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July 31, 2007

STEPHANIE SALTER: Rats can be gourmet cooks — if they’re guy rats

By Stephanie Salter

TERRE HAUTE — Back when I was among a national handful of women reporting on professional basketball, we noticed a quiet bond between ourselves and black players. One of those men, a member of the Golden State Warriors, told me his theory of why.

“We see what you women go through just trying to do your job,” he said, gesturing at a post-game locker room. “You don’t know what it’s like to be black, but you’ve got an idea. You know what it’s like to stick out from the majority and be judged right away just by what you are physically. White guys can’t see it because it doesn’t happen to them — unless they’re homeless.”

The NBA player’s observation came back to me recently as I read an opinion piece in the San Jose Mercury News about the movie “Ratatouille.” It was written by Margot Magowan, whom I knew when she was a radio producer in San Francisco.

Magowan helped found the Woodhull Institute, a think tank and leadership training organization for young feminists. She also is a wife and the mom of a 4-year-old girl. In that latter capacity, she sees a lot of animated films. “Ratatouille,” she wrote, suffers from an omission that is common among the movies her daughter gets to see: a female lead who isn’t a princess bride-to-be.

“When my daughter goes to the movies,” Magowan wrote, “she sees animals talk, fairies or unicorns prance around, witches cast evil spells, but she’s never shown a magical land where boys and girls are treated equally, where gender doesn’t matter. Why can’t Pixar or Disney allow her the fantasy of equality?”

In “Ratatouille,” an ambitious French kitchen rat longs to prove his haute cuisine chef’s skills. Male humans and other animals help him. The only noticeable female character is a woman sous chef named Colette. The film’s creators, Magowan wrote, toss “a bone” to Colette and girls in general by giving her “a brief monologue on misogyny” that neatly explains why she must remain a secondary character.

When Magowan complained to female relatives about this, they told her Colette’s dilemma in a male-dominated kitchen is “how it is in the real world.” To which Magowan responded:

“OK, let me get this straight: It’s just fine to stretch our imaginations to believe in a talking rat who can cook, but when it comes to gender roles, we admire realism and authenticity?”

Same with “The Lion King.” Wondering aloud to someone else why the lioness couldn’t have attacked Scar instead of having to wait for Simba to come back, Magowan was told that this is just the way it is “in nature.” Male lions lead the pride.

“So a lion can be best friends with a warthog and a meerkat without gobbling them up,” she wrote, “but a lioness heading a pride? That could never happen in the animal kingdom.”

This institutionalized sexism even finds its way into the stuffed animal kingdom,” Magowan has discovered. When she uses the pronoun “she” for her daughter’s plush toys, “adults invariably do a double-take, checking for manes or tusks: even female toys must stay in their place.”

After I read Magowan’s op-ed piece, I sent her a complimentary e-mail and told her that the great tennis star, Billie Jean King, had expressed similar sentiments 25 years ago about the movie, “E.T.” King loved the film, but said her heart sank during the chase scene when E.T. levitates all the boys on their bicycles to save them.

Steven Spielberg and the film’s co-creators may not have noticed there were no girls on the bikes, but Billie Jean King did. “I wanted to fly, too,” she said.

Usually, when women bring up this kind of unintentional but real sexist exclusion, they are made fun of or told they should “lighten up” and get a sense of humor. God forbid a woman expresses a little anger, as Magowan did in writing, “Pixar is made up of a bunch of guy geeks.”

One veteran national film critic, Glenn Kenny of Premiere magazine, responded to Magowan’s “Ratatouille” essay in just such a way on his blog. He characterized her thoughts as “puling and sniping” and “yammering.”

Kenny suggested that “Ms. Magowan take her 4-year-old daughter and bivouac somewhere with a DVD of Free to Be You and Me they can watch over and over until Pixar hires Ti-Grace Atkinson as a creative consultant.”

That he referenced Atkinson, a writer who was on the far radical fringes of feminism even back in her hey-day of the early 1970s, indicates the critic’s mindset.

Kenny’s blog reminded me why I so often feel deprived by mainstream movie reviewers: Women are still a small minority, and that makes a difference.

A recent example was a powerful review by the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis, who bucked the national tide of thumbs-ups for a documentary called, “Crazy Love.”

The film is about a flashy Bronx lawyer in the 1950s who, though married and a father, wooed a young glamour girl then hired a hit man to throw lye in her face when she tried to break off with him. Fifteen years after he was convicted, his maimed and blind ex-girlfriend married him.

Dargis said the documentary’s “overall vibe is morbidly entertaining,” but, unlike her male counterparts, she took issue with the film’s tendency “to play this pathetic story for laughs.” And she delivered an eloquent riff on the euphemism, “crime of passion.”

“Crimes of passion,” she wrote, “have often been viewed as categorically different from other crimes because they supposedly originate in lust and desire, an argument that has been used historically and even legally to rationalize violence against women, including rape. What is so odious about the notion of so-called crimes of passion is how the phrase necessarily implicates victims, because it is the very desirability of victims, after all, that provokes their assailants to madness (passion).”

Male film reviewers are capable of making that point. It’s just that none did. Probably it never occurred to them — anymore than it did to Pixar to star a female rat or Steven Spielberg to allow just one girl on a bicycle to fly.

What’s the matter with complaining about that?

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

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