I didn’t really know what to expect when I sat down to watch. In my head I imagined something like Supersize Me. But I was wrong. Supersize Me is about the fast food industry, but, while Fast Food Nation deals specifically with the fast food industry, what is really dealt with is the ‘system.’ What tends to happen when a movie deals with injustice is that one side is pure evil and the other side is pure good. That’s not the case in this movie, and I think that’s what I liked about it. Everyone in this movie is in some way partially a victim. They are being victimized by the system. And yes, the system is even victimizing those who created it.
Greg Kinnear plays a corporate executive who digs a little too deep and realizes what he is actually perpetuating. But Kinnear’s character, Don Anderson, is a good man and decides he is going to speak out. He does this to Bruce Willis’s character, Harry Rydell. Unlike Don, Harry isn’t blind to the system, he understands the ins and outs and the extreme complications of trying to breakout of the system. Harry points out that if the system is brought down in order to help those people at the bottom (the customers, the immigrant employees at the meat packing plant, et cetera) that it will instead fall down on them and crush them instead of helping them. Harry is the first one in the movie to point out the complications of bringing down the system. Harry lives his life understanding the ills of the system, but at the same time feeling that the system is the lesser of two evils, and in that way he seems to feel little guilt for being apart of it.
Amber, played by Ashley Johnson, comes to the same realization that Don does, when she quits her job at the local fast food restaurant because of new found moral objections. Her and some friends with similar moral objections take a trip to the meat packing plant one night to set the cows free. They cut the fence expect the cows to run free. They don’t. Amber and her friends give up and retreat to a dorm room where they realize that maybe the animals would rather eat the genetically enhanced feed and live in the pens than actually roam free eating grass. In this way the cows’ actions echo Harry’s point.
What I liked about this movie was that nothing was as simple as it initially appeared. And what frustrated me about this movie is that nothing was as simple as it initially appeared. My real life is full of contradictions and complications, and Fast Food Nation portrayed life in such a way. I could relate to that, but at the same time didn’t feel relaxed and energized after sitting on the couch for two hours. There were no answers at the end of this movie, nothing was solved. So what do we do about these systemic evils in our society? I’m not so sure it’s as simple as tearing down the system and blaming those at the top. In some ways they are victims themselves. So who do we blame? Who can we blame? What have we gotten ourselves into?
