Two school girls in Uganda, sneaking fruit from the hotel garden. Beauty!
It is a hot, sticky Sunday afternoon and my 13-year self is slumped in the church pew, passing time by flipping through the Old Testament. Why hey now. What’s this in Song of Solomon? “Comfort me with apples for I am sick with love…Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor.” Wha–? What could her navel possibly want?! “Thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies.” !! By now I am convulsing, trying to suppress my laughter. “Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins.” Oh, who can stand this hilarity!
Over Sunday dinner I ask how Solomon made the cut into the old testament as he was clearly obsessed wit food and women. My older teenage sister leans over and says: ‘DUH. It’s SYMBOLIC, stupid. He’s not REALLY talking about women. It’s about God’s love for his flock. Or, you know, something.”
I was reminded of this lesson in food and sex metaphors when I recently saw Eat Pray Love (EPL), a tripartite travelogue that pays homage to self-actualization. In the first chapter, our heroine goes to Italy, where the audience endures bumper-sticker comments like “I just want to make love to pizza” and sits through long scenes of Julia Roberts meditating over a bowl of pasta. Once Roberts has finished working through her relationship demons, she jets over to India for her next self-awareness project where she promptly sinks into an existential crisis, symbolized now by her reckless and emotional eating that is so excessive her meditation mate nicknames her “Groceries”. I admit that by this point in the movie I was feeling so bludgeoned by the script I stopped listening, and instead settled into admiring Julia Robert’s ability to well up beautifully in front of the camera. She sure is pretty.
Then, at long last, our last chapter, “Love”! As in most Hollywood movies, Julia’s first date predictably involves engaging with something exotic, earthy and culinary (insert market stroll, picnic, or cooking scene), a harbinger of the delectable passage to the lover’s sweet spot–or to the “blinkity blank blank”, as my mother would say.
But Javier and Julia stop eating after this market stroll, and instead of usual scenes of pre- or post-coitus flirting over food we are subject to more yammering about enlightenment. No surprise then, that the consummation scene unfolds like a Puritan sex manual: we never see it. This is all starting to feel vaguely Calvinist to me, where enlightenment transpires only after excising earthly pleasures and wrestling with demons like jealousy, regret, or desire. By the end of the movie, I’m feeling the way I do after reading an Oprah magazine, burdened by the growing list self-improvement projects.
Flip over to the other current foodie/romance film “I am Love”. In this film, food is a main character, occupying each scene from the heroine’s first flush of love to seduction. The sex scene is so breathtaking that for the first time it occurred me that the word “consummate” comes from “to consume.” Unlike EPL, the true subject of the movie isn’t How to Be Better, but rather a celebration of abandoning the strictures of should’s and giving into joy and rebellion.
After mulling over why I found I EPL so grating despite some delicious moments, I’d like to say this: Bite me, you film directors and Sunday school teachers who divide life into neat self-improvement chapters or suggest that food and sensuality are mere metaphors in the journey to spiritual enlightenment. I think Solomon really did find joy in the intimate entanglement with earthly pleasure.
Comfort me with apples. Make me strong with wine cakes. Let’s stop reading and dine instead.
