Respect Authority

I just watched Julie & Julia with my family – a Christmas Eve compromise between It’s a Wonderful Life, which I’ve watched more or less every year since I was five and could probably recite from memory, and Star Wars, which Spike TV is currently playing in marathon and, honestly, never gets old. In fact, despite the movie choice being in actuality a compromise, it’s about as far from my normal decision-making process as possible: an entire film (and a long one, let me tell you) about the literal joys of cooking, as compared with several nostalgic hours of pre-Calista Harrison Ford and animatronic banthas. For someone who owns approximately one pan and has used her oven twice in ten months (and one of those times was to make pot brownies), the choice would have otherwise been fairly obvious.

As it turns out, J&J wasn’t as bad as I was expecting. Which isn’t to say it got bad reviews; most critics seemed wowed enough by Meryl Streep as Julia Child that they overlooked the movie’s rather tedious length and borderline endless discussion of actual cooking. In fact, in some deep-seated female part of my being, I guess the movie did make me want to cook a little – only because Amy Adams/Julie made cooking seem like such a respectable alternative to sitting around in your apartment and watching TV. It seems downright productive.

No, this is what really annoys me about Julie & Julia, and movies like it. Shit like that doesn’t really happen. Not to normal people, not often enough that watching it happen isn’t in actuality just as infuriating and depressing as anything else. People don’t dash off to France and magically overcome historical prejudice so they can go on to be one of the most famous chefs of all time. They don’t just happen to have husbands with government jobs that afford them plenty of leisure time to pursue a completely (at least at the time) absurd hobby, or pen pals who just so happen to know major book editors who just so happen to be interested in not only reading, but testing out, cookbooks from otherwise unknown authors.

And back in New York, in 2002, government employees don’t just decide to start a blog and then within a year not only have mastered cooking but also gotten numerous book deal offers, to say nothing of a movie starring, oh, Meryl Streep. People who live in dipshit apartments above pizza places in Long Island City are supposed to CONTINUE living in dipshit apartments above pizza places, or Chinese places, or butcher shops, to make the rest of us (read: me) feel like it’s totally OK to continue living in Brooklyn next to a car wash with a neon sign that sometimes blinks through our window the entire night.

So, in conclusion, fuck you Julia Child, and Julie Powell, for your uncommon success and its alleged ability to inspire (rather than depress) those of us who are forced to sit through a movie about your lives on Christmas Eve. This isn’t even a tale of hope, or of overcoming hardship. This is a story about two relatively happy people who became even happier through a series of fortunate and lucky events. And those stories, like Santa, aren’t real.