Fictionalized “Food Nation”

I’ve been very curious about the adaptation of Eric Schlosser’s nonfiction best-seller Fast Food Nation into a fictionalized version directed by Richard Linklater. In this LA Weekly interview, Linklater says this general idea was Schlosser’s. The film

depicts a burger chain called Mickey’s whose McWhopping cash cow “the Big One” turns out to be riddled with shit. But Mickey’s is less a ringer for McDonald’s than a synecdoche for the fast-food-franchise herd entire, and Fast Food Nation the movie sets its sights not on individual corporate malfeasance so much as a pervasively poisonous socioeconomic order. If a Mickey’s Big One, for all its shiny happy advertising, leaves a trail of exploited workers, abused animals and despoiled land — not to mention unhealthy consumers — there’s an industrial-grade logic behind it. At the heart of the movie is the image of the meat-packing plant’s disassembly line, a conveyor belt whose speed directly correlates with the plant’s profit. Faster means higher margins, more workplace injuries and more irremediable mistakes at the gut table….

The co-writers approach their subject through three storylines that intersect in Cody, Colorado, a fictional meat-packing anytown. Don (Greg Kinnear) is a Mickey’s company man, sent to investigate the source of a “fecal coliform” infection; Sylvia (Catalina Sandino Moreno) is an illegal Mexican immigrant trying to resist the vice of drugs, harassment and injury that constitutes work at the Uniglobe Meat Packing Plant; Amber (Ashley Johnson) is a teenage Mickey’s waitress, experiencing the first stirrings of political consciousness.

It’s an interesting approach. The risk, or at least it seems like a risk to me, is that fictionalizing it makes it all much easier to dismiss. On the other hand, the power of a hit movie still blows away most other platforms I can think of. We’ll see how this one plays out….