Rats in the Kitchen

by Greg Skiano | 15 min read

We have good reasons to exclude rats from the kitchen. They are scavengers; they spread disease and excrement; they kill the ambience. Nobody’s five-star review includes the words “my favorite part wasn’t the food. It was the rats.” And yet many people (myself included) loved Ratatouille—a movie, lest we forget, that frames the exclusion of rats as bigotry.

If the rats in the movie, and Remy in particular, were merely a metaphor, say for the marginalized, the provincial, or the immigrant, then who cares. But they are not simply metaphorical. Remy’s literal “ratness” drives the plot at least as much as his artistic aspirations do, and the peculiar interplay between the literal on the one hand and the metaphorical on the other, for all its charm, prods us to consider whether every exclusion we make is not, at bottom, a failure of imagination.

Remy is not your average animal character. He is not flat by any measure. He is a brother, a son, an artist; he expresses fear, self-doubt, pride, a sense of betrayal, and so on. In his glowing review for The New York Times, A.O. Scott described Remy as “one of the most persuasive portraits of an artist ever committed to film.” This, despite the fact—also noted by reviewers—that Remy is unusually realistic for an animated rat. The Guardian said it well: “Ratatouille’s rats are unmistakably ratty. They have snaking tails and skittering claws and rapid heartbeats that make their flanks quiver and their fur tremble. Sometimes they bite.” Having such a well developed non-human character is not in itself strange. Pixar has proven its ability time and again to make compelling characters out of non-humans, whether fish, toys, robots, or even cars. Ratatouille stands out because—unlike examples such as Toy Story or Finding Nemo, where the substance of the narrative is located almost entirely within an imaginative non-human world—the key dramatic action in Ratatouille takes place between the human and non-human worlds. Astoundingly, we are presented with a fully rounded animal character, an artist of all things, understanding human language, acting in every significant way as a person, yet incapable of being understood by humans, remaining a rat.

The movie repeatedly accentuates this tension, as in those choice moments when we hear Remy from a human perspective, his speech transforming into the tiny squeals of a rodent, or in moments of heightened action when his bipedal movement regresses to scurrying on all four. Even when allowing Remy to slip more into his personhood would solve obvious narrative problems, Ratatouille resists: the most ridiculous example being Remy’s communication with Linguini (which A.O. Scott aptly described as “under-the-toque puppetry”). That this “puppetry” comes off as charming instead of stupid is surely a testament to the ingenuity of Pixar animators and Brad Bird’s direction. Were it not for such craft, the audience would surely raise an eyebrow each time Remy uses Linguini’s hair as a human joystick. It would have been much simpler (though certainly less fun) to have Linguini understand Remy’s speech, nor would Linguini understanding rat speech be any weirder than his cutting vegetables by means of some sort of hand-hair coordination. This ill-fitting slapstick hints at the importance of Remy not being misconstrued as a human character rendered metaphorically as an animal.

In fact, the whole movie turns on Remy standing for both a rat and a person. He faces not a single, but a double exclusion, first, for being dirty (rats are a health risk), and second for being lowly (rats are too unsophisticated to become great chefs!). Thus, he faces a double antagonist, the health inspector and the food critic, both of whom are defeated in their own way. The health inspector is vanquished when Remy’s rat clan captures, binds, and gags him, disposing of him in the food safe; while the food critic is converted when Remy’s culinary tour de force causes him to confront his own elitism. These twin conflicts are woven together throughout the movie, and—at first glance—appear distinct.

The conflict with the food critic seems easier to tease out, underscored as it is by Gusteau’s famous motto: “anyone can cook,” and brought to a satisfying resolution with the food critic’s final revelation of the motto’s true meaning: “not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.” However, if we read this in isolation, we fail to grasp its full scope. Indeed, just before his revelation, Anton Ego confesses, “To say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions about fine cooking, is a gross understatement—they have rocked me to my core.” This is about much more than food, or even art. Not only was Ego’s imagination limited with regard to art (the meal), his imagination was also (and more importantly) limited with regard to the identity of its maker. This perfectly mirrors Gusteau’s own elaboration of the motto, shown earlier in a television interview where he explains that if you want to be a great cook, “you must be imaginative, strong-hearted” and “must not let anyone define limits because of where you come from.” And lest we fail to see that cooking here is not just about art, he concludes dramatically: “Your only limit is your soul.” More than some anodyne message about who can make great art, these moments raise profound questions about the relationship between identity, imagination, and limits. Consider the following exchange between Remy and his imagined Gusteau:

GUSTEAU
So… we’ve given up.

REMY
Why do you say that?

GUSTEAU
(looks around, shrugs)
We are in a cage…

REMY
No, I’m the one in a cage.
I’ve given up.
You… are free.

GUSTEAU
I am only as free as you imagine me to be.
As you are.

Remy points out that Gusteau, being an imaginary ghost, is “free” to leave the cage, whereas his own physical body prevents an easy escape. But Gusteau’s “as you are” suggests that the physical cage is not the real cage and that real freedom is not about the body, but the imagination.

REMY
Oh please.
I’m sick of pretending.
I pretend to be a rat for my father.
I pretend to be a human through Linguini.
I pretend you exist so I have someone to talk to!
You only tell me stuff I already know!
I know who I am!
Why do I need you to tell me?
Why do I need to pretend?

Now, what exactly can Remy really mean when he says “I pretend to be a rat for my father” and “I pretend to be a human through Linguini.” These don’t seem parallel, for Remy is—in actual fact—a rat, whereas he is definitely not a human. His assertion—“I know who I am!”—suggests a resolution, however; namely that a radical distinction exists between who he is and what he is. Physically speaking, Remy may be a rat and not a human, but neither fact tells us who he is; and, crucially, by divorcing his identity completely from what he is, he affirms what Gusteau is trying to teach him: that he is only as free as he imagines himself to be. His only limit is “his soul.” In other words, his imagined self (for what else could it be if not rooted in physical reality?) is exactly who he is, and this is because his imagination is not mere pretend, but an authoritative form of knowledge—“I know who I am!.. Why do I need to pretend?”

The second conflict, represented by the health inspector, which at first appears distinct, actually forms the necessary counterpart to clarify this message. There are moments throughout the movie which directly point to the health risks that rats pose to humans. Toward the beginning Remy explains why he walks on two legs: “I don’t want to constantly have to wash my paws.” Then later, when the rat clan helps Remy run the kitchen, he makes all of them enter an industrial dishwasher before they can get to work (the script emphasizes that their fur is “clean and fluffy” when they emerge). While these may seem little more than cute narrative details, they are much more. When Remy’s brother hears his explanation for walking upright, he warns, “well, okay. But if Dad sees you walking like that… he’s not gonna like it.” But why exactly? If the rats can walk however they want, why would he be angry about his son walking in a way that affords obvious benefits? It appears that their uncleanliness, one of the sources of their exclusion from the kitchen, results not from how rats are, but how they imagine themselves to be. Perhaps then, the rats who emerge from the dishwasher, newly fluffed and cleaned, will realize (as Remy has) that they are only pretending to be rats. They are limited, not by nature, but by custom.

The father’s motive is made explicit when, during a torrential downpour, he forces Remy to view a horrifying store window, displaying row upon row of dead rats hanging in traps. “Take a good, long look, Remy… The world we live in belongs to the enemy. We must live carefully. We look out for our own kind.” His father commands him to look at the window and to see it a certain way, to understand it as representative of the world, an understanding defined by existing hierarchies and enmities, which he—out of fear—perpetuates no less than any human. Remy, however, refuses.

REMY
No, Dad. I don’t believe it.
You’re telling me that the future is—can ONLY be—
(points at window)—more of this?

DJANGO
This… is the way things are.
You can’t change nature.

REMY
Change IS nature, Dad.
The part that we can influence.
And it starts when we decide.

The action line in the script here is crucial: “With that, Remy turns and—walking upright on two legs—starts back to Gusteau’s. Django calls after him.”

DJANGO
Where you goin’?

REMY
With luck… forward.

Remy’s refusal to see the world as his father sees it, to imagine it as he imagines it, should not be read merely as a moment of “growing up” or declaring independence from parental authority. He stands up to his father (literally), but his challenge is directed not primarily at his father, but at nature itself. His caveat—“the part that we can influence”—is nothing more than a fig leaf. If a rat can become a five-star chef, can any part of nature remain beyond our influence? No, when he stands up (on two feet) he subjects nature to his own decision by means of imagination.

Shortly after this high point, the two exclusions Remy faces begin to blend into one undifferentiated conflict. Returning to the kitchen, he comes upon Linguini, who has discovered that Remy (out of anger) allowed his rat clan to invade the food safe. While we may have expected the discovery of a horde of rats contaminating the restaurant’s food to fit neatly within the ongoing conflict with the health inspector, that isn’t what happens. “You’re stealing from me? How could you? I thought you were my friend, I trusted you!” Instead of feeling disgusted, Linguini feels betrayed. Here, the dirtiness of the rats and their social marginalization fuse. They are both vermin and criminals. They fail to be upright in two senses, and this fusion comes to fruition when Linguini scolds Remy, “Get out!… Or I’ll treat you the way restaurants are supposed to treat pests!” At this low point Remy says to his father, “You’re right, Dad. Who am I kidding? We are what we are. And we’re rats,” and the script includes the action line, “Remy turns, unconsciously drops to four legs and walks slowly away.” His unconscious drop to four legs reveals that he now imagines himself to be—and so becomes—a pest.

When he manages to rally and returns bravely to the kitchen, we finally see that his double exclusion is only superficially differentiated, and the health concerns, as much as the elitism, are nothing more than masks for concealed bigotry. Upon seeing him, Colette screams, “RAAAAT!!” and everyone grabs knives to kill Remy. “DON’T TOUCH HIM!!,” cries Linguini, swooping in to rescue his friend. At which point, he explains to his coworkers that, really, it has been Remy all along who is responsible for their newfound success. Then, each employee, one by one, silently quits. Their silence is loud when we look into their eyes. We don’t see an expression of concern or even surprise. We see the faces of people holding tight to their own sense of superiority, the stubborn lip of a phobe more than anything else. When they thought there was just a pest in the kitchen, they united to act. The problem was solvable. But when they were challenged to expand their idea of who could participate in the kitchen, they could not abide. Significantly, it is Colette, the lone woman, struggling to earn her own acceptance, who leaves last and returns first. Gusteau’s motto—anyone can cook—wakes her up to her own prejudice, and she is able to see who Remy is as separate from what he is.

So what does any of this amount to? And doesn’t this just confirm that Remy represents an immigrant, nothing more? It’s quite possible this is all that was intended, and of course the movie can be viewed this way. However, if we do, some of the details begin to look “problematic.” The rats are not just misunderstood or unwelcome. They are actually unclean. Their ascension toward respectability is catalyzed by one of them being inspired by a french cookbook (an icon of western culture) and brought to completion when they are literally made clean (in an industrial machine of all things!). If they represent immigrants from another culture, they also represent a fairly xenophobic view of that culture, a view that the film fails to negate. Even the moment where Remy finally asserts his origins—“Ratatouille? It’s a peasant dish,” remarks the food critic just before consuming Remy’s masterpiece—even here, Remy earns approval by making his “peasant dish” sophisticated, something worthy of Anton Ego’s ego. These unfortunate implications would have been easier to manage if the human characters were simply another kind of animal (cats, for example). No, I think the treatment of rats in the movie becomes far more interesting if we refuse to treat them as a thinly veiled political metaphor. The realism of the rats, juxtaposed with the humans, makes it unique among Disney films that exploit the animal/human divide in similar ways. Pocahontas, for example, sings to John Smith:

You think the only people who are people,
are the people who look and think like you.
But if you walk the footsteps of a stranger,
you’ll learn things you never knew you never knew.

Not coincidentally, as she sings these lines, we see a family of bears trudging through the woods, leaving footprints for us to (metaphorically?) walk in. However, Ratatouille places the line between nature and imagination squarely before our eyes and then, effectively, demolishes it. The movie works so well, I think, because it takes two types of exclusion, one to do with natural difference and the other to do with culture and taste, and weaves them together so elegantly that they become one. Nature is effectively subsumed in art, and we are offered a vision of progress based entirely on our capacity to imagine. If we ask where this leads, Remy would offer us the same answer he gives his father. “With luck… forward.” Maybe he’s right. Certainly, we want him to be.

Although Ratatouille’s optimism may be enchanting, we do well to consider another magnificent (though far more sobering) depiction of nature: Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man. Like the memorable line from Pocahontas, Herzog’s ruminations accompany depictions of bears. Unlike Pocahontas, however, these bears are real. The documentary is about Timothy Treadwell, a conservationist who filmed his own close (and disturbingly familiar) interactions with brown bears in Alaska. He names them and treats them like friends, even going so far as to pet them. The way they relate to him is undeniably special, at times quite charming, and watching his footage we may wonder if the boundary between ourselves and bears really needs to be as sharp as we imagine. Yet an ominous atmosphere pervades Herzog’s treatment because we know how it will end. Treadwell and his girlfriend were famously killed one night when a bear entered their camp and ate them both. The audio of their final struggle was captured by Treadwell’s camera, but we do not hear it directly. Instead, Herzog listens through earphones and narrates, leaving the horrific sounds of their screams to our imagination.

While it may seem distasteful, unfair even, to draw a comparison with such a dark documentary, the parallel is worth considering. Both Ratatouille and Grizzly Man challenge us to consider the relationship between nature and imagination, asking just how much power the former has over the later. Which boundaries are natural, which are artificial, and which are malleable? Doubtless, the answer is neither none nor all. Where we believe a given boundary is artificial, we may be an optimist or a fantasist; and where we believe that boundary is natural, we may be a realist or a pessimist; it all depends on whether or not we are correct. These two films together—Ratatouille’s optimism and Grizzly Man’s pessimism—check our tendency to reach for easy answers.

Ratatouille doesn’t just “represent” an optimistic view of imagination’s power. In a way, it proves that power by making us, the viewers, accept as artificial a boundary that is undeniably natural: the boundary between food and vermin. If it is characteristic of excellent kitchens to be vermin-free, and if rats are vermin, an excellent kitchen cannot include a rat, by definition. Somehow though, we can ignore this, despite the overwhelming realism of the rats and the inclusion of the health inspector, which ensure that this boundary is not reduced to a metaphor in the story. Right before the credits roll, this becomes clear. In the end, the health inspector (the one bound and gagged by the rats) shuts down Gusteau’s restaurant for health violations. Of course he “squealed,” Remy explains in voiceover: “The food didn’t matter. Once it got out there were rats in the kitchen, the restaurant was closed.” No matter, Remy has since opened La Ratatouille—presumably skirting the approval of close-minded health officials—where Anton, the newly converted food critic, dines happily. The script describes it as a bistro “jammed with open-minded foodies; a hip, cultured mixture of bohemians of all ages… all there to enjoy good food and life.”

In Grizzly Man, on the other hand, we witness a person who, by the power of his imagination, lives as if in a dream, even if, in the end, he must die in reality. It is a disturbing reminder that imagination can be particularly dangerous precisely because it is so powerful. Treadwell, as the documentary makes clear, knew what he was doing. He knew that bears were risky, but his ideas about them empowered him to push further into their world than most of us would dare to go. There is a tantalizing ambiguity about his death, since we don’t know exactly what happened or what went wrong. Was he a bold optimist who met an unfortunate end, or just a naive fantasist? At one point, Herzog asks a native resident for his opinion of Treadwell. The man explains that people who spend time near bears develop a “desire to get into their world, but the reality is we never can, because we’re very different than they are,” and “the line between bear and human has… always been respected by the native communities of Alaska.” Treadwell, by this traditional standard, transgressed a sacred boundary. He wanted to be included by the bears, but nature placed real limits on that possibility. There was only so much his own imagination could reshape his relationship with nature. Perhaps most disturbingly, his transgression was not revealed gradually. Things were going well until—suddenly—they weren’t. Whereas the end of Ratatouille reminds us how much power we have with our shared imagination, the end of Grizzly Man reminds us that, sometimes, our imagination offers nothing more than delusion. We may yet discover a stronger link between who we are and what we are than we care to admit. Reality, sad to say, sometimes bites.