This week I was really drawn to our discussion on how professional kitchens are gendered. Although cooking is see as a traditionally feminine role, in the professional world of cooking it is heavily dominated by men. Women have to fight really hard to get a role in kitchens and they are even harder to find in films or on TV. When we watched the movie Chef, I was taken aback by the complete absence of any female chefs at all.
While that was horrible, I thought about the times that they are shown and how they are portrayed. That is what I wanted to explore deeper. When women chefs are shown, they are all depicted in very similar ways and I wanted to find a movie that illustrate the way they are portrayed. The movie that I immediately thought of is No Reservations, it is one of my favorite movies but when I took a closer look at it I realized that there are some problematic aspects of it.
No Reservations is about an upscale chef, Kate, who is suddenly thrust into motherhood when her sister dies and leaves her in charge of a ten year old girl. One of the themes of this movie is highlighting how horrible she is at motherhood until her male chef replacement comes into her life and essentially “fixes” her.
This movie also fits in nicely with some of our discussions on hegemony, because while it allows for a break in the status quo by giving us a female chef as the star; it also upholds common beliefs and ideas of gender, especially within the kitchen. When we look at the two chefs side by side it really highlights exactly how women chefs are supposed to seem and how they are not as good as their male chef counter parts.
From the outset of the movie Kate is seen as an uptight control freak who rules her kitchen with an iron fist. Those are the words that we have been programed to assign to her behavior, because when we see her trying to make sure every last detail of her food is perfect she is supposed to be seen as a control freak not as a chef who wants to make her food perfect for her guests. When a customer complains that their foie gars is under cooked and Kate comes out and tells that it is perfectly cooked she is supposed to be seen as a know it all. However if it had been the male chef that had acted that way he would have been seen as assertive and sure of himself. And when a steak is sent back over and over again for being over cooked (when it was clearly extremely rare), Kate takes a completely raw steak and slaps it down on the table. In this scene she is seen as dramatic and emotional, a trope that is all to common for female leads.
Kate is shown as being extremely job centric and is made to feel bad about loving her work. She is not allowed to have any friends, which is illustrated when she checks her voice mail everyday and never has any messages waiting for her. That leaves us to believe that she doesn’t have any friends, because her whole life is taken up by work. She doesn’t like to date and has very specific rules to keep her away from being even some what romantically involved with anyone. She is almost demonized for having rules that she puts up to protect herself, like when her incredibly pushy neighbor keeps showing up, even though she has told him that she isn’t interested, we are supposed to feel bad for him and think of her as a prude who won’t let anyone in.
Even the way that she dresses hints at her uptight nature. Her hair is always pulled up into a tight bun or in a hat. She is always dressed in black clothes when she is out of the kitchen and then when she is in the kitchen her chef’s attire is pristine white and always perfectly straight. It isn’t until she and Nick get romantically involved that we see her hair down out of its bun and her become a bit more carefree with how she looks. However, the entire movie Nick wears clothes that reflect his fun and laid back manner. From his crazy print chef pants to his bright orange crocs. He never has to prove his professionalism to anyone, which allows him to be more of himself the entire movie.
Kate is seen as emotionally unavailable from the first few minutes of the movie when she spends her whole therapy session talking about quail instead of her own problems. The few times that do we see her be emotionally vulnerable during therapy sessions are when she talks about some of her rules regarding men. She never wants to give up her own apartment or move in with another guy because she assumes that it will always end in disaster. This highlights the problem that a lot of female chefs face, the idea that they can’t be both a great chef and also have a family.
Women in a professional workplace always have the problem of trying to juggle a demanding career and a family. Many female chefs either choose one or the other, but this movie was all about how Kate learned to do both. But, it isn’t until Nick comes along that she actually becomes a good mother figure, even though she was trying incredibly hard from the beginning. When she is first thrust into the role of a mother, she sucks. She doesn’t know how to relate to her niece at all and she also doesn’t know the basic rules of child-rearing. Kate often leaves her niece alone or with questionable baby sitters. She also has no idea how to feed a younger child, meaning that for a part of the movie Zoe, her niece, is essentially starved.
That all changes when Kate starts to take Zoe to the restaurant and she meets Nick. Nick immediately knows what to feed her and how to make her laugh. The reason this is problematic is because it says that men are able to juggle being a chef and having a healthy family. It also says that Kate needs a man in order to have a family which both upholds the notions that female chefs can’t do both by themselves, but it also upholds the nuclear family structure. That family structure says that there needs to be a man and a woman in order to raise a healthy child. The movie doesn’t allow Kate to learn how to be a mom on her own.
How would this movie be different if Kate’s character had been portrayed as a male chef? I think that if Kate had been a male character we would talk about him in a much different way. The actual language that we would use would be incredibly different, he wouldn't be uptight and controlling, but powerful and commanding. And when a male character struggled to connect to their niece we would feel sympathetic towards him and proud that he was at least attempting to connect. But we aren’t supposed to feel that way towards Kate in the movie, we assume that she should automatically be able to take care of Zoe (because she is a woman) and that she is a failure when she needs Nick to show her how to have fun. So overall even though I love this movie it does continue to promote the struggles that female chefs face, and it is important that we start to recognize how harmful some of those ideas are in reality.
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