Response to Fast Food Nation

True Story: I read the book of the same name junior year of high school, so like, three years ago. Really, it wasn't all that long ago that everything Eric Schlosser wrote kinda crept back on me, except just the parts about meat-packing and how generally awful an industry it is. Don't get me wrong, the whole of industry involved with making fast food is terrible, but it seems that meat is the biggest one that the writers of this film had a beef with. (yes, pun very much intended). Dialogue aside, there were lots of times during the movie when it seemed unrealistic, like the rendezvous at the "mart" whose name was obviously blanked out, or Luis Guzman as an alien transporter, or the vapid discussion the college students have. I don't sound like that. I don't know anyone who sounds like that. And I learned that Avril Lavigne was one of them. Ugh, that part killed me. What is real, however, is the footage of the killing floor. You couldn't have ended the film in a more powerful way, just showing the brutal and sickening methods these people use to tear apart cows for human consumption. I would rail against the fact that the movie tried too hard to be serious, and the method of framing things in a narrative way only works towards a comedic effect (see Thank You For Smoking). However, that last bit, of her crying while having to de-kidney the guts is the literary nadir of the movie. It ends on that down of a note.

To do a documentary of a book that could possibly be a documentary would be foolhardy, but to make it a narrative tends to ruin things, like the extraneously long and poor conversation between Greg Kinnear and Bruce Willis' characters, or the over-long and too-much-detail inclusion of Ethan Hawke's character, or the fact that Kinnear's character just kind of disappears from the film after he checks out from the hotel except for the brief bit at the end where you see he has begrudgingly sold his soul, shame on him.

I suppose we watched this because it shows us what not to do for the next assignment. Particularly, it should be rooted wholly in reality, and not dip out into it at times for matters of convenience, and it should be real, not contrived in any way, and it should be biased, like the entire message of this film. Fast food is evil. And fast food is delicious too, but the evil part is more essential to the film. There are essential topics and there are non-essential topics. We should be focusing on the essential ones, i.e. the ones we agree on and want to expose. Looking at the film this way, it was effective, albeit poorly executed in some respects.