Nor is this very mysterious, since such moments of sudden illumination are at the same time moments when we are beside ourselves, and while our waking, habitual, everyday self is involved actively or passively in what is happening, our deeper self rests in another place and is touched by the shock, as is the little heap of magnesium powder by the flame of the match. It is to this immolation of our deepest self in shock that our memory owes its most indelible images. —Walter Benjamin, “A Berlin Chronicle” (1970)1

At the beginning of the cemetery sequence which concludes Jon Avnet’s cinematic version of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (1991), Evelyn Couch drives to Whistle Stop to look for her elderly friend, Ninny Threadgoode, who left the nursing home earlier to return to Whistle Stop, unaware that her house has been condemned and torn down. Evelyn finds Ninny sitting, disheartened, on her suitcase near where her home once was. A conversation between the two follows. Evelyn insists that Ninny should move in to live with her husband and her. Ninny accepts the offer after some hesitation, and then begins to divulge the until then undisclosed details of the story of the Threadgoode family, which she has been telling her younger friend whenever they met at the nursing home. A final flashback reveals who really killed Frank Bennett, the abusive husband who came to Whistle Stop to claim his child from his wife, Ruth Jamison, who had left him while pregnant. At the end of the flashback, the two women are sitting in front of the chapel. They stand up and begin to walk back. Ninny directs Evelyn’s attention to the cemetery, where Evelyn finds a note and a jar of honey at Ruth’s grave. The note is signed by Idgie Threadgoode, Ruth’s best friend and the unconventional, independent woman in Ninny’s story whose example has had a transforming and liberating effect on Evelyn and has helped her find meaning in life. Never suspecting that Idgie is still alive, Evelyn is delighted and leaves the cemetery and the town feeling joyous and thankful. In many ways this is a remarkable sequence worthy of detailed analysis. Most importantly for the present purpose, the sequence, as visual and diegetic summation of the preceding narrative, presents a cogent articulation of the fundamental nature of mimesis, a careful consideration of which may prove to be invaluable in dealing with issues related to memory, tradition and subjectivity. Here let us begin with Evelyn’s identification with Idgie. At first glance, this seems to be a simple case of mimesis as the imitation of role models, the cultural significance of which has traditionally been conceived along lines established by the third book of Plato’s Republic.2 But even such an obvious reading is troubled by complications. Evelyn’s case is presented in the film as an instance of “good” imitation bringing happiness to Evelyn, but such affirmation is immediately countered with ambiguities and un-Platonic overtones. By age, gender, or profession, Evelyn can never be considered as among the future “warriors” for whom Plato developed his educational scheme.3 And Idgie hardly counts as an epitome of the collective values of the time or a good model for role emulation: She charms bees, plays poker with men, appears to have “a crush on Ruth” even in the toned-down cinematic adaptation,4 wants to have nothing to do with the church except when poking fun at Reverend Scroggins, the local preacher, and is in general engaged in forms of irreverent behavior. In fact, under the influence of her example Evelyn becomes rebellious to her husband, imagines herself to be “TOWANDA, THE AVENGER” who rights all wrongs,5 and, when two teenage girls jeer at her after forcing themselves into the parking space she has been waiting for, she wrecks their convertible by repeatedly driving into it. Imitation does bring about happiness, but the uplifting effects are shown to be associated what underlies the traditional distrust of musical mimesis, the ambivalent “enjoyment beyond the signifier” which psychoanalysts refer to as the “feminine jouissance” and theorize as the enigmatic voice which “undermines any certainty and any establishment of a firm sense.”6 Nor is Evelyn’s case to be read, contrarily, as a simple example of the modernist, profoundly anti-Platonic “counter-tradition of mimesis” which conceives mimesis as “the arbitrary, natural movement of being or dionysian play.”7 It is true that, in form at least, the transgression of moral code in Ninny’s story is not limited to behavioral irregularities but points to profounder dimensions: Idgie is responsible for having the body of Frank Bennett barbecued, and, when she is charged with the murder, Reverend Scroggins comes forward and lies in court to provide an alibi for her. These are serious instances of non-conformity bearing on the fundamental groundings of ethics, legitimacy, and resistance. But the narrative manages to dissolve the more disturbing, hence “real,” elements of the action by portraying them as ways to survive an unjust world; Idgie, for example, refuses to take the local sheriff’s suggestion and run away from the trial, on the ground that a white woman would stand a much better chance in court than Big George, the black man who would have certainly had to take the blame for his mother who killed Frank to prevent the latter from taking Ruth’s baby. What is accentuated, therefore, is not any “dionysian” release of repressed forces but friendship, compassion and harmony, values undoubtedly and paradoxically positioned in the proximity of the ideals of both Plato and mainstream American society. In fact, the adaptation has been judged to have turned a lesbian story into “a parable of platonic devotion” and has been faulted for its “hackneyed” message.8 Nor is the original novel less ambiguous: in an episode not included in the film, Evelyn goes into a black church in Birmingham and, hearing the sermon, she feels spiritually transformed, so that “the heavy burden of resentment and hate released itself into thin air, taking Towanda along with them.”9 There are a variety of possible ways to explain this hesitation between conformity and deviance, this mixing of community and its subversion, this sojourn in a liminal space where emulation and play come together; not the least plausible of these is to appeal to theories of female spectatorship to explain the return of moral order and collective normativity as one more instance of the difficult situation and inevitable “confounding of desire” involved when women are represented, as Evelyn and Ninny the storyteller surely are, in the position of the masculine gaze, because such a position contradicts the precept that men’s place is in action, adventure, narrative movement, whereas women must be associated with space, matter, the image, “a-subjectivity.”10 For the present purpose, however, this particular formulation of feminist film theory will not be followed. Rather, I will take up Adorno’s thesis that there is profound ambiguity in the very nature of artistic mimesis. If, as Gertrud Koch argues, film is “a medium which offers the asethetic [sic] possibility to objectify modes of experience pertaining to the time before the ‘ego is crystallized into a definite shape,’”11 then the liminality of the cemetery sequence of Fried Green Tomatoes points precisely to the temporalizing and temporalized nature of what Walter Benjamin calls the “mimetic faculty” of the human species and Koch associates with the experientail foundation of film as a medium: to set up a semblance of reality on the cinematic screen is no mere one-dimensional exercise in the imaginary resolution of whatever contradiction may have taken shape in the depths of the psyche of a society, but is inevitably troubled by ghostly echoes from the past, forces derived ultimately from the formative period of the subject, “the margins where nature and society collide”:12 Even if such imaginary resolution could be said to involve the retrieval of “repressed” elements, the result of such retrieval would not be the finding of peace in the authenticities of one’s being, but, on the contrary, the renewal of the primordial sense of chaos and alterity. Out of such a shake-up of reality, according to Koch’s reading of Benjamin, we are to forge new ways to deal with temporality and make some sense out of the subject’s gendered alienation from nature and from the objective world: If film attaches itself to such early layers of experience, then the issue of identification with characters in fixed sexual roles has to be reconsidered. For the spectator’s pleasure can no longer be exclusively defined as that of the voyeur—whose look after all is intentional and directed—but would be complemented by that of the infant before language, propped in the mother’s arms, who lets the world pass by, a world of which he or she is a part anyway.13 Fried Green Tomatoes, of course, is very much a story about aging and the passing on of wisdom. The temporalizing of experience and the opening up to liminal apparitions from other points of time is, therefore, a vital part of its meaning. In a number of ways, the cemetery sequence stages this spectral liminality, correlating it with the mimetic nature of film as a medium and hightlighting it as a driving force behind the thematics of the narrative. For there is no coherence in a narrative, filmic or otherwise, without continuity, and what would constitute continuity if not the spectral liminatlity which would open up each isolated instant, allowing it to take leave of narcissistic complacency and enter interdependence with any number of preceding, following, or unrelated instants, forming what Erich Auerbach, using the older vocabulary of “figural interpretation,” unabashedly described as “oneness within the divine plan” and what Benjamin, no less mystically, would call a “constellation”?14 When Evelyn enters Whistle Stop, not as a passerby but with an aim and an openness to change, she crosses the borders between young and old, present and past, self and other, normalcy and deviance. When she becomes acquainteed with the cemetery, she literalizes her status as a latter-day inhabitant of the ghost town, rejoyced to know that Idgie lives not only in the story but in the present world, but no less cognizant of the fact that the world of the town belongs to the past, already fragmented into aged historical objects accessible to her only through narrative mimesis and personal emulation. In this strange mode of apprenhension, the ghostly place becomes more of a home to Evelyn than her real home. Distance and proximity not so much penetrate or intervene in each other but are intertextualized, mutually pregnant, within an imaginary continuum. In the cemetery sequence, this complex temporality is mimetically represented by visual echoes from earlier parts of the film. In fact, the shots representing Evelyn driving toward Ninny recall the very opening of the film when Evelyn and her husband pull up at the abandoned Cafe to use the public phone outside it. Other echoes include visual flashbacks connecting the chapel, the cemetery, the houses, the railroad, the placing of a jar of honey at a grave, and of course the haunting facade of the cafe, with earlier, more prosperous, versions of the same. A general pattern of wide camera panning following Evelyn and Ninny into and then out of the heart of the town tops earlier instances of 180 degree panning shots used on the same location. These echoes are not to be read as facile instances of repetition. The very contrast between a bustling town and its ghostly remnant precludes reading such repetitions as formalistic, “structural” elements, mere “self-contained fragments” which, for Adorno, reveal the degradation of nineteenth-century music from process into hierarchy.15 Paradoxically, a grand narrative becomes “grand” only when it evacuates temporality and allows its separate moments to be locked into “self-contained” positions of a synchronic structure, thereby losing touch with the continuity which alone would enable narrative othering. But this is not the case with repetitions of the cemetery sequence of Fried Green Tomatoes. Although such repetitions are expressed in visual representation, the very contrast between prosperity and decay endows them with a rich dimension of “nonsensuous similarity,” and the coincidence of such contrast with counteracting imaginary identification heightens them into “opaque” resemblances “gazing at us from across the depths of memory,” calling for interpretation as if truth is hidden in them and must be excavated.16 In this context, even the straightforwardly “proairetic” resolution of the puzzle of how Frank was really killed challenges the viewer by partially foregoing what Lacanians would call the protective screen of variation and resorting, at the beginning of Ninny’s final installment of this part of the story, to the outright replay of some earlier shots. In Benjamin and Adorno’s aesthetic theory, the enigmatic quality of such mimetic gaze instances the condition of art in modern oppressed society. The point of the object gazing in return is to challenge the viewer to transcend, through mimetic similarities, the meaningless fragments of experience and enter another dimension, the dimension of otherness where, without the fragments being made whole, differences becomes “functional” rather than “insignificant.”17 On this account, artistic mimesis, continuing ancient magic and ritual,18 provides the link enabling the subject to assimilate itself to the other, to behold an “objectivity which lies beyond conceptual frameworks,” where it would become possible to engage in “a pre-linguistic, non-repressive appropriation and transformation of nature”19 and to achieve a degree of autonomy amid distortions of petrified consciousness. Such mimesis points to the existence of “an indeterminate cluster of associations from the depths” which attracts the subject with an auratic gaze but is at the same time perceived as dangerously captivating,20 always capable of regressing to the “barbarian literalness” of mere imitation.21 Ultimately, the cemetery sequence of Fried Green Tomatoes has to be read as itself a reflexive allegory about such mimesis. All the visual echoes of the sequence converge in pointing to the link between Evelyn’s final encounter with the heart of the town itself (the cemetery) and the general “gaze” of the narrative: the inescapable coexistence of separation from and connection with the past. The past, of course, cannot be revived, and Ninny must leave the deserted town to live with her younger friend. In Ninny’s final words: After Ruth died and the railroad stopped running, the cafe shut down, and everybody just scattered to the wind. It was never more than just a knockabout place, but now that I looked back on it, when that cafe closed, the heart of the town just stopped beating. It’s funny how a little place like this brought so many people together. But separation is accompanied by connection. That is the enigmatic doubleness of time: for Ninny as for Evelyn, “all these people will live as long as you remember them.” It is in the cemetery sequence that these “morals” are given; at the same time, the sequence not only resolves the narrative suspense about the killing of Frank and visually harks back to earlier details, but is itself a realistic evocation of the ghostly presence of the past, a homage to the physical integrity of the place that “brought so many people together.” Here we have a glimpse of the profound implications inhering in the Benjaminian concept of mimesis: if language is the “most complete archive of nonsensuous similarity,”22 then mimetic textuality consists precisely in the reconstitution of memory into something more than the particularity of place could embrace. An “archive” is not necessarily a non-functional, synchronic structure; its formation involves primarily the splitting of each cultural object into two separate moments: existence as a dead “fragment” in the scattering of time, and existence in the togetherness of the virtual real of history, awaiting to reenter the present when the archive is browsed. Is not Evelyn’s encounter with the cemetery of the town, where she finds the reason and “moral” of the whole story, not only an instance of nonsensuous communication between different times and places but, through the respectful interaction and identification with the generation she will become, one of what Adorno calls the “nonconceptual affinity of a subjective creation with its objective and unposited other”?23 The conflicting possibilities of such mimesis, such self becoming other, is indicated by Benjamin’s comments on Proust: To observe the interaction of aging and remembering means to penetrate to the heart of Proust’s world, to the universe of convolution. It is the world in a state of resemblances, the domain of the correspondences . . . This is the work of the mémoire involontaire, the rejuvenating force which is a match for the inexorable process of aging.24 The point of the town and the characters from Idgie’s world being either dead or dying is, therefore, not the “sensuous” and “conceptual” recognition of fateful aging and scattering as shared by all, but something in between the sensuous recollection of past events and the conceptual understanding of the common ground of experience: the “rejuvenating force” arising out of the subjective coming to terms with physical time. Benjamin defines that force as a transcending of finitude: “For an experienced event is finite—at any rate, confined to one sphere of experience; a remembered event is infinite, because it is only a key to everything that happened before it and after it.”25

Notes 1 In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 36f. 2 See Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf, Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society (1992), trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 33f. 3 The designated receivers of Platonic education are “men who are destined to be warriors”; see Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds., The Collected Dialogues of Plato (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 631. 4 Roger Ebert, Review of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Chicago Sun-Times 10 Jan. 1992, <http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_ reviews/1992/01/735400.html> (13 Feb. 1997). The film is listed as of the lesbian type in PQ Video’s online database of queer movies; see<http://www.planetout.com/ pno/popcornq/db/getfilm.html?1898> (Oct. 6, 1997). 5 Fannie Flagg, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (London: Random House, 1987), 238. 6 Mladen Dolar, “The Object Voice,” in Renata Salecl and Slavoj Zizek, eds., Gaze and Voice as Love Objects (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 22f. 7 Mihai Spariosu, Editor’s Introduction, in Mihai Spariosu, ed., Mimesis in Contemporary Theory: An Interdisciplinary Approach, vol. 1: The Literary and Philosophical Debate (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1984), xxi. According to Spariosu, there are two “sub-traditions” within this “counter-tradition.” Both return to the pre-Platonic meaning of mimesis as play, but one views art or literature as “an epistemological model for other modes of discourse,” and the other views it as “dionysian play.” See also Martin Jay, “Mimesis and Mimetology: Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe,” in Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart, eds., The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 29-53. 8 Rita Kempley, Review of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Washington Post 10 Jan. 1992, <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/ longterm/movies/videos/friedgreentomatoespg13kempley_a0a28a.htm> (13 Feb. 1997); Frank Maloney, Review of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, 1992, <http://us.imdb.com/Reviews/12/1244> (13 Feb. 1997). 9 Flagg, Fried Green Tomatoes, 313. 10 See Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 6f, 10, 13. The classic statement in film theory on the association of the woman with image and spectacle is Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), in Visual and Other Pleasures (London: Macmillan, 1989), 19ff. See also Judith Mayne, The Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism and Women’s Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 13-20. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 45ff, makes a similar point about the nude in European painting. For a Lesbian critique of Doane’s position which reveals the need for such theories of spectatorship to guard against dangers of reductiveness see Patricia White, “Female Spectator, Lesbian Specter: The Haunting,” in Diana Fuss, ed., Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (London: Routledge, 1991), 146ff. 11 “Ex-Changing the Gaze: Re-Visioning Feminist Film Theory,” New German Critique 4 (1985): 148f. 12 See Walter Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty” (1966), in Reflections, 333-36; Koch, “Ex-Changing the Gaze,” 146. 13 Koch, “Ex-Changing the Gaze,” 149. 14 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 555. For the distinction between Benjamin’s historiography of the “critical constellation” and nostalgic historicism see Michael W. Jennings, Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Literary Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 204ff. 15 See Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 209-12. 16 For this elaboration of Benjamin’s concept of “nonsensuous similarity” in terms of the enigmatic object looking back at the subject, see Shierry Weber Nicholsen, “Aesthetic Theory’s Mimesis of Walter Benjamin,” in Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart, eds., The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 66-69. 17 Subotnik, Developing Variations, 210. 18 For the relevance of magic and ritual to mimesis, see Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (London: Routledge, 1993). 19 See T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1972), ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge, 1984), 453; Gertrud Koch, “Mimesis and Bilderverbot,” Screen 34.3 (1993): 215. 20 As Nicholsen explains further, “A quality of depth, distance, and otherness is built into that state [of mimetic resemblance], even at the same time as that state is undoing the separateness of consciousness”; see “Aesthetic Theory’s Mimesis,” 69f. See also the discussion on the “dark side” of mimesis as revealed in Benjamin’s childhood memories (59f). 21 Michael Cahn, “Subversive Mimesis: Theodor W. Adorno and the Modern Impasse of Critique,” in Mihai Spariosu, ed., Mimesis in Contemporary Theory: An Interdisciplinary Approach, vol. 1: The Literary and Philosophical Debate (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1984): 27-64. 22 Benjamin, “Mimetic Faculty,” 336. 23 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 80. 24 Walter Benjamin, “The Image of Proust” (1929), in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 211. Adorno refers similarly to art in general as a way to overcome the transience of time: “Quite a few scholars have stressed the fact that a picture, irrespective of its specific content, is first of all a phenomenon of regeneration”; see Aesthetic Theory, 392. 25 “Image of Proust,” 202.

Interesting Links about Fried Green Tomatoes The Idgie which is Not One (Shelbey Cooper) Fried Green Obsession (Erin Lillis) Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

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