Michael Koresky: Raw Meat -- On Fast Food Nation

Raw Meat
Michael Koresky on Fast Food Nation
Reverse Shot



Everything about Richard Linklater‘s terrific movie Fast Food Nation (2006) is something of a red herring. A film about huge subjects writ tiny, this freeform fictional adaptation of Eric Schlosser‘s best-selling nonfiction exposé of the meat and processed food industries is not really about the meat at all. It’s a survey of the current culture: big, sprawling, and endlessly frightening, told via the minutiae of everyday life, as it’s lived in one Nowheresville Colorado town.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to followers of Linklater’s extraordinary career. In a sense, the Texan director’s films are never about what they’re about. Or to put it more vividly, perhaps, they confound typical dramatization, even as they appear to grapple with recognizable subjects. Thus, his debut Slacker (1991) isn’t really a generation X-ray at all, despite its wayward title, but rather more of a sketch of universal existentialism; it’s site-specific (it’s still cinema’s most authentic depiction of the bustling hive of open minds that is Austin) but all-encompassing, and it remains a benchmark of Nineties American independent cinema not because it so brilliantly captures a time and place but because it’s profoundly engaged with its crazy quilt of philosophical voices—there’s literally something for everyone in it. Dazed and Confused (1993), his studio-financed disaster turned instant cult classic, is hardly the kitschy, nostalgia-drenched look back at those extraterrestrials known as Kids of the Seventies that its promotional material misguidedly promised, but rather a poignant, and almost alienatingly casual evocation of directionless youth—its painted-on bell-bottom jeans, tie-dyes, and clacking bead necklaces are functional rather than symbolic. And Linklater’s 1995 and 2004 diptych Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, cumulatively his masterwork thus far in his young career, about an American boy falling for a European girl in Vienna and, nine years later, again in Paris, isn’t simply a Brief Encounter for the Kurt Cobain generation, but a deeply spiritual quest for romantic fulfillment that transcends eras as much as it does continents.

Fast Food Nation is reminiscent of those earlier films in style and informality—like them it casually surveys an environment rather than flat-out states a thesis or purpose, and it also drifts around its characters, catching them in seemingly on-the-fly moments rather than engaged in big dramatic dialogues or conversations meant to represent cultural or social shifts. Then again, Fast Food Nation differs greatly from those films in scope. Slacker, Dazed and Confused, and Before Sunrise/Before Sunset, as well as SubUrbia (1996), Tape (2001), and Waking Life (2001), all took place over condensed periods, their narratives resolving generally within the course of one day or night. Fast Food Nation on the other hand, follows many characters, segmented in discrete story zones, over an indeterminate number of days, even months. As such it’s easily Linklater’s best film not contained within a limited time frame, and by extension, perhaps maybe his most purely dramatic film to date. So, even though the film remains remarkably laidback by the standards of Hollywood—the films of which are more apt to pummel viewers into submission than engage them into debate—it’s still clearly borne of a subject that has gotten Linklater riled up. So what is it that has rocked him?

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Michael Benton: The Politics of Meat 3.0

But the hands of one of the partners were already at K.’s throat,
while the other thrust the knife deep into his heart and turned it there twice.
With failing eyes K. could still see the two of them immediately before him, cheek leaning against cheek, watching the final act. "Like a dog!" he said: it was as if the shame of it would outlive him.

—Franz Kafka, The Trial

I believe that eating meat in itself is not immoral; at least that is what I have told myself as I continue to eat it (although, in the interest of environment, I try to limit my consumption). For me, the issue is the "way" in which we currently raise animals and slaughter them--factory style, injecting drugs, inhumane (kind of a stupid word, but at least it communicates a sense) conditions, environmental pollution, issues of sustainability...

Has anyone read Michel Faber's brilliant novel Under the Skin that acts as a parable about factory style slaughter of animals (in the dystopian tradition of 1984, Animal Farm, Brave New World, Lord of Flies, We)--allowing us to see it from the animal's viewpoint (in this case, particularly vivid for a male perspective).

Carol Adams' The Sexual Politics of Meat first chapter "The Patriarchal Texts of Meat" has very vivid examples of how we raise our food and how what we eat plays a strong role in our attitude toward our fellow humans (in Adam's case of men toward women--which she demonstrates with visual advertisements that sexualize meat eating).

Many Holocaust survivors made strong connections between their experiences and the factory style breeding and slaughtering of animals, becoming vegetarian/vegan as a result. Richard Rubenstein in his brilliant book The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the the American Future makes the same point in the development of a ruthlessly efficient technocratic-bureaucratic order that understands only the bottom-line of efficiency--the most bang for your buck. As a reader of Rubenstein's book states:

Modernity laid the foundation, and bureaucracy provided the means. Bureaucracy's roots are deep in military organization. Both require a hierarchical structure with decisions made only at the top. Both require layers of non-individuals who follow orders without thought or input, even if the end of the process is massive death. We were (are) just following orders. Just let me do my job. Don't bother me. Bombing cities, manufacturing cigarettes, dealing drugs, killing the earth become matters not of choice but of necessity. To make a moral judgment - any moral judgment - is to set oneself outside society.

Can we make the same assumption along the lines of those who engage in the abuse of animals (either by choice or necessity)? Anyone who has chosen the vegetarian/vegan lifestyle understands very vividly how our society treats anyone who chooses to step outside its dominant order of treating animals as products to be consumed (as food or pets or entertainments).

If we can understand the setting up of camps for the apatrides (this history being repeated in the "War on Terror") as leading to the atrocities of the concentration camps of WWII, could we also make the argument for the development of factory style slaughtering of animals as a step in the same direction?

For a discussion of this consult Richard Rubenstein's Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the
American Future

Giorgio Agamben in The Open: Man and Animal, Means Without Ends, and State of Exception has been wrestling with these philosophical issues. Danesh Wadiwel, in a review of Agamben's The Open: Man and Animal and Charles Patterson's Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust states:

There is a certain humanist line of thinking that suggests that violence is invariably accompanied by what can be described as ‘dehumanisation.’ According to this standpoint, the instigator of violence suspends the humanity of his or her victim, in order to circumvent the ethical deterrents that would normally prevent the use of violence. In many respects this strikes us as true: the human subject of violence is frequently ‘objectified,’ they are treated as ‘pigs,’ ‘vermin,’ ‘dogs,’ as sub-human. It is perhaps unsurprising then that the greatest acts of violence against humans appear to be accompanied by a dehumanisation that is of commensurate intensity. The Holocaust was no exception to this. Dehumanisation was found in the Nazi labour and extermination camps, not only in the forms of violence and death prevalent there (for example cattle cars and mass exterminations), but in the plight of those in the camps, who as a result of starvation, brutal working conditions, indignity and violence, are said to have lost touch with their ‘humanity.’ A survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau recalls: "You could watch human beings turning into animals" (Volkel in Steinhoff, Pechel and Showalter, 1991: 236).

The humanist will say "Stop treating humans like animals: respect the human and violence will not be possible." But there is alternative line of thinking that responds in an apparently oblique way to the humanist: "Stop treating animals like we treat animals; then it will not be possible to treat humans like animals." Understood in this fashion, human violence represents not only a capacity for dehumanisation alone, but is tied closely to the justification of violence against the non-human. This reflects not only the capacity for humans to harm each other, but draws attention to the sustained incarceration, torture and violence that is directed towards animals in slaughterhouses, experimental laboratories and factory farms. It was perhaps this line of thinking that prompted novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer to observe "In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka."

Should we introduce the concerns of animals into the "political sphere"? How disconnected must we be from the environment to think that they do not deserve the same considerations that humans do... is our domination, exploitation and mistreatment a sign of our collective (in)sanity. If we can make a designation of the slippery slope of the "state of exception" leading to the destructive depersonalization of humans, can we not delineate that same process in our treatment of animals?

Giorgio Agamben: Means Without Ends

PBS Frontline: Modern Meat

MICHAEL POLLAN: AMERICANS' UNHEALTHY RELATIONSHIP WITH FOOD

Ruth Ozeki: Creating Novel Life Forms

With all of this in mind, with my politics, in the reality of contemporary food production, I believe I should become at least a vegetarian?