Mark Ruffalo as Kenneth Marshall and Toni Colette as Ylfa. | Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
In the new Bong Joon-ho movie, sauce is a metaphor for civilization. That’s also what it is on Earth.
Mickey 17 is a rich exploration of technology and capitalism, raising questions about the innate self versus free will. The Bong Joon-ho movie follows Mickey (Robert Pattinson), a sadsack dummy on the run from loan sharks, who decides to volunteer as an “expendable” — someone who can die and be endlessly “reprinted” anew — on a space mission run by Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo doing his best Trump impression), a failed Earth politician who has vowed to begin his own society on a new planet.
It’s also a movie about sauce. (Spoilers ahead.)
Marshall’s wife Ylfa (Toni Collette), is obsessed with sauce. “Sauce is the true litmus test of civilization,” she tells the ship’s crew, who all have their gray, unidentifiable food rationed to the calorie to save energy on the four-year journey to the planet of Niflheim. In the Marshalls’ quarters, the meals are far more elaborate than in the communal dining halls, the steaks adorned with vibrant sauce and garnishes. And of course, when they land on Niflheim and find a native species, all Ylfa can do is click her manicured nails together and squeal over sauce possibilities to be made with them.
Like much sci-fi, the film is a metaphor about class and race. The Marshalls want to begin a new, “pure” race on Niflheim. They have forbidden sexual intercourse on the ship (too many calories expended), and promise to bring about the orgy to end all orgies once the new society is established, presumably resulting in the birth of this new “pure” population. And yet, in this calorie-restricted ship, Ylfa makes sauce, asking crew members to taste iterations from her pinky finger and smothering her own dinners in the stuff.
A sauce is not a necessary food. A steak or a roast chicken or a pile of vegetables can certainly be served without it, providing protein and carbs enough to survive. Sauce is extra. Sauce is for pleasure alone.
Sauce is also the backbone of French haute cuisine, which in turn is the backbone of the entirety of fine dining. The five French mother sauces codified by chef Auguste Escoffier at the turn of the 20th century formed the foundation of cooking for French royalty and, later, the bourgeoisie. The style of cooking, with its emphasis on complex technique and rich ingredients, went on to become popular in Britain and eventually fizzled through the world as the standard of fine dining. Haute cuisine was different from the kind of cooking that was found in the more casual bistros and brasseries at the time, establishments that served roasts and cassoulets and other simple, unadorned meals to the less moneyed masses. Anyone could serve a steak. What elevated it to fine cuisine was the sauce.
The French are not the only ones to come up with the concept of sauce. There are moles and toums and chimichurris and fish sauces that take as much skill and care as any bechamel. But the codification of French haute cuisine, and its dissemination among British colonizers, all but guaranteed it became the touchpoint for all modern fine dining. If it wasn’t served in multiple courses by trained kitchen staff, and adorned in a sauce, it wasn’t fine dining period.
This has begun to change only very recently. But even though chefs are perhaps more free now to present a Mexican or Senegalese tasting menu, culinary schools still drill the techniques of the mother sauces and stocks, and fine dining still often exists through the lens of French haute cuisine: the flavors of India or China or Cambodia, plated in sequence, draped in sauce.
So of course Ylfa is obsessed with sauce. It is the clearest signifier of everything she and her husband value — the delineation between high and low, the production of pleasure for the select few on the backs of a hierarchical, exploitative system. It’s apt that when the Marshalls invite Mickey to dinner in their chambers, his gooey-looking steak sits in more of a pool of its own juices than a sauce like the Marshalls and another officer, Kai, enjoy. Mickey is expendable. Why waste a good sauce on him?
But the thing about Ylfa’s sauces is they aren’t really sauces, or at least not the one we see her make. A good veloute requires a roux and a meticulously made stock, while a rich mole could require dozens of ingredients. In one scene, Ylfa makes a sauce from one of the planet’s native creatures by merely cutting off its tail, chopping it as it’s still wriggling, and blitzing it in a mini blender. Like most colonizers, she doesn’t care for the skill or craftsmanship required to create the thing she loves. She just blends meat and calls it a sauce, so she can act the part of the educated, refined culinarian without putting in any of the work.
By the looks of the food being served to the scientists and pilots and janitors on the ship, I’m sure they would have loved some bearnaise sauce, something to remind them that life exists beyond the intake and expenditure of calories, and that the dying Earth they left was, at one point, a world in which the flavors of the French bourgeoisie and Mughal emperors and Chinese banquets were available to more than just the rich few. A sauce that would perhaps signal that they could build that world again, maybe even a better version, no human printer required.
