A couple nights ago I had a dream about big animation companies basing movies on public domain stories. Apparently my dreams are doing media criticism now, possibly more competently than I do.

I couldn’t remember much of the dream on waking, but one line of dialogue lodged steadfastly in my brain: “And that’s why Ratatouille is involved in the story of Cain and Abel.”

(I have never seen Ratatouille, but evidently I’ve absorbed enough Ratatouille facts from memes and references for it to turn up in a dream.)

This sentence left me unaccountably disturbed. First, I recall it carried the subtext that Pixar, or whoever made that movie, had somehow permanently embedded Ratatouille in the Old Testament—had in some Philip K. Dickian way rewritten more than 2000 years of cultural memory, and no one now recalled any other version. Which is absolutely something big media companies would do if they could pull it off.

Second… well, what was Ratatouille doing in the immediately post-Edenic world? It can’t have been good. Natural enemies, hell—that rat and that snake are working together.