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Badikian | Food and sex, That's All We're Good for: Images of Women in Like Water for Chocolate (19??) Beatriz Badikian Roosevelt University Food and Sex, That's All We're Good for: Images of Women in Like Waterfor Chocolate (1993) [Como agua para chocolate] Alfonso Arau; Laura Esquivel, screenplay. Miramax, 1993. (VHS: S21358. $96.98) The success in the United States of the film Like Water for Chocolate, a Mexican production based on a Mexican novel, that became the highest-grossing foreign language film ever released in the US, intrigued me tremendously and continues to do so, especially since the film continues to be shown in small towns and at discount theaters. I want to make clear at the outset that this paper is not a critique of the film per se but an interrogation about its success in the U.S.A. Furthermore, I want to clarify that the success I am referring to is the suburban- theater-in-the-mall kind of success , not the art- house-viewed-by-a-minority-ofintellectualsand -artists kind of success. In other words, Like Water for Chocolate appealed to the American middle-class population , a group not usually attracted to films with subtitles. Why was this film about Mexican women living in a ranch in the year 1910 so successful in the United States? Why haven't any other foreign language films about Mexican or other Third World women been this successful? On a parallel note that can offer additional information regarding my positionality, I want to relate a recent personal experience . Friends (and others) asked me why I objected to the film Evita, starring Madonna. My answer was succinct: Americans learn history from the movies. Fictionalizing history is not bad in and ofitself; it depends on what and who is fictionalized and the repercussions that that fictionalization may have. My interrogators then added: the film The English Patientfictionalized the life ofa man before and during WWII. Why doesn't diatbother you? And I answered: because the real person behind the character is virtually unknown. Furthermore, in the film, he is not made to stand for an entire nation or group. Therefore, his representation does not educate the viewing audience regarding all men, or all Hungarian men for that matter. He is an individual character whose image does not reflect any known stereotype. You get my point. Evita, on the other hand, concerns a larger-than-life historical figure, a Third World woman from a Third World country. Her representation educates the viewing audience aboutArgentina, aboutArgentine men and women, about Eva Peron herself. The representation and the setting of that film is incorrect, flawed. In consequence, the spectators are left with erroneous information that leads them to a myriad ofstereotyped, narrow, and incorrect ideas about Third World women, men, and nations. The cultural critics Robert Stam and Louise Spence state in their essay "Colonialism, Racism, and Representation : An Introduction" that "the analysis of stereotypes must also take cultural specificity into account" (Movies and Methods, Vol. II 640), referring to a national specificity that relates to the beliefs and attitudes of different countries. Lola Young in her book Fear ofthe Dark acknowledges this specificity, adding that audience reactions are not uniform. My interest here is on the American audiences' reaction and response to Like Water for Chocolate. I am certain that the film enjoyed a significantly different response in, let's say, Mexico, and yet a different one in every other country where it has been shown. Like Water for Chocolate: A Summary Before I continue I would like to offer a very briefsummary of the film. The story is set in 1910 Mexico. Tita lives cursed by a cruel family tradition; as the youngest daughter, she is to take care ofMama Elena in her old age, and is forbidden to wed. Tita falls in love with Pedro, and when Mama Elena refuses to let them marry, he agrees to take older daughter Rosaura's hand, thinking he will at least be close to his true love. Forced to bake their wedding cake, Tita moistens the cake batter with her heartbroken tears. Upon eating the cake, the wedding guests are overcome...

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