Singing the "I'm the Center of My Universe" Blues

What do Julia Child’s life story and the Ramayana have in common? Very little, except that they are both pilfered and somewhat misused by contemporary writers who come across as far more concerned with “what the story means to me” than with what these other stories might have meant in their original contexts. Both Julie & Julia and Sita Sings the Blues, though enjoyable in many aspects, have a troubling approach to other people’s stories.

Julie & Julia’s frame story feels very specific to life as a twenty-or-thirty-something in the 2000s. Julie Powell (Amy Adams) is a former aspiring writer who now finds herself answering phones for a government agency—actually, though this is never indicated in the film’s trailer, answering the questions of people who lost loved ones in the Twin Towers on 9/11. We see Julie crying over callers’ stories, so we know she has some level of empathy—sadly, that’s really the last we see of her concern for others within the film. When a successful friend of Julie’s starts her own blog, Julie decides she will do the same. Her topic: a year of cooking through all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s 1961 classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

The film, with a script by director Nora Ephron, interweaves Julia Child’s own story (adapted from her memoir written with Alex Prud’Homme) with Julie Powell’s (adapted from her book, Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously), and some of the parallels and contrasts give the film added punch. For example, when Julie’s blog posts are followed by Julia and Paul Child’s letters from France to friends and relatives back home in America, the movie makes you consider the differences and similarities between writing for an unknown audience and writing for a well-known audience of one (though the film also includes the revelation that Julia has never met one of her best friends until a key moment in the movie—they’ve only corresponded through the mail).

One of the problems many reviewers have noted in Julie & Julia is that Julia Child’s story is far more interesting than that of her unacknowledged protégée. Her character, with all its enthusiasm and determined unflappability, is also a great deal more appealing than Julie’s self-absorption. While other characters, including Julie herself, confront her narcissism, Julie’s character never seems to change significantly. All the changes in her life are external and culminate in . . . a publishing deal for her blog (which, you know, would be exciting if it happened to us here at CaPC, but it makes for a rather lackluster high point in a film).

In the midst of calls from literary agents, Julie receives a call from a reporter asking her to respond to a quote from Julia Child (then still alive, but almost 90) implying that the blog is disrespectful and that it uses Child for Julie Powell’s fame and publicity. What does Julie take away from this reported comment? “Julia Child hates me.” Not even “Julia Child thinks my writing is bunk,” but “Julia Child hates me.” The response from Julie’s husband is even worse. “The only Julia Child that matters is the Julia Child inside your head,” he tells her. Oh. Good. We’ve just denied Julia Child’s objective reality, rather than actually dealing with the consequences of insulting her.

Later on the same day that I saw Julie & Julia in the theater, I also watched the animated film Sita Sings the Blues on DVD (though the whole film is also available for free online). Like Julie & Julia, Sita Sings the Blues alternates between a contemporary frame story and an older story that is supposed to be its parallel—though in Sita Sings the Blues, the older story is very old indeed: it’s the Ramayana, the ancient Sanskrit epic that tells the tale of Rama and his astonishingly devoted and long-suffering wife Sita. As in Julie & Julia, the contemporary story seems unnecessary to the film and is included here only because it was important to the creator herself. Director/writer/animator Nina Paley splices the story of her own break-up with her husband Dave into the story of Rama and Sita. According to Paley, she read the Ramayana during her divorce: “I was moved by the story and it seemed to speak so much to my life at the time, my problems at the time. It was cathartic to retell the story. . . . It was a very personal project from the beginning. Including the autobiographical bits emphasizes that. I didn’t set out to tell THE Ramayana, only MY Ramayana.”

Now ancient epics have no existence outside our own heads, either.

I’m trying to be careful here, because I don’t want to say that there is a single, objective interpretation of a text. In fact, Paley does an admirable job, in the non-autobiographical portions of the movie, of showing that even within India, there are multiple versions and multiple interpretations of Rama’s and Sita’s tale. In fact, my favorite part of the film (aside from a snippet of a cat demanding its breakfast, which I admit to playing constantly over the past few days) is the chorus of three native Southeast Asians who offer their own sometimes confused, sometimes contradictory takes on the legend. Paley also suggests that the Ramayana need not be limited to its original cultural context by animating sequences with Sita lip-synching to recordings by 1920s American jazz singer Annette Hanshaw. With the Southeast Asian commentators and the Annette Hanshaw recordings, Paley already accomplishes the task of opening up the Ramayana to contemporary audiences of many cultures; adding the story of her own divorce actually has the effect of closing the Ramayana off again, making it into one individual’s therapy.

Indian criticisms of Sita Sings the Blues have come from two main camps: Hindus on the “far right” (Paley’s phrase) who feel it’s sacrilegious to treat Rama’s and Sita’s marriage on the level of an ordinary human marriage, and secular academics, who believe that Paley’s appropriation of the tale to her own (white, American) ends is an act of neocolonialism. Though I enjoyed the film, I have some sympathy with both critiques. Paley’s own response, “An artist’s responsibility is to be true to his/her own vision,” leaves me less than satisfied. Yes, it’s at least partially true, and stories don’t exclusively belong to the culture that originated them (if I believed that, I could hardly be a Christian), but, at the same time, Paley’s mantra too easily abdicates responsibility to the external world.

An artist, or even a blog writer, does have a responsibility to represent the truth as he or she sees it. But the artist also has a responsibility to look, to look long and hard and carefully, at his or her subject matter. To listen. As Alan Jacobs writes in his essay “Shame the Devil,” “The business of the artist is to be attentive.” What I would like to see in these two films is greater attentiveness to Julia Child’s own story (on Powell’s part, that is, more than on Ephron’s) and to the Ramayana—and a greater humility about the artist’s own powers of observation.