Babette's Feast, a neutralist answer to sexual famine

[Note: This post is part of what turned into a series. Here are the other parts

• Babette's Famine
• Steve Martin's The Jerk: The phonebook as metaphor for sex
• Not cupid's darts: when the worst that could happen happens

I watched Babette's Feast with my family last night. (Talk about proof that small children will watch *anything* if it shows up on TV! It's in Danish with subtitles and it's about a French woman's relationship to a Puritan community in Jutland in the late 19th Century! They didn't exactly eat it up, and they confided that they found it very boring, but they didn't go upstairs to play either.)

Anyway, in case you missed it the first time, the story is about two sisters in an austere protestant sect who as an act of charity take in a French refugee as a cook and housekeeper. For 14 years she helps them make dreadful but familiar-to-them concoctions like ale soup (bread, water, ale, boiled till thick) or salt flatfish (soak in water, then boil till edible.) Then one day she hears that she's won the lottery with a ticket purchased by her only living friend in France and she asks the sisters if she might prepare a feast for their aging, dwindling, and increasingly fractious congregation. We learn at the end of the movie that before she became a refugee she had been head chef at a premier Parisian restaurant. (More remarkable for her being a woman in that once most misogynistic of professions.)

What's really cool about the movie, though, is the deep and abiding concern of the locals as it becomes clear that she's *not* going to be serving fancier ale soup and salt fish. Rather than look forward with appreciation the sisters confess that they may all be subjected to a "satanic sabbath" of excess. And rather than confront Babette, who they still clearly hold dear, they all decide they'll make no mention of the food, discuss only the weather, and generally pretend nothing unusual is going on.

Before the meal they meet outside and anxiously sing hymns.

As the meal progresses the stick to their plan -- at one point an outsider, a worldly general who once loved one of the sisters, tells his aunt how extraordinary the meal is and the aunt replies that she thinks that the storm outside has died down -- but they gradually warm to each other (if not, outwardly, to the meal.) In the end they are satisfied and warmed, yes, but -- their fears unwarranted -- their identities are not lost by the experience and, they discover, that having "survived" unmoved they are also somewhat redeemed.

This is a sex blog, a blog neither about food nor (directly) about faith. And as a sex blogger I chose to make of the film an allegory what seems to be our society's greatest fear about sex: that by having sex we are changed; that its fleeting pleasures must be paid for. (As an aside I would argue that this belief underlies our resonance with, say, venereal disease which, while certainly awful are objectively no less awful nor more easily transmitted than other diseases that are transmitted "merely" socially.)

In his book Smut: Everyday Reality - Obscene Ideology Murray S. Davis argued that Western Civilization has three basic attitudes towards sex, two of which view it as transformational.

One view, which he calls "Jehovanist," is based on the Jewish/Christian/Muslim tradition of personal autonomy: We're born alone. We die alone. We're single, independent, autonomous beings with distinct, non-common souls. Which is all well and good *except* when we have sex because then we're interpenetrating both physically and worse -- from the atomistic perspective -- emotionally and intellectually. We become "a beast with two backs." We lose touch with everyday reality and become immersed in a separate form of consciousness. And, worse than all that, at least in the hetero-normative case, when you put two distinct individuals together like that you can wind up with additional autonomous individuals that weren't there at all before... and that just messes with the model in (they feel) the worst way.

Another view, which he labels "Gnostic," takes exactly the same view as the Jehovanists except Gnostics think all that chaos that sex introduces is just great, that it reveals the "real" world that underlies the "superficial" world prized by Jehovanists.

Within the Jehovanist sensibility the more sex you have the further removed you become from worldly reality. Within the Gnostic view, meanwhile, the more sex you have the "closer" to otherworldly reality. In both views, in other words, sex not only rocks our world, it *rocks our world!* In either view sex transforms us either away from or perhaps toward deeper truths.

This is the world into which Babette wishes to bring her feast -- fearful of the transformative power of food the way we tend to fear transformation through sex. (One could imagine a similar, Gnostic group that might have instead looked forward to the feast believing that by consuming glorious food their lives might have been transformed for the better.)

And yet... after the feast the congregation was warmed, yes, and perhaps made more introspective in that moment of comfort, but for all their fears they weren't transformed, not materially, not psychically. At best they had one thing less to worry about next time. (And, to maintain the parallel, one might imagine a different group leaving disappointed that their world remained fundamentally unchanged afterwards.)

And that brings me to Davis's third approach to sex, one, ironically, he says occurs most frequently in Scandinavian cultures such as the descendants of the Danish villagers in the movie. He calls it the "Naturalist" outlook where sex is just another aspect of biology to be undertaken with no more, but no less, appreciation than we have for food, or work, or play. When viewed as an ordinary part of life sex neither raises our consciousness nor lowers it, it neither reveals nor obscures "reality." It might temporarily transport us, as Babette's feast transported the congregation, but when we are done we return to who we were before, to a world as it was before.

The label "Naturalist" brings a certain bias to the discussion with its built-in implication that that which is "natural" is somehow more laudable. (There are, of course, biases in his other labels as well.) While I happen to share that bias I think a more accurate term might have been "Neutralist."

To be neutral is no less powerful, though, in the face of the fears or anticipations that sex brings us closer to unseen worlds, or further from the seen one. And to be neutral is unquestionably more powerful in the face of the dread or excitement, and the inevitable disappointment or relief that comes when we find ourselves unchanged -- no more "a woman," no more "a man" no more a adult or childish than we were before.

It's a great movie. It's a great lesson. Check it out (perhaps again) next time you're tooling around the video store.

(Note: There's a nice analysis of the movie, and the Isak Dinesen short story it was based on, at here.)

[Woof! I've been posting from an unfamiliar machine (long story) but not even that explains the egregious spelling errors in the original post. They should be all fixed now. Sorry about that. --fl]