but we can’t let it branded.
Michael Keaton gave a brief account of his role in The Founder on Stephen Colbert’s show last night, and the two chatted back and forth about what Ray Kroc actually accomplishes in his commercial conceptualization of the Mc Donald’s experience in American culture. The film celebrates Ray Kroc’s discovery of a place to buy fast food and consume it where so-called ordinary people can break bread together — in essence, he proposes that under those golden arches people will find the “new American church.” His discovery touts that the food is ready at the moment it is ordered, and that the customer needs no implements to eat it, and can do so wherever she or he chooses. There is an implied freedom of choice in the branding of Mc Donald’s, a supposedly unique American twist on social freedoms.
However, I think that it’s the smoothness of the branding that makes Ray Kroc’s manipulations seem like an object of celebration. Fast food already existed in the U.S. and working people had the freedom to eat it as they wished without being cajoled into buying a new brand along with the product. From 1902 to 1991, Horn & Hardart’s Automat restaurants in New York City signified the efficient lunchtime experience. People with only 30 minutes to eat browsed the offerings behind the glass displays and inserted their coins to make a selection. Sandwiches, slices of pie, and Jell-o with whipped cream revolved in the carousels where restaurant workers replenished them as they were sold. People ate at lunch counters and sat on iconic soda fountain stools, chatted with wait-staff and other regulars, and participated in the secular exercise of choosing one’s lunch and socializing, or simply eating quietly.
A significant difference is that there are no leftover bags of food in vehicles or homes when eating lunch remains just that — eating lunch. There is no buying of the product as experience or as an emblem of democracy, in fact, the marketing of a fast-food brand is precisely what ends up imposing a belief system upon customers: you’re not just buying lunch, you’re buying a product disguised as enfranchisement — think of the niche marketing to African Americans by Mc Donald’s, appropriating the linguistic use of Mickey D’s by the turn of the 20th century. Anthony Lane has dubbed this film “trumpist,” in his New Yorker review, pointing to the strategy of repeating something long enough to make it true — remind you of anyone? I tend to agree. Hancock’s film could be our cautionary tale for 2017.
