Maybe I’m wrong but I always took it as a metaphor for class. At one point Skinner literally calls linguine a rat. Also Skinner wanted to turn the restaurant into a frozen food empire…
When he locked remi in his truck, he said he wanted the rat to cook for him for his frozen food industry.
This is why i love that movie, there’s no evil person but one who doesn’t want the restaurant to run by someone who can’t even cook nor run a business, and he doesn’t want the restaurant to shut down by health inspection. The crew quitting over it signified the seriousness of this issue. Linguini almost ruined the restaurant if not for Remy.
They kind of had to add that bit of him being a sellout who wants to ruin Gusteau’s legacy.
So he was evil?
Late-stage capitalism is hardly all on his shoulders.
I don’t think that Ratatouille had that much of an anti-capitalist angle. Let alone a late-stage capitalism one.
I didn’t mean to suggest that. Simply that he was a business man doing business in a capitalist society. If you lose the talent of your main chef, what do you do? You ride his name and legacy for as long as you can.
That’s just the world we live in.
In reality, you’re right. But that stuff doesn’t exist in the narrative of the movie. In the movie, he’s a sellout and therefore: evil.
Also: Linguini did ruin the restaurant. Wasn’t that kind of the point of the whole “Everyone can cook” idea?(i.e.: Haute-cuisine is not that important)
Linguini did ruin the restaurant.
For that case we need to separate the two protagonists, Linguini and Remy. For the ending, i guess it’s fair to say Linguini ruined the restaurant as he invited rats into his restaurant and to cook, but if we look at Remy as a separated entity, then the restaurant closed down due to Remy’s and his family. The instance where Linguini almost ruined the restaurant is when a critic were served the same pot of soup he ruined, Remy saved the soup, thus saved the restaurant reputation.
Forgot the soup. Why do I always forget the soup!!??
?(i.e.: Haute-cuisine is not that important)
Nah. Confit byaldi is ludicrously haute-cuisine, needs three-star levels of manual prep work. The tag line is “Not everyone can be a great cook – but a great cook can come from anywhere”. And so can a good recipe or idea, that wasn’t ever new in French cuisine it’s been riffing off peasant recipes for ages, Escoffier did plenty of that.
Good food isn’t special in the sense that everyone so inclined, with enough obsession, can learn to combine aroma, to cook things to point, all that stuff, which is how excellent home cooks are made. What sets haute cuisine apart is the time and labour invested in every dish for increasingly diminishing returns.
But the restaurant closed. The movie ends with Remy in a bistro.
Because of the health inspector, yes. The restaurant critic, now disgraced for having talked up an “unsanitary” restaurant, is eating at the new place, happy as a clam.
The social status and renown that comes with haute cuisine indeed is unimportant, it’s the food that’s important.
The social status and renown that comes with haute cuisine
In my mind, that was haute cuisine. I never thought of that distinction between social status and all that diminishing returns stuff.
Social status and exclusivity plays into it in practice, for sure, in a right-out fetishistic sense: Like there’s chefs who have onions chopped so fine, using a special technique (not the usual chef technique you see) that they melt in the sauce, very labour-intensive. Now, having the onions melt into the sauce is a nice and valid thing, however, why in the everloving fuck aren’t you using a blender. Even if there’s a difference, which all my experience tells me there isn’t, it’s going to have such a minimal return on investment it’s utterly pointless but as an exercise in exclusivity.
Also I like my potato mash chunky but that’s another topic.
Idk if you had intelligent talking people-rats like in the movie then being excluded from whole industries just because people think they’re icky would actually be pretty bigoted.
They aren’t icky simply because they’re rats, they’re ugly because they piss and shit everywhere.
Bigotry and such is unjustified because the people it’s targeted at aren’t the bigoted things people assume about them. They’re normal, same as any of us.
Rats are unsanitary. Even pets shouldn’t be in a food prep area. I’m not sorry for any rat furies out there.
(We are all icky)
Seems like you kind of just ignored the entire first part of what was written.
I didn’t. Intelligent talking people rats are still rats, the rats in the movie behave entirely like normal biological rats, just they can “talk” and stuff too
How many “normal biological rats” run themselves through the dishwasher?.
So intelligent talking people-rats can run a five-star restaurant but can’t understand the concept of hygiene? Why? Because “Rats are unsanitary”, apparently. Sounds pretty bigoted. Sounds like you found a big-worded sciency way of calling them icky. You’re a scientific ratcist.
If they have to live in the walls and don’t have sanitary living conditions that’s a societal issue, also due to deeply entrenched anti-rodent bigotry.
I can’t wait for Ben Shapiro to clip this and use it as evidence of the crazy woke left.
When the final boss is the sanitary inspector:
he was french though
Gross. I hear they eat snails
I hear they eat food cooked by rats
The villain in Ratatouille wanted to take over the restaurant, specifically for the name, so he could sell out with cheaply made frozen meals.
He was also a massive French asshole. 🤢
He was also
a massiveFrenchasshole. 🤢He Fr*nch 🤢🤮
ugh the Americans of Europe
Don’t insult Americans like that. Even we don’t deserve that much hate.
it’s the perfect insult - there’s literally no one who wouldn’t be upset at this!
So he was just a capitalist
Wait you’re telling me that movie had a plot and wasn’t just about how bad I wanted that bad French bih to sit on my face?
Sitting on her face tho… ouch
The old chef forged documents to take over the restaurant for himself, stealing from the protagonist, took advantage of the name Gustav to sell cheap food for profit.
Have you even watched the movie?
I have but I banked on people’s mandela effect memories to flip them towards the opinion.
Worked on me OP 👍 (I’m easily swayed and have no convictions)
You should change that right away.
You got it boss. Done 👍
