by Lance Lee
The guests find it tasty, then are driven to tears. Soon the cake’s impact drives all to rush from the table to vomit, Pedro and Rosaura not excepted. The depth of Tita’s feelings are more than amply revealed through the effect of eating the cake.
Elena attacks Tita but is deflected by the death of Nacha. Tita becomes head cook.
Pedro gives Tita a bouquet of roses to mark her first year as head cook. That evening, Tita makes a special dinner. First, she is scratched by a thorn, i.e., she suffers from the thorn of passion, then she crumbles the rose petals into the sauce. One by one the family taste an exquisite dinner imbued with Tita’s passion for Pedro. It makes Rosaura ill. Her other sister, Gertrudis, rushes out to cool herself and sets an outhouse on fire from the heat of her arousal. That draws a rider toward Gertrudis as she runs naked across the countryside to cool herself. He sweeps her up and rides off while she embraces him uninhibitedly.
All dramatic emotion is heightened: it is felt by characters in conflict and crisis. The cooked, despite its displacement of direct emotional expression into some effect, heightens even that heightened dramatic emotion. There is an implication for style here too: the reality communicated through Like Water for Chocolate’s handling of emotion could not be in a slice-of-life or cinéma vérité style: we recognize it as magic realism. In Road to Perdition magic isn’t evoked, but events become aesthetic through stylization and consequently stand out in sharp relief because such treatment is so unexpected in a gangster film.
Chocolat gives several excellent examples of cooked emotion. The Comte resists Vianne’s temptation throughout the film, insisting on tradition and conventional propriety taken to an extreme. We see the depth of his rage against Vianne’s chocolate challenge to the denial Lent stands for expressed through Serge when that desperate man takes a momentary expression of the Comte’s feelings literally and sets fire to Roux’s flotilla, endangering Vianne and her daughter’s lives, along with a good many others. The Comte is appalled at the revelation of his own anger/destructiveness when Serge explains he did what he thought the Comte really wanted, much as Henry acts horrified when his knights take him at his word and kill Beckett in Beckett. The Comte banishes Serge from the town.
Desperate, wielding a knife, the Comte goes to confront Vianne. He doesn’t assault or rant at her but breaks into her shop, sees the offending chocolates, slashes them with his knife, licks its blade, and then devours the chocolates in an oral frenzy expressing all his repressed passion and hunger for life before falling asleep in the window.
Vianne and Josephine understand this perfectly the next morning as they give him milk and help him up. So do we. There is no doubt about his emotions at all or the redemptive value of their release: watching his collapse into an eating frenzy is at once funny and quite touching.
The cooked, then, can displace emotion from one object or person to another, or omit a conventional, realistically expected element. Any technique that uses displacement, distance, or stylization cooks the presentation of emotion. Cooked effects don’t affect our identification with the heroine or hero, or our experience of the moral substance or ambiguity of a story. But on the face of it, the heavy is virtually ruled out by using cooked emotion, for the cooked isolates single expressions of feeling for great effect and never involves a continuous flood of direct feeling, let alone unrelieved self-destructiveness of the kind Bess sinks to in Breaking the Waves.
The cooked can obviously go too far, like anything else in writing. Too far into symbol, image, stylization, or substitute effects and the same approach that serves to communicate feeling powerfully begins to distance emotion and make a film seem obscure or literally weightless because emotionless, which we experience as tedium.
But the cooked has wider uses in storytelling, beyond emphasizing emotional expression. It can be used to portray social structure, especially in a society where the denial of emotion results in the ossification of that society and the repression of its members.
The elders in Breaking the Waves and the church they run, as well as the lifestyle they have imposed on their community, are deeply repressive. The steeple is empty, women subjected to men, dress severe, and masochism the order of the day. At Bess’s wedding an elder crushes a glass in his hand in response to one of Jan’s friends crushing a beer can. Fall afoul of the elders and they damn you or leave you fallen, like Bess on the path, in the hour of your need. The town is frozen, life ossified, love repressed to the disappearing point, the cooked technique taken to an extreme of stylization of existence until life feels stifled.
Dramatically speaking, we expect an extremity on the order of the elders to be confronted. We are ready for Bess before we understand who she is, the opposite such an extreme inevitably calls up and releases against itself. We can be neither wholly emotional nor wholly repressed in this variant of cooked storytelling: something better must grow out of their clash. That is hinted at when Bess’s sister-in-law denounces the elders at Bess’s funeral and when the bells ring by the oil rig in the End.
If that shows a dark side but valid structural use of the cooked, overplotting shows a fault. When we begin to feel there are one too many plot turns, we are distanced from the story: “It’s too much,” we say to ourselves. No Way Out gives a good example of this: Costner’s character goes through so many turns that the plotting in effect becomes a cooked displacement of emotion, so much so that the final plot turn throws us out of any sense of emotional involvement as well as probability, so that we shrug the film off in irritation. Beyond this, the misuse of the cooked is apparent whenever we move too far away in the action from the emotionality that is due from the conflict, whether because stylization goes too far or overplotting snaps credulity and affect. In that case cooked elements come to stand between us and the story.
Yet a deliberate and able accumulation of plot complications in a story can move it toward the comedic. Prizzi’s Honor shows this common technique well. It’s one thing for the family hit man to go off and seek to recover money from a freelancer, but another for him to fall in love with and marry her, then have her retained to hit him after a multitude of intervening complications. We can’t help but laugh. The cooked here displaces the experience of a serious drama into the comic realm.
The Raw
Emotion flung at us directly is raw. There is no distancing or displacement of emotion for effect, as in the cooked, but instead the direct confrontation with feeling in a given character.
We see Bess lying in bed naked to offer herself to the doctor in Breaking the Waves. He rejects her, although he tries to soften his rejection; nonetheless she is humiliated, suddenly not naked but indecently exposed because of his reaction. Nothing stands between us and the direct experience of these emotions and their effects. Terry and Edie confront one another in the bar in On the Waterfront, culminating with her request for his help; when he equivocates, she is provoked into calling him a bum. Their emotion is in our face. Even more dramatic and classic, as we saw, is Terry’s breaking down Edie’s door after his series of confessions to Father Barry and herself. Edie’s flailing fists weaken into an ardent embrace as Terry gathers her in his arms and kisses her into submission as he demands she admit her love. Nothing could be more direct or unvarnished.
The climax1 of On the Waterfront is just as direct. Terry is refused work, yet the longshoremen wait, watching to see what he will do. They follow him toward the dockside building where Johnny Friendly and his thugs are gathered. Terry calls for Johnny Friendly to come out and then taunts him with his own version of events before the longshoremen. He attacks Friendly physically in response to Friendly’s challenge, winning until the thugs overpower him. Everything is direct, powerful, emotional, in our face: raw.
Tita is not set free by Elena’s death in Like Water for Chocolate. Elena periodically haunts her like a Freudian guilty conscience given body, harsh and condemning. She continues to stand between Tita and Pedro. Finally Tita expresses her hatred directly to Elena
and drives her mother from her presence. Tita’s hatred is powerful, direct, and satisfying in its expression: there is no attempt to displace, stylize, or symbolize it. I could say there is no need: the hatred between mother and daughter needed to speak for itself. But Tita’s grief over Pedro’s marriage could only be expressed as typical grief if expressed in a raw way: displacing that into the effect of the cake on others allows that emotion’s fresh experience. I emphasize again that each way of handling emotion used at the right moment is equal in power.
The raw, then, involves none of the techniques of the cooked: it is real in an obviously “realistic” sense, what we would expect of cinéma vérité or slice-of-life writing or from our conventional idea of what is real. The raw has the effect of a direct assault on us: the cooked does not make the raw’s claim of “Here I am, here are my feelings now, take it or leave it.” But the raw can degenerate into the unearned emotionality of melodrama or heavy earned emotion in the form of destructiveness experienced for its own sake.
Raw emotion wants to sweep us away; the raw drives toward the ecstasy and intoxication of complete instinctual release. It can be sweepingly Dionysian in effect, as we saw with Agave in Euripides’ The Bacchae, who dismembers her son in an emotional transport. But she is horrified as that emotional transport wears off. Nothing could be rawer. The cooked tries to beguile and seduce and tends toward delight; the raw wants to overwhelm and submerge us in a character’s emotions and tends toward horror.
The raw demands our absolute, undistanced assent to the illusion of a story’s reality, while the cooked invites a sense of illusion even while making as absolute a claim for our emotional involvement. The hint of an Apollonian sense of “illusion” lets a cooked approach weave its magic and handle emotionality in other than a raw way. Nietzsche, in defining the Apollonian, emphasizes its compelling nature that yet possesses simultaneously a hint of illusion, which gives a dreamlike edge to reality.2 In that sense, a screenplay is a waking dream we know is a dream at the same time we are caught up in and compelled by its action.
Blending the Cooked and the Raw
An extended pure encounter with either the cooked or the raw is unusual: both provoke a need for relief from too exclusive, or narrow, a handling of emotion with its implications for storytelling. Usually we find both elements in a film, however marked a given tendency may be, as we saw with the conflict between Tita and Elena in Like Water for Chocolate, or in the handling of the elders’ society in Breaking the Waves.
High Noon handles emotion violently and physically in the fight between Kane and Harvey and the shoot-out with Miller and his friends. Nonetheless, we are never far from a clock and the time shown to be shrinking between Kane’s efforts to find help and the moment when Miller will arrive. Finally we need only glance at a clock in High Noon: we know what it means. It is a cooked element, a symbol standing for time running out to a violent climax. In its inexorability the clock evokes a sense of an iron fate compounded by the betrayals around Kane.
What in On the Waterfront is cooked? Everything seems in our face, its characters’ emotions directly handled and expressed in a raw manner. But after his appearance in court has hurt Friendly but not removed him, Terry must consider what to do next. Edie wants him to leave, fearing for his life: they should go upstate and farm. Terry says nothing as she pleads, playing instead with his longshoreman’s hook. That has multiple meanings, like the clock in High Noon. It is the longshoreman’s tool; being a longshoreman is what Terry is silently debating, with all the implications now of asserting or abandoning that role. Finally he dons Joey’s jacket, already a cooked element, a symbol that stands for reform, and states his intention. “I’m just going to get my rights,” he tells Edie, and walks out.3 It’s a cooked sequence in a generally raw film.
Rashômon finds critical moments of displacement and distancing too. We never see the husband being killed, even in the woodcutter’s climactic story in which the two men fight desperately. As Tajomaru thrusts his sword home, we focus on the bandit’s face distorted by the intensely unpleasant experience of killing another, like we do on Michael’s grief at the moment of Rooney’s death in Road to Perdition. An element of displacement, of the cooked, enters right at the climax of a raw fight.
Earlier the woodcutter relates how he encounters items of clothing in the forest before he finds the husband, wife, and Tajomaru. These items shouldn’t be there and indicate by their presence that something awful is underway or has happened. That too is a cooked communication, just as are the frequent shots of the sky with clouds serenely passing, so at odds with the emotional rawness and moral misbehavior of husband, wife, and bandit.
Often the cooked and the raw are blended in the same experience. Note the purely raw confrontation by father and son in the field in Road to Perdition as Michael Sr. demands Michael Jr. obey him unquestionably in order for them to survive, or the raw climax when Michael Jr. can’t shoot McGuire, who has shot his father. Michael Jr.’s hesitation gives Michael Sr. time to kill McGuire himself, after which Michael Jr. breaks down over his father’s body in a powerfully raw expression of grief. Now revisit Michael Sr.’s cooked killing of Rooney. We experience Michael Sr.’s grief in a raw way as we concentrate on his face; in this instance, a cooked handling of emotion, by isolating a single emotion, amplifies its rawness.
Similarly, if we revisit Michael Jr. watching his father gun down Finn’s men, a scene handled in a cooked manner, the abrupt appearance of the bloody face that horrifies Michael has a raw impact the cooked handling underscores. Even the murder of Michael’s wife and younger son has this blending: as Connor appears in the doorway, gun drawn, Michael’s wife sees him and shields her son as they are killed, which we never see. The cooked handling here isolates the horror of the situation by removing individual reactions. When Michael Sr. and Jr. later look at the bodies, we see them look but not what they look at, and so are not distracted from their moment of perception, a moment again blending the cooked and raw.
The problem with Road to Perdition is the conventionality of our expectations. The raw and gangster film seem synonymous: a gangster film that uses cooked techniques, as if such a story could become an aesthetic experience, nonplusses us. Habit, as Hume noted, is dominant, and genre writing is an aesthetic habit. Few of us have read Nietzsche, and fewer think as he does that the horror of reality can only be redeemed by its transformation into an aesthetic experience, to make it an object of pleasure. Freud doesn’t speak of “horror” but suffering; yet he means much the same thing and points out how creativity is a sublimation of libido, whose aim is to provide a way to master our suffering. Consider, if you are still in doubt, how the continual effort to make films about the Holocaust shows a tendency to transform an actual horror into an illusion (a film) that can be enjoyed, whether in Life Is Beautiful, The Pianist, or Schindler’s List. The goal of such aestheticizing is not to deny the reality of the experience but to find a way to prevent our turning away from it in historical aversion or personal repression of a memory too harsh to bear. Containing such reality in a work of art keeps it present for experience in a way we can bear.
The cooked plays to that tendency, the raw to its opposite. An entirely raw depiction of an individual’s experience in the Holocaust, culminating in our following him or her into the gas chamber and furnace, would be unendurable. When the cooked moves a plot toward comedy, it makes us see the expression of the raw as an absurdity, as Benigni’s character at moments succeeds at doing in the concentration camp in Life Is Beautiful. That is quite a feat, and Nietzschean in spirit.
The illusion of art does not deny but redeem, and makes possible, in extreme cases, the possibility of the experience of a reality we know yet don’t want to know.
Antecedents
The cooked and the raw are primarily techniques for handling the expression of emotion, with implications affecting plot and story style. These concepts have worthy ancestors. Primary in this regard is Nietzsche’s develo
pment of Dionysian and Apollonian in The Birth of Tragedy. He presents these as formative forces of nature and psyche, and is ultimately interested in the way they unite in the climax of a Greek tragedy. He was deeply influenced by Schopenhauer, and with him is caught up in the argument we are having with ourselves, contesting the deep dualism stemming from Descartes and given its modern impetus by Kant.
Schopenhauer spoke of a unitary will, which has a sublimated modern life as the Freudian libido.4 The will is the very essence of being in its urge to become all it can be, to stop at nothing until fully realized, fully alive. It is ruthless, undeniable, immediate, and metaphysical. A sense of it is echoed in a Robinson Jeffers poem, De Rerum Virtute:
… And the Galaxy, the firewheel
On which we are pinned, the whirlwind of stars in which our sun
is one dust grain, one electron, this giant
atom of the universe
Is not blind force, but fulfills its life and intends its courses. …5
That urge of the dust to be, whether of the immensities of the universe or of the dust beneath our feet, and to live fully, exemplifies the Schopenhauerian will. But if there is only the will and its endless appetite, how do we get to anything else? Again, through the will. Once that will achieves satisfaction, it can cease its relentless striving and regard itself, the reason why Schopenhauer entitled his key work The World as Will and Idea. Once the will regards itself it moves into the realm of ideation, of reflection and creativity. Nietzsche splits these two aspects, relentless drive and ideation and imagination (creativity), apart in order to speak about their nature once unified under the pressure of intense dramatic conflict.
The Apollonian formative force elaborates image, form, and structure. It is consequently defining, reflective, and in history embodied by the injunction “Know thyself.” Something of the dream experience is integral to the Apollonian experience, because an elaborated reality is in that sense illusory and dreamlike, such that we have the perception at the very edge of an Apollonian experience that it is after all “only” an illusion. The epic reflects an Apollonian perspective in poetry; today we would make that claim on the part of the novel, however minimalist or traditionally full, with or without an acknowledged omniscient author. Delight as well as self-knowledge characterize the Apollonian experience, which can move steadily into ever more rationalistic formulations until scientific or so technical it abandons the realm of feeling altogether. As a construct it can ossify, as society has in the world of the elders in Breaking the Waves against which Bess struggles so hard, for ossification invites its own destruction.
