at least play as well as the guy in Nordstrom?
After all, anyone can become a great pianist with practice. Anyone who tells you that there are Talented Great People who are randomly distributed throughout the population who are better piano players than you is lying to you.
Bullshit. We just went through this with the Jane Austen movie. If the puppet-chef had been female, then everyone would be bitching about how all female “success” has to be “owned” by men in modern fiction.
If the rat were female, then there would be some snide remark about how, of course, women are supposed to do all the cooking. I agree with the above posters who say “You are reading too much into this.”
I’m kind of with Petey. If Remy had been a female rat, there would have been complaints - maybe even from me - that, yes, of course the woman is doing the cooking, and the man can’t do anything in the kitchen without the woman tugging him around by the hair, and when all of the male chefs in France couldn’t win over the critic, the woman did it with her simple, heartfelt home cooking, while the man gets all the credit. I just thought it was a really sweet movie, and I didn’t notice the rat’s gender at all, while I loved the female chef’s monologue about sexism in her profession.
There could have - should have - been some female rats, though. I mean, there were about a billion rats on the screen at one point; they had to come from somewhere.
The rat was the only chef in that restaurant (other than the dead gy) with the opportunity to cook for the critic.
And your evidence that Gusteau’s restaurant was the only restaurant in all of France, and therefore the only one the critic ever ate at is … ?
As other people have pointed out above, the problem with Colette actually comes out of her own mouth, when she says that the chefs in the kitchen don’t create the recipes, they only make the recipes, and they follow them to the letter. That’s why she’s not a great chef.
You must really hate The Incredibles. And, probably, every other story ever told where the protagonist is the special one with the fantastic abilities, like Star Wars, or The Odyssey, or Spider-man, or The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, or Happy Feet, or Die Hard, or anything about Sherlock Holmes. Sometimes, just sometimes, people write stories about fantastic heroes with abilities beyond the normal ken because that’s what they want to write a story about. People also write stories about ordinary people if that’s what they want to write a story about.
What’s the complaint, really? Protagonist is male? Yes, there are more male protagonists in movies than female ones. Could the story have been written better with a female protagonist? Possibly, but you weren’t writing it. It’s possible that the layers of politics caused by making Remy both a rat AND female would have made the task in front of him more Sisyphean than could be easily overcome within a story that is supposed to have an element of lightness to it. It is possible that splitting up the feminist argument into a sub-character was just easier from a narrative point of view. As a writer, I’d bet dollars to donuts that this is the reason Remy was a male. I put female protagonists in my stuff as much as possible because, as has been pointed out, some things are more interesting if there’s a woman doing them just because it’s a woman and this is a male-dominated world. It adds depth. But still, the last screenplay I wrote had a nearly all-male cast, because, frankly, it was mainly about three men. If it had been about three women, or two men and a woman, it would have been a different story. You can only go so far before the story you want to tell kicks the ass of whatever sensibilities you want to appease with your selection of characters.
Brad Bird hardly shies away from strong female characters - look at Elastigirl in The Incredibles, who went to rescue her husband and had an incredibly well developed partnership as equal head of a struggling family dynamic - but Pixar and Bird have, first and foremost, a keen eye for what makes a good story, and layering on all the politics in the world rarely works.
This, incidentally, is why comparing anything Pixar do to Ayn fucking Rand is a crock of horse shit. If Pixar were reading from Rand’s book, the stories would suck and half the film would be the writer’s personal politics delivered in achingly dull monologue. Rand is the perfect author if you hate stories and want everything the writer believes laid out in front of you so that you can analyse it philosophically. I, personally, prefer the more twisty and intriguing pathways of great storytelling and characterisation.
Since this is animation we’re talking about and not a documentary, I’m pretty sure the characters have all the talents and attributes the artists give them. Colette’s not adventurous because they don’t want her to be. The rat is “the best” because it works with the movie title. ETC.
It might have been a more interesting movie (for me, at least) if it were about an adventurous female chef who bucked the odds and became head chef at an M5 Paris restaurant. I know it’s very hard to imagine a situation like that if you work at Pixar in Emeryville and you can eat at Alice Water’s place anytime you like …
Mnemosyne,
I’m not exactly sure what you’re getting at (that was snark, right?)…I’m not arguing that most people are geniuses — what bothers me about the film is the role assigned to the 99% of the population that aren’t geniuses: that of mindless servants doing the bidding of their intrinsically-superior masters (the image of Remy as Linguini’s puppet-master is so literal, and funny, that it’s easy to overlook what’s really going on).
Remember the NYT article (full article is hidden behind Times Select) in which multi-billionaire CEO’s justify their outrageous wealth in ethical terms? I remember one of them saying something like, “In any organization, there are one or two people who really make a difference,” and then asserting that he’s one of them, and thus deserving of his billions.
Ratatouille, I think, absolutely buys into that ideology.
You know, I married (twice) a fully professionally trained chef who happens to be female, and I gotta inject a note of reality into this: She would have been better off a male rat than a human dyke in terms of the access to other people’s money her Great Gift buys her.
And the restaurant biz is all about rich people who can eat choosing which talented trained chefs will get the chance to be famous. The rat using the man as his puppet differed from the woman in the kitchen in one vital respect: he had nothing to lose by expressing his talent.
So yeah, sorry to burst bubbles, but Roxanne had it in one.
We love the movie, have taken the kid to it twice, but it’s realistic in that regard. Not in the aspect of showing a Hobart full of rats, but in showing the real sexism of food culture.
It might have been a more interesting movie (for me, at least) if it were about an adventurous female chef who bucked the odds and became head chef at an M5 Paris restaurant. I know it’s very hard to imagine a situation like that if you work at Pixar in Emeryville and you can eat at Alice Water’s place anytime you like …
It would have been awfully boring animation. “Oh, look. A bunch of humans running around doing exactly what humans do … but they’re animated!”
I’m guessing that you think Dumbo should have been about the plight of mistreated elephants in the circus and not about a flying elephant. I mean, how stupid is it to write fantasy
If you think that a movie about a female chef should be written, go buy yourself a copy of Syd Field and write it. You’ll never sell it as animation, but I’m sure some indie producer would be interested in it as live action.
It might have been a more interesting movie (for me, at least) if it were about an adventurous female chef who bucked the odds and became head chef at an M5 Paris restaurant.
That’s called science fiction, because it can’t happen in our current reality. But yeah, I’d also pay $20 plus popcorn to see that movie…
It’s true. Mulan, Pocahantas, Snow White and Cinderella were all about the animals.
I’m not arguing that most people are geniuses — what bothers me about the film is the role assigned to the 99% of the population that aren’t geniuses: that of mindless servants doing the bidding of their intrinsically-superior masters (the image of Remy as Linguini’s puppet-master is so literal, and funny, that it’s easy to overlook what’s really going on).
Of course, at the end, Linguini is released from his servitude to do what he’s really good at — being a waiter. You know, the same way that Remy is freed from having to have a “beard” who cooks for him. Unless you think that being a waiter is automatically a horrible, degrading job that no one should have to do since you’re a “mindless servant doing the bidding of your intrinsically-superior master,” I’m not sure I get your point.
RemyLinguini is freed by inheriting the restaurant. But I also don’t buy totally into the Rand thing. What was the title of the cookbook? Anyone Can Cook!It’s true. Mulan, Pocahantas, Snow White and Cinderella were all about the animals.
Maybe try some Disney movies that didn’t have intelligent animals helping humans? Because all of the above have exactly that. Or do you not remember Gus and Jacques and the rest of the animals sewing Cinderella’s dress for the ball? Or the forest animals helping the Dwarfs build Snow White’s bed? The only difference with “Ratatouille” is that the animals get to speak to one another, even if the humans don’t understand what they say.
Sorry to leave in the middle of the argument, but G. is dragging me out for a healthy walk. I’ll be back.
Pesto- I had exactly the same reaction to The Incredibles-Brad Bird’s previous attempt to make Atlas Shrugged for tykes.
My girlfriend and I both had that complaint while leaving, although we did still love the movie on the whole.
While the number of female characters would still be low, there was an easy fix available for the Remy consistently having better judgment than Collette. Remy’s ability related to smell and taste. I think it’s reasonable to just accept movie logic and say he can beat any human on that score. Collette could have simply once gotten a recipe better because she understood texture. (Collette wasn’t set up as having a superior understanding of texture, but presumably that’s an area where a rat wouldn’t have much experience.)
This is technically OT, but Mrs. F and I saw Stardust the other day, and while we enjoyed the film as and immediately after we watched it, the more we thought about it, the more we started to dislike it.
The story is about a star who falls to earth (as a means of establishing dynastic succession among sons) and incarnates as a lovely young woman. An adventurous lad, wanting to impress his girlfriend, sets off on a quest to retrieve the star. He doesn’t know at that time that the star is now a woman, but when he finds that this is the case, his first move is to bind her with a magic chain and lead her halfway across the country — while she’s limping. Later, of course, they fall in love.
Did anyone see this and what did you think?
Roxanne,
Yes, “Anyone Can Cook” — which clearly includes rats and people with no control over their own limbs, as long as a Genius is controlling them. Remember, Linguini absolutely cannot cook on his own (don’t forget what he does to the soup as a plongeur). The critic, whose name escapes me at the moment — wait, is it Scar? — parses the phrase in his long “Critics are sniveling parasites, except when they help people recognize Geniuses” voice-over, when he explains that, while not everyone can cook, a great cook can come from anywhere, and the Greatest Cook in France comes from such humble origins that this reviewer etc. etc. etc.
Mnemosyne,
The Randianism fits in well with Brad Bird’s last big hit, The Incredibles, which, as pablo mentions above, was about how society holds back the Truly Great by not letting them be their true, superior selves.
Unless you think that being a waiter is automatically a horrible, degrading job that no one should have to do since you’re a “mindless servant doing the bidding of your intrinsically-superior master,” I’m not sure I get your point.
Alright, I’m calling strawman. I might point out that Remy’s talent as a waiter/skater is completely unjustified in the film — until he starts his Brian Boitano impersonation (sorry, I can’t come up with the names of any great roller skaters), he’s played over and over again as a klutz. His ability as a waiter is driven by the needs of the plot (all the small-minded kitchen staff need to leave in a huff at Remy’s unveiling, and someone needs to serve in the dining room) and of the movie’s physical comedy, not out of anything from within the character himself.
I think waiting demands tremendous talent and hard work. I think being a comis, or a sous chef, or a maitre d’hotel also demands talent. But I think the movie itself, and also Brad Bird, think that quality depends on (a) a Single Great Genius, who is just naturally better than nearly anyone else, telling everyone exactly what to do, and (b) everyone else just doing whatever the Genius says. Individualism is great for the Geniuses — everyone else exists merely to do as they’re told. In terms of the quality of food, it evidently doesn’t even matter if the food is actually cooked by trained, dedicated professionals like the human kitchen staff — they’re all worth exactly the same as a bunch of rats who can’t even tell food from garbage. All that matters is the Genius directing them.
My point is, I think that’s a ridiculous, reactionary, anti-democratic version of reality. And that the only people who really buy into it are members of the ruling class trying to justify their enormous power and wealth to themselves and their employees, and your local Objectivist Society.
Sorry to lower the intellectual tone of the conversation, but did anybody else have trouble getting over the shudder factor of watching rats flow over a kitchen?
Okay, I’m back.
Pesto, first of all, REMY IS THE RAT’S NAME. The human’s name is Linguini.
The Randianism fits in well with Brad Bird’s last big hit, “The Incredibles,” which, as pablo mentions above, was about how society holds back the Truly Great by not letting them be their true, superior selves.
Uh-huh.
What was the name of the island that Bob went to?
You could read The Incredibles as an attack on mediocrities purporting to restrain their betters. An equally valid interpretation would be seeing it as an attack on those who want to stand forth and make society better.
… and make society better.
After all, it is arguable that Syndrome only became Syndrome because he wasn’t permitted to be on the good guy side, which speaks against the snobbishness of the gifted elite of Supers, which speaks against a Randian take on the film.
Mnemosyne,
Yes, you caught me one time typing “Remy” instead of “Linguini”. I blame the little rat sitting on my head controlling my hands as I type.
If you want the full run-down on Brad Bird and Rand, just google “Brad Bird” + “Rand”. You’ll find Randians extolling his virtues, normal people analyzing Bird’s politics, and even this review of Ratatouille by someone named Julian Sanchez that makes the same connection between the film and Rand as I do (I haven’t read this particular review until this exchange, and I swear I came up with Ratlass Shrugged all by myself — maybe I’m a Genius after all…)
Yes, you caught me one time typing “Remy” instead of “Linguini”. I blame the little rat sitting on my head controlling my hands as I type.
Actually, you did it three times. Hence the all caps.
And, yes, I am aware that some libertarians are convinced that The Incredibles is a Randian screed about how supermen should rule us all. I heard all of the arguments when the movie first came out. If you want to buy that argument, then Spiderman and Batman are also Randian screeds about Our Superiors. Not to mention Superman, the ultimate Randian hero. Therefore, Sam Raimi and Bryan Singer are Randians just like Brad Bird, right? After all, they also make films about superheroes who are forced to suppress their powers by their inferiors.
You didn’t answer my question: what was the name of the island that Bob went to? It’s very important to the themes of the film. Brad Bird even makes a point of discussing it in the commentary to the film.
Sorry to lower the intellectual tone of the conversation, but did anybody else have trouble getting over the shudder factor of watching rats flow over a kitchen?
At least they had to go through the dishwasher …
But, yeah, it was pretty unnerving to have the army of rats swarming the kitchen. At least they acknowledged what would really happen and had the restaurant shut down.
Rats that have been inhabiting the Paris sewers, no less.
Sorry to lower the intellectual tone of the conversation, but did anybody else have trouble getting over the shudder factor of watching rats flow over a kitchen?
Yes, but mostly because I was worried that they would get hurt. I have pet rats, and they are not allowed near the stove when something is cooking.
The Incredibles may oppose creeping mediocrity in a somewhat smug way, but that doesn’t make it Randian. The heroes of the movie are unselfconsciously committed to sacrificing for the public good, and not just when they’re in their spandex — Mr. Incredible goes out of his way to assist policyholders at his insurance gig, and it costs him his job.
I’ve seen negative Objectivist reviews of The Incredibles that emphasized just that issue. Many Randians have big problems with the movie, and they should.
Without getting into the ideological battle lines being drawn here, let me suggest to Linden at # 17 that Miyazaki films in general are really good for their female protagonists: Kiki’s Delivery Service and especially My Neighbor Totoro are great for young kids, and as they get older they can watch Castle In The Sky and (eventually) Princess Mononoke.
Mnemosyne,
I still only count one time when I wrote “Remy” and meant “Linguini”. Comment #14 — no names. Comment #36: “Remy as Linguini’s puppet-master” — got that right. Comment #47 “Linguini absolutely cannot cook on his own (remember what he does to the soup as a plongeur)” — also right. “Remy’s talent as a waiter/skater”: blew that. That’s one “Remy’s unveiling” — refers to the rat being revealed, got that right. But whatever. Why are we arguing over that again?
You didn’t answer my question: what was the name of the island that Bob went to? It’s very important to the themes of the film. Brad Bird even makes a point of discussing it in the commentary to the film.
I don’t remember. I saw the film with my kids when it came out. I only mentioned The Incredibles in passing. Why don’t you explain your point — if you want to discuss The Incredibles — instead of quizzing me about the movie?
I’m kind of with Petey. If Remy had been a female rat, there would have been complaints - maybe even from me - that, yes, of course the woman is doing the cooking, and the man can’t do anything in the kitchen without the woman tugging him around by the hair, and when all of the male chefs in France couldn’t win over the critic, the woman did it with her simple, heartfelt home cooking, while the man gets all the credit.
On the other hand, it would have brought the major female character count up to two. That would have counted for a lot, and if the female Remy had still had the male Remy’s innocent, enthusiastic, and nerdy passion for cooking, it would have portrayed an under-represented trait in female characters.
Would I still have complained? Hell yeah! I am always critical of the things I love!
I agree that part of the reason Remy was a better cook than Colette was because he had nothing to lose. Colette, as she explained, had to work twice as hard as anyone else in the kitchen, and probably focused on memorizing the rule book (cook book?) because that was the only way she could get ahead–any attempts at individuality would have been squelched because everyone was looking for any excuse to get rid of her.
I don’t know that this particular movie would have been better with a female protagonist, but we do definitely need more movies with female protagonists. This is a hard complaint to make because, no, I’m not suggesting Buzz & Woody should have been girls–I don’t think we need fewer movies with male protagonists, exactly, just a more equal ratio. And, for the love of the disco ball, yes, it would be nice–and this was my one slight complaint with Ratatouille (which I didn’t have with The Incredibles, incidentally, because The Incredibles didn’t have this problem)–to have relatively equal gender ratios within movies, too.
I used to love people like you when I was a divorce lawyer. Such attitudes were a blissful guarantee of files and income from couples who otherwise wouldn’t have needed or wanted to be apart.I only mentioned “The Incredibles” in passing. Why don’t you explain your point — if you want to discuss “The Incredibles” — instead of quizzing me about the movie?
Actually, I wanted to discuss “Ratatouille,” but you seem convinced that Brad Bird is a Randian in disguise, so I guess we have to debunk that first.
The island is Nomanisan Island. As in, “No man is an island.” Because the entire movie is about how Bob can’t do everything on his own and needs to learn to rely on the help of the people around him. He created Syndrome by rejecting him as a partner, so his stubborn insistence on doing things by himself literally comes back to haunt him.
Now, I’m not very familiar with Rand, but I seem to recall that she didn’t have many teamwork themes in her books or her philosophy. I don’t recall her talking about how The Supermen would need to work together to accomplish their goals. Maybe I’m wrong, though.
Yes, there are Randians who are convinced the film is one big libertarian valentine. Those people are idiots who paid attention to nothing other than the fact that there are superheroes in the movie, and superheroes are, like, totally what Ayn Rand was talking about, man!
Since the whole meme was pretty popular, I do think that Bird was playing around with it in “Ratatouille.” Again, though, you seem to have missed the whole part where Remy using Linguini as a front is a failure. It makes both of them unhappy and it can’t be sustained for the long term.
I used to love people like you when I was a divorce lawyer. Such attitudes were a blissful guarantee of files and income from couples who otherwise wouldn’t have needed or wanted to be apart.
Notice that I said “things” and not “people”. There a difference between the way one approaches relationships with people and the way one approaches movies and other forms of media. You can say whatever you want about a movie and it won’t get its feelings hurt or decide it doesn’t want you to watch it anymore.
The island’s name is Nomanisan, and you’re damn right that it’s significant. At the end of the day, the movie suggests that while some people are extraordinary at certain very specific things (their “superpower”), it’s only in tandem with each other, with ordinary joes and janes, and with their own basic human decency (the scenes with Mirage are especially telling here, as is the scene where Dash tries to come in second), that anyone can produce an extraordinary result.
Mnemosyne,
Thanks for elaborating on your Incredibles analysis. Your reading of the island certainly cuts against the “if everyone is special, no one is” theme in the first part of the film, and the I’s’ unhappiness by their legally-enforced normality. FWIW, I was a lot less irritated by that film than by Ratatouille, though, paradoxically, I also found it less entertaining.
Now, as to whether the Remy-under-the-tocque (sp?) arrangement is a failure…well, they do manage to cook the sweetbreads successfully, which is a pretty important moment for them. And they do manage to launch the Linguini/Colette romance. Of course, part of the failure is due to the constraints the arrangement places on Remy, and the fact that Linguini starts to think that he’s better than he really is and argues with his Little Chef. The problem then, is that Remy can’t really run things when his Genius isn’t acknowledged, and Linguini can’t really follow him when everyone treats him as the genius.
So you’re right, neither of them is “being himself” until Remy is revealed as the real chef. Everyone is happier being honest in the end. If the restaurant had triumphed as a result of Remy encouraging Colette and the other staff to use their own creativity the way he had used his, to stop mechanically reproducing recipes just because someone wrote them that way, to trust their talents and taste as he had, then the film would have demonstrated different dynamics of creativity. But as it is, you evidently either have it (and can see all the colors and hear the symphony when you taste food) or you don’t (and can’t tell food from garbage). Even if you can taste it, you can’t necessarily create it yourself. And success in the restaurant relies on only one Genius to trust his instincts and taste — everyone else, who for some inexplicable reason aren’t geniuses, can contribute only to the extent that they serve the Genius’s vision.
I still maintain that this is a reactionary vision of a society with Leaders and Followers that functions only when everyone knows their place. Leaders need to lead. Followers are happier being led and not making decisions. I think the film could have moved in another direction at a number of points, but it is what it is and what it is is something that irritates me a lot.
I’m sorry to comment and run, but it’s 1 a.m. where I am and I need to get up and go to work tomorrow (where I can lurk here, but I really can’t post). But I can come back to this thread tomorrow to continue our part of the discussion tomorrow if you’d like.
Even though Remy is pretty androgynous–or at least doesn’t carry much stereotypical masculinity into the plot–I’m not sold on the idea that such a gender change wouldn’t mean a radically different movie. As Petey points out, the movie becomes more objectionable if we keep everything the same but change either Remy or Linguini’s gender. If you leave things as they are, those objectionable aspects change the movie significantly. Addressing them adequately also changes the movie significantly.
That’s not necessarily a problem–it would be great to see a movie that addresses those issues–but that would be a different movie. Complaining over the non-existence of that different movie makes sense, but, while that’s a more than fair complaint against the industry, market, etc., I don’t see how it’s a legitimate criticism of this particular movie. We might as well complain that Ratatouille isn’t a good film because it isn’t about organic food or vegetarianism.
Give it another shot. It may just be that you don’t like the movie, or even the genre. But don’t confuse “I wanted to see another movie” with “The movie I saw is bad.”
I’m sorry to comment and run, but it’s 1 a.m. where I am and I need to get up and go to work tomorrow (where I can lurk here, but I really can’t post).
That’s why it’s nice to be on the West Coast — I can usually get in the last word when all of you Easterners go to bed.
If the restaurant had triumphed as a result of Remy encouraging Colette and the other staff to use their own creativity the way he had used his, to stop mechanically reproducing recipes just because someone wrote them that way, to trust their talents and taste as he had, then the film would have demonstrated different dynamics of creativity. But as it is, you evidently either have it (and can see all the colors and hear the symphony when you taste food) or you don’t (and can’t tell food from garbage).
Which is why I brought up muscial talent earlier. In this film, like it or not, cooking ability is shown as a talent, not a craft. Anyone can cook … but not everyone can be a great chef.
As I said earlier, not everyone has the same talents. I know you don’t like to hear it, but that’s kinda what life is like. Some things you can practice and get better at, but some things you can’t. I might want to become a professional animator, but I can’t draw and, more importantly, I can’t caricature. So an animator could encourage me all day long to draw at a professional level, s/he could spend years tutoring me, but I wouldn’t be able to do it, because I do not have that talent. I could become better at drawing, but I wouldn’t be an artist.
Does this set up a hierarchial world when some people have inborn talents and others don’t? Well, yes. But it’s better than the alternative.
I still maintain that this is a reactionary vision of a society with Leaders and Followers that functions only when everyone knows their place.
Actually, it sets up a world of Artists and Consumers. The Artist produces his/her art and gives it to the Consumers, hoping they will like it. That’s one of the reasons for the scene between Remy and Emile where he tries to teach Emile about better food. He’s not teaching Emile that he’s a Follower; he’s teaching him that he’s a Consumer who has a right to better nourishment than what he’s been getting.
There’s a reason why the most feared man in the entire film is not the chef, but the critic. The entire enterprise will be a failure if the critic doesn’t like it. Personally, I saw it as a wry commentary about Pixar’s position at the top of the animation food chain (pun intended) and the fear that this film that Bird took over from a longtime Pixar employee (who subsequently left the company) would be the first bomb from Pixar. Not to mention that the artist is positioned as a tiny rat trying to wrestle art from a full-size human, which I’m sure is what leading a team of animators sometimes feels like.
No, they were all about girls getting the guy in the end, therefore fulfilling their roles as females.
I have to admit I like Mulan better than the others, because Mulan gets to save China on her way to getting the guy. Pocahontas is the worst; I think that movie spends at least 30 minutes doing nothing but checking out her babelicious bod as she slinks through the forest.
Someone higher in the thread said a banana is sometimes just a banana. That might be true on the individual level — you can always find a reason why any individual protagonist in a movie “had” to be male. But when you look out over the larger landscape of kids’ movies, it’s hard to find any with female characters who aren’t there to serve as moms, girlfriends, helpmeets, or love interests in relation to male characters.
A friend of mine has a 16-year-old daughter who wants to be a screenwriter. Her imagination has been schooled almost entirely in male-dominated imagery. She idolizes Tarantino and all her screenplays are about boys or men. After she writes them, she decides she needs a girl in them somewhere and goes back and adds one. She’s a girl and she doesn’t even write about girls, and looking at Hollywood, why would she? We raise kids in a sea of gendered images and storylines, then wonder why there’s so little meaningful representation of girls and woman in popular media.
Slight clarification to my above rant: I’m not saying that there are Natural Artists and The Rest of Us. That annoys me, because it implies things like, Mozart was a greater composer than Beethoven because Beethoven had to work harder at it. Just that when it comes to art, some level of talent exists before one starts the laborious process of growing and improving one’s art.
A friend of mine has a 16-year-old daughter who wants to be a screenwriter. Her imagination has been schooled almost entirely in male-dominated imagery. She idolizes Tarantino and all her screenplays are about boys or men.
Did she even see “Kill Bill”?!?
More seriously, if she’s willing to watch it, see if you can find an Australian movie called “High Tide,” starring Judy Davis. Watch the whole film, and then let her know that the Judy Davis character was originally written as a man but was turned into a woman with only minor changes.
Personally, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with women writing action films, or crime films. My thesis was a modern film noir with a male protagonist … who learns that all of his macho bullshit actually makes things worse. See if you can get her to watch some Samuel Fuller films, who was one of Tarantino’s idols. Fuller has some really fascinating critiques of masculinity, especially in “Shock Corridor.” And as far as Fuller is concerned, there’s absolutely no reason a prostitute or a junkie can’t be the romantic heroine of the film — she doesn’t even have to be “redeemed.” A couple of other great Fuller films are “Underworld USA” (with a very young Cliff Robertson) and “The Naked Kiss,” where the heroine is a prostitute who becomes a pediatric nurse and discovers that “respectable” people are just as bad, if not worse, than she is.
This idea that The Incredibles is really about working together, or whatever, is such crap. The Nomanisan Island thing is cute, but it doesn’t really tie into the rest of the movie in any real way. Not only that, but Mr. Incredible working with his family doesn’t exactly democratize the distribution of power in the society portrayed in the film. Like, oh, it’s his children’s birthright to be powerful, and Mr I should have known that.
Syndrome being an example of the generous interpretation of the film (it’s actually got good politics!) when Mr Incredible doesn’t want to work with him is just silly. The reasons that Mr Incredible doesn’t want to work with him are clear for within the narrative - 1) he’s irritating and portrayed as fawning, 2) he’s weak and would be more likely an ad hoc hostage than a super team mate, 3) he’s a child that Mr I doesn’t want to be responsible for. And Mr I being a good person in real life at his insurance job doesn’t make him heroic, it makes him non-evil, and plenty of people without super powers act in selfless ways every day. To make a point about his character that he is different from the masses in that he is bucking the insurance system is both aiming low and dismissing the possibility of similar good being done by average people.
As for Syndrome’s threat “if everyone is special, no one is,” it only makes sense in a Randian reading of the film. If we take it seriously it means that power to the people in the form of technology to make them super is dangerous to the order of how things ought to be in the minds of the creators. It’s dangerous to the supremacy of the Incredible family. There’s a lot of support for this view within the narrative, like the sub plot of Jr’s desire to win running races. His frustration at not being able to compete isn’t based on his love of running, but about being denied his entitlement. It isn’t somehow noble to want trophies because you were born with ability.
As for Ratatouille, yeah, Roxanne’s reading of the film only makes sense in terms of the rest of the gender discourse in society. The description she gives isn’t by itself accusatory of sexism, if you take a second and examine the statement. That some some men will be better than some women at things even when those women work hard isn’t sexist, it’s reality. It’s just as realistic as some women being better than some men at things even when the men have worked really hard at them. So Roxanne’s statement is a pretty bad criticism of the film.
That said, does much of the popular media express the idea that some people are special, and far above all other people and we should get out of their way and let them be geniuses or whatever? Sure. Are these people more often men? Yep. Popular media does, by aggregate, reflect quite a lot of societal biases in favor of men and the elite. And, or course, perpetuates such biases.
This movie is fantasy. like on the order of lord of the rings.
the worst social flaws of people working in a kitchen are hiding a secret special rat and a head chef who’s a jerk. that’s it? No heroin junkies? no creepy 30 year olds who owns more porn than square footage in his apartment? no one who’s a registered sex offender? Kids watching this movie might get the idea that there are decent human beings who work in commercial kitchens. Which just isn’t the case.
Also, Remy didn’t really need to be male. But I’m not sure how I’d react to Patton Oswalt doing a woman’s voice (and there’s no reason for this movie without him.)
Also, Randians actually surpass Solipsists in pure irritating power. Brad Bird isn’t Randian. His body of work is generally readable as an anti-randian screed. His definition of a Superman is one who sacrifices themselves for the good of others, fer cryin’ out loud.
But when you look out over the larger landscape of kids’ movies, it’s hard to find any with female characters who aren’t there to serve as moms, girlfriends, helpmeets, or love interests in relation to male characters.
Here you go. And here. And this.
Aimed at children, strong central female characters *and* romance.
mnemosyne I salute you for having the stomach to read more than one Ayn Rand book.
Dan,
OMG! I make a point about over simplification of literature and you took it literally! I guess there really are people as stupid as you on the internet! You get the Ric Romero award of the day!
I think we see the Rand we imagine, not the Rand as is.
Yeah, but Phoenician, Miyazaki really is cheating — he’s not like our movies, he’s like movies from some other dimension. (The Utopian version of our world!) God, I love those movies. I raised the kid on them. Plus? Really pretty!
And Mnemosyne, isn’t that like the smurfette principal? By which I mean, just because some movies exist that have female leads, or female characters in them, that doesn’t mean it is, nevertheless, untrue that the landscape of movies still trains us to expect male protagonists — that we still, therefore, visualize a world where men always take the lead, are at the center; men are who the story is (by default) about? (As this thread demonstrates, I think.)
Which means, and this is why it matters, that’s going to be our worldview as well, mostly.
Here’s the why of my cryptic comment:
http://arunsmusings.blogspot.com/2007/08/km-munshi-and-ayn-rand.html
KM Munshi was a follower of Gandhi, freedom fighter, the “father of modern Gujarati drama”, novelist in Gujarati and English, the founder of a university, the governor of an Indian state, one of the authors of the Indian Constitution, etc., etc.
I guess we can ask the standard feminist literature questions here:
1) is there more than one female character?
2) do they talk to each other?
3) … about something other than men?
I haven’t seen Ratatouille yet, but if those questions are answered with a “no”, at least in the sense of not questioning the patriarchal privilege of having movies being “all about the menz”, Amanda’s right and there’s a problem with the movie from a feminist perspective. Doesn’t mean it’s not a good (or great) movie, but it’s not a feminist one.
I’ll repeat - to the extent that this is true about Ratatouille, it’s true about pretty much every hero story ever told. It’s a narrative format, Remy has a form of “protagonist power” that gives him an edge over the other characters in the story because it is about him. It’s a story. You could write a story about a rat who wasn’t the greatest chef in France or who was a female or who turned out to be not as good as the female chef who had been slaving away for years but these stories would not have been Ratatouille and, honestly, wouldn’t have been as compelling if the central character had still been the rat. You could have written the story about Collette, but then Remy would have been much harder to make into anything other than a superfluous Disneyesque animal helper. It would have been a different story.
Brad Bird didn’t want to write a story about the power of supermen to rule us. He wanted to write a story about a Rat who wants to be a chef. That story, to be told well, needs certain things that may, if you’re geared towards it, come across as Randian. This, I would say, says more about your own personal hot buttons (as well as, it seems, a belief that movies have one big simple political message which is their entire raison d’etre) than it does about the director.
Bull. Shit. There aren’t any trophies in the scene where Dash finally cuts loose - he’s running away from robots that are trying to kill him. But he realises that he’s so fast he’s running on water and the immaculately Pixar-realised expression on his face is total joy and excitement at finally being able to do what he’s good at. For a moment he forgets the robots. He doesn’t sulk earlier in the film because he’s denied his entitlement, he sulks because he’s a child.
mnemosyne: As I said earlier, not everyone has the same talents. I know you don’t like to hear it, but that’s kinda what life is like.
Actually, there has been quite a bit of research into what makes a good or great artist, and “natural talent” is much less important than the time spent practicing the art. It certainly is possible for you to become a professional artist. However it would require spending the time equivalent of a full-time job, with overtime, for the next 12 years to get there. (Actually the bar for making a living off your art is probably quite a bit lower. Most art jobs don’t require that one be the next Kahlo.) Mozart and Beethoven may have had an advantage of perfect pitch, and a good physique for the instruments they mastered, but they also had dominating fathers who filled every minute of their day with theory, technique, practice and rehearsal.
Another myth of “artistic/scientific genius” is that great artists produce overall high-quality and memorable works. Mozart in particular composed hundreds of lesser known works with considerable plagiarism and self-plagiarism. Twyla Tharp also dismisses the notion of her success as due to some magical talent. Rather she claims that her obsessive habit of documenting and storing every idea, no matter how trivial or relevant to her current projects. Retrospectives of Einstein point out that he published rarely, spending years chasing down dead-ends. (And when he was wrong, his reputation set Cosmology back by a decade.)
Certainly, natural talent is a factor, but it’s not an overwhelming factor, or even the primary factor. And the “talented hero” narrative in which the protagonist comes from nowhere with no formal training or practice to get the better of more experienced people in the field is also a myth. (And of course, everyone here knows that Amadeus is fiction, based primarily on a play by Pushkin and 19th century nationalist propaganda?)
I think that concerns that Pixar is becoming a Ranoid propaganda front are dismissed by Cars, in which McQueen gets success by learning that he can’t win on his own, and sacrifices his own short-term success in the interests of integrity and fair play.
Still, I do think that Pixar has a bit of a blind spot in regards to gender. Granted, it perhaps is a reaction to the whole Disney princess phenomenon, but how many movies have they done in which female characters are marginalized?
And Mnemosyne, isn’t that like the smurfette principal? By which I mean, just because some movies exist that have female leads, or female characters in them, that doesn’t mean it is, nevertheless, untrue that the landscape of movies still trains us to expect male protagonists — that we still, therefore, visualize a world where men always take the lead, are at the center; men are who the story is (by default) about?
My very first comment on this thread was a link to the See Jane Foundation, which is dedicated to getting a better gender balance in chldren’s films. So, no, I’m not arguing that “Ratatouille” is a feminist film. I’m arguing that complaining that it was about a male rat and not a female human is a stupid argument. It’s like saying, “You know ‘The Godfather’ would have been a much better movie if it had been about migrant farm workers instead of gangsters.” The movie is what it is, and the specifics of it should be criticized on their own merits, not what you wanted it to be.
That said, if we want to start criticizing the children’s entertainment industry as a whole and pointing out that “Ratatouille” is just another small cog in the machine that forces gender roles on children, I’m with you.
Certainly, natural talent is a factor, but it’s not an overwhelming factor, or even the primary factor. And the “talented hero” narrative in which the protagonist comes from nowhere with no formal training or practice to get the better of more experienced people in the field is also a myth.
I tried to pull back on that a bit but, yes, I’m sure that if I worked 12 hours a day for 12 years, I could eventually draw reasonably well. That doesn’t invalidate the fact that there are people out there who don’t have to work as hard at it as I would have to. It’s like saying, “Oh, anyone can be a mathematician if they work hard enough at it!” Sure, probably, but you get to the point of diminishing returns if you have to spend all day, every day, trying to develop a skill that comes more easily to some people.
Still, I do think that Pixar has a bit of a blind spot in regards to gender. Granted, it perhaps is a reaction to the whole Disney princess phenomenon, but how many movies have they done in which female characters are marginalized?
Pretty much … every single one of them. I think the only two where the female lead is at least important to the story are “Finding Nemo” and “The Incredibles.” Otherwise … “Toy Story”? “Monsters Inc.”? No women in sight, even if Roz does turn out to be the head of the monster equivalent of the FBI.
This idea that “The Incredibles” is really about working together, or whatever, is such crap.
Yes, it’s such crap that it’s CONSTANTLY DISCUSSED IN THE MOVIE. It’s such crap that several plot points turn on it.
Seriously, did you at least see the movie first, or did you go in deciding that the secret message of it was “Aryan Supermen Are Our Superiors”?
And, again, if anyone can point to me where Rand said that her elite has a responsibility to anonymously serve the rest of humanity, please point it out to me, because I never saw it.
He wanted to write a story about a Rat who wants to be a chef.
Which, of course, in order to avoid being “political,” must be male. Because a female rat–and really, go through the text, other than changing pronouns, the story can remain as is, unless you’re enough of a gender essentialist to think that a human male would speak differently to a female rat, fercryinoutloud–could have taken the exact same role: wanting to be a chef, dealing with and eventually standing up to parental disapproval, having to struggle against those in positions of power who make essentialist judgments, but ultimately following her dream and achieving some level of success. Making Remy a male IS a political statement. It says “the default is Male.” Which is the default position, even, it seems, among many of those posting to this thread.
mnomosyne: I tried to pull back on that a bit but, yes, I’m sure that if I worked 12 hours a day for 12 years, I could eventually draw reasonably well. That doesn’t invalidate the fact that there are people out there who don’t have to work as hard at it as I would have to. It’s like saying, “Oh, anyone can be a mathematician if they work hard enough at it!” Sure, probably, but you get to the point of diminishing returns if you have to spend all day, every day, trying to develop a skill that comes more easily to some people.
The basic point is that it never* comes easy. If you look across fields at the people regarded as celebrated geniuses, almost all of them have devoted years of their life, spending all day, every day at their skill. It’s true of artists, chess players, mathematicians, and great chefs. Celebrated geniuses are celebrated geniuses primarily because they are obsessive workers who started at a young age. They also tend to be obsessive workers as adults, investing a lot of time and energy on mediocre work to find the few gems.
* there is of course always an exceptional case.
Except the rat spent a whole 15 minutes being a chef and not a lifetime. Enter echo-boomer angst about being in the workforce for 15 minutes and not yet achieving “vice-president of the world bank” status.
Star Wars, as someone mentioned in jest above, is seriously and truly a manifestation of the Übermensch myth; it’s an endemic problem throughout fantasy, and though it’s not as universal, it’s also a big problem in science fiction. David Brin wrote extensively on the topic here. Not all heroic figures need to be inherently heroic.
So, any takers on explaining how The Iron Giant was Randian?
JW, you already went on about how Remy should have been female way upthread, and you’ve been answered at least once. (Also see comment 67.)
All of this debate over Remy’s maleness would make a whole lot more sense if his maleness were ever actually known by the other (human) characters in the film. When does Linguini or any other human notice that Remy is a male? They don’t even know he has a name at all, let alone that it’s a male name. Only his fellow rats are aware of his sex.
And I really, really don’t understand the complaints towards the top of the thread that all of the hundreds of rats are male. How do you know?
Actually, grendelkahn, you dear, sweet sugarbeet, I *commented briefly* that Remy COULD–not should–have been female. What I got in response was the equivalent of “but then you’d just bitch about about *that*,” which is not addressing the relative truth or falsity of the matter, but rather, a shutting down of the line of questioning. If you’d like to actually engage the issue (giving me a reason why Remy MUST be male, or dealing with the fact that there’s a whole lot of blind gender privelege being tossed about haphazardly) I’d be more than happy to read your response, rather than your thinly veiled STFU.
“The basic point is that it never* comes easy. If you look across fields at the people regarded as celebrated geniuses, almost all of them have devoted years of their life, spending all day, every day at their skill. It’s true of artists, chess players, mathematicians, and great chefs. Celebrated geniuses are celebrated geniuses primarily because they are obsessive workers who started at a young age. They also tend to be obsessive workers as adults, investing a lot of time and energy on mediocre work to find the few gems.”
That’s something I would agree with but also something different than what you were saying earlier. I don’t think anyone seriously believe that great artists or other talented individuals’ talents or skills solely come to them naturally. The ‘amadeus’ myth that great music just flows from the genius composer’s fingers or the great prose just flows effortlessly from the great writer’s pen. But the idea that “genius” is merely a product of intense grooming and effort and relative disparities between people in terms of talent or skill is due to the relative differences in “effort” they have put into their work is wrongheaded, and potentially pernicious in it’s own way depending on what context it’s used in.
Art of any kind is probably too subjective to make comparisons so instead I’ll use professional sports, and I apologize if the subject is unfamiliar. Kobe Bryant and Brent Barry are both men of similiar physical proportions and economic backgrounds. They both had fathers who were successful NBA players and they both spent the bulk of their respective childhoods and time as young adults immersed in basketball, playing basketball and being groomed for a future professional career in basketball by parents and related parties who spent a great deal of time and money facilitating their children’s development in this area. This ambition was shared by the children and they spent a great deal of time and effort honing and perfecting their individual basketball skills. The efforts paid off and thanks in large part to the time and interest their father’s devoted to their basketball development, the unique expertise they were able to impart to their children, and the fact that they had sufficient economic comfort to devote so much time, effort and money, not to mention all the work put in by the men themselves to improve and refine their own skills, they were both able to make it to the NBA (no small feat) and of this writing are both veterans of the league who have enjoyed steady careers. However, while Brent Barry has always been at most an average player at his position by NBA standards, Kobe Bryant is a bona fide superstar, among the elite players of the league and has been for quite some time.
This is not to say there weren’t actual differences in how well each were groomed as players or how much work they put into their own development. But I don’t think the (rather large) gap between the quality of basketball play exhibited between Kobe Bryant and Brent Barry is accounted for by measurable differences in their grooming as players or the individual work involved. More succinctly, I don’t think Brent Barry isn’t or never has been anywhere near as good as Kobe Bryant because he didn’t practice enough.
Wait, I figured the lead rat was female, based on the promo posters. (Haven’t seen the film yet.) I mean, has anyone here spent much time with rats? It’s incredibly easy to tell whether a rodent is male or female. (hint: GIANT BALLS)
It wasn’t a thinly veiled STFU; it was a request to engage the response you’d already gotten rather than repeat yourself. The response was that, in short, making Remy female would have led to a more objectionable movie rather than a less objectionable one. I assume you didn’t just mean “COULD”; the story COULD have included a Magic Negro, but I don’t think you would have considered that an improvement.Is misspelling my name (honestly, it’s written right there) and referring to me with diminutives supposed to be a “thinly veiled STFU” to me?
murcielago: You expected the Hollywood establishment that gave us bulls with udders in Barnyard to give us anatomically-correct gigantic rat testes?
Phoenician — As I mentioned before, there’s a big difference between Japanese import movies and a movie like “Ratatouille.”
Ratatouille = big budget, big release American movie made by guys, about guys. Currently you can walk into just about any movie house in the U.S. and see it at any hour. See also: Cars, A Bug’s Life, Aladdin, Lion King, Meet the Robinsons, Wallace and Grommit, Tarzan, Pirates of the Caribbean, Monsters Inc., Shrek, Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Spongebob Squarepants, etc., etc.
Japanese anime = lower budget, small release import movies made for adults but which happen to feature children and appeal to children. You might catch one at an art house theater, but you’ll probably have to wait until it comes to video. You have to know they exist and deliberately seek them out. See also: well, that handful of movies you mentioned, which were all made at least five years ago.
My overall point remains. Boys get to see themselves as protagonists in a wide variety of stories that are plentiful, well-financed, and easily accessible, even when it wouldn’t make a difference to the storyline whether the protagonist is a girl or a boy. Girls get variations on the theme of how animals will help you get your prince if you’re pretty and kind, except for certain import movies that are not well known or readily available.
Right, a typo renders my point moot. Got it.
Would have rendered the film more objectionable to whom? That’s the central question, friend, and one that you still have not answered. Fortunately, Linden has spelled it out for you, in the first sentence of the last paragraph there. Way to hammer on OT.
Also, there are far too many “magic negroes” in films already. And you know why? Because the same white dudes who finance films and relegate female characters to love interests or ball-busters can’t imagine black people any other way.
DRR: But the idea that “genius” is merely a product of intense grooming and effort and relative disparities between people in terms of talent or skill is due to the relative differences in “effort” they have put into their work is wrongheaded, and potentially pernicious in it’s own way depending on what context it’s used in.
But of course, I didn’t say that. What I did say was “Certainly, natural talent is a factor, but it’s not an overwhelming factor, or even the primary factor.” Quite a bit of research has been done on this, and pretty consistently “natural talent” is not the primary factor behind career success.
Art of any kind is probably too subjective to make comparisons …
Nonsense, while there may be some disagreement in terms of raking those people within the top 1% of their field, it’s not that hard to separate the top 1% from the rest. And of course, you can say that there is some kind of inherent difference in talent between Bryant and Barry, but the nature of professional sports is such that both Bryant and Barry are, for all practical purposes, the “cream of the crop.” Barry may be mid-ranked by NBA standards. But compared to the population of all athletes, he’s a member of the elite.
In addition, professional athletics probably shouldn’t be compared to the arts (including haute cuisine) because athletics is so physically selective. Not that the arts are not physical, but Cole Porter, David Baker, and Julie Andrews are three examples of artists who were able to continue their careers after a serious injury limited their performance ability.
JW, at no point did I state that a typo made your point moot. Very deft sidestepping the issue of using diminutives toward me, though–does your typo render my point moot?
If you read the comments to which I’m now referring for the third time, the film would have been more objectionable to the same audience that is finding it objectionable that Remy was male. Please actually read the comments.
I’m certainly not denying that movies, especially children’s movies in this case, portray a stunningly gender-biased world which sends very different messages to boys and to girls. I do deny that flipping Remy’s gender would have made it a better movie, or would have addressed the central concerns here.
And yes, the whole point of my “Magic Negro” example is that adding one doesn’t improve a movie. How was that not clear?
Clearly the “casting” in Ratatouille conforms to the male=default standard that’s so common in pop culure. And clearly that tradition is a sexist one. But Roxanne’s post seemed to agrue that there was additional sexism operating in the way Colette’s character was presented, and that strikes me as be a bit of a stretch.
If Colette’s character were itself a part of the problem, then presumably the movie’s treatment of gender would be improved if she were made male and some other character were made female instead. As folks have suggested above, there doesn’t seem to be an obvious candidate for such a swap.
So yes, the genre convention that dictates that all but one or two of the characters in a story be male is a sexist one, absolutely. And yes, Ratatouille is guilty of that brand of sexism. (Though interestingly, The Incredibles wasn’t. Wonder why not?) But I’m still not buying Roxanne’s original argument.
Hear hear.
JW–I’m not saying that you shouldn’t complain that Remy is male because you would have also complained if Remy had been female. I’m saying that the complaints raised if Remy were female would have been right. Female has inborn cooking talent. Objectionable gender stereotype. Female wins over critic with food like mama used to make. Objectionable gender stereotype. Female controls male by pulling his hair and making him dance like a puppet. Highly objectionable gender stereotype. And so on.
Like mnenosyne said, this isn’t an argument that Ratatouille is a feminist film. I think that Collette’s speech about her exclusion from the kitchen is reproduced in Remy’s exclusion, and it’s quite frank about sexism, privilege, and adaptive strategies, but those are part of the larger theme rather than the theme itself. More problematic, there’s only one female character who exists primarily as the love interest for a mostly unlikeable male lead.
It is, however, an argument that “Remy could have been female!” is not a good criticism. If anything, Remy’s gender is used to play against gendered expectations. It would have been an interesting movie if it had been more female-focused, but it would have been a very, very different one as well. And while nothing says we can’t or shouldn’t have that different movie, there is an infinite number of different movies Ratatouille could have been.
I’m put in mind of a Washington Post review of “Batman Begins” that complained the movie wasn’t campy like the TV show. Sure, it wasn’t, that doesn’t tell us anything about the merits or demerits of the film. It might tell us something about the industry–Hollywood isn’t making enough campy films!–but that’s a separate issue.
Roxanne: Actually, Remy spends a lot of time reading the chef’s book and watching the television show. It’s not on-screen, but he knows the recipes and things like what Gusteau says about saffron.
This is, and I can’t imagine it actually could be, even sillier than the “Velma is gay” and “Incredibles is about Ayn Rand” lunatics.
How, exactly, is Collette dismissed any differently in ability than any other chef in the movie? The point is they were ALL afraid to take the risks and present the drive Remy did. The reason Remy was depicted as a better chef than the others was because, well, he WAS.
Roxanne, if your claim that the message is a rat is a better chef than a woman, I’d expect at least a casual example from the movie where that’s implied. Your statement says Remy makes a better chef, and yet it doesn’t explain WHY he does. WHY does Remy make a better chef than Collette, and then WHAT does his gender (which is, by the way, never even disclosed to the characters in the movie, only to the audience) have to do with it?
If there’s no explanation here, then the anger appears to be solely that Patton Oswalt happened to be cast in the role and therefore the lead character was male.
I love you guys here but people grasping for “hidden meanings” in cartoons is a lifelong pet peeve of mine and I’m going to call you on this silliness. Sorry.
The Chief - First things first, go fuck yourself. Your point was about over simplification, and my point was that Roxanne’s whole post was bad, not because it oversimplified but because it didn’t give any context to its criticism. If you’re saying the context I suggested that would have made the criticism valid is wrong, how about some evidence or argument as opposed to insult. Hm, how about engaging in the ideas?
mnemosyne - Yeah, I’ve seen the movie, more than once, and I get your point, I just disagree with you. For one thing, I gave a lot of evidence in my post as to why the message of that movie was somewhat Randian. Allow me to adjust my claim, and let’s see if we both agree with it. Ok, how about this: the message of the movie is at various times various things, and for a substantial portion of the film is not about the virtues of working together. In an attempt to give motivation to various characters to make the plot work VERY BAD WRITING was done. The intent of the film may have been to show that working together is important blah blah blah, but the result incorporates a lot of other ideology because the script is shoddy and the creators thought no one would notice. So you not only have people working together as a plot driver at multiple points, you also have characters developed as entitled brats and a villain whose message is not entirely menacing, a0nd to fight against that message isn’t exactly an ideological battle that makes a super hero look good.
Daniel Turner: word, Incredibles was a muddled movie in many ways.
But when you look out over the larger landscape of kids’ movies, it’s hard to find any with female characters who aren’t there to serve as moms, girlfriends, helpmeets, or love interests in relation to male characters.
Not that this justifies the glaring lack of female characters in cartoons, but Disney to their credit has made four animated daytime series in the last five years with female leads- Kim Possible, Brandy & Mr. Whiskers, The Proud Family, and Lilo & Stitch. In all four, a female character is depicted as the strong, self-assertive heroine, in only one (and only the last season) is there any romantic association with a male co-lead, and in the latter two the main characters are not only female but non-white, which is amazing given the standards of cartoons only twenty years ago. Disney has a load of problems but they deserve recognition for that.
In contrast, Disney has made only two- TWO- feature animated films with a female lead not supplemental to a male lead: Lilo & Stitch (the movie) and Alice in Wonderland. They were made over fifty years apart from each other.
Daniel, The Incredibles is to a great extent a movie about family — about the bonds of love and obligation between spouses, and between parents and children. These are not questions that Ayn Rand ever showed much interest in, and they are not presented here in a particularly Randian way. Beyond that, the movie is grounded in the superhero genre, and takes as a given the genre convention that heroes are heroes not because of their powers alone, but because they use those powers for the common good. No, the Incredibles aren’t self-abnegating, but that’s precisely the point — the filmmakers see self-realization and public service as mutually reinforcing.
All of this is at odds with Rand, and all of it must be addressed in an argument that The Incredibles is an Objectivist tract. Yes, there are moments that Rand would have liked in the movie, but if all it takes to make a movie Randian is a few such moments, then the claim is virtually meaningless.
How, exactly, is Collette dismissed any differently in ability than any other chef in the movie?
At one point in the film, Linguini is preparing a dish with Colette’s help and he literally waves her away from the plate at the urging of the rat.
Brooklynite - My point is that major portions of the message in the movie are Randian. And I’d disagree that the movie is *about* those bonds of love and obligation more than it includes those bonds. Heck, I’m going to watch it right now though, I’ll look for that too.
JW
Fact: real kitchens in real restaurants are really, really male oriented.
Fact: Remy was