Precisely at the moment when “French” has become a synonym for wickedness, all things French seem to be doing very well in the realm of popular culture, from Madeleine Peyroux to the Oscars, to speak nothing of fashion and food, which never entirely fall out of touch with the Hexagon. The success of Ratatouille in particular reflects the complexities of contemporary Franco-American cultural relations.

First, two quick asides on the current status of “French”:

1) Over the past years, I’ve had more than one non-academic stranger respond to my revelation that I work on French literature with the phrase “Well, that’s okay” –precisely as if I had revealed that I were gay, or Mormon, but seemed like a decent sort anyway.

2) It seems to me barely an exaggeration to say that hostility toward the French is actually more pure than hostility toward Islam. With the latter there is usually some gesture of complication (“They’re not all like that”), grounded in the notion that “we” are trying to save them from themselves, are trying to bring them Democracy. But the French should know better; they have no excuses; they are refusing to get with the program out of sheer perversity. My theory about this is that a good deal of the call for vigilance against terrorism has less to do with fighting this perfectly real threat, than with a desire to “re”-masculinize American culture, to create an environment in which the distinction between beer-drinkers and wine-drinkers, between those who watch Nascar and those who watch Bravo, takes on a life-and-death significance. In other words, the pseudo-political character of the hostility to France gives the game away.

But back to Remy and his friends. The motto of Remy the rat’s human muse, Auguste Gusteau, is “Anyone can cook!” and the whole movie might be seen as a working-through of the ambiguities of this claim. Indeed, the movie’s “moral,” in a way, is food critic Anton Ego’s gloss: this means not that everyone can be a great cook, but that a great cook can come from anywhere. That is, the slogan implies a mixture of populism and pickiness that we Americans have never really come to terms with. We worship winners, excellence, getting ahead, the best of the best, and so on, but we also hate the rich, hate snobs, hate anyone who thinks they are better than anyone else, just as surely as we worship those who we think are better than everyone else.

We handle this ambiguity better in some realms than in others. In sports, for example, we have something like an objective presentation of value. We can watch the game, review the stats, watch the post-game debriefings, and decide for ourselves whether someone is confident or cocky (a distinction athletes love to make). But with food it’s a little more complicated. With food there’s always a suspicion that someone might be trying to trick us simple folks: how many dollars for an ounce of –are those mushrooms?

Remy’s story is about the conflict between innate ability and communal belonging. He happens to be born with an extraordinary sense of taste, which makes his father proud and happy to the extent that he can use that talent to detect any traces of rat poison in the food gathered by the collective. But that same ability drives Remy behind the values of the community, toward impractical and even dangerous curiosities. In classic Bildungsroman fashion, the story ends with a resolution of this conflict, one in which Remy is able both to fulfill his individual destiny and to maintain his loyalty to family and community, bettering life for that community in the process.

What is distinctly American about this story is that the conflict takes place as a confrontation between normalcy and fanciness, for which “France” is the perfect setting. The rats are all French, so to speak, but they live in a world apart from the Paris above them. And of course the French rats all speak American English, while the French people speak with heavy accents.

In an age of Vulgarity de Luxe, “France” becomes the symbolic scapegoat for America’s unresolved conflict with its own fanciness. Chain restaurants increasingly offer pesto, or blue cheese, or something chipotle (or maybe a blue cheese-chipotle pesto?) on just about everything, football players are mastering the Foxtrot, Dunkin Donuts sells “lattes” even as it produces commercials mocking the pretentiousness of other coffee chains, and so on. In other words, I don’t think that it’s a question of “regular” folks getting sick of all those Yuppies with their fancy food, but rather of people who would like to think of themselves as regular not being so sure anymore about what once seemed a natural distinction. Our age is one in which distinctions of taste are being broken down by precisely an explosive proliferation of distinctions.

Ironically, it is probably many of the very things that Americans experience as an invasion of French fanciness that the French experience as an invasion of American-style vulgarity, like the microwavable gourmet items pimped by Gusteau’s successor in the film. The danger on both sides of the Atlantic –to which most seem eager to succumb—is to understand the increasing globalization and commercialization of food in terms of a conflict of national values and traditions.

France has always signified, for Americans, refinement in food, clothing, the arts, and so on, but this cultural imaginary has traditionally been of the take-it-or-leave-it variety: there as an option for the fancypantses, but not of much interest to just plain folks. Today, however, this association has taken on an almost visceral, clash-of-civilizations intensity that would have been unimaginable even ten years ago.

Ratatouille’s American dream of class mobility (a great chef can come from anywhere) is replaced, in this environment, by an aggressive assertion of existing equality: anything anyone makes is as good as anything anyone else makes. Or else. As damaging as this old-fashioned dream of happy endings often was, I have to say I prefer it to the current nightmare in which anyone who isn’t a traitor believes that we're already living the happy ending: “mission accomplished.”