The Founder is a film of our time: capitalism as entertainment
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Version 0 of 1. This week I went to see The Founder, a new movie about the man behind the origins of McDonald’s fast food empire. Michael Keaton has been tipped for an Oscar for his portrayal of Ray Kroc, who turned the single-outlet burger flippers McDonald’s in San Bernadino, California, into a global success story. The film has an 80% rating on the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, a solid gold cast, outstanding production values – and I hated it more than any other movie I can remember. It represented something I had never seen on screen before (outside of United Passions, the ludicrous hagiography of the then Fifa president Sepp Blatter): the full penetration of corporate values into mainstream culture. For those who haven’t seen it, The Founder tells how Kroc, a failing gadget salesman and hustler, came across the original McDonald’s restaurant run by two lovable, folksy brothers, Rick and Maurice McDonald. He began to franchise the brand, in the end selling out the brothers who continued to insist on old-fashioned virtues such as quality. So far so unobjectionable. What is extraordinary about The Founder is that it asks us to empathise with Kroc, an empathy that was impossible for me since Kroc is an amoral chancer. Traditionally, in such films, some kind of reversal would take place, whereby Kroc would learn that there are more important things than commercial success. Alternatively, in movies where the main character is an antihero – Michael Corleone in The Godfather, say – a Faustian dark inversion takes place, and the protagonist ends up losing their soul. Neither of these things takes place in The Founder. Admittedly, Kroc isn’t a ruthless shark at the beginning of the film – he’s just a selfish loser with a failing marriage – but the narrative hardly takes him from hero to zero. Instead, by being persistent, he gets the company, gets the money, even gets the girl, who he steals from an associate having been won over by her evangelical passion for chemical milkshakes. There is no “mid-point crisis”, no revelation that he must make a choice between keeping or losing his integrity. We are just meant to watch his rise to power – and applaud his grit. Certainly other interpretations are possible. Empathy for a film’s main character is not always demanded of an audience, and independent films frequently invite a more critical perspective. But everything about the pattern, shape and structure of The Founder invites you to identify with Kroc as an American hero. What is going on here? There have been plenty of corporate foundation stories in film before. But movies such as The Social Network and Steve Jobs take highly critical views of their protagonists. The Social Network shows Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg not as a hero, but as someone who, in gaining the world, lost the girl he loved. The Founder is different. Perhaps it is just an accident of bad film-making. But it may be that something more sinister is going on. Over the past few years, the interest of business in narrative has increased. It has long been there, of course, mostly in advertising. Think of the famous “JR Hartley” Yellow Pages ad, which tells the story of a forgotten author going in search of his book. But nowadays, “story” is everywhere. Understanding that it is emotion rather than fact that counts for consumers, the game is all about associating products with positive emotions. The latest Tesco campaign has the strapline “Food Love Stories”. The Co-Op tells a love story to sell its plonk. Burberry, Nike, Guinness, Google, Compare the Market – all have recently told mini-stories in their advertisements. Screenwriting guru Robert McKee runs Storynomics courses to unpack the secrets of narrative for corporations such as Microsoft and Nike. Perhaps courses like these are where you learn how to present stories such as Kroc’s to cinema audiences? Hollywood moviemakers scented a gold rush when they discovered Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces, an anthropological study that claimed to identify a universal story structure in all world myths. Famously, George Lucas was influenced by it. The Founder does not meet Campbell’s screenwriting rules because, in the mainstream, protagonists must enjoy our empathy. I understand that McDonald’s did not help to fund The Founder, but was left wondering why not. I don’t know what the film did, or will do, for all its viewers. But I know what it did for me. It frightened me. Because if this is the future of story, the denouement will be depressing indeed. |