#i really despise the model minority myth | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

noneoryes · 1 year

Text

I used to really love Pixar's Ratatouille when I was young. It used to be one of my favorite films, encapsulating themes about art, media critism and even queerness and otherness.

Watching it today, I couldn't help but have my own critical thinking skills, my inner critic suddenly sneak up on me and reconsider the film and its messages and themes.

The biggest problem with the film is how it champions capitalist meritocracy and how that undermines everything it might try to say about being a part of an oppressed and despised minority.

Remy is often rightly seen as a metaphor for someone from an oppressed minority finding their place in the world and escaping oppression. The rats themselves are hated, elicit disgust by others, they are persecuted on genocidal level and are always forced to leave in fear, hidden from the rest of the world.

The rats are also seen in the stereotypes of minorities, always stealing, a deceitful, shameful crime, the movie tells us again and again. The rats can only thrive at the end of the movie when they have been "cured" of their stealing, by finding an alternative.

As a Jew, I couldn't help but see the resemblance between the scene in which Remi's dad shows him the display window full of dead rats and extermination tools and the genocidal horror of the Holocaust the Jews faced. Remy's dad tells him that this is the reality and it's always going to be like this. Rats will forever be persecuted. An idea and reality familiar to many Jews facing antisemitism through millennia.

How are the rats saved from this genocidal reality, from their shameful immoral stealing, how do they find a place in a world that hates them?

Through the meritocracy myth. More specifically, through the model minority paradigm. Remy is the model minority, the model rat, who chastises the other rats not to steal, who is better than the other rats, and through his singular talent he shows the humans rats are useful, worthy of company, full of talent and genius. Truly anyone can cook, even the hated rat. Truly, the minority is worth living, as long as they rise to the top through their own merit, like anyone else. The survival and wellbeing of Remy's kin is reliant on his talent and on him being a model minority, and that is one of the uplifting messages of the film, intentional or otherwise.

In a world where rats, like Jews, are forever doomed to be persecuted, Remy's family survive by living in secret, and being useful to the dominant, oppressive class, earning the favor of a powerful benefactor, Linguini, who owns the restaurant. This is similar to how some Jews have survived for centuries, living in the outskirts and earning the favor of a local person with power. That is the happy ending the minority metaphor gets in Ratatouille.

The second part of my problem with Ratatouille also connects to the meritocracy myth, but in a different way. Cooking in this film is a larger metaphor for creation itself, for art and artists. Yet the way art is created in Ratatouille and what it promotes is mainly, Auteur theory. The greatest force in creating art and film being a singular force of artistic genius, voice and talent. That is what Remy is. An Auteur. A talented individual with fantastic ideas that directs the rest of the cooks (the crew) in creating the perfect dish (the film).

Ratatouille doesn't see the making of food or art or film as a collaborative medium and so when things are dire and the critic comes knocking, only Remy and his singular talent and ideas can save the day and strike gold. The human cooks, each with their expertise, leave and never return to the narrative. They are the crew, and they are disposable, replaceable, as long as the Auteur stays. The crew, says the film, is not essential to the creative process, merely tools for the artist to express himself. The film may name one of it's antagonists Ego, but really it is the filmmakers ego that is running the show and pushing art as an individual art form.

Furthermore, the film never delves into the practicalities of cooking and therefore of filmmaking. Collete may teach Remy the practicalities of being a professional chef, but not how to make food. It shows ingredients, ideas, combinations, but never technique, never learning the skills of cooking. If the movie did delve into cooking technique, one could assume you could learn how to cook, how to be a better cook, improve, become more versed in creation through experience. But Linguini never learns to cook. Never improves. Remy never learns new cooking skills, never discusses cooking itself, only the different ingredient combinations. That's because art as the film sees it is a matter of talent, a natural gift, a meritocracy of the most talented, not something you have to work on or that is also work.

All of this makes the film feel self masturbatory, celebrating Auteur theory and art as idea and the genius of artists of singular minds. What cements this feeling is how the film views critics and critism. Everyone loves Anton Ego, I love him, who wouldn't? But his role in the narrative, his job as critic, is to antagonize, destroy art and artists, be a threat to the restaurant, the art. Ego is redeemed when he leaves a glowing, flattering review, but his redemption comes at the expense of his job. Sure, he loses his job because the restaurant closes down due to health inspection. However, the next scene shows him happy and redeemed when he is no longer a critic.

Indeed, Ego's redemption is him leaving his critic career behind and becoming an investor for the restaurant (patron to the artist). He cannot be both good and critic, showing a critic that praises is no longer a critic. The film does not understand, and even dismisses outwardly the meaning of criticism, or its usefulness to society. If it's negative, leave it at the door right? This message doesn't really bode well for critical thinking skills or meaningful analysis.

With all these major criticisms, the film is also just really sexist. Collete rants about the hardships of being a female chef, a cook in a male dominated workforce, yet at the end of the day, she is relegated to love interest status, there to support the protagonists, be their backup, stand by their side, be sexy in her defiance of her gendered role. Much has been said since about Pixar's toxic and gendered work environment in those years and boy does this movie and Collete's character show it.

I'm sad that a film I once loved disappoints me so as an adult. It's still a good film, still pretty to look at and Ego's review is still moving. But it's important to note what the film is actually telling us and what themes it conveys, in order to not just create art, but criticize and understand it.

#Pixar #pixar animation studios #ratatouille #Animation

11 notes · View notes

evilelitest2 · 4 years

Note

Do you know of any good resources on how and why Reagan won? He seemed to have a lot of resistance from the Republican old guard and all four of my grandparents absolutely despised him. But he somehow won with what sounded like was a very unpopular platform, and I don't understand exactly what happened.

I mean most electoral histories will have you covered, are you looking from a cultural perspective or an electoral perspective, or just a general overview of the 1980 election? Personally I recommend the book “Backlash” on the larger reactionary movement of the 80s which is in no way relevant today...

But in short there are many reasons why Reagan won, many of them depressing familiar today

1) Ronald Reagan was an actor and was a really charismatic speaker, specifically he was very good at seeming friendly, approachable and non condescending. It was extremely easy to understand Reagan’s message if you weren’t paying attention and he didn’t seem like some sort of elite who understood policies or knew where Cambodia was on a map, because he didn’t either. With the possible exceptions of JFK, and OBama, Reagan is likely the most charismatic president in the last century and that makes a big difference in the election

2) Jimmy Carter was a bit of a mess. I love Carter and I think he is one of the most moral people to ever be president (judging on a scale) but...his administration was extremely chaotic, inept, and really bad at messaging.

3) Reagan cheated. At his most famous debate with Carter, it turns out Reagan’s team had actaully managed to get Carter’s debate plans before hand, so Reagan knew exactly what Carter was going to say which is why Reagan seemed so invincible in the debate

4) The Economy. Due to a wide variety of reasons including but not limited too the fallout of the Vietnam War, the OPEC oil crisis, the natural eb and flow of the market, and the failure of Kenysian economics meant that when the 1980 election was happening, America was in a pretty bad economic place. Unemployment was high, inflation was spiraling and for many white people it was the first time they had ever experienced an economic downturn

This wasn’t really Carter’s fault, just like the economic boom in the 80s wasn’t really Reagan’s fault (though the initial crash certainly was) but that is how it was perceived.

5) The Failure of Kenysian Economics. Now when I say “failure” i don’t actually mean “this is a bad system” Kenysan economics got us out of the Great Depression after all and lead to the largest economic boom in US history. However they aren’t the end all, especially when politicians running things don’t really understand what they are doing. So while they aren’t nearly as awful as the Free market economics that would follow, people were becoming disillusioned with the prior economic model

6) Vietnam. Oh dear god Vietnam. Reagan would be the first president who didn’t preside over Vietnam in any way, which meant he wasn’t tainted by the total fuck up that was that war. America was still reeling from losing our first major war to a small nation that nobody had heard off before they started to kick our ass, and the battle over Vietnam has basically torn the country apart. A huge amount of people felt pissed and humiliated over the defeat, and rather than question why we went to war or the morality of our tactics, blamed protesters and leftists for not supporting the war enough, a stabbed in the back myth if you will. Also Vietnam was a Democrat fuck up, Republicans weren’t in power when it started under JFK and LBG, who collectively created the horrific circumstances of the war. The republicans who oversaw it were the comparatively (to Reagan) more ‘moderates” of Nixon and Ford. So American both felt humiliated and weak from looking a major war to a people we saw as inferior and was blaming everything associated with the left for it. Reagan’s “Make America Great Again” message was extremely attractive to a lot of people, and since he didn’t have anything to do with the war, you couldn’t blame him for its failure.

7) The Soviet Union. The presence of the USSR hung over every US election since Woodrow Wilson, but after Vietnam a lot of Americans felt like the USSR was winning. This was ironically utterly untrue as the Soviet Union would collapse only 11 years later, but the perception in America was that the US had been defeated by COMMUNISM and needed to get our groove back for round II. And Reagan was by far the most aggressively confrontational anti Communist president we have had since FDR, so much so that he accidentally almost triggered a nuclear war and destroyed all of civilizations...whoops. But that is what American wanted back then

8) The rise of the religious right. For most of the 20th century, while religion was certainly a thing which effected politics, the US political landscape was largely secular, religion being evoked more than it made its own demands. But due to rise of the Counter Culture movement, religious folks sort of went into panic mode and suddenly conservative fundamentalist Christianity was one the rise. And Reagan embraced them 100%, leading to the fundementalist cancer that lives with us to this day

9) The death of the Counterculture. At the exact same time as the Religious Right came into power, the group it was opposing had largely collapsed. I mentioned this before when talking about the civil Rights movement, but once overt legal segregation had been outlawed, what was left were the far more serious, complicated and unclear problems, which lead to a lot of hippies burning out, falling into infighting, declaring victory and going home, or turning to more radical and largely ineffectual approaches. And since so much of the counter culture was linked to to its fashion and aethetic, as the Hippie style/music/clothing/demeanor became lame and uncool, the causes behind them were seen as uncool as well. Also the most dedicated leftists quickly turned to auto cannibalism and spent more time fighting each other rather than focusing on their enemy a dynamic which the left can always be counted on (cough what happened to Counterpoints cough)

10) The larger cultural backlash. America as a whole was feeling threaten by the left, and by extention the progressive made for women, racial minorities, and sexual minorities, and was pushing back against them. The 60s and 70s was a moment of sudden shocking change which took the old guard by surprise and they didn’t know what to do, but once the left had burned themselves out a bit, the Right was able to reorganize, refocus their efforts, and remake their arguments to reassert the oppressive systems they so valued. And for a lot of Americans who were passively bigoted, the incredibly fast pace of change got them scared and they sought comfort in the return of the familiar. Again Reagan wasn’t just an actor, he was a cowboy actor from shitty kitch family films. And as we’ve seen before in terms of Whitelash or Male Fragility, fear of losing privilege can get people to vote against their own interest (cough union workers cough)

11) America was facing a big choice. After WWII, we were basically the only major nation with a good economy, which we were able to turn into a great economy, and had an over 20 year post war high. But other nations started to compete with us (most notably Japan) and our status as the singular nation started to be threatened by the EU, India, China, Latin America, and our own changing history. For the first time, Americans started to realize that maybe, not right away, but eventually, we would just be one nation among many again, rather than the only superpower. Simultaneous, the threat of Climate change first started to be noticed, and Americans started to realize that maybe we should tone down the materialism, the consumerism, and the reliance on fossile fuels. Carter infamously wore sweaters in the white house to save on gas and put solar panels on the roof, which was seen by many Americans (idiots) as weakness.

Basically we had a choice, we could either

A) Prepare our nation for the transformation period we were going for, and slowly start to move off oil as our economy changed and we had to make adjustments for it

B) FUCK THAT. THIS IS AMERICA AND WE DON”T COMPROMISE FOR ANYTHING. YOU KNOW WHAT...LETS BE EVEN MORE RECKLESS

Americans were asked to choose between accepting an uncomfortable reality or embracing a comforting delusion.

12) The Iran Hostage crisis. This made Carter look weak internationally and everybody knows that America looking weak is worth destroying our own internal economy.

13) The Democrats were in the middle of a civil war. The Civil Rights movement and the Great Society had torn the democrats apart which means Carter was never really able to get his own party to obey him like the Republicans did. WHats worse is that the aftereffect of the Vietnam War had basically crippled LBJ’s Great Society Program, meaning the Democrats were really chaotic

14) Finally, it is important to remember, the Democrats had held power from 1932 all the way to 1980s, the US was kind of a single party state for most of the century, and a lot of people were pretty sick of them. Corruption, incompetence and hypocrisy are around in every party and the democratic congress in particular was widely hated, so the Republicans felt like this new exciting thing, something which could maybe bring a new era in America. “Its morning in America”

And of course, Reagan was in many ways what white America wants, a giant self congratulatory message that lets us avoid dealing with real issues....

#Ask EvilElitest2 #Ronald Reagan #American Politics #1980 Election #Jimmy Carter #Vietnam War #Counter Culture #HIppies #Backlash #Republicans #Democrats #The Great Society #OPEC #enviromentalism

9 notes · View notes