Fabio Parasecoli

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.The comedy genre protects masculinity, when goofy chefs and the movie smain characters reveal all their weaknesses and food becomes a security valve fortheir emotional needs.This is the case for a romantic Adam Sandler in Spanglish(2004) and the surreal Hong Kong movie star Stephen Chow in God of Cookery (SikSan, 1996).Sandler plays an award-winning chef who rediscovers his passion forcooking and his skills, almost forgotten because of the stress of fame and his failedmarriage, through the straightforward sensuality of his home caretaker, played byPaz Vega.The celebrity chef played by Chow falls into disgrace and manages to getback to the top only with the help of an ugly, but effective woman, who creates anew sort of meatballs that become all the rage and with whom he eventually falls inlove.Of course, when gay men cook in movies all bets are off and masculinity is nolonger an issue.With them, food preparation reveals all its nurturing and poignantundertones.The Turkish filmmaker Ferzan Ozpetek often deals with gay characterswhose emotional lives and memories are expressed through food.In His SecretLife (Le Fate Ignoranti, 2001), Michele (Stefano Accorsi) is the center of a wholecommunity of unusual characters, including gay men, a transsexual, a prostitute, andan AIDS victim, who gather every week around the table, and for whom cooking andfeeding each other constitutes an act of resistance and a declaration of love for life.When his deceased lover s wife Antonia (Margerita Buy) discovers his existence, it isby inviting her to join the cooking and by preparing her morning coffee that the twomanage to create a relationship built on respect and affection.In Facing Windows(La Finestra di Fronte, 2003), Giovanna (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), an aspiringbaker, meets an old man suffering from amnesia who turns out to be a Holocaustsurvivor whose suffering was compounded by his repressed homosexuality.Theman turns out to be a expert pastry chef who, by making cakes and desserts withthe younger woman, succeeds in reconnecting with his past and his memories,even if only briefly, while giving to Giovanna a new sense of herself and of herfemininity.In another of Ang Lee s movies, The Wedding Banquet (Xi Yan, 1993),it is through food that an interracial gay couple convey their emotional attachmentsand their mutual love.Wai-tung (Winston Chao) a successful and career-drivenHungry Memories " 31Taiwanese businessman, and his American lover, Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein),have to fake a wedding with a Chinese woman and organize a massive banquet toappease Wai-tung s parents, visiting from the mainland and unaware of their son ssexual inclinations.Despite the difficulties, Simon reaffirms his nurturing qualitiesby cooking for his partner s parents, who eventually show acceptance by enjoyinghis food, even if it is not Chinese.These works focusing on food, although from different genres, share a modelof human being where the body and the mind are not separated, but integrated in afunctioning whole.Emotions and sensations are not considered as better or worsethan rational faculties, just as a different, complementary dimension of human innerlife.They propose a totally different position from the computer-related movieswe analyzed previously, where the body is a mere material support for higher func-tions that autonomous from the flesh can be easily shared with machines andcomputers.This deep contrast between two different conceptions of the humanexperience emerges in different instances of pop culture, which we know plays animportant role in disseminating and naturalizing concepts and ideas, values andanxieties.The presence of diverging, even contradictory, approaches to food pointsto the fact that an ongoing negotiation is taking place among different ideologiesto assert their take on human life, the mind, and its connection with the body.Thepolitical and social implications go well beyond pop culture.Sell It to the Brain!A new branch of neuroscience is being developed in collaboration with sociologists,anthropologists, psychologists, and philosophers: the neuroscience of human be-havior, which focuses on the interaction of the brain with the social environment(Adolphs 2003).Some researchers have pointed to the existence of brain functions,defined as emphatic, that are tuned to perceive and react to another s pain (Singeret al.2004).Others are studying the so-called mirror neurons, which allowindividuals to imitate another s action by stirring in their brain the same areas activein other persons (Frith and Wolpert 2004; Meltzoff and Prinz, 2002).This linkconnecting different brains would also explain the capacity swiftly to synchronizeand harmonize people s movements, body postures, and vocal intonations as theyinteract with other individuals (Goleman, 2006).These studies could throw newlight on the dynamics that take place around the table, on the emotional relevanceof the act of sharing food, and on the desire to adapt to other people s eating habits.Other scholars are working on the new field of neuronomics, which analyzes thedynamics of the brain in behaviors related to economic choices, and the relevanceof the emotional and values systems in risk-taking and decision-making (Camerer2005; Cassidy 2006).Social relations are still to be fully analyzed from the point ofview of neuroscience: for instance, how do humans read intentions out of a fellow32 " Bite Mehuman s actions (Blakemore and Decety 2001)? This line of research is crucial tounderstand any collective behavior, including food consumption.For instance, itcould allow new insights into how children are socialized into eating, how likes anddislikes develop, and how we try to experiment with new ingredients or dishes.We also witness the rise of a new interest in the emotional dynamics of thebrain to assess the relations that humans build with the objects they acquire andemploy in everyday life.Design, marketing, and advertising are paying newattention to this dimension of human psychology and culture.Donald Norman, acognitive scientist, is at the forefront of these studies both as an academic and asa businessman, having served as vice-president of Apple Computer s AdvancedTechnology Group and having co-founded the Nielsen Norman Group, a consultingfirm that focuses on human-centered products and services.In his books, Normanputs forth the intriguing hypothesis that appealing things, able to elicit intense andpositive emotions, actually work better (Norman 1989 and 2004).He often useskitchen design objects as examples, but the same line of reasoning can be applied tofood packaging, arrangements of food on dishes, and produce itself.Norman arguesthat design and use of objects are influenced by strong emotional components [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Linki