Babette's Feast

This is Charisse.

The film, Babette’s Feast, explored one of the greatest pleasures of life, food. I grew up in a house with a professional chef and good food is something that is essential to my life. When I saw the meals that Babette was forced to prepare at the beginning of the movie I was immediately disgusted, but when I found out that Babette was a chef herself, I was sad. In class we discussed the pleasures denied to the people who lived in the Denmark village, but my main concern was for Babette. Cooking is an art and to be denied the opportunity to practice the skill that Babette had was one thing, but to be asked to stifle that kind of talent in order to prepare the horrible meals that Babette had to make is a tragedy.

Cooking is a pleasure that I only get to experience occasionally when I feel like braving the Guild kitchen and even then it’s not the same as when I cook at home. This denial of pleasure brought me back to Freud’s theory of repression. Too much pleasure can certainly be a bad thing, but being cut off from pleasure in the extreme way that Babette was is just as bad if not worse. As witnessed in some of Freud’s patients, repression can lead to psychosis and other ailments. It must have been very stressful for Babette to suppress her culinary skills to prepare the same meals every day.

The fact that the villagers were denied good food and drinks all their lives is horrible, but what is worse is that Babette knew of all these pleasures and was simply unable to experience them in her new home.