Ratatouille

July 8, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Ratatouille” opened to universally great reviews, and it’s a delightful film. The more important question for Hollywood, though, is not whether a film is good but whether it will make money. No, not just whether it will make money but whether it will make a lot of money. “Ratatouille” had an opening weekend gross of “only” $47.2 million, and people at Disney already felt they had to spin the numbers to rebut claims that the movie was a disappointment.

The “trades” (I love using show-biz lingo) were comparing it unfavorably with “Cars,” Pixar’s 2006 summer movie and a big money make. But besides the financial comparison, the two films also provide an interesting cultural comparison. They exemplify the “culture wars,” the red-state blue-state divide.

“Cars” embodied the Nascar red-state mythology, not just because of its obvious theme (stock car racing) and setting (the American Southwest) but because of its moral: the triumph of American small-town virtues (friendship, community) over egotistical self-fulfillment and achievement.

The Michael J. Fox film, “Doc Hollywood,” was nearly identical in plot (career-minded doctor headed for Beverly Hills crashes his Porsche and winds up in a small Southern town; you can guess the rest), but this theme is a staple in many American fictions. Community is to be prized over individual achievement; plain small-town folk are better than city fast-trackers.

“Ratatouille,” by comparison, is downright unAmerican. I imagine Disney-Pixar was taking a chance even with the title, a foreign word unknown to many Americans, and most of those who do know it probably can’t spell it. On the other hand, what could be more American than “Cars”? The movie is set in France, a country US patriots were boycotting not so long ago (remember “freedom fries”?).  As for the virtues of bucolic settings, the rural life shown at the start of the film has little to recommend it, and our hero, the rat Remy, quickly winds up in Paris. And this movie loves Paris, a city which has long been, in the American imagination, the antithesis of down-home American virtues and values. Paris is tempting because of its sensuality (“How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm?”) but ultimately evil.

Even the basic concept of the film must seem foreign to the red-state mentality. It’s not about a manly pursuit like driving fast; it’s about cooking. While other films may extol just plain folks who eat plain simple food that nobody made too much of a fuss over in preparing, “Ratatouille” dismisses such an attitude as unworthy. Food is something that requires attention, both in the cooking and the eating. And the film takes frequent jabs at the American way of eating. It makes Remy’s rival (the evil chef Skinner) all the more repugnant by having him promote his line of micorwavable frozen foods – burritos, pizzas, and other things you’d find in many American freezers. Even worse, he has his people working to produce a frozen corn dog.

The attack on American bread is a bit more subtle – a didactic speech by a female chef giving the audience a lesson in what makes for good bread: a crunchy crust. The slap at our preference for squishy bread (Wonder) is so obvious she doesn’t need to say it out loud.

Despite this unAmerican aura, the film seems to be “doing well,” and the grosses from the weekend will probably look encouraging. I take these numbers as a sign that things are changing in America, that good food, even good European food, is not something that happens only on the coasts. Remember the Republican attacks on Democrats in recent elections as “brie-eating, chablis-drinking” pretentious snobs? But stores in the heartland are selling brie and chablis. David Kamp is probably exaggerating in calling America The United States of Arugula, but apparently a lot of Americans now at least know what arugula is.

In fact, the red-state blue-state division may be less an accurate representation of reality than a convenient stereotype dreamed up by politicians and the press. Like any stereotype, it may be a useful shorthand with some truth to it, but like other stereotypes, it can also make real-life contradictions harder to see. Not so long ago, a caffe latte was an exotic drink reported on by adventurous tourists returning from Italy. Now, every kid in Iowa and Wyoming has grown up with Starbucks. The drinks have been Americanized (a spoonful of high fructose corn syrup makes the espresso go down), but now latte and cappuccino are as American as pizza.

Maybe the next time you stop in at Flo’s Café in Radiator Springs, the menu will feature ratatouille.

The Colorblind Doctor

July 5, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

(Big hat tip to Mark Liberman at The Language Log for this post.)

Deepak Chopra, of all people, is writing about language and politics. The good doctor was blogging at Huffington Post about the recent Supreme Court decision that forbade school districts from giving any consideration to race in assigning students to schools.

The cities involved in the case (Louisville, Seattle) had been struggling to achieve some degree of integration in their schools. Where other factors were equal, the school district would avoid assigning a white student to a predominantly white school or a black student to a predominantly black school. The Court ruled 5-4 that this policy was unconstitutional.

Chopra’s point is that the majority opinion makes clever use of language in defending an indefensible position. He is particularly ticked off about the Court’s use of the word colorblind “as a disguise for racial neglect.”

He’s right, though I would put it more in terms of individual and group effects. Being colorblind at the individual level will probably lead to more segregation at the school level. The schools will become indistinguishable from pre-Brown schools, where students were deliberately segregated by very color-conscious policies and laws. So the ruling mandates a policy that is both colorblind and segregationist.

Justice Roberts, in his majority opinion, made an equally facile statement, one quoted in many news stories: “The way to end discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discrimination on the basis of race.” Clever, but sees the problem of race and schools as a purely individual matter (discrimination) rather than a social one (segregation). What about putting it the other way: “The way to end racially segregated schools is to end racially segregated schools.”

But Chopra makes a wonderfully ironic mistake. He writes:

Despite the overwhelming public support for school integration in both Seattle and Louisville, five powerful white males were enough to squash a society's better nature.

Those five powerful males are Scalia, Roberts, Kennedy, Alito, and . . . Clarence Thomas, the only African American on the Court.


Chopra was obviously being colorblind. His classification of a man as white had nothing to do with the color of his skin but only with the content of his characteristically white opinion on integration.

Why I Am Not a Psychologist

July 2, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

A link on some political blog – I wish I could recall whose – took me to this posting on a site called StraightDope:

I recently read Phantoms by Dean Koontz and was curious about his description of the “flatworms in a maze” phenomenon – namely that a flatworm can be taught to negotiate a maze and then ground up and fed to a flatworm that has never seen the maze. This new flatworm will absorb the knowledge of the maze from the first flatworm.

I’ve never read Dean Koontz, but I’m pretty sure the cannibalized-learning theory is bunk, at least where it concerns flatworms. But the mention of these studies took me back to a summer long ago when I worked in a university psych lab run by two psychology professors. It was the beginning of my disillusionment with psychology. It was as though I’d taken a lowly summer job at a law firm and discovered that most lawyers never saw the inside of a courtroom and that their work did not in the least resemble that of Perry Mason.

I had just finished my first year of college, and at the time I still thought that psychologists studied ways to understand and heal minds that were troubled and confused. Minds like my own. I also thought that a professor’s work involved the teaching of students – courses, lectures, exams, that sort of thing. But these two men did neither. They were researchers, and most of their research was about communication in rhesus monkeys. The way they treated the monkeys would today probably land these guys in jail, but as I said, this was a long time ago.

Their domain was the top two floors of one of those tall buildings that gets very narrow at the top. There were a half-dozen linoleum-floored rooms, most of them occupied by monkeys. Most of the monkeys were in cages. The few in the experiment were kept in uncomfortable “primate chairs” that allowed very little movement. Our own little Gitmo.

That summer the professors had read a journal article showing that planaria (flatworms) could be conditioned to swim or crawl a maze. For some reason, the article inspired them to branch out from monkeys and to try to replicate these experiments. Step one was to buy some flatworms – I guess there must have been a planaria supply house. Step two was to assign the groundwork to me.

Planaria (flatworms) are very simple organisms. They are worms, and they are flat. They measure less than a half-inch, with a triangular head featuring two eyes that are set so close together it makes them look cross-eyed.

My job included their care, feeding, and education (or “conditioning” as psychologists call it). Feeding meant dropping a piece of raw beef liver into each worm’s Petri dish. The hungry worm would crawl up on the liver and chow down. For their conditioning, I was to put the flatworm in a narrow, water-filled trough with electrodes at each end. I would then turn on a light — planaria are senstive to light — give the worm a second to realize that the light was on, and then zap him. The worm’s body would contract.
It was “classical conditioning.” The idea was that the worms would learn the light-shock connection. Then, even without the jolt of electricity, the worm would react to the light the same way it reacted to the shock, just as Pavlov’s dogs started salivating at the mere sound of a bell because it had been rung so often at Alpo time.

It sounds easy, but there was one catch. How do you move a worm from its Petri dish to the experimental trough? Our technique was to dip an eyedropper into the dish, suck the worm into the eyedropper, then squirt him out into the trough. After the worm’s experimental session (I forget how many light-shock trials I hit them with each time, maybe twenty), I would put the worm back using the same suck-and-squirt method. Unfortunately, the eyedropper aperture was a bit narrow, and the worm got squeezed each time in its rough passage in or out of the dropper.

The research plan was that after we succeeded with the classical conditioning, we would move on to the “operant conditioning” phase, teaching the little guys to swim a maze – i.e., to bear right at a Y-intersection.

We never got that far. The hardest part turned out to be keeping the planaria alive. Each morning I would check the tank and find a few more of my charges getting paler and paler, becoming translucent and finally giving up the ghost. We brought in new subjects, but they too withered. I figured that the reason for their failure to thrive was the combination of being squeezed through the narrow aperture of the eyedropper and then being electrocuted. That and maybe having to live in water that quickly became murky from the liver decomposing in it.

When I left at the end of the summer, I had not taught a single worm anything – preparation for my eventual career – and as far as I know, my bosses gave up without a publication. Ever since, I have been extremely skeptical about reported findings on flatworm learning. Yes, I know that these studies have been done and replicated. I just choose not to believe them until I see them first hand.

My bosses did publish several articles about the monkeys, but my first-hand experience with those experiments makes me very skeptical of those results too. But that’s another story.

The road sign, which I found using Google, is from the MySpace page ofTeresasaurus Rex .

Just Wait Till You’re Older

June 29, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Sometimes when I was an adolescent, I would voice some opinion about teachers or sex or drugs, and an adult would say, “Just wait till you get older and have kids.” And indeed, the opinions of the people in the room often divided along age lines. My peers and I were more liberal than the grown-ups.

In the previous post on age differences in political views, I mentioned the difficulty of knowing whether differences were a matter of age or of generation. If it’s age, then people’s opinions will change as they grow older. But if it’s generational, then the members of that generation will retain their views forever. Imagine today’s twentysomethings in fifty years, still thinking their tattoos are cool, while the youth near them on the beach shake their heads in disbelief.

A survey like the one done by the Times/CBS/MTV shows a cross-section of the population at one point in time. But what we’d really like is “longitudinal” or “time-series” data that can show us what happens over the course of time.

Statistician Howard Wainer has an example that illustrates the dangers of drawing longitudinal conclusions from cross-sectional data. If you did a cross-sectional survey on language development in Miami, you might be tempted to conclude that when Miamians are young, they speak Spanish. As they mature into their middle years, they change to speaking English. And when they get even older, they switch to Yiddish.

Hat tip to my brother Skip for relaying this example.