‘Ratatouille’ (2007)
One of the missing features of the DSM is its inability to explain to patients the intrapsychic processes that guide us. One of these processes is how our values can lead us to a deep sense of guilt, shame, and the resulting feelings of alienation. It is extremely common for patients to enter our clinical practice feeling shackled by beliefs that they should accomplish more and be more than they are.
The animated film “Ratatouille” does an excellent job at addressing this feeling. The film follows Remy, the protagonist rat, and his adventures as he explores his passion for cooking. Remy teams up with the inept but good-natured human Alfredo Linguini and guides him through cooking while hiding under his chef’s hat. The primary antagonist, Anton Ego, is a particularly harsh food critic. His presence and appearance are somber. He exudes disdain. His trim physique and scarf suggest a man that will break and react to anything, and his skull-shaped typewriter in his coffin-shaped office informs the viewer that he is out to kill with his cruel words. Anton Ego serves as our projected super-ego. He is not an external judge but the judgment deep inside ourselves, goading us to be better with such severity that we are ultimately left feeling condemned.
Remy is the younger of two siblings. He is less physically adept but more intellectual than his older brother, who does not understand why Remy isn’t content eating scraps from the garbage like the rest of their rat clan. Remy is the creative part within us that wants to challenge the status quo and try something new. Remy also represents our shame and guilt for leaving our home. On one hand, we want to dare greatly, in this case at being an extraordinary chef, but on the other we are shy and cook in secret, hiding within the hat of another person. Remy struggles with the deep feeling that we do not deserve our success, that our family will leave us for being who we are, and that we are better off isolating and segregating from our challenges.
The movie concludes that through talent and hard work, our critics will accept us. Furthermore, once accepted for what we do, we can be further accepted for who we are. The movie ends with Remy cooking the eponymous dish ratatouille. He prepares it so remarkably well, the dish transports Anton Ego back to a sublime experience of eating ratatouille as a child, a touching moment which not only underscores food’s evocative link to memory but gives a glimpse at Anton Ego’s own narrative.
Ego is first won over by the dish, and only afterward learns of Remy’s true identity. Remy’s talent is undeniable though, and even the stuffy Ego must accept the film’s theme that “Anyone can cook,” even a rat – the rat that we all sometimes feel we are deep inside, rotten to the core but trying so hard to be accepted by others, and ultimately by ourselves. In the end, we overcome the disgust inherent in the imagery of a rat in a kitchen and instead embrace our hero’s achievement of ego integrity as he combines his identities as a member of a clan of rats, and one of Paris’s finest chefs.
While modern psychiatry can favor looking at people through the lens of biology rather than narrative, “Ratatouille” can serve as a reminder of the powerful unconscious forces that guide our lives. “Ratatouille” is not a successful movie only because of the compelling narrative, but also because the narrative matches the important psychic paradigms that psychiatry once embraced.