This past weekend, we here at Peeled Snacks World Headquarters took a little field trip to go see Richard Linklater's newest gab-fest, Fast Food Nation.  We've all obviously read the book (vigorously nodding our heads in agreement at every page turn), and we'd all seen at least SOME (I've seen them all) of Richard Linklater's flicks.  So we all hid our Peeled Snacks in our jackets (BBC for me), found our seats in one the 3 New York theaters still playing the film (it's done poorly), and took in the show.

What would you expect from a fictionalization of a non-fiction expose', huh?  Would you expect characters barraging you with facts and figures, and the villification of dastardly Fast Food Executives?  I went in expecting some tirades and polemics, and angry characters shaking their fists at every golden arch past which they drove.  I expected to see secrets exposed, and society shaken up by some anti-french-fry revolution....

Nope.  Nothing in the film like that.  Nothing at all....

Where the book is a disclosure of what's going on in an industry run amok, the film is a different bird entirely.  It's not a documentary, and not "info-tainment".  Rather, it's a humanization, an attempt to analyze the impact that the fast food industry has on people.  Linklater's film casts a wide net which catches up Fast Food execs, Mexican immigrants, idealistic liberals, conservative ranchers, jaded teenagers, and regular American families, and he tries to paint the impact of an unscrupulous McDonalds clone on their lives.

The film centers around a Colorado meat packing plant and the discovery by a fast food exec (nicely underplayed by Greg Kinnear) that there's quite a lot of cow poop in his "Big One Burger" meat.  He investigates, rubbing shoulders with the illegal immigrants who work the plant, poor families who eat the crappy burgers, and college kids who just can't find a way to wake people up to how aweful this all is.

Linklater's made this sort of film before.  The film's scope mirrors Dazed & Confused, which meanders through the last day of high school in a Texas suburb in 1977.  That film was filled with archetypes from everyone's high school days, and it asked you to find YOURSELF in the film, and think about where you were on that day.  It was like a Japanese Tosa painting where you're supposed to figure out who you'd be in the panorama.

Unfortunately, that makes the "disaster films" of the 70s its closest film cousins.  But the effect worked for me- I associated with an uncle (played by Linklater regular Ethan Hawke) who rolls into town and tries to inspire his niece to set high standards for her life (and diet).  As a marketer for, you know, this healthy snack company thing, I'm certainly eager to inspire good dietary decisions (and, apprently, good film-watching decisions as well).

But there's a strange rub in there- the most common target in the film isn't the meat processing plant (though it does come under fire), but the marketers who have to sell the crap that the plant churns out.  Greg Kinnear's character wrestles with the ethics of selling burgers filled with sh!t, even though he combs through chemical BBQ scents and thinks up BS slogans for a BS-filled burger.

But "liberal" marketing gets attacked too.  Bruce Willis pops in as a fellow Fast Food exec who defends the meat packing plant, pointing out that if you cook fecal matter, it won't kill you.  He challenges the prissy, sterilized notions of liberal foodies, and informs our sullen hero that "sometimes, we all have to eat a little sh!t."  Willis nails his delivery, and skewers the films supposedly liberal premise.

Likewise, when the college kids dream up a scheme to wake everyone up to how wrong it all is, they just can't understand why no-one gets the point.  There's an unsubtle allegory involving a bunch of cows NOT wanting to be freed from their captivity "get it?  The HERD doesn't WANT to be free...", and the puzzlement on the co-eds faces reminded me of the morning after George Bush got ellected the second time around ("you mean people really ARE that stupid?!?!").

A lot of pot-shots are taken at America today, from the abuse of eminent domain to the patriot act, from the illegal immigrant question to metha-emphetamine abuse, and all of it underscores Linklater's clear goal of using the Fast Food industry as a symbol of over-arching societal ills.  He's taking on exploitation, but is perhaps more concerned with apathy in the face of exploitation (see Borat).  Frankly he's attacking every marketer everywhere, and every schmoe that buys our stupid little spiels.

To that end, it really shouldn't be "Fast Food Nation: the Movie", it should be "Upton Sinclair's The Jungle: the Movie"- Sinclair's novel coaxed the federal government into overhauling the meat packing industry, but that wasn't Sinclair's target.  He was aiming for the impact on the PEOPLE in the industry, not the cuts of meat.  Linklater doesn't care about the statistics- he just wants you to understand the human cost.

That take on the material actually rubbed Peeled Snacks' founder and president quite wrong.  She found the film rather pointless, and was let down by the lack of any call to action (beyond a request to go to www.participate.net that played over the closing credits).  Likely many viewers expecting a rallying cry will be similarly dissappointed.  But it's a film, not a protest, and it works best as drama, not revolution.