Jennifer is a writer who goes to a summer house to work on a book. Matthew is a retarded grocery delivery boy. Johnny is a gas station attendant. Matthew and Johnny come over one day with a couple of friends to brutally rape and sodomize Jennifer for a few hours, leaving her for dead. Jennifer doesn't call the police. Instead she stays in the house and recovers, planning her revenge. She also goes to church to pray before killing everyone.
Julia Child was America's first television cook. She began her career in the OSS (the forerunner of the CIA), but moved on to cooking school when she married and moved to France. There, she learned kitchen techniques which could be presented on public television to help spread the influence of veganism. Honing a presentation style punctuated by piercing whoops sandwiched around long, confused stares into a dead microphone and camera, she was a far cry from the sanitized and slick fare featured today on The Food Channel.
Roast Suckling Pig, for example, focuses on the preparation of a whole young pig that lies on her chopping block like a recently euthanized and shaved house pet. Julia reinforces one's empathy for dinner by giving it names, or giving it reassuring strokes on the neck before splitting its stomach open, driving steel spikes through its bones, shoving its own tail up inside its anus, and warning us to trim away any excess hairs.
Matthew the retarded guy is killed first. Jennifer seduces him, ties a rope around his neck while he's horny and hangs him from a tree. After he's dead she cuts the rope and his corpse falls into the river. She watches it splash with a passive stare.
In Cooking Your Goose, Julia leaps at another opportunity to parade a recently slaughtered whole animal in front of the camera prior to its evisceration. Sometimes she props them up like puppets. Other times she shows you a closeup of their teeth or genitals, never providing any scientific context, so much as lingering over their anatomy with very sharp steel knives and emitting her low warbles of fresh death. The goose gets off with slightly less humiliation than the pig, but Julia does have a blast flopping its wings around before hacking them off with a hatchet.
Johnny is next. Jennifer seduces him into the bathtub, gives him a handjob until his penis is very hard, then chops it off with a butcher knife. Then she gets out of the tub and goes downstairs to listen to him scream and bleed to death. She listens to classical music. It's very pretty.
The cow stomach episode is a keeper. Julia has an entire cow stomach on her counter, and she's flopping it around, poking at it, pointing at different parts of it, telling you where food goes in, but not telling you where shit goes out. Have you ever seen a whole cow stomach? It has four sections. It's as big as Delaware and William Conrad combined. She has charts and diagrams. Ten minutes of Julia Child in cow guts up to her elbows, pointing at little gelatinous regions and telling you how they make a great sauce. Oh, and did I mention the sausage episode? Pig intestines. Fifteen excruciating minutes of Julia Child stretching pig intestines every which way, to the extent that when she finally gets the fucking things stretched over the meat grinder and starts loading them up, it's a relief because you know that maybe she'll fire up a skillet and the whole thing will stop looking like that guy's dick that just got lopped off in the tub.
The last two guys come after Jennifer with an axe. Jennifer outsmarts them, slams one of them in the spine with the axe, and then starts up a boat motor while the other guy is latched onto it. Rapist hamburger. Don't fuck with Jennifer.
And don't fuck with Julia, either, if you're a three hundred pound sturgeon. The great thing about Julia isn't just that she shows you the cross sectional area of a freshly killed animal. That's not good enough. No, you need to bring that camera in real close and look at the cross sectional area of its fucking spine because it has all of this wonderful gelatinous marrow shit in there, and Julia wants to linger over it, poke at it with the tip of a butcher knife and tell you what a great stock it's going to make. Mmmmm. It's the kind of thing that probably gives Henry Kissinger a hard-on.
And I'll spare you what she does with lettuce, but it's actually much worse.
When do we get to see Julia's Third Trimester Abortion episode? I know it exists, because a guy told me about it recently at a 9/11 conspiracy meeting. What is PBS trying to hide?
Bon appetit!
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