Fast Food Nation

There's shit in the meat.

In FAST FOOD NATION, a very loose 2006 adaptation of Eric Schlosser's expose, these are the words Don Anderson hears from his superior at the HQ of Mickey's, a fast food conglomerate. It's perhaps only a theory, but Anderson (Greg Kinnear), vice president of marketing and inventor of the "Big One", Mickey's latest gut-busting burger, is sent to Colorado to check out the conditions in a certain slaughterhouse. One that provides much of its product to the chain. Previous research studies suggested the presence of the foreign contaminant; Anderson determines that it is indeed so.

Now we had all heard rumors of what just is in that burger we so gluttonously coveted over the years. Rodent hairs, roach wings, the very meat itself being that of equine. Yet the outlets would continue to sell billions and billions of hamburgers. If you confronted most consumers with these claims, they would shrug and anticipate the next happy meal. I was one of them. Ignorance was bliss. Maybe I actually knew but just put it out of my mind. Alright, so maybe there are foreign ingredients. They cook the meat at high temperatures, so they're no longer of concern. Correct? That's what Harry Rydell (Bruce Willis), a Mickey's corporate shiller, argues as he tears into a Big One while chatting with Anderson. He rejects the concerns Anderson has after the latter learns more about the processing than he would ever care to know. Something's going to kill us! Might as well die happy!

Rydell may as well be the voice for many citizens who just can't give up their charred death on a bun, or any other food that is yet another opportunity for a future angioplasty. Again, I point as many fingers at myself as at anyone else. And, as Rydell offers, "We all eat a little shit from time to time." I also did not want to believe that those dudes in the kitchen were not arbiters of cleanliness. Surely they didn't pick patties up off the floor and then serve them? Didn't spit on my quarter pounder when I sent it back because someone screwed it up? Indeed, when Anderson visits a Mickey's in Cody, CO, one of the apathetic teen workers (Paul Dano) does drop a bit 'o mucous on the burger. What does he care? He and his co-workers spend hours in substandard conditions for peanut wages. They make just enough to subsidize their ten cent lives. Cashier Amber (Ashley Johnson) is blissfully unaware of the chain of events that bring those frozen red patties to the fryer, but she thinks a bit more about things than her peers. 

Eventually, she will learn about the unhealthy process, reassess her role in all of it. She quits Mickey's and finds her activist voice, raising it louder as she learns not only about the nature of the swill she used to serve, but also the exploitation of the workers who facilitate the process. Those who toil in the slaughterhouse, a place that sparkles in immaculacy as Anderson tours. But behind the scenes, behind the clockwork precision of the assembly lines and conveyor belts are flesh and blood souls who are co-opted and otherwise abused in more than 57 varieties. Most of the workers are illegals, people who can be exploited every which way and find themselves unable to initiate recourse. It starts when minion Benny (Luis Guzman) rounds up gangs of locals near the American borders in Mexico. He finds them on both sides of the divide, often after they've wandered for days, hoping to reach El Norte, and freedom. They are desperate, willing to be gathered up like the cattle they will eventually slaughter and "clean.", in order to make a few dollars, but far more than they could earn in the homeland. 

It is an American Dream, to have enough money not only to send back to relatives, but to also engage in the modest pleasure of eating out at a place like Appleby's. We meet a few of the Mexicans, and their stories are sad. Some will be chambermaids in hotels, the others will end up hosing cow manure off rooftops and sifting through Grade D chuck as it makes it way down the belt (one worker is berated for letting a slab deemed prime sirloin get through). The women at the meat plant will be forced into sexual relations with supervisors, the men will be victims of industrial accidents that cause loss of extremities. Again, there is little fear of liability from the establishment as the workers are undocumented and a breath away from an immigration sweep straight back to the southland. They endure these hardships, resigning their fates, all for a little piece of the pie. Director Richard Linklater co-wrote the screenplay with Schlosser. It is not the expected indictment of the ills of immigration, fast food, and complacency, but it is an effective essay. That's what Linklater does in most of his films, presents characters talking about themselves, big ideas, life, their plight.

FAST FOOD NATION resembles several other of his films in that we have large, very diverse ensembles whose lives may or may not intersect in some concrete way, but certainly thematically. Anderson never actually encounters Sylvia or Raul, two of the main Mexican protagonists, but their lives and their dialogue certainly serve a similar directive. So does Amber's, even as she spends lots of screen time chatting with her slacker uncle (Ethan Hawke, damned good at playing slackers in Linklater's and other's films). While the book was a nonfiction rip job on cavalier sanitary concerns and corporate chicanery, this movie is another opportunity for the director to have his characters wax philosophical. The "plot" is really an excuse for lots of fascinating conversations. They make this film worth seeing, but afterward you may wish there was more satiric bite, more venom. 

As I relayed, FAST FOOD NATION is not some left-wing manifesto, despite appearances. The movie actually presents opposing points of view in a fair light. Willis' cameo as the cocky Rydell makes many points that even the most liberal viewer may nod along with. Linklater offers no answers, only scenarios and attempts at answers. He does include a very graphic sequence of the actual slaughter of some bovines, scenes that may put you off beef for at least a few days. His film does not, however, work the paranoia like Upton Sinclair before him. But, there is at least one very telling scene. Amber and her new eco-activist peers attempt to stage the release of a pasture of cattle. After opening the gates, the contented cows refuse to budge. They're well fed, comfortable; why would they budge? Why, indeed.