In six more hours, I will be leaving class, and I can forget I ever saw Babette’s Feast… Well, I’ll remember insofar as I’ll be sure never to see it again.
Am running class in the absence of the professor, who is probably giggling with glee over the fact that he doesn’t have to teach this cruddy material. (I have only one question for the cosmos: “Why not Fiddler or Malcolm X? Why not saddle me with a film I could actually enjoy teaching about??? Stupid cosmos.)
So I will show the film, swallow my disgust, and try to convince these students that I’m not wasting three hours of their precious youth. Will start on religion and food as means of preserving ethnic culture in diaspora or immigrant contexts, and slide into Passover as an example. This will lead me to The Last Supper as a ritualistic and iconic meal, and how it is paralleled in Babette’s Feast (also how her feast can be read as Lenten and Wake rituals, too). This will segue into Christ figures in the film (Babette, the dead Preacher-Father, and the two charitable sisters). Then I will open for questions and debate.
Then I shall surely die, as that will have been three hours flushed away on this utterly forgettable film.
My co-TA, who will be taking a bit of the class tonight, as well (discussing the Lutheran versus the Catholic understandings of human nature as seen in the film), tells me I am missing the so-called “magic” of this film. He thinks it is because I am a Jew (though he didn’t phrase it quite that way), and my tradition just isn’t meant to access such beautiful parables of hope because we are too materialistic (conceptually speaking), and live too much in the here-and-now to “get” this film.
Nuts to him. Just because my religion isn’t infused with an excess of fairy dust doesn’t mean we don’t get magic. If there was one tiny scrap of magic in this, I’m sure I’d notice it… Or at least my Irish half would.
I think he needs to take two showings of Duck Soup (1933), The Immigrant (1917), or maybe The Bank (1915), and go to bed, immediately. Maybe then he’d understand true magic and get off the backs of the Jews, as we sure the hell get the magic in those films.
Die, Babette, die.
4 comments:
Well, maybe not the MOTHER of asses, but close... maybe a morfar of all asses.
Um.... Baby Sitter of asses?
I know.... Son of Ass.
i thought the movie was pretty good for just a watch, but not an analysis kind of film...just for the sake of watching something different that isn't another hollywood copy cat. are half jewish and half irish like me?
I really disliked the film, though on subsequent viewings I could at least get a hokey sort of chuckle from some of it.
Yes, I am one quarter Irish (though I call it half, as my dad was born and raised in Dublin, and immigrated here in the fifties, so the cultural importance equals it up, I figure). My dad's mum was an assimilated Dutch Jew. My mum's dad is a Polish Ultra-Orthodox Jew, and my mum's mum is an Orthodox Austrian Jew. My mum immigrated from Germany via Israel with her parents in 1949. My parents are socialists, so they hold no religion, per se, but the household was culturally pretty Jewish with a lot of Irish uproar added for flavour, as well as the Acadian (French), Native, Scottish and German heritage in the settlement in which I grew up in, in Nova Scotia's Annapolis Valley. So, really, just a hodge podge seen through my parents' hand-me-down hippy ways. My parents "dropped out" in the sixties, so we were raised without telephone, electricity or inside plumbing, and roughed it on a self-sufficient, eco-friendly farm...
Odd now, then, that I study both religion and film. I guess that's the way you rebel against hippy atheist parents... The next step would be to vote Conservative, but not even I could be that wacky.
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