Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Ratatouille
2007 · Brad Bird · Ratatouille on Sightlines
Remy shuts his eyes over a scrap of cheese and a piece of strawberry, and the kitchen drops away. Black field. A swirl of orange. A blue one crossing it. A few notes of music that weren't in the room a second earlier. He opens his eyes and Paris comes back.
Three seconds, maybe four. It's the best thing in the movie, and it's the reason the rest of the movie works.
Nobody had shown a taste before. You shot the face, you shot the food, you let the performer sell it. Bird cut out of the comedy into abstraction and put the sensation itself on screen: colour and sound with no object attached. Deleuze has a name for what's in that black field. He calls it a qualité-puissance, a quality-power: a feeling lifted off the person having it and shown for its own sake, with nothing waiting at the far end. Cinema normally doesn't allow that. A feeling is what a character has on the way to doing something. Fear leads to the run, grief leads to the decision. Here the sensation leads nowhere. It isn't Remy's opinion of the cheese. It's sharp-and-sweet-at-once, raw and unusable, and the film just hands it to you.
Hold onto that, because everything else in Ratatouille is built as its opposite.
Outside the black field the film runs on what Deleuze calls the movement-image: somebody perceives a situation and acts to change it, the act changes the situation, cut. Remy wants in, the door is locked, he finds a vent. Skinner suspects. Skinner sets a trap. Linguini slips it, barely. The kitchen sequences are Keaton machinery, a small body in a hostile mechanical environment, with the geography of every burner and cleaver and stockpot established in advance so the gag can be read rather than merely watched. That's the debt to Steamboat Bill, Jr., and it's the same debt Bird had already paid off in The Incredibles, where he imported live-action lens lengths and camera pacing into CG so that action could have real estate. Deleuze would call these scenes the small form of the action-image: an act that discloses a hidden situation. Every gesture Remy makes in that kitchen risks revealing the one fact that would end everything, which is that he is in it.
So why bother with Deleuze on a Pixar comedy? Because the ordinary reading, believe in yourself and follow the dream, can't explain why the film's two greatest scenes are both scenes in which nothing happens. The flavour burst is one. Ego's bite is the other. Both are stoppages. A theory of sensation and time explains them. A theory of self-belief doesn't.
Start with the building. The dossier's phrasing is exact: Remy finds himself beneath one of Paris's finest restaurants. The film is a vertical section. Above, a derived milieu, a real social place with a hierarchy, a brigade, a dead founder's motto on the wall. Below, the colony. Deleuze called that lower level an originary world, a zone under the social surface where there are no persons, only drives. Rats eating what's there because it's there. The plot names the distinction in a single word: Remy wants to create rather than scavenge.
This is the impulse-image, and in Deleuze's examples it always runs downhill. Appetite degrades whoever has it; the slope goes one way, toward exhaustion. Bird runs the slope backwards. Appetite climbs. A palate is what hunger becomes when hunger gets interested in itself. That is a strange argument for a family film to make, and it's the reason this one is about art instead of about rats.
Then the hair. Remy hides under the toque and drives Linguini by fistfuls of it, and the two become one cook. Disney had rodents working covertly inside human households since Cinderella; Bird literalises the conceit into a steering mechanism. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, calls a posture that exposes a social relation a gest. This one exposes an entire economy: the body that gets credited, and the body doing the work. Bird staged his argument as a physical attitude long before anyone states it in dialogue. And because Remy cannot speak to a single human, the whole emotional line has to travel through silent-comedy body-acting. That's the Chaplin debt the film wears openly, on top of the discipline Bird taught himself on The Iron Giant, where a non-verbal protagonist was made legible by restraint instead of mugging.
Now the bite.
Anton Ego takes a forkful of a peasant vegetable dish and the film stops. Deleuze, following Bergson, separates two kinds of recognition. Habitual recognition is automatic: you see the thing, you place it, your body responds, no gap opens. Attentive recognition is what happens when that fails. The object won't resolve, you go around it again, and instead of acting you reach into memory. Ego is a machine of habitual recognition. Instant placement is his profession. The ratatouille breaks it, and the film gives us the thing Deleuze calls a recollection-image: an actual dated past, a boy at a country kitchen door, restored to the screen because the present has nowhere left to go.
Everything converges on that dish, which is why it works as the film's symbol in the strict sense, the one object condensing its organising relation. Peasant food in a temple. Anyone can cook.
What follows is stranger still. The climax of a Pixar movie is a piece of criticism read aloud in Peter O'Toole's voice, about the risk of standing up for something new. The new needs friends. Deleuze's category for an image that poses a problem as discourse rather than settling it through action is the discourse-image, and Ego's review is precisely that: the film handing its own question back to us. Notice what it refuses to do. It never humiliates the critic. It lets him be right, then lets him be changed, then makes him the one who pays for the little bistro at the end. A family film about artistic gatekeeping that won't make the gatekeeper a villain is a rare object, and it's why cinephiles claim this one so hard.
The craft consequence landed immediately. Bazin thought cinema's authority came from the photograph's physical contact with the real. Animation has no such contact, so Bird built tactility from nothing: the chef consultants were there to make a thing that never existed feel like it had been touched. After this, screen food that isn't rendered with that care looks like plastic. The burnished evening light of that Paris did the same for colour, which here carries feeling the way Giacchino's accordion does, a whole scene absorbed into one warm key.
One question to carry into a rewatch. Remy never gets to be seen. The bistro thrives, the food is loved, and the genius stays under the hat. Count the shots that keep him hidden. The film insists a great artist can come from anywhere. It is much less confident that anywhere will let him show his face.
Concepts in play
- qualité-puissance (pure quality presented for itself) — Remy's synesthetic flavour-bursts: the kitchen cuts to a black field of abstract colour swirls and musical tones, a sensation shown for its own sake with no action at the other end (the dossier's noted extension of Lady and the Tramp's sensual eating set-piece).
- affective colour — The Paris of burnished evening light, and the coloured bursts that absorb the whole frame during a taste — colour carrying the scene's feeling the way Giacchino's accordion score does.
- the movement-image — The film's governing regime: Remy perceives an obstacle (a locked kitchen, Skinner's suspicion) and acts to change it; continuity staging serves the causal chain, with Bird's Incredibles-derived live-action lens lengths and camera pacing keeping the action geography legible.
- action-image, small form (ASA') — The kitchen-as-deathtrap choreography built on Steamboat Bill, Jr.: each of Remy's acts threatens to disclose the concealed situation — that there is a rat in the brigade.
- derived milieu — The restaurant above: a concrete social world with a brigade, a hierarchy, a calculating head chef, and a dead founder's motto on the wall.
- originary world — The rat colony beneath one of Paris's finest restaurants — the film is a vertical section, with a world of pure appetite directly under the social surface of haute cuisine.
- impulse-image / naturalism — The colony's scavenging drive, which the plot explicitly contrasts with Remy's wish to create rather than scavenge; Bird inverts naturalism's usual downward slope so that appetite ascends into taste.
- the gest — Remy puppeteering Linguini by the hair under the toque (the Cinderella covert-rodent conceit literalised): a posture that exposes the social relation between the credited body and the working one.
- attentive recognition (the two recognitions) — Anton Ego's bite of the ratatouille: habitual recognition, the professional's instant placement, fails; the object will not resolve and he reaches for memory instead of judgment.
- recollection-image (image-souvenir) — The flashback released by that bite — the boy at the country kitchen door — a dated former present restored to the screen because the present has stalled.
- symbol — The ratatouille itself: a peasant dish served in a temple of haute cuisine, condensing the film's organising relation, Gusteau's 'anyone can cook'.
- discourse-image — Ego's climactic review, spoken by Peter O'Toole — the dossier's 'finest thing ever written about criticism in a Hollywood film' — poses the film's question about genius and gatekeeping as discourse rather than resolving it in action.