Local scenes that slowly blossom new forms of music, films, food, art, etc., that then slowly spread across the nation, for all intents and purposes, are dead. Gin joints and art galleries that fostered the birth of culture-shifting art movements see their inevitable death because of the growth of gentrification. Katz’s Delicatessen, the famed restaurant where Meg Ryan faked an orgasm in When Harry Met Sally… may still be around, but you can’t really “have what she’s having” anymore. It simply wouldn’t feel the same; the area around it hardly resembles 1989 New York City. Urban culture is determined by a sense of place and location, born from and reacting to the nail salons, barbershops, subway stops, nightclubs, scummy dive bars, concert halls cataloguing years upon years of the groundbreaking musical acts that performed there over decades, rising buildings ranging from the neighborhood apartment block to the skyscrapers that invite awe from half the world over. Many are still there, to be sure, but it’s almost every day now that we hear about some historic mainstay of our hometown getting destroyed to make way for a new high-rise apartment. In replacement of this loss is the internet as a tool for sharing and building upon artistic progress. While social media and online content creation is often more focused around the person making it, the vast reach of the internet brings new perspectives and innovations to a wider audience more quickly than ever before.
NYC suffered the most from gentrification due to its iconic status in America; its 8 million-plus population also makes it ripe for business and profit. For better or worse, beginning in the late 80s and continuing into today, the city government cleaned up NYC, reshaping its image from urban degeneration and crime to safe, on-the-rails tourist experience. People have pejoratively named this shift “Disneyfication” for its theme-park-esque city planning, exemplified best in the overwhelming bombardment of neon signs, digital billboards, and big chain stores crowding up Times Square. This change has happened across the country, and even the entire world, as fast food chains like McDonalds and Starbucks appear on every corner from Paris to Beijing. Historic coffee shops and pizza places that once defined NYC have increasingly less space to survive; forget about trying to open a new small business across the way from Dave & Busters. It’s a change that’s left many New Yorkers feeling culturally uncentered, adrift in a city built more for visitors than for sustaining and building interesting art and culture.
Nora Ephron was always concerned with how a place informed the lives of the people living in it. So much of When Harry Met Sally… is defined by the fallen orange and brown autumnal leaves on the corners of NYC streets, the feeling of New Year’s at a friend’s apartment, the sandwiches that are good enough to make you orgasm. Sleepless in Seattle, likewise, differentiates between NYC and Baltimore by drawing attention to their respective city skylines, demonstrating that architecture is another integral part of city life. Long-distance communications over space and time and how they shape personal relationships are also one of her fascinations; Ephron characters often find themselves connecting more with people from outside their own cultural bubble. Sleepless and You’ve Got Mail both depict romance blooming across radio and email, respectively. These early examples of relationships forged not by face-to-face contact, but messages from thousands of miles apart, were incredibly predictive of how the internet is used today to connect with others. Mail is also quite notable for its cynical attitude toward the oncoming gentrification of NYC, with the little Shop Around the Corner bookstore put out of business by the Barnes & Noble-esque mega-bookstore. A little bit of culture is lost, and Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan), the Shop Around the Corner’s owner, is resigned to life as a housewife.
Julie & Julia is the ultimate synthesis of Ephron’s ideas on personal destabilization due to loss of cultural space and the evolution of relationships in the modern era. Taking place in a decidedly post-9/11 landscape, the film openly tackles a rapidly changing NYC through its protagonist’s position: Julie Powell (Amy Adams) works for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation’s call center. It’s a job that often leads to open confrontation with gentrification, as well; Julie’s first calls are from New Yorkers dissatisfied with the company’s plans to replace the Twin Towers. At lunch, one of Julie’s friends lays out her plans to tear down buildings at Midtown and replace them with high-rise apartments with little care for the impact it may have on the city, demonstrating how impersonal profit-chasing leads to cultural destabilization. The scenes in the office and the lunch scene are also integral for communicating how Julie feels adrift in a New York that is losing its identity. Her personal coping with the loss of the Twin Towers is captured in a swooping crane shot that shows her first glancing at the site in a kind of mourning, then shrugging it off and walking past as if nothing were wrong. Her friends are cold and exploitative both of her and the city, prioritizing transactional relationships over emotional ones and ignoring her when she cannot offer them anything. To make matters worse, the new apartment she has moved into is less than glamorous, its dinky, damp halls caught in still camera shots that leave little space for her and her husband to breathe. Life has stagnated in the city, both spatially and culturally, with the dumpy block they live offering little to no excitement.
Julia Child (Meryl Streep) and the art of cooking anchor Powell in an untouched cultural space. Child, unlike Powell, lived for a long stretch of time in a France untouched by outside forces or business, their post-war priorities focused on preserving the French cooking, architecture, and art that was nearly lost to them. The difference between modern day NYC and 1950s Paris is communicated quite clearly: Ephron paints Paris as a gorgeous wonderland resplendent with light beiges, browns, and reds, depicting Child’s exploration of her new apartment with a swooping tracking shot, moving past the various windows and doors that create access to a number of delightful cultural spaces. Her past exists untainted by our current post-modernity. The food she makes also cannot be contaminated by our sensibilities, either; after all, the point of making beef bourguignon is to replicate the exact recipe to achieve a specific flavor. Powell’s mission isn’t just to cook, it’s to evoke the image of Child’s Paris in her mind to escape current NYC.
The oncoming emergence of the internet in everyday life allows Julie to transcend the cultural-spatial barriers and establish a relationship between both her and Child and her and others like her. One of the most predictive aspects of this film comes when Powell’s blog finally gets a solid following. People with a very specific interest congregating around one person’s thoughts on the shared interest has only become more commonplace with the emergence of social media and other websites. Powell’s confidence rises and she becomes sure of herself as an author as she realizes that there are others out there who feel displaced and are looking for an online space to share their interests. By running the food blog, Powell also exposes people who are unfamiliar with Child to her cooking in a relatable manner; much of the film focuses on her frustration with preparing every dish. Mastering the Art of French Cooking was itself a way of making French cooking accessible to Americans, so Powell, almost unknowingly, repeats the process by reinterpreting these recipes through a post-modern lens. In many ways, Child set the precedent for spreading culture through mass communications, first through her cookbook, and then through her TV show, The French Chef. She pioneered focusing on the personal relationship between the cook and their food, the appeal of the show coming from how straightforward and jolly she seemed, the strange sing-song quality of her voice. There seemed to be little falsehood in the way she presented herself; she would often make mistakes while cooking and admit them. Like Child, Powell is imperfect. But now we’re not just watching Child prepare an aspic, instead reading every micro-detail of how this dish relates to her real-life trials.
Julie & Julia toes a thin line between equivocating its protagonists’ respective experiences and contrasting them. By cross-cutting between Child’s struggles to be recognized as a female culinary expert during a time of oppression and Powell’s trials and errors to navigate a world where, despite double standards and misogyny being prevalent, women now can be empowered, the film risks implying that the two women are going through similar experiences. The way it gets around that issue is by presenting Powell’s fascination of Child as a parasocial relationship. She dresses up as Child, mouths along to the show, and even says that she feels like she’s speaking to Child whenever she cooks. Child is fetishized and turned into a part of Powell’s identity. A key scene comes when Powell and her husband watch the SNL parody of The French Chef, where Child’s gregarious personality is taken to its most extreme, past the person we know that she actually is in the 1950s scenes. Ephron could have just made a movie about Powell but chose to include a depiction of Child’s life in order to remind us that she was a person, not the idealized version we and Powell have of her from television. Her only real “interactions” with Child are through reading her words and watching her cooking show, which both distill Child’s personality into its most palatable aspects for mass audiences. Her delusion reaches its peak at the end, where she chooses to ignore the real Child’s disdain for her and instead only accept the idea of Child in her head as the only one that matters. Ultimately, Powell may have found some stabilization, but she will never truly innovate the art of food; she’s too obsessed with faithfully recreating Child’s recipes to get closer to her.
Food blogging may be dead, but everything else Ephron predicted in Julie & Julia has only become more pervasive since 2009. Social media killed the food blog (and blogs in general) because people could express their thoughts in a short, uncontrived, less filtered manner than ever before. Scroll down your Facebook timeline right now; how many posts do you see about a meal someone proudly pulled off at home? Likewise, on Instagram, there’s a plethora of photos of aesthetically appealing dishes shown off to make their devourers look more cultured. It stems from the Powell line of thinking about our relationship to food, where it’s more about the person than the actual craft. Has this “ruined” food culture? No, absolutely not, for two primary reasons. The first is that social media, despite putting personality first, exposes more people than ever to things they would never seek out themselves through their friends. As stated above, Powell’s reasons for running the blog might have been self-serving, but the reason she gained notoriety was because she presented Child’s cooking in a way accessible to a modern audience. The second is the return of the food show on streaming services, especially Netflix. In their attempts to drive up subscriptions, they’ve begun cornering the marketing on producing content that other networks have stopped making. Food shows in general were victim to their daytime television show spectacle throughout the 00s, placing far too much importance on the image of the host over the food. Each one became larger-than-life celebrities without the intimacy of a well-worn home kitchen or the modest nature of a Child. Netflix shows like Chef’s Table, Salt Fat Acid Heat, Somebody Feed Phil, and Ugly Delicious still focus on engaging personalities, but are more about their explorations of other culture’s cuisines and finding personal meaning in preparing their dishes. Their passion for food leaps off the screen like Julia Child’s did, even if they are produced by Netflix only to cynically fill a niche. The physical world may become a homogenous soup of the same five restaurants on every corner, but as Nora Ephron so wisely puts forth in this film, we’ll continue to find others who offer a new perspective on food (as long as we keep our heads out of our butts).
