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| ID: still from the end of the film Ratatouille (2007) showing a sign reading 'La Ratatouille', with Paris and the Eiffel Tower in the background. |
On the surface, Ratatouille is absurdist slapstick. At the end of the day, it is a children’s movie about a rat yanking on a ginger guy’s hair to make soup. Yet, The New York Times isn’t wrong in calling attention to its sincere message: Ratatouille explicitly argues for the ceaseless pursuit of passion, regardless of social norms, familial support, and inner saboteurs.
In this article, I will make the bizarre-seeming argument that the film also has the texture of a queer coming-out story. Through the rat’s secret double life, his abject body in the kitchen, and the eventual embrace of both chosen and biological family, Ratatouille stages an allegory of queer resilience.
The film follows Remy, a rat with a vocational calling to the kitchen — a space famously hostile towards rodents. When we are introduced to our protagonist, he is struggling to fit into the rural, homogeneous environment of his colony. Born different from his family members, he is gifted with a heightened sense of taste and smell. These talents help him develop his cooking skills, yet also isolate him and invite mockery. Remy’s father ridicules him for his sensory sensitivity: “You look thin. Why is that? A shortage of food, or an excess of snobbery?”
Remy’s reprieve comes from stolen glimpses into the world beyond rat life. By sneaking into an old lady’s cottage, he gains access to the human world through her books and television. “I had a secret life,” the rat confesses in voiceover. For queer audiences, this resonates: the secret life sustained through media, the stolen access to stories of possibility when no community is immediately accessible.
But when Remy reaches Paris, he struggles to fit into the world of humans as well. He inhabits two spaces but fully belongs to neither, caught between the colony that cannot celebrate his difference and the human world which recoils at his presence. To everyone but Linguini, Remy is a verminous intrusion.
In queer theory, abjection refers to the disgust provoked by what threatens the boundaries of the self. Remy’s passion and talent for cooking does indeed upset the boundaries of the kitchen space, if not human society entire, and so he is met with horror. The horror is not only that he has entered, but that he excels—what if the thing we most fear turns out to be better at our game than we are? Because of the four-legged body he was born in, Remy initially cannot be recognized as legitimate. Yet by the film’s end, the famously harsh Anton Ego names him “the finest chef in France.”
Remy achieves this all while hidden under Linguini’s chef hat – a kind of closet. Critic John M Clum characterises the closet as “less a place than a performance […] maintained by the heterosexist wish for, and sometimes enforcement of homosexual silence and invisibility.” Remy is forced into a series of such performances throughout Ratatouille.
Near the end of the film, he cries to his imaginary friend (the ghost of Chef Gusteau, naturally): “I’m sick of pretending. I pretend to be a rat for my father. I pretend to be a human through Linguini. I pretend you exist, so I have someone to talk to! You only tell me stuff I already know! I know who I am! Why do I need you to tell me? Why do I need to pretend?” Gusteau responds: “But you don’t. You never did.”
In this moment, Remy rejects the performances imposed on him and claims authenticity on his own terms, echoing the queer refusal to remain invisible in order to appease the norms of family and society.
The film ends in pure queer fantasy: Remy does ‘come out’ of the chef’s hat, revealing himself as a cook to his rat family and as a rat to the human kitchen. He and his human allies open a new restaurant, La Ratatouille, with space for humans downstairs and rats upstairs. He keeps his chosen family and his blood family, feeds his community, and secures work for the hopeless Linguini too. This is, as critic José Esteban Munoz might put it, a kind of queer ‘worldmaking’: Remy imagines and then builds a life for himself beyond the limits of a culture hostile to him.
Chef Gusteau’s motto is repeated throughout the film: “Anyone can cook.” For me, Ratatouille has an even bolder, queerer message: anyone can create a world in which they belong. I am not here to argue that Remy himself is queer (although in my research for this article I did unfortunately stumble upon the fanfiction corners of the Internet that do make that leap).
I argue that, in a world that so often asks queer people to shrink, disguise, or defer their dreams, Ratatouille shows us what might happen when we stop pretending and start living out loud. As put by Remy, “Change is nature. The part that we can influence. And it starts when we decide.” And so we decide – that garbage scraps aren’t enough, and that we want the whole damn kitchen.
By bel (she/her)
Bibliography:
Clum, John M (1994) ‘Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama’, Columbia University Press.
Muñoz, José Esteban (1999) ‘Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics’, University of Minnesota Press.
Scott, AO (2007) ‘Voila! A Rat for All Seasonings’, The New York Times.