Ratatouille
(x-posted to The Valve)
I am melancholy to think of the moment in which this gorgeous, sunset-toned film appears. Every frame of it is washed in romantic pastels, an opulence that alone made it worthwhile to me. To the extent that the film has a point, it is a diatribe against criticism, except under particular circumstances that the film itself memorably defines — when the critic risks himself in defense of something new. There are warm niches for the rats and human beings in this film to occupy; for example, the scene where the food critic, eating a spoonful of ratatouille, is carried back to his childhood, could very well be a statement about the air of homeliness and familiarity that is always as present as strangeness in great art. Looking ahead to I’m Not There, I am thinking that the folksiness of Dylan’s music always complemented and deepened the hallucinatory carnival overfilling his lines. Ratatouille does not know quite what it is — consider the final scene, where the critic is living happily as an “investor” in the new restaurant. That investment is, quite literally, what critics do, and what everybody else does as well when it comes to art. They give to art the stuff of their lives: their time, their hopes, their conversations. Works of art spark friendships and kindle desires, all secondhand in conversations between people: awkward, ardent statements that ripen into criticism. Nonetheless I am sure that, just as Brad Bird thought it was profound to rate bad art higher than criticism, other people will think his movie profound for saying it. Some will interpret the scene where Ego eats ratatouille as the long-awaited victory of the merely personal, pastel tears and all. For my part, the scene of Ego’s salvation reminds me of sitting right outside of Blackstone’s, in a rain-weary corner of Oxford, reading a pink and orange volume of Proust. Proust is more than ninety years old; it took many voices, and much embittered and questionable pride in what is rare, to ensure that some of that endless, extravagant, nearly unreadable novel survived long enough to become an ingredient in Bird’s parable of the new.
Yes… Proust. Very good.
I thought that scene was one of the most horrid attempts at manipulation I have ever come across as a critic. I felt I was being pandered to.
Most films and book portray critics as bitter failures and I think a lot of critical types were won over by the novelty of having someone say something nice about them.
Interestingly, I thought the film confused criticism with reviewing. Ego is clearly a restaurant reviewer… the term “food critic” is an affectation at best. Criticism, as Frye puts it, is a literary form quite distinct from the subject matter it writes about. Its aesthetic standards are its own and its genuine visionaries are as praiseworthy as the visionaries in any other artistic medium. As a result, I felt that “critics can do good sometimes” is somewhat patronising especially when the visionary rodent Ego was reviewing did noting more than knock-out a well made and fussily presented vegetable stew.
3) I don’t even think Ego’s claim that critics only take risks when championing the new is correct. For starters, Ego seemingly has no editor or advertisers to answer to. In fact, he’s independently wealthy so I don’t know why there’d be any editorial pressure upon him. Secondly, the restaurant he was reviewing was not only a massive commercial success, every other critic loved it, so in producing a positive review he was agreeing with received and common opinion. The brave position would have been “yes it’s cooked by a rat but that’s not the problem… the problem is that the food is shit”.
I genuinely felt dirty and used for having watched that scene. It was almost unbearable patronising.
To the extent that the film has a point, it is a diatribe against criticism…
This will sound strange, but I’ve been waiting for this moment for four months, because as soon as I saw Ratatouille I had a sense that you would feel this way and that I would have to say why I disagree. Now I find myself less prepared than you’d expect, but nonetheless, here goes:
Ego does not represent The Critic, he represents The Snob—there’s his name, obviously, but also what he says when we first meet him: “I don’t believe that anybody can cook.” Ego’s sin isn’t to know about food or write about it, it’s to believe in a strict traditional hierarchy of restaurants and chefs, and to despise and ridicule attempts to circumvent this hierarchy. He doesn’t just pan food he dislikes; he revels in the opportunity to do so, and his final speech is about the worthlessness, not of criticism, but of mocking an artist’s perspective rather than a critic’s obviously, and I don’t agree, but it’s not absurd to me. His office is shaped like a coffin, and he himself like a corpse, because he is interested in death, in killing restaurants, rather than in creation. I believe that negative reviews are often vital, and make the positive ones meaningful, but I agree with the film that artists and critics both should be on the side of creation, even when criticizing bad art.
I agree with you, incidentally, that Ego’s turn as an investor is weird, since it suggests that supporting the creation of new art is always better than criticism. Similarly, Linguini’s fate as skater-waiter (who gets the girl!) kind of cheapens the “anybody can cook” idea since it turns out that he didn’t want to in the first place. I see these as non-essential flaws.
I am certain that Brad Bird would see the criticism that led to Proust’s entry into the canon as an example of brave and worthwhile criticism. I’m not really sure what distinction you’re trying to draw between the cases; obviously Bird doesn’t mean the completely new, sui generis new, since what the food evokes for Ego is his mother’s cooking. The fact is that both of us can think of a dozen people in our own grad program who are hoping to make it as unadventurous, unhelpful critics. I don’t feel a need to stick up for them.
Finally, if I disagree with nothing else I have to disagree that the purported “diatribe against criticism” is the only point of the movie. The point of the movie is to show, through Remy, the challenges and the necessity of creating art—you’ve got the unappreciative family and friends (Remy’s fellow rats), the forces of greed and crass commercialism (the head chef at the restaurant, with his line of instant foods), and spiteful, uncomprehending criticism. Take out that last and you’d have a less rich movie, but you’d still have a coherent whole. (By the way, it’s interesting that, in the movie, the first and third obstacles have to be convinced, whereas the second one—commercial greed—cannot be negotiated with.)
Your new template reminds me of the Forgotten Boy site.
Hmm, a bit is gone from one of my sentences. Perhaps it was never there. This incomprehensible phrase:
“his final speech is about the worthlessness, not of criticism, but of mocking an artist’s perspective…”
should be, “…the worthlessness, not of criticism, but of mocking criticism. This is an artist’s perspective…” etc. Sorry about that.
* * *
Jonathan M., Ego gives the restaurant a positive review despite seeing that there are rats in the kitchen, which is not only gross but also a sign that the restaurant may not be long for this world. In fact, the health board almost immediately shuts it down, and Ego loses his job and his credibility as a result. So in fact this was a brave review, one with immediate consequences for the reviewer. As for your view of critical bravery:
The brave position would have been “yes it’s cooked by a rat but that’s not the problem… the problem is that the food is shit”.
Well, in fact, the food is delicious, so writing the above would mean being insincerely negative for the sake of seeming “brave” and getting noticed. Which is a pretty common practice, and is exactly what the movie rightly condemns.
Jonathan,
I agree that a certain distinction should exist between criticism and reviewing; in general, given that book reviews, music review publications, and the like already exist, I make it a point to steer away from posts that can be boiled down to “I recommend this but not that.” That said, I have seen a number of professional critics, or critics-in-training (graduate students), decide to wholly abandon evaluation in favor of critical explanation (often “close reading”). The usual result is too much time spent on bad art.
You make a great point about the ratatouille — the fact that it is such a simple dish does strengthen the argument that responses to art are subjective. I would only respond that Remy does pick the dish specifically for Ego; he has a tailor’s eye for what will fit, and that is certainly part of some artistic creation.
Since the only risk Ego took was praising the cooking of a rat, it’s true that the courage required by his review is of a sort not easily relatable to real-world partnerships between artists and critics. It strains the metaphor, though perhaps we are not as far from patronizing African-American writers (for example) as we would like to believe, and that does suggest legitimate parallels with the scandal of the “Little Chef.”
***
Tomemos,
It’s terrific to build up a history, including a visual history, with the blog — actually, the new template was a deliberate reference to my first blog. Having written several pieces in a row very specifically focused on academia, I am eager to return to blogging about a wider range of things.
I rated Ratatouille five stars on Netflix; my reflections on it had little to do with disliking the film as a whole. I agree that the film is also about Remy’s passion for his art, but I don’t think that’s a particularly interesting part of the film, and it isn’t what generated the most discussion. (Of course critics talked about the portrayal of criticism, but so did everyone else.) I don’t mind it, just as I don’t mind Wayne getting with his girl at the end of Wayne’s World. It’s just there — the father and brother are stock characters, the press conference (where Remy doesn’t get proper credit) is a stock scene, and so on. I also enjoyed the escape from the murderous old lady at the beginning of the film, and the adventure in the storm drains, both of which are also clichéd.
The reason I wrote about it in this way has to do with the cultural environment that produced it. There is a useful analogy with Charles Dickens here: I don’t dismiss Dickens as a conservative, just because he wrote about problems with social welfare and public education. On the other hand, it would be quite illegitimate to use Dickens to prove that funding for public education is misspent, or to prove that the poor don’t really benefit from government aid. There are critics like Ego, and there are artists like Gusteau/Remy, but they are much more specific to this film than Bird realizes. Unfortunately, I am quite certain that Ratatouille will be used, in an offhand way, to praise artists at the expense of critics, particularly because of this one line: “But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.” Bullshit.
I’m not just talking about Proust’s entry into the canon; I’m talking about the fairly conservative work of preserving Proust for ninety years, in order that people like Bird can steal (in the best sense of the word) from the madeleine scene. Anyone who thinks this preservation doesn’t involve a lot of “It’s good, but it’s not Proust” is kidding themselves — if that were the case, each new wave would completely obliterate the previous tradition.
I think Ego put it extremely well when he mentioned providing a little perspective. Of course we tend to think of artists as dapper young men, like Remy, and critics as nasal old farts, like Ego. But the truth is that T. S. Eliot was basically an Ego — in taste, in comportment, even in his morbid pessimism about much new art. There are also a million critics who praise everything new that comes along, taking virtually no risks by doing so, and mainly serving to dilute our experience of what is best. Finally, in the scene where Remy teaches his brother to taste grapes and cheese, he is not merely being an artist — he is doing criticism. An artist puts the grape with the cheese, or paints a woman in cubic form, hands it to you, and says There you go, I leave you to interpret my genius! As early as high school, it was critics and teachers who helped me to appreciate the symphonies latent in created things.
In short, Bird’s film cuts both ways — praising the new, but clinging nostalgically to the old; damning the critic, then building him up. That is why my own reaction was mixed. It is easy to blame critics for thriving on the death-dealing work of writing negative reviews that are “fun to read,” but nobody blames Ratatouille for lavishing time on short, temperamental villains who are fun to watch and to hate.
Speaking of Eliot…Eliot defended Ulysses (“the new” again!) against charges that it would lead to absurdism and nihilism, not by saying that it wouldn’t, but by pointing out that possible negative uses of a work are irrelevant to its quality. That sounds right to me: while one can criticize the work, or Ego’s line, on its own merits (as you do eloquently, though I don’t go as far as you), the “cultural environment” isn’t what makes it a good or bad line. Furthermore, I don’t think that it’s illegitimate to use literature as support (though not as “proof,” I agree) for any real-world position; we do this all the time, even by simply calling a heartless person “a Scrooge.” Using literature for intellectual and moral support can only increase the status of literature and criticism. The way to respond to such arguments is to disagree with the reading, the relevance, or the original text as you do here, not to deny the applicability of literature to real-world situations.
”here at Pixar we are so brilliant and BETTER than other animation studios that we actually make feature-length movies about our own narcissism. Take Ratatouille. Anyone, populists as well as highbrow intellectuals, can enjoy our superiority and creative brilliance! In the end we even have a Communist message: innovation comes from talented working class rats. But no matter how you interpret our fantastic story, always remember that it’s MORE daring and MORE original than any other studio’s story.”
”What we do is we watch Eastern European animation, for example Jan Svankmajer’s LUNACY, produced for a fraction of our splendid budget but containing the sort of quality content that is impossible to purchase in the United States. We isolate the themes presented in these films, such as the theme of the animator as a reanimator, the animator as a Demiurge with direct access to the Real, whose undead, zombie-like creations persist to usurp the control society, but we strip these themes of their politically relevant content and translate them into Disneyesque tropes digestible for our generally respectable burgeois audience.”
”To make sure though that we don’t disturb the balance of the divine order, we accentuate our stock values such as the moral triumph of the hard-working, decent and democratic working class American over the snobbish and elitarian French culinary critic. The representation of the French critic thereby is politically correct along the lines of old Disney villain design, and so he is shown as an uptight British fag who nevertheless has a kind heart and who will ultimately cede to American democracy. In the background we have rats from Elia KAzan’s ON THE WATERFRONT and those types of 1950s Communist movies to satisfy our audience at the American media academies. After all, our sympathies are a bit to the Left.”
”Although we do pride ourselves in being the more adult industry on the American animation scene, we do follow the Hayes code in that it is practical, and so you won’t find too many ambivalent or gender-bending representations in our product, save for the safest ones, like Ellen Degeneres in the role of the lesbian fish. We generally like to keep a degree of distance from Disney when conceptualizing our strategies of visual representation.”
Parodycenter, is there something better you could be doing with your Saturdays?
Yes Tomemos, I could be out with young people playing the new RATATOUILLE game at the Nintendo Wirde Out club here in Amsterdam, or maybe smoking pot in the sleazy district underneath it. That I prefer this nerdy discussion on Ratatouille is surely a sign of sick intellectualism!
Yeah, you know, it’s not a discussion when it’s just four of your sarcastic comments in a row. That’s what most people would call a “tirade.”
I didn’t prevent you from commenting on my comments?
Prepare, my friend, for a series of unfunny “parodies” involving scifi from the ’80s. You’ll probably be pitted against Anthony Paul Smith … just make sure you don’t make him dance.
(Also, I go comatose for a week and you get new digs? Not cool, man, not cool … but I like them.) (Not that I’ll tell you that, mind you.)
Sek if you actually manage a parody of the Cultural Parody Center I am definitely going to hire you for at least a year, but it is only after you have passed Jonquille de Camembert’s testing that we can discuss a fulltime contract. I did not understand the cryptic note in brackets:
(Also, I go comatose for a week and you get new digs? Not cool, man, not cool … but I like them.) (Not that I’ll tell you that, mind you.)
I love this movie so much I can barely speak of it. But it is not perfect, and almost nothing is. But what I mainly want to say here in relation to some of the discussion above me is that I don’t see the movie so much as a diatribe against criticism, or even snobbery, or negative reviewing, or pinched/half-dead academic types, so much as see it as attempting to bring together in a kind of love relationship the critic and the artist who, in my mind, really should be collaborators, of a sort. Henry James wrote a wonderful essay on criticism in which he argued,
“The critical sense is so far from frequent that it is absolutely rare, and the possession of the cluster of qualities that minister to it is one of the highest distinctions… In this light one sees the critic as the real helper of the artist, a torchbearing outrider, the interpreter, the brother… Just in proportion as he is sentient and restless, just in proportion as he reacts and reciprocates and penetrates, is the critic a valuable instrument.”
And also, don’t forget that when Gusteau’s ghost [or Remy's figment of Gusteau] tells Remy, “anybody can cook!” Remy’s reply is, “yes, but not everyone should.”
Eileen,
Yours is the most charitable reading, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I totally agree that the film is trying to accomplish a synthesis of criticism and art. The sticking point, for me, based partly on how the film’s message was received, is that Remy is the perfect marriage of critical and artistic sensibilities, while Ego has all the worst qualities of the negative critic. While it is true that many artists are also astonishingly sensitive critics — your example of James comes readily to mind — many artists write lousy criticism or despise the whole practice, and there is no reason to encourage the superstition that the two powers are frequently united.
Yeah, I agree with you: Ego is definitely a stereotypical pastiche of all the worst qualities of the negative critic [isn't he also too French, in a way?] and the fact that ratatouille is a “simple” dish [albeit Remy does not necessarily prepare it in the usual down-home way] would seem to indicate that overly sophisticated food is for phony snobs, but I do, nevertheless, like the idea of the artist and critic “in business & work & amity” together.
blackstones! for some reason in the beginning of this post i immediately hoped you would bring proust into it.
blackstones! the scene of all of my oatbar eating, when I brought my own instant coffee and used their hot water, egregious kant reading.
yay. i’m going to go see ratatoiulle now – i overheard some old irish blokes saying their big haired girlfriends ought to see it. which automatically made me want to see it slash totally not.