Como Agua para Chocolate
Our task for this lab was to watch the film "Como Agua para Chocolate," which is also known as "Like Water for Chocolate," and identify six metaphors—three of which have to do with food—in order to analyze it. These are the ones I found, along with a thorough analysis of what I believe they are referring to:
When Tita is narrating and discussing how to make dough and how it reacts when it comes into contact with boiling water, more specifically, how heat bubbles begin to form on the dough that is burning. She continues by saying that she is afraid she will experience heat bubbles on her skin as a result of being so close to Pedro and that she won't be able to manage the chemical reaction.
Tita sobbing into the cake batter prior to her sister's wedding. Nacha tells her "only the pots know their boiling point, she can feel hers." It was almost a premonition of what was to come. She implies in her statement that the pots emit steam and boil when they get too hot, alerting the cook when they have reached a boiling point. She uses this metaphor to advise her to take it easy and let go of her feelings before the wedding so as to avoid giving away her feeling
When Tita is devastated to learn that Pedro will marry her sister the following day and that she must assist in making the wedding cake, it's possible that this scene serves as the film's most poignant metaphor. She sobs into the cake dough because she is in so much misery. When the guests begin to eat the cake the following day, they are immediately struck with loss, sadness, and an intolerable longing for the love of their lives. This metaphor is powerful because it conveys the idea that Tita's anguish over the love she is unable to experience and the guy she is unable to be with is contagious, causing all of the other guests to grieve over their own soul mates.
Tita preparing a delicious lunch for her family, complete with meat and roses on the plate, strikes me as another metaphor. Pedro is overtaken with an almost holy experience when he consumes the dish, to the extent that he feels as though it is the best meal he has ever had. Another way to put it is that Tita is "invading" Pedro's body through her food, which is a new means of interaction. It seems as though the food acts as a conduit for an almost spiritual and telepathic energy between them because they are unable to express, much less act upon, their feelings for one another.
The fifth metaphor I came across is when Tita is narrating once more and describes how she had slept with Pedro and is now expecting his child. Despite her feelings for him, she finds it difficult to accept this because of how her sister could react if she finds out and because it is ethically wrong. She declares her intention to "keep the words inside until the worms consume them," meaning that she cannot bring herself to say them out loud.
The last metaphor I found was when Tita compares her sorrow to a black hole that lets in all of the chilly air at night, when she is almost at the height of her grief and despair. What she means is practically palpable—a sort of icy hollowness in her body. She makes the decision to knit, and she spends so much time doing it that she completes a quilt. She then wraps it over herself in an attempt to warm up, but as she says, the cold comes from within and cannot be fixed by an outside source.