France hates Muslim women? Old news!
New news! A friend sent me a screenshot of a tweet from Muslim Twitter this morning (posted on amaliah.com‘s instagram page) and I was momentarily confused. Here’s that tweet, take a look at it and let me know if you are also confused.
Does that tweet make any sense to you? It makes close to zero sense to me, my apologies to the tweeter as well as others who loved this tweet. Why is this tweet nonsensical? Because, at the crux of it, “they” don’t let a rat cook–in Ratatouille Remi has to hide himself in Linguini’s chef’s hat and once he’s ratted out, most of the staff quit. While these moments in the film reflect the social acceptance of an outsider, the conclusion of the film reflects the systematic acceptance. At the end, the restaurant gets shut down for health code violations (aka breaking the law) once an inspector discovers there are rats in the kitchen. See how it doesn’t make sense any more?
This tweet might be reworded as such to accurately reflect the film:
So, they wouldn’t let a rat cook and now they won’t let a Muslim woman wear hijab?
Also, notice the parallel structure in there. I am so obnoxious, I know.
You might be thinking, of course the tweet’s author intended to reference the overarching message of the film: anyone can cook. Although this idea is what the film would like audiences to take away from the film, the way the film ends implies that anyone can do anything (well) but that doesn’t mean that everyone or every institution will accept them. That’s a much tougher pill to swallow, but one that is more grounded in reality. I can’t quite remember if Remi, Linguini, and Collette end up running a sketchy operation ultimately…I can see flashes of rats at mini tables and the critic Ego eating…regardless.
If we overlook the crucial ending of the film, this tweet doesn’t make sense from other angles, either.
Remi is a male rat and Muslim women are women. The better thing to do is look at how Collette plays the sole woman in a male-dominated field and gets little credit and not much success for her hard work. She mostly just supports the main characters and gets a man in the process, overshadowing her fierce ambition. Now, there’s nothing wrong with getting yourself a man in real life, but when that’s all you get as the only female character in the film…I’m also not supporting ambition above all else. Let’s just shoot for balance, here. It also points at the frustrating reality that traditional gender roles put women in the kitchen, but if someone gets paid to cook for others professionally, it’s generally a man. Can the government please give me 20 bucks–okay, I’ll take 5, every time I cook a meal for my family?
This tweet also equates cooking with wearing hijab, which unnecessarily genders the act of cooking and plays into stereotype of the Muslim woman barred in her home as the ultimate homemaker. This feels like a bit of a stretch, right? It’s mostly because this tweet doesn’t work on multiple levels. Tangent: I don’t know a lot about France, but I assume that Muslim cuisines are considered third class/trashy over there, like how Turkish food was considered low class in Spain and Italy when I visited a few years ago.
Lastly, the film Ratatouille is simply a depiction of France in the American imaginary–it’s not a film representative of the French government or people at all. Did the people who created the film do some research on France? Were there any French people significantly involved in the making of this film? I sure hope so, but all hopes aside, it honestly has very little to do with what the real-life country of France does.
In this fast-paced era of consumption, let’s slow down and smell the tweets 🙂
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