Despite much public fervor over the U.S.’s failing health, us American consumers keep cramming our collective maws full of nugget-sized chicken bits and fistfuls of fries, dumbly bemused by the inevitable damage to our tired little hearts. Austin-based filmmaker Richard Linklater—one of independent cinema’s most beloved auteurs—is now tackling America’s preoccupation with grease, elbowing aside the physical ramifications and probing the grim political pitfalls. Turns out that big, bulbous bellies and goo-filled arteries aren’t the only consequences of a mass fast-food obsession.
Based on Eric Schlosser’s bestselling book of the same name, Fast Food Nation focuses on a fictional anyplace named Cody, Colo., home of an internally corrupt meatpacking plant, highway intersections, packs of disaffected youth, working-class families, illegal aliens and a bevy of other newly American symbols. The film’s script, which was co-written by Linklater and Schlosser, dares to translate the book’s impeccably argued, strictly nonfiction polemic into a character-centered narrative focusing loosely on three disparate strands of the fast-food industry: the kids who slap cheese and pickles onto burgers, the undocumented immigrants who hack the cows apart and stack the patties in boxes, and the executives who package and market the fat-addled chow. Schlosser’s statistics and indictments are traded for personal histories, and, suddenly, the academic becomes emotional.
“That’s how Eric and I instinctually approached [the story],” says Linklater, whose diverse filmography—from Dazed and Confused to Before Sunrise to Waking Life to School of Rock—confounds genre purists. “The book did what the book does. If that was our hope for the movie, we would have made a documentary. But that wasn’t what Eric or I was interested in. He knew that there was another kind of movie to be made, one that concentrated on the people who populate this world. And that’s an interesting way to tell any story. You drop the facts and figures, but you can do something that cinema does very well, which is to find a way into people’s lives and stories, and hopefully care about them. This film is asking you to care about people and things that you’re not supposed to care about, that you’re not supposed to think about.”
Appropriately, Fast Food Nation skewers more than just cheap hamburgers, plastic ketchup packets and the crooked machinery sustaining their production. The film also revels in America’s blatant self-consumption—Linklater, his camera hovering along the side of the freeway, quietly parades big-box stores and fast-food huts, restaurant chains and theme bars, an endless expanse of parking lots and colorful signs, each more painfully anonymous than its predecessor, faceless, homogenized and cold. This is the new American wasteland; Author James Howard Munster—in his book The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape—describes suburban overdevelopment as “depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading,” sharing his horror at America’s devolution into “a landscape of scary places … that has simply ceased to be a credible human habitat.” Fast Food Nation may be peppered with grim visions of immigrant exploitation, sexual abuse, slaughterhouses, shit-riddled meat and human dismemberment, but Linklater’s franchise pageant remains one of the film's most disturbing sequences. What Happy Meals have done to our arteries and waistlines is disconcerting; what fast food has done to our country is heartbreaking.
“That’s America,” Linklater sighs. “That’s our whole country now. Outside of the few people who live in urban bubbles, where there’s actually some personality, or older towns, where there are still little shops and restaurants—by and large, it’s all one big box, one big strip mall. It’s sad, but it’s so ubiquitous you don’t even notice it. That’s why I liked putting it in a shot, so you kind of have to look at it. Whereas, in life, you don’t even notice it.” He pauses. “It’s not like it’s not functional, it’s always useful. On a real-estate level, that’s the easiest way to serve people in a certain suburban community. Strip malls are effective. You pull off the road, it’s right there. There’s a reason it exists.”
Linklater—whose sophomore feature, Slacker, inadvertently pigeonholed an entire generation of flannel-clad dilettantes— has extensive experience tackling the relative numbness of American suburbia, from Dazed and Confused’s desperate condiment hazing to the aptly titled SubUrbia, an adaptation of Eric Bogosian’s off-Broadway play about kids hanging out near a dumpster. “It seems like a force in the world, to be taken on or at least acknowledged,” Linklater explains. “There’s kind of a suburbia of the soul, too. Is your consciousness going to be suburbia? Are you going to be autonomous and your own person, or are you going to be a strip mall? It’s a mental landscape, as well.”
Fast Food Nation is, in many ways, also a global story: The film meticulously details the trials of undocumented Mexican workers, many of whom employ coyotes (human smugglers) to lug them past the U.S. border, slumping through the desert and stuffing themselves into filthy vans emblazoned with ridiculous slogans, only to be rewarded with constant degradation and unsafe, unregulated factory jobs. Accordingly, nearly one-third of the film's dialogue is spoken in Spanish. “We wrote in English, and it was translated into Spanish. And then we worked with the actors and a dialect coach, so the Spanish was really worked through. But it was very important for the movie. No matter where you are in the country, if you’re in the meatpacking industry, you’re in a Spanish-speaking environment,” Linklater explains.
In the film, Wilmer Valderrama, Catalina Sandino Moreno and Ana Claudia Talacón play Raul, Sylvia and Coco, young Mexicans who score illegal and treacherous jobs in Cody’s meatpacking plant. While the most vocal protesters against the meatpacking industry tend to focus on the plants’ excessive cruelty to animals, they still—for the most part—overlook the ritual abuse of humans who work there. A vegetarian since 1983, Linklater didn’t avoid grisly slaughterhouse scenes (Fast Food Nation’s final moments are packed with stomach-wrenching gore), but the film focuses more heavily on the human toll. “[Portraying animal cruelty] has been done to a large degree. It’s in our movie, but we wanted to show what’s behind the murder, which included the workers. I admire PETA and everybody who’s bringing attention to the plight of any element in our culture who can’t speak for itself,” Linklater says. “And I think that goes for workers who aren’t documented and have no voice, and certainly animals, and our environment, too.”
“I don’t make a lot of distinctions—[for me], it’s easy to jump from animals to people. And by the end of the movie, there’s not much difference,” Linklater says. “With Catalina’s character, we were really trying to make the point that she’s not much different from the meat she’s cutting up. The system is certainly not seeing her any differently. When Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle a hundred years ago, he really thought people would be outraged by the treatment of the workers. He made a joke, saying, ‘I aimed for their heart’—thinking people would care about the horrible treatment of immigrant workers—‘and I hit their stomach.’ All people cared about were contaminants in the meat.”
Greg Kinnear—who worked with Linklater on 2005’s Bad News Bears—plays Don Henderson, an executive for invented fast-food monolith Mickey’s, sent to Colorado to investigate reports of high fecal content in the chain’s ground beef. Henderson is strangely sympathetic. A smiling, well-intentioned marketer who refuses to succumb to broad, corporate clichés, Kinnear never flashes toothy grins or guffaws at the plight of the factory workers. Instead he shuffles around Cody with his hands in his pockets, chomping on burgers and trying his very best to understand and remedy the problem. “Kinnear is a wonderful actor and a really interesting guy,” says Linklater. “It’s an understated part, and it’s the hardest kind of thing to do, to take [a character like Henderson] and make him sympathetic, make him a real person,” he adds with a nod. “Don Henderson represents all of us. Personally, my way into this movie was creating a character who represents me and a lot of people of a certain age who really aren’t putting our asses on the line. You incorporate dissonant information that you’d rather not know and then you go about your life. You move on through it. But you still define yourself as a somewhat honorable person. You can’t step outside of it completely. We’re all complicit as taxpayers and citizens. Are you really doing all that you could? Each of us has to look in the mirror and say ‘No, you’re really not.’ You try in whatever way is convenient. I have a lot of sympathy for him because I think he represents so many.”
Financed without any U.S. industry cash, and completed on a relatively low budget, Fast Food Nation—not unlike A Scanner Darkly, Linklater’s 2006 adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel about crisis-driven government surveillance—serves up big ideas about contemporary American injustice. While the fast-food industry is certainly not free from investigation and concern (see the success of Morgan Spurlock’s documentary Super Size Me), Linklater is still upset by what he calls the “end-user approach.” “It’s an unhealthy, exploitative, cruel system, but [the most upsetting part for most people is that] the final product is bad for you,” Linklater says. “[Like] it would be different if, at the end of the road, it had a positive result. We accept bad systems in the world—oil, for instance. We know it’s an ugly business, with geo-political ramifications. But hey, you put gas in your car, you get to go visit somebody, you get to take a trip. But when you eat crappy food that’s really bad for you, then you’re poisoning your family and yourself.”
Exposing that kind of flawed ideology has been one of Linklater’s long-term goals as a filmmaker. “For years I’ve been trying to make some version of this film,” he says. “I was always going to make something like this.”
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