SILVER PLATTER, SILVER
SCREEN
FOOD, FILM, AND BODY IMAGE.
By Inez Hedges and Emily Fox Kales
Beyond its universal significance as the source
of survival, food has always reflected the values and belief systems that
create culture. What, when, how, and why we eat is inextricably linked
to custom, ritual, and celebration; food marks birthdays, holidays, weddings,
funerals-in fact, all our threshold experiences-and is the symbolic marker
of our family, social, and religious life. In recent years we have witnessed
a growing fascination with food and eating behavior, as evidenced by a
vast literature from the fields of anthropology, psychology, and the culinary
arts. At the same time, body shape and body image are a national obsession
in America, and food is therefore simultaneously loved and feared.
Coming at these two perspectives on food from
very different angles, two Northeastern professors created a new interdisciplinary
course titled "Food, Body, and Culture in Cinema," which made
its debut in the College of Arts and Sciences this past fall. Inez Hedges,
founder and codirector of the Cinema Studies Program, and Emily Fox Kales,
a clinical psychologist who has been teaching courses in human feeding
behavior in the Department of Psychology, met last year at a campus forum
during N.U.'s Jewish Film Festival. We became excited at the possibility
of merging our respective disciplines in a course that would investigate
how films about eating and body image serve to illuminate psychological,
sociocultural, and aesthetic levels of meaning about the human relationship
to food.
For example, the connection between food and sex,
initially introduced to moviegoers more than thirty years ago in the famous
seduction scene in Tom Jones, and more recently-and far more explicitly-in
such films as The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover and Tampopo,
is a prominent theme in "food films." In fact, it would appear
that the Victorian view of sex as a taboo subject has been replaced in
contemporary culture by the depiction of food, most particularly in America.
American fanaticism about fitness and fat grams
may account for the conspicuous absence in our national cinema of films
in which food, in all its sensuous and delicious glory, plays a starring
role. At the same time, however, there is no dearth of American films-such
as Eating, The Famine Within, and What's Eating Gilbert Grape-that deal
with the themes of obesity, anorexia, and the quest for physical perfection
and thereby provide provocative images for a dialogue about the body. This
is particularly significant in the context of the university, since it
is all too well-known that our national pursuit of slenderness has led
to an epidemic on college campuses of abnormal and restrictive eating behaviors,
often the precursors of the clinical disorders anorexia, bulimia, and compulsive
overeating. (One recent study reports that twenty-two percent of college-age
women engage periodically in purging behavior to control their weight,
and as many as forty percent restrict their food intake to fewer than 800
calories per day.)
While moviegoers' eyes feast on sumptuous cuisine
in such films as Eat Drink Man Woman, Like Water for Chocolate, and most
recently, Big Night, their minds can be nourished by the way the filmmakers
mix metaphorical "ingredients" to make food the expressive vehicle
for generational conflicts, family dynamics, and artistic creative processes.
Looking carefully at the films' aesthetic, we found that the culinary arts
and the cinematic arts are related; during the course, we often stopped
to reflect on the way that cinema is a mix of elements-sound, light, props,
editing, cinematography, acting, mise-en-scène-that have to be combined
in just the right way to make the intended impression on the viewer.
The directors of these films
are aware of it, too, and spin the metaphor out still further. You might
say that the tension between the old and the new in Eat Drink Man Woman-fast
food versus the traditional Chinese art of cooking-is reflected in the
choices today's filmmakers must make between for-profit entertainment films
and the more reflective and ultimately more satisfying art film. The director,
Ang Lee, seems aware of this comparison and thus his film implicitly criticizes
today's movie establishment. In the same way, Babette's Feast shows that
art can be found in the task of preparing a magnificent meal for Danish
peasants unaccustomed to haute cuisine-or producing a rare visual feast
for today's mass-media gorged audiences. Putting art films (The Piano and
Eat Drink Man Woman) side by side with Hollywood entertainment films (Vision
Quest) enabled students to see the contrast between entertainment films
that simplify social problems, resolving them with "happy endings,"
and the more probing narratives presented by art cinema directors.
The films we viewed afforded insights into the
filmmaking process. The documentary The Famine Within opened up a discussion
about various styles of documentary film. Here we evaluated the convention
of the impersonal voice-over narrator, a somewhat traditional documentary
presentation that has been replaced in recent years by the personalized
narrator of such films as Michael Moore's Roger and Me and Ross McElwee's
Sherman's March. We speculated about how today's young filmmakers might
approach the subject matter of anorexia or body image and discovered that
there are real possibilities for new films and videos in this field. When
we moved to the independently produced What's Eating Gilbert Grape, we
talked about the way that the flourishing American independent market has
allowed original voices into the mainstream.
Our students came from a variety of academic backgrounds:
communications, psychology, modern languages, English, and even engineering.
This provided for a rich mix of perspectives. In keeping with the interdisciplinary
nature of the course, assigned and supplementary readings ranged from feminist
psychosocial studies of the body, such as Susan Bordo's Unbearable Weight,
to Michel Foucault's treatise on diet in ancient Greece. Since many members
of the class were interested in the craft of filmmaking, we also provided
a field trip to a local cinema to view a film by an aspiring new director.
At the end of the course, students were asked to present their research
projects, which ranged from a comparison of body ideals among Latina and
African American women to an essay in French on food and psychology in
Fried Green Tomatoes. A few students wrote screenplays and learned to shoot
and edit their own video projects. By the end of the course, our students
were able to make quite sophisticated judgments about film representation
as it reflects and propagates cultural values such as bodily perfection
and control.
Both the final projects and discussions profited
from the diverse constituency of our class, whose backgrounds ranged from
North American to Asian, African, and Latin American. This made it possible
for the class to examine cross-cultural differences in food traditions
and body ideals. We celebrated our final meeting with a potluck meal in
which students shared foods that carried a particular cultural or psychological
significance for them. The films we screened facilitated this cultural
interchange as well: Like Water for Chocolate is Mexican, Eat Drink Man
Woman is Taiwanese, Tampopo is Japanese, and The Piano is from New Zealand.
Ultimately, concocting this course with its blend of interdisciplinary
ingredients proved to be a stimulating and rewarding learning experience,
not unlike the creation of a meal rich in flavors and textures. We look
forward to developing new academic recipes in the future.
Inez Hedges, a professor of French, German,
and cinema studies, is a founder and codirector of the Cinema Studies Program.
Emily Fox Kales, an adjunct clinical professor of psychology, is the founder
and faculty adviser of NEWCOPE, a program dealing with eating disorders
among Northeastern students.
Return to top of
page