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Chocolat
and Strangers
A
movie titled after my favourite treat was a must-see for me.
Of course, a chance to see Johnny Depp on the big screen didn’t
hurt either. So, I went to
see Chocolat last year in Winnipeg mostly for the sheer pleasure.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that the movie had substance
as well as sensuality.
[insert
atheist sound clip] Vianne,
and her daughter Anouk, are travelers, descendants of Mayan women who
are destined to follow the north wind from place to place, never
settling down. Vianne’s
father married such a woman when he was in Mexico and against all advice
brought her back to France. After
Vianne was born, her mother felt the north wind and left her husband,
taking Vianne with her. Vianne
carried on the tradition, taking Anouk from town to town, opening up a
Chocolateirie in each town, using ancient Mayan ingredients that not
only satisfy the sweet tooth, but also cured the body and soul. But
invariably, Vianne felt the north wind again and packed up and left,
taking Anouk with her.
Roux
is also a traveler, a “river-rat” who lives with a community of boat
people who drift from town-to-town, selling what they can to stay alive.
[insert enemies sound clip]
Like Vianne, Roux finds it difficult to stay in one place.
And like Vianne, Roux enjoys a life filled with sensual
pleasures. The river-rats are gypsy-like in their expressions of freedom
and mobility and their love of music and dance.
The
town where Vianne and Roux meet is a small Catholic town under watchful,
controlling eye of Comte Reynaud, who takes his family tradition of
caring for the town extremely seriously.
The presence of strangers, especially non-Catholic strangers,
during lent is disturbing to the Comte and what disturbs the Comte,
disturbs the town. [insert lent sound clip]
The
stage is set in this mix for everyone to learn a life lesson and the
comedic love story is quite predictable, but enjoyable and beautiful to
watch nonetheless.
There
are several other plots intertwined with the love story of Vianne and
Roux and their problems with the Comte, but the interactions of these
strangers with the town piqued my sociological imagination the most.
The
advertisements for the movie declare it a comedic fable set in an
old-fashioned-buttoned-up community in France in 1959; but the ads say,
it might as well be 1859 because of the backward ways in which the town
views those different from them. After
watching the European elections this Spring, I thought the fable could
be set in 2002. Fear of
strangers is back in vogue and the implications of this fear are
staggering and tragic.
Jorg
Haider of Austria, Flimish Block of Belgium, Pia Kjaersgaard of Denmark,
Jean-Marie Le Pen of France, Makis Voridis of Greece, Umerto Bossi and
Gianfranco Fini of Italy, Carl Hagen of Norway, Paul Portas of Portugal,
Christoph Blocher of Switzerland, Nick Griffin of the United Kingdom,
and three key right wing parties in Germany have made varying, but
significant gains into the governments of their respective countries
over the past few years and their popularity seems to be growing.
One of the reasons for the growth in popularity of these
extremists is that more Europeans are expressing fear of immigrants in
general and Muslims, in particular.
Add to the list the recently assassinated Pim Fortuyn, whose
pitting of gays against Muslims rocked the usually tolerant Netherlands.
Fortuyn’s version of right-wing politics differed from most of the
rest of Europe, but his party tapped into a fear of strangers with its
anti-immigration stance winning 26 parliamentary seats even after
Fortuyn was gunned down apparently by an animal’s rights extremist
angered because of Fortuyn’s stance on furriers.
Why
bring up the dismal political scape of Europe in a review on Chocolat?
The culture of this
tranquil French town has an historic context that set up the fear and
suspicion and ultimate acts of hatred that drove the story line.
The theme is an old one in Europe and the Catholic Church was
central to this fear. [insert laughing sound clip]
Long
before the Nazis killed 6 million Jews and asserted the supremacy of the
Aryan race, the so-called “Jewish question” was debated in Europe.
The current anti-immigrant debates have much the same flavour.
During the Middle Ages, the official position of the Holy Roman
Empire was that Jews were to blame for the crucifixion.
Jewish refusal to convert to Christianity was not only a sign of
their sinfulness, but a sign of their antagonism to Christianity and
their lack of political allegiance to Catholic rulers.
With the advent of the Crusades in 1006 (which is the first time
Europe feared Muslims), the position of the Jews became extremely
dangerous, forcing many Jewish communities into isolation and obscurity.
In addition, myths of Jewish terrorism aimed at Christians
abounded, creating fear and prejudice.
This lack of an official position in society carried over into
Protestant Europe as well. In
the early 19th century, things changed.
A belief in religious freedom and the separation of church and
state, an acceptance of Judaism as a religion and not just as ethnic
identity, and a desire to access Jewish resources into the greater
economy led to their emancipation throughout Europe.
After emancipation, Jews did begin to assimilate into the greater
culture, though very slowly and with great debate among themselves.
With that assimilation came a backlash of prejudice and
resentment. This tension
between the desire to assimilate and the desire to protect ethnic
identity led to a Jewish intellectual class in Europe with two faces –
the assimilated Jew who played down his Jewishness in favour of his
education and the Jewish scholar who reclaimed lost understandings of
Jewish religious teachings.
In
addition, to an intellectual class, a Jewish bourgeoisie emerged,
including shopkeepers and artisans.
Among this class were traveling merchants.
European communities in the 19th century were
discovering each other. Most
Europeans had been tied to their land in some way.
Industrialisation led to the need to open up new markets.
Jews were not allowed to own land for most of European history
and while they had ties to their communities, they seemed more willing
to travel than many other Europeans. Thus, they took jobs that sent them from town-to-town to open
up markets for products produced in major industrial centres.
They were the classic “middle-men” who sold manufactured
products to retail merchants for distribution to consumers.
The
study of strangers as a sociological phenomenon stems from the concepts
such as Karl Marx’s alienation and Emile Durkheim’s social anomie. But the first sociologist to directly discuss the archetypal
"stranger" was Georg Simmel, who not coincidentally was a Jew
who was never offered a position at university despite his obvious
scholarship and popularity as a salon speaker among the intellectuals in
Berlin. Each of these
concepts possesses economic roots.
Marx's alienation originated in the separation of the worker from
the product of his labour. Durkheim
describes anomie in terms of "dysfunctional" methods of
dividing labour. Simmel's stranger moved from town to town working as a
trader.
While
Simmel did not invent the sociological archetype of the stranger, he
expressed the meaning of the stranger profoundly.
Most important, he did not see the stranger as alienated and
unsocial in the sense that Marx did.
Instead he asserted that the position of the stranger, someone
who was both "distant" and "near," brought an
important element to relationships with others by virtue of his unique
position.
Both
Vianne and Roux possess this “distance” and “nearness” in Chocolat.
It is their strangeness that divides the town and creates
tensions as the season of lent progresses.
Lack of respect for the fasting season by selling the wonderful
confections and dancing on the river demonstrate to the Comte how holy
his quest to rid his town of these pagans was.
But Vianne and Roux were part of what helped the town figure out
its own character. The
presence of a stranger drew the lines clearly and it is no accident that
it is the town’s misfits that take to the strangers more easily than
those who are vested in the town’s culture.
Most
notable among these misfits is Josephine, whose husband’s cruelty has
led her to kleptomania and mannerisms bordering on schizophrenic.
But her strangeness is accepted as part of the town culture
because she stays in her proper place, with her husband.
Vianne’s kindness to Josephine frees her to leave her husband
and seek refuge from the town’s culture and her husband’s cruelty.
This act is the beginning of change in the whole culture and
atmosphere of the town. Black
and white belief systems become grey as the Comte realizes that
Josephine has suffered right under his nose.
The illusion of his control and the town’s tranquility begins
to break down.
At
first, the Comte tries to regain control through reforming Josephine’s
husband and driving out the strangers Vianne and Roux, but these efforts
eventually backfire. The
position of the strangers offers an objectivity on the true nature of
the town and having seen itself through the eyes of others, the town
changes, questioning its foundations. [insert time sound clip]
This
“objective” position of the stranger and its usefulness in the
social system of a culture is one of the positive social aspects of the
stranger archetype according to Simmel.
Strangers are defined as strangers because they are different
from “us” and when we define who a stranger is, we define who we are
in the process. The stranger is far from anti-social or non-social; it is a
necessary concept in order to form a cohesive group. We have to know who we are not in order to know who we are. [insert
not welcomed sound clip]
The
problem is that these attempts of definitions of “us” and “them”
can lead to a marginalisation of strangers.
The river people were not only “them” but they were regarded
as a dangerous “them” and boycotted and excluded from commerce for
being “them.” [insert
boycott immorality sound clip]
Robert
E. Park coined the term “marginalisation” in 1928 in his essay
"Human Migration and the Marginal Man."
Concerned with the question of how races and cultures
"evolve," Park looked to migration and not biological
evolution as the key to the "processes by which new relationships
have been established between men."
Park moved the narrow view of the stranger into a broader context
which could include every person at some time in his or her life because
"periods of transition and crisis in the lives of most of us that
are comparable with those which the immigrant experiences when he leaves
home to seek his fortunes in a strange country.”
In
the 1970s, Everett C. Hughes continued Park's work by expanding the
concept through analyzing marginality "from the angle of status.”
In status we find identity in our culture.
In a very real way, culture and society meet in an individual's
status. "Status is a
term of society in that it refers specifically to a system of relations
between people. But the
definition of the status lies in a culture."
By
looking at marginality through the lens of status, Hughes expands the
concept beyond the traveler or migrant who intrudes on a social
situation. In our own
society the contact of cultures, races and religions, combines with
social mobility, to produce an extraordinary number of people who are
marginal in some degree, who have some conflict of identity in their own
minds, and who find some parts of the social world which they would like
to enter closed to them, or open only at the expense of some treason to
things and people they hold dear. This
sets up a kind of inner conflict for strangers – how far must we go in
changing our beliefs and identities in order to be accepted by others? [insert
give a damn sound clip]
Chocolat
ends with both Vianne and Roux settling down in the town that they have
changed. Not only does the town change by expanding its definition of
“us” to include people who are from different backgrounds, but the
strangers change as well. Roux
leaves the river and his people to return to Vianne and Anouk.
Vianne scatters her mother’s ashes in the north wind as a
symbol of her decision to no longer listen to her mother’s voice or
follow her mother’s ways, something she believed was in her hereditary
make-up at the beginning of the movie.
Both characters forsake a part of themselves in order to belong
to each other and to the town.
These
negotiations between strangers and friends take on great importance in
the context of horrors like the Holocaust.
The extent to which we succumb to the fear of the other, we set
up despots who will lead us to such horrors.
Since most of us have been the stranger as well as belonged to a
group, I am reminded of Martin Niemoeller’s famous quote about the
Nazis which he gave in response to a student’s question:
“How could it happen?”:
“First they came for
the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out. Then
they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither,
so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew
so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left
to speak out for me.”
Chocolat
offers a wonderful meditation on how strangers affect our lives and how
the ways we define ourselves and others needs to be re-examined on a
regular basis in order to not descend into xenophobic prejudices and
hatred. It is a timely
fable and one that perhaps should be required viewing for us and our
leaders in an increasingly fearful world.
What better than chocolate to bring the world together.
copyright
by Pattie Thomas and Carl Wilkerson 2002
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