Innateness, Excellence and Rats

I played hooky this afternoon and took the family to see Ratatouille. We got to the theater after the start time but before the main feature began. It was packed, though, and we ended up in the second row surrounded by chattering two-year-olds and crying babies. It is to the filmmaker's credit that despite all this I was suitably entertained--much more so than any of the recent blockbusters that we have seen.

But there is something slightly disturbing about the film that sloshes over from The Incredibles: the disturbingly Ayn Randian notions concerning excellence and mediocrity. In both films, the main characters possess innate abilities that transcend the abilities of their peers and that make them unique and exceptional. In The Incredibles it is the, well, incredible talents of the superheroes. In Ratatouille, the main character has a heightened sense of taste and smell that sets him apart from others.

Now, some of the critics drew direct parallels with Rand in terms of the opposition to the Incredibles by the masses and by their arch-enemy who resorted to technical feats to achieve his own power. But I don't think that is quite right because while Rand's characters strive against backlash from critics and opposition (well Roark does, at least), they do not achieve their talents and powers from some innate source. They are "constructively" brilliant or the source of their capacity is an emergent property of their life experience.

Instead, I interpret both films as more religious in tone because they specify talents that arise through unknown agency, much like the celebration of Mozart in Amadeus, rather than as exemplifying extraordinary devotion to craft. Of course, if excellence is purely innate, that leaves the rest of us out of luck with regard to spectacular achievement. And that is a bit disturbing to me as a message for young people.

Still, the films are wonderfully crafted achievements in their own right, maintaining Pixar's fine reputation for devotion to the craft of film making. There is even a lovely homage to Citizen Kane in Ratatouille when the grumpy critic eats a nouveau ratatouille (of course) that causes a flashback to his simple childhood. His pen drops from his hand and we watch it fall from below, just like the snow globe dropping from the hand that once piloted Rosebud. Sadly, the semantic associations flowed to Orson Welles hawking wine later in all his obese excellence as the critic sipped his wine in reverence over the rat's gustatory achievements: we will sell no wine before its time. The final fate of the truly extraordinary?