Ah, I feel the need to talk a bit more about Ratatouille, 'cause I said some stuff about Ratatouille, and I realized I want to say more things about Ratatouille, but I have wrist injuries so I can't type long messages, so I will instead record this voice message. Which, by the way, contains spoilers for the ending of Ratatouille? If — if that's a thing you care about in the year of our lord 2020. I don't know if... anybody here cares about Ratatouille spoilers, but if you do I guess stop listening now.
Um, anyway, um, what was — what did I want to say about this movie? I think like, uh, the thing about — so the thing I said about how like Ratatouille has kinda like one antagonist too many, or like even like one... early climax too many, in the story? Like, it's not that the character of... What's his — I think his name is Skinner, like the evil, the evil sous-chef who becomes the owner of — Whatever.
It's not that he's like... bad for the story per se, it's just that like for me? Ratatouille is a movie that like, perhaps moreso than most of the Pixar movies, is like... To me personally, right, like I do wanna preface this with like this is just my personal reading of the film, but it is very clearly about something to me, because it's, it's got a very like, apart from this one like weird antagonist side-plot that for me kind of is in the way, it does have a pretty clear like thematic through-line, where it's like... This is a movie that is about something, and it tells you very clearly what it's about because the movie ends with one of the characters giving like a long speech about what the movie is about, so! Um.
Like at the beginning of the movie, you have, um, this recurring character who is a dead cooking ghost named Gusteau, um, who is Remy's idol and his famous motto is "anyone can cook", right? So he — he presents this viewpoint of "anyone can cook" which is what inspires Remy to try to do cooking even though he's a rat, right? Um, and he's sort of like framed as the, I guess like the, the good?? Or like yeah kinda like the good viewpoint? That he's like yeah, anyone can do this, like it doesn't matter if you're a rat, or like whoever, you can do cooking, anyone can do cooking, right?
Um... And then on the other side, you have Anton Ego, who is the evil food critic. Well, I say evil? He's not really like... You could argue that he's not really like evil-evil? Because... he doesn't do anything overtly like... uh... immoral, or like criminal, or like... I mean what he, what he is is he's like, he's cold, right? And he is irresponsible with his, his power, the power that he wields as an influential food critic, which is that he can effectively destroy people's business by giving them bad reviews, and he uses that power very liberally to just destroy people's livelihoods because he thinks that most people can't make good food, right?
So... If Gusteau represents the viewpoint of "anyone can cook", then I guess Ego represents the viewpoint of "most people can't cook for shit!", right? His viewpoint is, "there is maybe a select handful of people who can cook good food, and most people can't, and they suck, and I'm here to destroy them". Right? That's sort of his viewpoint for most of the movie, right? And then, towards the very end of the film, he goes and eats at the restaurant, and he eats Remy's cooking and he's like "oh shit I've been wrong about a lot of things", and then he delivers like, effectively the final speech of the movie? Where he lays out his new worldview that he's achieved when he ate this cool food that a rat cooked for him!
Um, and the... the sort of like, moral lesson I guess that he imparts at end of the film? Is... not as — as you would think in many other movies, that he has like adopted the viewpoint of the good guy. He has not adopted Gusteau's viewpoint that anyone can cook. Instead what happens is that he achieves kind of... a synthesis of his previous viewpoint and Gusteau's viewpoint in this almost, like, dialectical sense, right, where he comes to believe — and this is one of my favourite quotes from the movie, although I will be paraphrasing it, 'cause I haven't seen this movie for a long time — but basically, what he says at the end of the movie is, "not everyone can cook, but a good cook could be anyone". Right? Or if you... if you expand this story's themes to be about more than just cooking, if you expand it to be about just art or creative pursuits more generally, then, you know, he's effectively saying ok, not everyone can be good at things, but a person who's good at things could come from anywhere, you never know who's going to be good at something, right?
And what that is, is it's basically like... I think what's cool about this is that it sort of mellows out the initial viewpoint of the movie in a way that feels authentic to me, right? Because... Like, I'm gonna be honest? I don't believe, and I've never really believed, that it's true that like anyone can be good at anything, right? I simply don't feel that — there are some things that I'm not good at, and never will be good at, right? So, when movies try to impart this lesson of like oh anyone can do anything, you just have to apply yourself, you just have to believe in yourself, you know, you can always make it if you try hard enough — I don't think that's true, and I think the movie Ratatouille doesn't either? But instead what it says is like, ok, but we need to change how we relate to that, right?
So... like, Anton Ego starts out as a food critic who believes that the championing of good art comes from destroying people who make bad art, right? He tries to gate people, he like — like he tries to find people who aren't good enough for his liking and sort of like, punt them off the scene? And sort of like, he tries to champion good art by destroying people who make bad art, right? And by the end of the movie, that changes, and he stops being a food critic and instead becomes an investor who invests in restaurants because he realizes that like, what I should actually be doing is I should be uplifting people and empowering them to make good art, instead of trying to destroy people who make bad art, right?
So... It kinda comes around to this idea of like... It's not necessarily true that anyone can be good at anything, but that doesn't mean that we have to go around like, knocking people's art if they're not good enough at it, it doesn't mean that it helps to, to be like super-critical and condescending and mocking of people who aren't good at things. What we should do is we should give everyone the chance to try to make good art because, you know, some people are gonna be good at it, some people maybe aren't gonna be good at it, you know like Remy is a cooking genius like... Already at the start of the film, he's already great at cooking. Like his journey is not about learning to be good at cooking, he already is great at cooking! But isn't given the opportunity to prove it. And then you have, you know, Linguine, who isn't good at cooking, and never becomes good at cooking either! Like this movie is not about him learning to be good at the thing that he sucks at! He just continues to suck at cooking! But he, you know, he instead helps Remy be uplifted into like, being given the opportunity to cook, right?
Either way, the point is, this isn't a movie that tries to tell you like oh anyone can become a good cook, because it's not really about anyone becoming good at cooking, instead it's about what kinds of opportunities we give people to do the things they love. Um, and I think it's, I think it's very... I think it's just a very sort of like cohesively, uh, communicative idea in the story, and like I think it ends very elegantly with this super-harsh food critic kind of mellowing out, and becoming sort of like a person who instead thinks okay well, there's no point in me destroying the livelihoods of people who aren't good at cooking, instead what I should do is I should give everyone — I should give people who aren't able to do cooking, who aren't able to prove themselves, I should uplift as many people as I can to give them the chance to prove that they can be good at cooking regardless of whether they're a rat or not. I think that's very cool.