Reviewed by Tim Wong

WITH Fast Food Nation, Richard Linklater resumes his journey to the center of the earth: an ugly America of franchise eyesore, prefabricated sprawl, and hamburgers made of shit. Reupping the doom and gloom of not-so-distant future noir A Scanner Darkly, his new film lays forth an alarming tableau that’s cause for concern. Grafted from Eric Scholosser’s bestselling expose are the underpaid teen minions beneath the golden arches; the corporate operatives who serve the almighty dollar; the notorious meat factories, grind houses closeting sub-human work conditions and unsanitary health practices; and the assembly line drones, border-hopping immigrants exploited in the name of the quarter-pound patty. Goaded by the book’s muckraking precedent – of scandalous malpractice in an industry high on greed – Linklater aims to spread onto hamburgers the same guilt-factor currently smearing the likes of Burberry fur and diamonds from Sierra Leone. Given fast food’s ubiquity, his narrative adaptation has the potential to turn legions of carnivores off flesh altogether. Not only is it a vegetarian conversion tool, but an appetite killer on par with Salo.


But eating feces is one thing. In Fast Food Nation’s most pointed scene, factory supervisor Mike (Bobby Cannivaro) escorts worker Sylvia (Catalina Sandino Moreno) through the meatpacking slaughterhouse – a nauseating gauntlet of strung out carcasses, severed limbs, rivers of blood, and discarded animal skins – before assigning her to the liver table, where gutting intestines incorrectly from the stomach results in shit minced with meat, nonetheless processed into frozen patties, boxed, and dispatched nationwide, where it’s grilled and served with a smile. Cooking these burgers are fuck-about teenage boys, who fantasize about robbing the money pit they’re slaves too, and who’ll deposit a spitball in your bun if you’re the vice-president of marketing at Mickey’s – the film’s fictional fast food giant competing against McDonald’s and Burger King. Said VP is Don Henderson (Greg Kinnear), on business in Colorado to investigate the contamination of their meat. He visits the factory, uncovers some disturbing testimonies, and then meets the voice of reason, Bruce Willis: a staunch realist with a shit-eating mantra that in “what they don’t know won’t hurt ‘em” speak, makes perfect sense in times of abject denial and concealed truths. Don exits the film at the halfway point, defeated, only to return a pragmatist with an even “bigger one” to feed the masses.

“The Big One” in question is Mickey’s biggest selling combo: a triple-bypass hunger-buster loaded with calories and artery-clogging grease. But not so fast: Super Size Me this is not. By now, audiences are better educated in the stealth arts of fast food promotion, and need little reminder of the health hazards in dieting regularly on burgers, fries and coke. That there isn't a single obsese person in this film says as much. Rather, unbeknownst to consumers at large is the excrement in their meat, or expressly, the shit that goes into making their meals. While thought is given to the counter and grill staff who provide the human face of fast food chains – high school subordinates on less than minimum wage – it’s the bottom dwelling labourers who form the ‘meat’ of Linklater’s venal America. No stranger to fleeing the South for the North, Catalina Sandino Moreno’s Sylvia fronts this concerted effort to portray the plight of immigrants lured by the land of opportunity, and the corporate opportunists who’ll milk their desperation for all its worth. Shacked up in a tiny motel room after crossing the border, Mexicans are plucked one by one, orientated on factory protocol, and set to work. No matter that sexual harassment is rife or occupational injury is commonplace – as long as patties remain under 40 cents, all is moot in the eyes of the executive few.

A mule for Columbian drug lords in Maria Full of Grace, Moreno makes for another quietly angelic beacon swallowed whole by the machine. Left with no other option but to join the butchery ranks, hers is a story tinged with pathos, a soul sapped by America’s secret sweatshops. Elsewhere, Linklater wields his Altman-esque ensemble skilfully, though less purposefully: there’s Benny (Luis Guzman), an illegal border shepherd delivering new migrants on tap; Rudy (Kris Kristofferson), the tell-all cattle rancher; Pete (Ethan Hawke), the lefty uncle lamenting the decline of society by way of Target and Wal-Mart; Amber (Ashley Johnson), the niece and Mickey’s employee swayed by the awful truth; and Paco (Lou Taylor Pucci), an army-jacket-wearing protest cliché, adamant he’ll change the world. Party to all of this is a very concerned Avril Lavigne, who as a sore thumb for fashionable Hollywood proactivism, is the only truly laughable entity in a film mostly bereft of humour, satirical or otherwise.

Crucially, Linklater withholds the urge to make fun. And that’s precisely why Fast Food Nation hurts. Uninterested in straining comedy from the mire, or camouflaging relevance in a marketable fantasy, Linklater proceeds to bite right for the core. He’s deadly serious. By sandwiching stricken characters between a quasi-oppressive bun – each victims of circumstance, each accessories to the act, each deployed to the four corners of the fast food brethren in a seemingly unbreakable chain of command – he leaves a bad taste of smothering disquiet and futility. As a statement, it’s not necessarily razor-edged, or even totally scathing in conviction – but it’s nagging all the same, reinforcing a lingering, contemporary dread in lieu of the cogent political documentary. And if there’s a barbed message in all of this, it’s of complicity, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Hamburger. After all, what could be more transgressive in this rotten, apathy-ridden day and age, than a film about how we’re all guilty of stomaching a little shit? In Linklater’s Bad News Bears, Billy Bob Thornton’s Buttermaker said it best about dishonesty: “You lie your ass off. It’s the only way. Look, this is America. You just tell ‘em what they want to hear.” Linklater’s certainly telling us what we ought to hear; whether we’re honest with ourselves on that front is something else entirely.