Ratatouille

Saw Ratatouille (the movie, not the dinner) today. The tale of a rat who dreams about being a cook, and the human who helps him get there (because, like, no one is going to let a rat step in and run their kitchen).

What I liked: the image of a kitchen swarming with rats, all of them cooking. Very disturbing. In a good way.

What I disliked: the complete lack of female rats.

What made me really, really angry: the notion that a woman who works hard is secondary to a man who doesn’t work hard but who has dreams and a good heart.

We’ve seen this before. In Harry Potter, among other places. It makes me mad there, too. Hermione knows her stuff, and does her homework, and Harry’s too, yet exists primarily to back Harry up, because for some reason he’s the real hero of the piece.

Worse, Colette, the female chef (the only female character) in Ratatouille loses all sense of her own ambition once the (human) male lead, Linguine, kisses her, and after that primarily exists to support and back him up–and the rat, too, by the end.

I comfort myself with the notion that if Colette were a woman in an Icelandic saga, she would consider Linguine beneath her, and would find someone to kill him if he thought otherwise.