julie, julia, and nora

So Netflix has pushed Julie and Julia to me a lot but I never had any interest in it at all. A few weeks ago I read Nora Ephron's personal essay in the New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/02/13/serial-monogamy) and thought it was quite cute. Then the other day I thought again about Julie and Julia and how it's meant to be about a modern woman engaging with Julia Child through her cookbook and was like, "Oh my god this is a Nora Ephron movie isn't it." Sure enough Ephron was all over the credits - she wrote, produced, and directed it.

Anyway, here's my Letterboxd review:

this is SO WHOLESOMe also the fact that nora ephron also engaged so much with cookbooks... i love
edit a lot of the reviews on letterboxd are like these stories arent interesting because theres no real conflict or growth and ok sure but also not all stories have to be really dramatic to be interesting... i loved that this was about how passion and hard work and INTEREST in something can really touch and change your life, and that you can measure your life by the “mundane” things like what you cook and what you wear and **ahem** the films you watch. in a time of information overload its important to cherish the times we really do engage with something. ive just started actually cooking these past few months and even though i dont follow recipes (and prob never will bc im impatient) and also hate french food, i felt connected to this too. and obviously so did producer/writer/director + new yorker article author nora ephron !

I just wanted to add that ever since I interviewed Canadian science fiction author Larissa Lai for Sine Theta's 8th issue back in September, I've been thinking a lot about this one thing she said, about the inherently patriarchal nature of traditional Campbellian hero journey narratives. I even quoted her in a footnote in my Greenberg essay when I make a side note on the patriarchal language in one of the secondary sources. She said that traditional narratives are driven by a black-and-white understanding of conflict: good versus evil, like Lord of the Rings or Star Wars. She said that they're stories about the boy needing to kill the father in order to come into manhood. But women don't want to kill their mothers - they want to have relationships with them.

“Women’s narratives,” she said, “need to be relational in the first instance, and not dialectical.”

I've been thinking about this because in some ways it feels true. In some ways I want it to be true, because then all this resentment and bitterness I have about men appears easily explained, that there's this inherent difference in the way men and women behave because of the way they've been socialised to think and to relate to people. But I'm also wary of generalising, because if you take this to the extreme you'd be saying that men are inherently violent and women aren't - which apart from being wrong is also quite dangerous because it would then excuse violence from men as 'boys will be boys' and would treat male violence as something uncurable and inevitable. But of course that's not what Lai is saying: she also talks about how women can actually be really nasty to each other and that's an aspect she wanted to explore in her books.

I've also struggled a lot with her use of the word "dialectical". Does she mean dialectical like a struggle, like a class struggle, between two sides? Or just a Socratic dialogue where two sides talk to each other to solve a problem? Because that's two completely different things and dialectics can mean either or both (or not??? IDK I'm very bad at grasping complex theory that has many explanations because the concept has been written about by different thinkers. I once cried in front of my tutor after class because I was frustrated by the ambiguous definition of the words 'semiotics' and 'structuralism'.) I guess in this context she means the former, because it would be the opposite of relational.

All this is to say is I've been wondering what kind of narrative would be a more feminine one, a relational one that's less about defeating evil. I haven't really found anything but I guess I'd say that Julie and Julia is one. But I'm wary of doing that because it's literally a movie about cooking. And what would that say about women? Lol.

I don't want to make this too long and I'm a bit annoyed that this is the first post (as far as I remember) that I'm making about the topic of Lai's relational narrative because it's literally been on my mind for months and I haven't formulated any real thoughts. This post is yet another ramble with no real aim. But I guess that's what blogs are for.

Also lol, Julie Powell just started a blog and left it there and didn't do anything to promote it (apart from telling her friends I guess) and suddenly it has a ton of readers?? How does that even happen, like how did they even find the website. There are so many websites wtf. Why can't this happen to this blog.