In our consumerist therapeutic culture, if your life has fallen apart and you want to find yourself, heal yourself, indulge yourself, and possibly find God — or whatever is the next best thing — you can take a year off and travel to exotic places, like Italy, India and Indonesia, if you can afford it.
If you can’t afford it, then you may be able to fund the trip with an advance from a publisher on the memoir you will write after your trip. If you’re lucky, Oprah will like your book, and it will spend up to three years on The New York Times best-seller list.
And if you can’t do that either, then you can at least buy the book, watch the Oprah show, and go see the movie. There are lots of books out there to choose from, and some movies too, and no end of Oprah shows, to learn all about what it is that is missing in your life and what you can do about it, or what other people have done about it who have more money than you.
Elizabeth Gilbert is such a person, and her best-selling memoir Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia is such a book. The book — and the movie starring Julia Roberts — suggest a fusion of Julie & Julia and Under the Tuscan Sun, with a dash of Eastern exoticism and pop spirituality. Originally (like Julie & Julia) a yearlong writing project by an introspective, self-absorbed American writer who (as in Under the Tuscan Sun) divorces her husband after an affair (in this case it’s the wife who has the affair; in Tuscan Sun it was the husband), it’s the chronicle of a woman’s journey to discover herself by recording her adventures in food and/or travel.
Clearly, there’s a market for this sort of thing. Gilbert is apparently an engaging writer, and even the vicarious experience of other countries and cultures can be enjoyable. Americans have an abiding affinity for consumerist self-indulgence and for pop spirituality, and a marriage of the two is a winning combination. “God never slams a door in your face,” Gilbert writes, “without opening a box of Girl Scout cookies.” Yep, there’ll be no shortage of people eating that one up. I suspect there may be a lot of people out there who feel as if doors have been slammed in their faces and who find the idea of opening a box of Girl Scout cookies, or even opening a book that talks about Girl Scout cookies, more gratifying than waiting for God to open a window.
In particular, this seems to be truer of women. Recent studies suggest that married women are on average less happy than their husbands, which may have something to do with the recurring theme of divorce and marital unrest in books in this vein. (Julie & Julia seems an exception, but see Julie Powell’s follow-up book, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession, detailing her affair with an old flame.)
For what it’s worth, at least one book of this sort reflects a male point of view: Andy Raskin’s The Ramen King and I: How the Inventor of Instant Noodles Fixed My Love Life. Raskin’s romantic woes were different from his female colleagues, involving too much sex with too many partners to keep track of. Still, I think this supports my impression that the genre is largely about wish fulfillment, only the women writers are catering to different wishes.
Just going by the title, Eat Pray Love sounds like an affordable DIY project that you can undertake without leaving home, even if you won’t be eating bucatini all’Amatriciana in some Roman trattoria or praying in Sanskrit in a Hindu ashram. The title is a little misleading, though.
In a way, it’s the missing commas. The book’s correct title, it seems, is Eat, Pray, Love, although the cover designers omitted the commas, and the movie version is unambiguously titled Eat Pray Love. This makes it sound as if the three verbs are ingredients all mixed together in a life well lived. In fact, each of the title words represents a separate stage in Gilbert’s yearlong journey, one for each of Gilbert’s three destinations — a schematic approach that isn’t clearly spelled out in advance in the movie version.
First come four months in Italy, where repeated shots of St. Peter’s in Rome seem to suggest that praying may be just around the corner. But no, in Italy, it seems Liz is only interested in feeding her body. It isn’t until India that she shows much interest in feeding her soul. In the end comes Bali, where she finds love.
Liz isn’t really trying to learn what these cultures have to offer. She’s like a student auditing classes rather than for credit, having decided in advance which parts of each teachers’ curricula really matter. In Italy, the lesson is to relax and enjoy life: il dolce far niente (the sweetness of doing nothing). Americans, Italians agree, are addicted to doing and achieving; they know entertainment, but not enjoyment. The movie omits the flip side of the coin, acknowledged in the book, that Italian young men tend to be mama’s boys living at home and catered to by their mothers well into adulthood.
In Italy, even in the Eternal City itself, religious reference points are basically limited to those images of St. Peter’s and a shot of a couple of nuns eating gelato. Gelato figured significantly in my recent pilgrimage to Italy, as I mentioned in my own account at my Register blog, but the shots of St. Peter’s only underscore that Liz is in a major pilgrimage destination. Her strange incuriosity regarding Italy’s spiritual heritage is all the odder in light of her spiritual aspirations during her time in India. (The book at least mentions Liz going to Mass at some point; I’m speaking here of the film.) Can you imagine a story about a spiritually curious person spending several months in Israel or Egypt or Tibet and completely ignoring local religious life?
Of course, had Liz explored Western religious tradition, she wouldn’t have found such flattering and fashionable nuggets of wisdom as “God dwells in me as me.” The book version expresses this in a local catchphrase too: the mantra “Ham-sa” (I am That).
The movie, though, prefers the bumper-sticker epigrams of Liz’s Balinese medicine man and Richard Jenkins’ fellow traveler from Texas that Liz meets in India, whom you can tell is profound by how obnoxious he is. (He calls Liz “Groceries,” for starters.) Jenkins’ performance is winning praise, particularly for a powerful emotional scene, although I liked Richard Dreyfuss better in a similar role in a generally more unpleasant film, the Nia Vardalos vehicle My Life in Ruins.
Don’t expect much attention to central Hindu ideas like karma and reincarnation, in any case. Even Eastern religion is all very well up to a point — or, as Liz’s Balinese medicine man puts it, “Not too much God, not too much selfishness.” It’s the Oprahfication of religion; the movie is ultimately no more authentically interested in Hindu or Indian culture generally than it is in Italian culture. Liz’s time in India is spiritual tourism, as her time in Italy was culinary tourism; it’s all a self-help consumerist approach to world cultures.
Roberts is both an asset and a liability — an asset because we can’t help liking her and a liability for the same reason. One of the book’s more winsome qualities is a sense of self-critical frankness that the movie can’t bear to apply to our adorable Julia. This is a problem from the outset, since the movie has no idea why Liz is suddenly so unhappy in her marriage after eight years with her husband. (In the book, Gilbert describes her husband watching her “fall apart for months now, behaving like a madwoman (we both agreed on that word).” Nobody wants to see Roberts behaving like a madwoman, but the down side is that her discontent seems rooted in nothing.
The movie actually makes a stab at blaming God by shifting a scene: In the book, Gilbert’s marriage is already falling apart when she first goes to Bali and meets the medicine man who tells her that she will be married twice, once short, once long. The movie chooses to open with this scene, so it’s like God himself has pronounced the marriage’s death sentence. Attempting another explanation, the 42-year-old Roberts actually utters the line “We were too young to get married.” (Coincidentally, just last week Suz and I celebrated our 19th anniversary. Roberts has a year on me and over a year on Suz.) Okay, Gilbert was a decade younger at the time, but still.
One interesting symptom of marital malaise does come across from the book: Liz doesn’t want to have a baby. “Having a baby,” someone helpfully tells her, “is like getting a tattoo on your face. You want to be really sure you’re committed.” Well, yeah, that’s why we call marriage a commitment. (This actually comes across in the book, which spells out that the couple’s life plan always included offspring.) In our contraceptive culture, of course, the idea of openness to life as an integral dimension of marriage is so foreign it might as well be Sanskrit. Actually, Liz seems more comfortable with Sanskrit. By the end of the film, she has learned to love again, but openness to life seems nowhere on the horizon.
The portrayal of Liz’s husband Steven (Billy Crudup) is worth noting. He contests the divorce (something he could do in New York, which is only now at this writing in the process of passing no-fault divorce laws), and his pleas for their marriage almost border on touching. He declares emphatically that the vows he took till death mean something to him, and when Liz angrily says that he is so full of contrary dreams that he never chose one thing to pursue, he shoots back, “Okay, I’ll choose! I choose you!”
Ultimately, though, Steven is angry and petulant. (At one point, he starts to sing a song he says he wrote for her, but he’s not exactly trying to woo her back.) Obviously, it wouldn’t do for women in the audience to wonder why exactly Liz is leaving him.
Later, there’s a key scene in which Liz imagines herself dancing with her ex-husband on their wedding day, a fantasy sequence that offers her the amicable parting of ways and mutual forgiveness that she couldn’t have in real life. What the moment is really about, of course, is Liz forgiving herself. Forgiving yourself can be a legitimate part of healing, but of course authentic forgiveness requires clear acknowledgement of wrongdoing — and if it’s yourself that you are forgiving, you should be sure that you’re sorry and willing, if possible, to seek the forgiveness of others and make amends. What exactly did Liz do wrong again?
Steven D. Greydanus is editor and chief critic at Decent Films. He also blogs at NCRegister.com.
Content advisory: Sexual themes including extramarital and nonmarital relationships (nothing explicit); brief rear male nudity; some profanity and crass language; muddled religious themes. Mature viewing.
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” In our contraceptive culture, of course, the idea of openness to life as an integral dimension of marriage is so foreign it might as well be Sanskrit. “
Awesome quote !!!
And ‘thank you’ for this review.
Yeah… I read only the first section of this book (on Italy) before going to Rome in April with my husband. I liked her most when she was describing what she was eating and seeing, and least when she was waxing poetic about herself. At one point in the book, though, when talking about her plan (at the beginning) to remain celibate during the year, she says something pretty good: “I resolved never to use another for my own selfish pleasure.” or something of that sort. Of course, when using contraception, that’s exactly what one does, but I suppose even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while.
I have to admit, I never planned on seeing this movie. I still won’t, of course, but I appreciate the review. It sounds like they should have called this one Stuff Your Face (which is far more charitable, I suppose, than Twilight, For Obese, Middle-Aged Women Who Wonder WHy Their Husbands Don’t Pay Any Attention To Them Anymore... but I repeat myself).
I endured the book as a book club section at my library and disagreed with a good portion of the group who thought it lovely. I found it self-centered and lacking in any real depth. I wondered, back then, if perhaps I ‘didn’t get it’ because, with a large family, I eat mostly mac n’ cheese from a box, I pray quite contentedly as a committed Catholic and have loved the same man for over 26 years. We also married ‘too young’ w/ him at 19 and myself at 21.
Reading your review of the movie confirmed that I was ‘right’ about the book. Nice to know. I’ll be sitting this one out - the book was ‘bad’ enough!
So basically Liz is doing the equivalent of sex tourism.
*** Crude language alert ***
Victor and Nick, I read someone allude to the book as Masticate, Meditate, Masturbate. That’s actually pretty accurate, especially if you take the last term as characterizing the generally self-indulgent nature of the whole journey and in particular the self-gratifying sort of “prayer” or meditation in which you conclude that “God dwells in me as me,” etc.
throw/THr?/
Verb: Propel (something) with force through the air by a movement of the arm and hand.
Noun: An act of throwing something:
AS IN “THROW IT OUT THROUGH THE WINDOW”
That M-cubed variation of the title definitely sounds more accurate. I guess what’s a little distressing, as you note, is the sheer number of books and movies of this type (reveling in the pleasures of body and yet so wholly dismissive of what the body really means)... perhaps we should start calling this genre “Gnosh-tic Literature” or something.
Victor: You’re awesome. Rock on.
“God never slams a door in your face,” Gilbert writes, “without opening a box of Girl Scout cookies.”
I don’t get it. Everytime God slams the door in someone’s face, He helps himself to some cookies? ;)
My impression of the movie was different. There were some good messages and profound insights in the movie which I appreciated and was touched by, even though, yes, some errors were mixed in.
Catholics can look at secular movies such as this (and the world in general) in one of two ways: (1) negatively (in the strict sense of the word) by focusing “exclusively” on the errors and thus seeing the whole as being dangerous or defective and thus to be rejected; and (2) positively, by focusing “largely” on the truths and appreciating them and showing how the truths that are in them are encompassed by and lead towards the fullness of truth that the Catholic Church possesses.
Thomas Aquinas was criticized for using the writings of the pagan Aristotle in helping him formulate his own thought and express the same in his magnum opus, “Summa Theologica”. The critics said Aristotle was a pagan and his work was filled with errors, and thus his work should not be used by the theologian. Thomas countered by saying that among those errors were many truths, and those truths can help the Christian more deeply discover and more profoundly appreciate the truth, goodness, and beauty of God and all that He has revealed. That is the lens through which I watch such movies.
Definitely “Twilight” for the spiritually vapid. People are hungry, desperate, for what the Church can give, but terrified of the commitment. So we eat up Oprahfied poisoned pablum. It’s PInocchio’s Pleasure Island all over again, and in the end, we’re all donkeys…
Victor:
“Twilight, For Obese, Middle-Aged Women Who Wonder WHy Their Husbands Don’t Pay Any Attention To Them Anymore” is quite a stupid gibe. The women who have this lifestyle are thin, weathy, trophy wives.
Poor obese women don’t have the cash to stop working and fly off to Italy, India, and Bali for a year! Neither do they collect lovers like designer jeans.
Wade St. Onge, thanks for your thoughtful comments. Your distinction between “positive” and “negative” approaches is helpful, and I agree—in fact it is a key principle in my work as a critic—that it is important to be able to appreciate positive elements even in mixed presentations, especially since we seldom if ever encounter presentations that are so perfectly and purely good that they admit no criticism whatsoever. As I’ve noted before, if we insist on perfection in this life—if we insist on, say, perfect friends, a perfect parish, perfect food and so on—we will die friendless, unchurched and quickly.
However, I would like to propose a third way in addition to your “positive” and “negative” ways, that is the critical way. The critical way evaluates both positive and negative, but does not programmatically emphasize one or the other. Rather, it seeks to arrive at a balanced judgment about the fundamental character of a presentation. It’s true that I can’t insist on prefect friends, a perfect parish or perfect food—but it’s also true that some friends, some parishes and some food will do you more harm than good. We can’t insist on perfection—but we should insist on wholesomeness. Just as it is unhelpful to reject any presentation for the slightest objectionable elements, regardless how much good they offer (the “negative” way), so it is unhealthy to look for the silver lining in every cloud, regardless how much darkness there is (the “positive” way).
Sometimes it is worth, as it were, cutting off a bit of inedible gristle from an otherwise delicious steak. Other times, paring away all the fat and burnt and so forth for one or two bites of edible steak just isn’t worth it. Some things should be shunned even if there is some good in them, because the good is outweighed by the bad. Judging between the two is the critical way, the way of discernment. In my critical judgment, Eat Pray Love falls into the latter category.
Steven, I agree with what you say about “the third way”. However, with the “third way”, one can still lean toward one or the other - the positive or the negative. I would say that if this was a “spectrum”, few would find themselves at dead center (ie. the purely “critical” way).
I also agree with what you say about the dangers of such movies, and for a secular audience, it certainly has some things that may very well mislead people who are searching or confirm them in errors that they might already hold (a lot of gristle). I think that is the perspective from which you as a Catholic movie critic wrote. However, for us Catholics who know how to sift truth from error, the movie has some beautiful things we can take from it. That is the perspective from which I as an individual Catholic viewer wrote.
But I would also submit my opinion that a critical review that leans more toward the “positive” would be more likely to attract those who are searching to appreciate our perspectives and opinions and such people would be much more likely to open up to the fullness of truth we propose and offer and point towards more than a more “negative” review would.
I saw the title and a trailer. I knew it would not be worth watching.
Wade, I don’t think “critical” means coming down dead center on every movie—far from it! By “critical” I mean being willing to go “positive” or “negative” based on an evaluation of the movie’s total pluses and minuses and drawing responsible conclusions about whether a movie meets a threshold of more or less “good for you” (positive) or not (negative).
I’m not saying that people can’t get something good from a movie like Eat Pray Love—far from it. People can find good things almost anywhere. I know people who have found good things in The Last Temptation of Christ and The Da Vinci Code. You could go to a church where a pastor preaches a thoroughly heretical homily and still find something good in it. If you are on the road and pick such a church at random, maybe looking for the silver lining is the best you can do. But no one would choose to live that way week in and week out if he had any other choice. And I think most Catholics will not want to go to a movie like Eat Pray Love for the bits of gold and silver that might be gleaned from so much dross and dung.
My experience over a decade of writing film criticism suggests a different conclusion regarding what is likely to attract other people to our opinions and perspectives. One of my early goals in developing Decent Films was to write commentary on films like The Last Temptation of Christ and The Da Vinci Code that would make orthodox Catholic objections to these films intelligible to outsiders inclined to dismisse objections to these films as fundamentalist fulminating. Over the years I’ve gotten any number of gratifying responses from sympathetic atheists and agnostics who’ve written things like “I never understood what all the furor over Last Temptation was about, but after reading your essay I understand your point of view.” I think I’m doing a service there that I couldn’t do any other way, certainly not by capitulating and trying to go “positive” on Last Temptation and only praise the things that could be praised. (Not that I’m not willing to praise where praise is possible, even in an otherwise contemptible work.)
So you see, I’m writing as an orthodox Catholic, not just for either sort of reader (Catholics or non-Catholics), but for both. It’s the only way I know how to do what I do, and I hope readers find it helpful. If they do, they’re welcome to come back; if not, they’re free to go elsewhere. My work is here for whomever finds it helpful.
Steven, thanks for the response and for the background information on “Decent Films” - which helped me understand your perspective better and appreciate this particular review and by extension other such reviews better. It is a perspective that is obviously needed in this particular milieu, as your examples show.
I think we will have to agree to disagree - I went “positive” on this one, although of course I may be wrong.
What I find amusing about this movie is that not even hardcore feminists like it (granted, they dislike it for different reasons than you do, but it’s still pretty funny). I was never a fan of this sort of movie, anyway. I mean, how many times do we have to watch some random woman go through a mid-life crisis and “fix” it through some journey of self-discovery? And why do people find this “me me me” thing “inspiring”? Sam carrying Frodo up Mount Doom is inspiring. This is not inspiring. It’s just downright stupid.
Wade, I’m happy to agree to disagree; I wouldn’t even necessarily say it’s a matter of one of us being “wrong.” Like I wrote not long ago to another correspondent who disagreed with me, perhaps we were both paying attention, but to different things.
Not always, but often I suspect it’s less helpful to think of conflicting responses to a creative presentation as “right” or “wrong” than as more or less persuasive or illuminating to other audience members (or to a majority of audience members), and more importantly as more or less comprehensive and helpful in accounting for the larger significance of a work in its cultural context. I recently avowed my loathing of Babe: Pig in the City, and went so far as to say that the people who liked it were “crashingly wrong.” That was a tongue-in-cheek oversimplification. It would be more accurate to say I think their take is tragically limited. :)
Screech: Did you mean to single out films about the midlife crises of “some random woman”? Are movies like Sideways or American Beauty different if they’re about men? Even The Incredibles is about a man going through a midlife crisis. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the subject matter (in relation to either sex). Like Ebert says, a movie is not about what it is about, but how it is about it.
Actually, “The Catholic Guy” does it better! I love listening to Lino Rulli (on Sirius/XM Radio), and his trips with the show to The Vatican City are wonderful. They do “EAT PRAY LOVE” much better and in a different, real, dimension.
And you get “eating” and the many different places the crews goes for chow; prayer, of course, it’s St. Peter’s and all the other churches and sites, with hefting dose of faith formation free. And there is “Love” alas, not romantic love for Lino, but definitely “love” of a close group of friends, and of God’s love for us.
Her book is the perfect description of the “ME” society we live in.
No debth, just shallow, shallow, shallow thinking.
Reading reviews of it and the movies gave me the cue to avoid both.
@Mr. Greydanus: Valid point. I mostly singled out the ones about the female midlife crisis because there seem to be more of them, and from what I’ve seen, all of them are so generic. If the subject matter was handled well, or if the women actually DID something rather than just run around the world on a journey of self-indulgence, then I wouldn’t mind the movie so much. But as far as I can tell, the genre itself doesn’t have much to offer.
@Kathleen (“The women who have this lifestyle are thin, weathy, trophy wives. Poor obese women don’t have the cash to stop working and fly off to Italy, India, and Bali for a year! Neither do they collect lovers like designer jeans.”):
True enough, which is why the obese, middle-aged women have to live that lifestyle vicariously, via bookclubs, movies, and whatever their daughters are into (“Zac Efron / Robert Pattenson / Justin Bieber is so CUTE! / HAWT! / EERILY DOLL-LIKE!”). But I will grant you that my jibe was undeniably a stupid one.
Whoa. The consumerist spirituality push is more far-reaching than I thought.
Well, at least one good thing has come out of Eat Pray Love: one of my best friends, an Anglican priest, got an entire homily out of how awful and self-centered it is. Thanks for giving her some fodder, Elizabeth Gilbert!
Wow. All this time I thought Eat, Pray, Love was about the Catholic Mass!
This whole article reads like a high school drama queen diary.
How dare Gilbert choose to live her life differently then how Catholics demand? How dare she go to Rome and not seek out the Vatican? How dare she embrace a spirituality that’s not mine?
@Andy
She lives exactly as millions do, or want to—a life of shallow, indulgent pseudo-enlightenment, seeking only what will support her no-commitment lifestyle. What is ‘living different’ about that?
The movie makes a point of showing St. Peter’s several times. In the book she went to Mass at least once. Maybe the movie makers were afraid, that actually showing the inside, or some real worship, would be attractive, and upstage the shallow ‘time to gnosh on a little bit of India’ that comes later. You can’t be too careful about what you show people, they might start wondering, maybe even thinking.
She didn’t embrace any spirituality. She played dress up. Real Hindu and Buddhist spirituality are as demanding as real Catholic spirituality. Real masters have seen scores of her type of Western wannbe’s for every real searcher for truth. That’s why she listened to her Balinese master—because he told her not what she needed, but what she WANTED to hear.
It’s always interesting to see how people choose to take things. I’m aware of nothing in my essay, Andy, corresponding to the indignant “How dare she…?” tone you ascribe to me ... dancingcrane’s comments in that regard are pretty much on the money ... and you may have noticed that I specifically compared Gilbert’s puzzling apathy to Rome’s religious heritage to someone displaying similar apathy in religio-cultural contexts NOT my own (Egypt, Tibet). So I don’t think I’m speaking particularly as a slighted Catholic, there. But you’re welcome to your reading. Cheers.
Thanks, Steven, I really loved your blog post. I once studied Eastern faiths with the intensity of the starving. When I embraced Catholicism (not without stiff resistance first), I thought at first God would want me to put all the past aside. He didn’t. He wanted me to use it. I can respond to this issue of “other spiritualities” because I know what the real thing looks like—and feels like—from the inside. I’m tired of the “Gnosh-ticism” (thank you, victor!) that permeates our culture, but I love any story of a real searcher for God (Ben KIngley’s ‘Gandhi’ comes to mind), even if they don’t end up where I did. I figure (hope, pray) that when they and we die, we’ll all find the one Truth we always sought, and embrace it then.
To be clear, I agree that the story is about “a life of shallow, indulgent pseudo-enlightenment, seeking only what will support her no-commitment lifestyle.”
But when I hear Catholics complaining about it, I hear the pot calling the kettle black.
Thanks for your follow-up comments, Andy. It’s interesting that we seem to agree on the film. I’m not sure how to take your other comments, other than to say that (a) as a critic I naturally think there’s a difference between criticizing and “complaining,” and (b) I’m hardly criticizing in a non-Catholic context something I would give a pass to in a Catholic context. If anything, I would go after a Catholic-flavored Eat Pray Love ten times harder than a Hindu-flavored one. So, I’m not really sure just what pot you’re tarring with what sort of black.
Hello! I found this article whilst searching for “Oprafication.” I wanted to find words to express what I have often felt in others (and sometimes even myself) as the desire to be spiritual—-but with a disregard of the discipline that most religions require, which is exactly how I see the Oprah machine and that Eat, Pray, Love movement, which has seemingly become a joke in itself (saw a sitcom the other night in which a very shallow character joked, “Oh I’m doin’ the Eat Pray Love thing ya’ know..” So thanks for the essay, it’s exactly what I was looking for..and the comments too, interesting! BTW, I am a Muslim—American woman and I find that in our Islamic communities (which differ in race, ethnicity, sect, etc) there is a growing trend: as Islamaphobia rises, so increases a shallowness in belief and religious practice, sad huh? I think so. Peace.
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