Takeout Order

Richard Linklater and Eric Schlosser set their sights on Fast Food Nation.

by Sam Adams

When the news broke that Eric Schlosser's muckraking best seller Fast Food Nation was going to be made into a movie, it seemed obvious that the result would be yet another left-wing documentary playing to the socially conscious crowd. But Fast Food Nation, the movie, turns out to be more Nashville than Super Size Me, an ensemble fiction with dozens of supporting characters and three pivotal ones: Don (Greg Kinnear), a newly hired marketing executive for a fictional fast-food concern called Mickey's; Amber (Ashley Johnson), a teenage high school student who works off-hours at a Mickey's franchise; and Sylvia (Catalina Sandino Moreno), a Mexican migrant toiling in the bowels of a local meat-processing plant.

"It didn't seem like an obvious idea, and I didn't really jump at it when it was first proposed to me," Schlosser admits. "I was meeting with documentary filmmakers, which seemed like a much more plausible thing to do. But I was on a book tour in Austin, and I had a meeting with Richard Linklater, and it just seemed the only way to do it would be to take the title of the book and some of its themes, and then just put the book aside."

BIG MAC ATTACK: Greg Kinnear's fast-food spin doctor orders one with extra compromise.

Schlosser modestly rebuffs the frequently drawn parallels between his book and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, whose shocking accounts of conditions in Chicago slaughterhouses led to the creation of the FDA. But as with Sinclair's book, Fast Food Nation's critique of the industry's labor practices has been overshadowed by its gut-churning description of slaughterhouses where assembly lines run so fast that workers cannot remove a cow's intestines without rupturing them, thus contaminating the beef with what scientists call fecal coliform bacteria. As Schlosser succinctly puts it, "There is shit in the meat."

If you haven't read Fast Food Nation, you might think that's all there is to it. But Schlosser's point of entry, and the issue he still sounds most passionate about, is the economic impact of the fast-food industry's business practices, whether it be on chicken growers reduced to the level of modern-day sharecroppers or on illegal immigrants working long hours in unsafe conditions. He might well echo Sinclair's complaint about The Jungle's reception: "I was aiming for the country's heart, and I hit it in the stomach."

Climaxing with scenes set in a working slaughterhouse (shot in Mexico since no American facility would give permission), the Fast Food Nation movie lands some solid punches below the rib cage. But the use of fictional characters and charismatic actors allows the movie to tug a few heartstrings as well. "It's a quirky adaptation, at least on paper," Linklater says. "But Eric and I felt that all these issues would be obvious if we could just show these people's lives. The facts and figures are in the book."

Lest the movie sound like a standard-issue docudrama, Linklater underlines the risks it takes with traditional narrative, the most obvious of which is writing Kinnear's character out of the story halfway through. Until then, he's filled the role of detective, tracking down the source of his company's contaminated meat and giving the movie entree to a wide range of characters, from Kris Kristofferson's disenfranchised rancher to Bruce Willis' cold-blooded middleman. But when the risk to his livelihood gets too great, Kinnear takes a powder. "This is our main character, the one who's going to be our Shane, come in and right things," Linklater says. "But he chooses not to be that guy, because it's kind of inconvenient. He literally walks right out of the movie."

The movie's most surprising development, however, involves the transformation of Amber from a teenage wage slave to a budding environmental activist. At first, the time the movie devotes to Amber's consciousness-raising seems like a diversion from its main subject: What does a teenager's decision to quit her job have to do with stemming the tide of fast-food culture? But for Schlosser and Linklater both, the turn in Amber's fortunes is critical, a metonym of social change on a small but pervasive scale. "To me, it's just a metaphor for awareness," Linklater says. "There's a lot of things in this world that, once you know the truth, you can't unlearn that. And you hope at some point your actions would catch up with your knowledge."

"There's no shortage of films about a young woman coming of age sexually," Schlosser points out. "But what about someone coming of age in a different way, just having a new consciousness of the world around them? In the end, she isn't organizing or joining the Communist party, but maybe she's gonna search, and she's gonna go off and do some things that are good in the world. It's a small kind of change, but I think that's what happens in real life."

Of course, bigger changes have been made in the years since Schlosser wrote Fast Food Nation: McDonald's stopped super-sizing, and Disney recently announced it would end product tie-ins targeted at children unless the food meets basic nutritional standards (i.e. no more Buzz Lightyear Happy Meals). Schlosser, who declines credit for the changes, is cautiously optimistic. "I don't want to minimize how fucked up things are at the moment," he says. "But I also think it doesn't have to be this bad, and there are reasons for hope. Otherwise, I really wouldn't bother doing this."

As for Linklater, he hasn't eaten meat in decades. But he and his daughter recently sampled the garden burger at a fast-food joint in his native Austin, Texas, called P. Terry's, where the food is healthy and the workers earn a living wage. "This place is catty-corner to a McDonald's, and there's a line out the door," he says. "It cost a little more, but it was good."

(sam@citypaper.net)

Fast Food Nation opens Friday at Ritz Bourse. See Sam Adams' review on p. 51.