Just for the record, I am not a feminist. Although I believe in the equality of the sexes, I do not believe in the adage, “A woman can do anything that a man can do.” Neither am I the kind of woman that would complain about Dolores Umbridge and Bellatrix Lestrange being the main villains of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and being second-in-command only to more powerful male villains. I don’t have a problem with having the desire to be taken care of. However, I have great respect for women—fictional or not—who know what they want and know how to get it, without letting any man to get in the way.
This brings my attention to the only female main character of the Pixar film Ratatouille, Colette Tatou. A chef in the kitchen of the gourmet restaurant Gusteau’s, Mademoiselle Colette is introduced as the mentor and partner of Alfredo Linguini, after he is mistakenly recognized as the creator of a fabulous new soup, which was really created by Remy the rat. “I am the only woman in this kitchen!” she says to Linguini on his first day of work. “I have been working too hard for too long to get here, and I am not going to jeopardize it for some garbage boy who got lucky!” (It is no surprise why she is an uptight nagger throughout the film. Tired women do that.)
It is clear that Colette has a strong personality. She can make Linguini shudder and recoil just by her mere presence. She initially sees Linguini as competition; it is her greatest misfortune to even be involved with him. “Haute cuisine is an antiquated hierarchy built upon rules written by stupid old men—rules designed to make it impossible for women to enter this world. But I’m still here,” she explains to him. To her, it shouldn’t matter that she is a woman; she can cook—and well, at that—and she is set to move beyond what the masculinist society dictates upon members of her gender.
Come to think of it, her motives are similar to Remy’s, who also wants to become more than what he really is. So now it bothers me that by the middle of the story, Linguini, under Remy’s control, has become the talk of the town just days after “his” soup’s popularity grew, and Colette lets it happen, putting her in the same position as she had been before. It bothers me even more that shortly after Gusteau’s reclaims its fame, she is shown to have given in to Linguini’s affections. It is implied that all she’s been looking for all along was love. She lowers her shield and lets an arrow pierce her, and that was it. All of a sudden, she is contented with being second place just when she’s halfway to her goal.
I understand that the theme of Ratatouille is “Anyone Can Cook.” Remy is a rat, and he has talent greater even than Colette’s. (His improvisation of the Sweet Bread a la Gusteau recipe became known as the “special order”; quite superior to the original, which was what Colette meant to serve; she was only following the rules.) Linguini, who cannot cook at all, is given a high position in the kitchen because people believe he can do it excellently. I understand that the audience loves the underdog. But doesn’t that make Colette, the only woman in the kitchen, sort of an underdog, too? I couldn’t accept that she’s been “working too hard for too long,” and suddenly it doesn’t matter because she fell in love. Who would have known that it would be a man that would soften her up?
And that’s another thing: Although I don’t have a real problem about women dreaming of someday having a stable family life with a man at their side to support them, I would agree that it is a masculinist notion that it is ideal that women would want exactly that. Walt Disney Pictures has been known to demonstrate through their films virtues that humanity holds dear—in the case of Ratatouille, perseverance against the odds. That being given, it could be deduced that even Colette’s behavior in the film was placed there that way on purpose. (Yeah, to make us go, “AWW…!” because she has a soft spot for Linguini—of all people.) That really seems disturbingly masculinist to me.
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