From science to stove – Weekend
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Chemistry Lessons, an adaptation of Bonnie Garmus’ semi-autobiographical feminist bestseller, is coming to Apple TV+. The story of the well-deserved success of a woman scientist in 1950s America is told in an overly formulaic, but quite sympathetic way.
In the early 1950s, pretty blonde Elizabeth Zott (Brie Larsen) works in a chemical laboratory at a research institute as a chemist. Her male colleagues and bosses – all completely chauvinistic pigs, but it seems that there can be no others in traditional feminist series – perceive her as a pretty laboratory assistant who should wash their flasks and serve coffee. Moreover, Elizabeth cannot even refuse to participate in a local beauty contest – thanks to the fact that instead of a bikini, you can show off a one-piece swimsuit. There is no time left for her own scientific research, Elizabeth works quietly in the evenings, and one day she steals a test tube with the necessary substance from the personal laboratory of local scientist star Calvin Evans (Lewis Pullman) – management receives grants for his future discoveries. Calvin, who discovers the loss, initially mistakes Elizabeth for a secretary. Even though they become close, start working together, and he has the opportunity to appreciate her intelligence and knowledge, he still thinks that she stole the monosaccharide ribose for baking – even the best of men only sees his partner standing at the stove.
In the initial episodes of the series “Chemistry Lessons” based on the fresh femme bestseller by Bonnie Garmus (2022), the patriarchy looks so dense that even a stone would be moved. Poor Elizabeth panics at the sight of a closed door – the reason for this is the violence she suffered during her studies: she stuck a pencil in a rapist with an academic degree, and for this she was hacked to death with a PhD! The series Mad Men told a similar story about errand girls in a purely male world in the late 1950s, but there the damned louts were charming, but here they are infuriating.
And yet, “Chemistry Lessons” is not a primitive black-and-white piece of propaganda with an impeccable heroine faced with a cruel world. Elizabeth is one hell of a thing. She behaves like a kind of “rain man”: despite her outstanding analytical abilities, she is completely devoid of empathy and does not understand why there is any need to establish relationships with people – after all, there is science! Arrogant and intolerant of others, she receives an angry rebuke from the secretary: they say, there is no need to wonder, try to be simpler as an exception, because we are all in the same boat. But Elizabeth can neither become simpler nor bend. Actress Brie Larson, herself an inveterate feminist, in the first episodes portrays her character as equal to Greta Garbo in Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka: an icy, unapproachable blonde whose facial expressions seem to amount to a slight frown. But even the fanatical communist Ninotchka will smile sooner or later – and Elizabeth will also thaw when she gets along with Calvin and quite quickly teaches him the basics of feminism.
Alas, happiness and joint work will not last long, soon Elizabeth will again face the world one on one – more precisely, from her loved ones she will have a newborn daughter, a friendly neighbor Harriet (Aja Naomi King) and a shaggy dog of the Goldendoodle breed (dog lovers will notice the anachronism: this breed was bred in the 1990s) named Six Thirty – it is at this time that the dog wakes Elizabeth up in the morning. Starting from the third episode, the dog will find his own voice and tell from the screen how he sees the world of people (a so-so world!) and that only with his owner Elizabeth he found courage. As for Elizabeth, then – as in another recent feminist series, “Julia”, she still cannot escape the stove, but through it she will gain true independence: a deep knowledge of chemistry allows her to cook with a full understanding of the process, and she becomes a popular culinary TV presenter show (another anachronism – the first women’s cooking television show was the program of the same Julia Child in 1962).
Bonnie Garmus wrote a bestseller based on her own life: she was not taken seriously, her ideas were once stolen by her boss, and her manuscript was endlessly rejected by publishing houses (and even Six Thirty, the name of her amazingly smart dog). But in the last episode of “Chemistry Lessons” it is not for nothing that the cover of “Great Expectations” flashes – in fact, the feminist manifesto turns into a classic Dickensian story about noble orphans who in the end get what they deserve, and the villains are defeated. And we plop ourselves back into the warm, creamy sauce of the “success story.”
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