The Sexual Politics of Burger King Chicken Fries

Burger King's 2015 series of commercials for the relaunch of chicken fries depends on powerful stereotypes about women, homosexuality, and race to market their product to privilege: straight, white, masculinity.

In this commercial, a rooster is shown browsing a dating website. After snubbing a number of hens, he comes across BK Chicken Fries and suddenly becomes very excited. Healthy, living chickens are not seen as sexy, but dead, dismembered, disempowered "meat" is sexualized:

In another commercial, BK Chicken Fries are insinuated to be a product of a sexual encounter between hypermasculinized potato fries and a teenage hen. The possibility of his daughter dating the fries sends her rooster father into a rage. Again, powerful gender norms are reinforced in the negotiation of dating and sex, and "meat" is sexualized.

Interestingly, a couple of commercials also present "becoming meat" as a challenge to masculinity, loosely drawing on the "racial threat" in doing so.

In this commercial, a father comes home to his son who is bopping his head to hip hop music with several boxes of fries. Father rooster screams, "You wanna explain to me what these french fries are doing in my house?" His son replies, "Dad, come on they're my boys."  Based on the language and tone, the audience is encouraged to think about the chickens as white-identified and the fries as the non-white thugs. Says the rooster: "Listen, you are a chicken, stop acting like a side dish!" The audience could easily imagine the common trope, "You are white, stop acting Black!" Because "meat" is feminized and exists as a signal of disempowerment, to be meat is to be non-white.

In this ad, a chicken is hanging out on a stoop in an urban setting with some potato fries. His friends catch him in the act, who begin to deride him: "Hey chicken! You gotta lotta nerve for hangin' out with those french fries, man! Maybe you wanna be a french fry, huh?" By placing the chicken in a hyper-maculinized setting (and giving them non-white accents, presumably to increase their "street cred"), we are encouraged to think that there is something emasculating about associating with french fries. In this case, fries seem to represent persons with non-conforming genders or sexualities. The chicken in question must reassert his masculinity and challenges his friends with retorts: maybe he does want to be a french fry. Again, "meat" represents something that is less than masculine, and the rooster's association with it suggests he might be trans or gay. When his friends realize that he might actually want to be a french fry, they become very uncomfortable.

Noticeably, in none of the commercials are the chickens concerned in the slightest with being killed and eaten. Their reactions range from arousal or anger at threats to gender, race, and sexuality norms. So, while chickens are anthropomorphized and the audience is invited to view them as persons, the political imagination is immediately stifled when the systemic violence imposed on chickens becomes a joke.

Vegan feminists have theorized that "meat" is a highly masculinized product, as it entails extreme violence and requires the support of strong ideologies of patriarchal dominance. Advertisers often pull on these ideologies in order to appeal to a hierarchical society that values masculinity and devalues all that is feminized (including women, homosexuals, trans persons, people of color, and other animals). The Burger King chicken fries series is one of several fast food commercials that frame the consumption of their product as a "manly" act that will define privilege for the consumer.

35 Years Later, Infamous Flop Still Bad

This year marks the 35th anniversary of "Heaven's Gate," the infamous cinematic flop that bankrupted the United Artists studio. While there seems to be a growing urge among critics to rehabilitate the film's reputation, I must reluctantly side with the original consensus. Director Michael Chimino's vision of class struggle on the American West is an absolute snoozefest, despite increasingly topical subject matter. Moreover, animal abuse involved in production has been completely lost in discussion of the movie's legacy. Meanwhile, the film's narrative highlights the historic entanglement of violence against humans and animals.

It's hard to overemphasize what a critical and commercial disaster "Heaven's Gate" was upon its release in 1980. The film was initially provided a $12-million budget, but this grew to a then-astronomic total of $44 million, due to Cimino's endless retakes and insistence on historical authenticity, among other things. In the end, "Heaven's Gate" recouped a mere $3.4 million at the box office, while receiving a critical drubbing. In the New York Times, Vincent Canby likened it to a "forced four-hour walking tour of one's own living room."

As mentioned, in recent years there has been a noticeable trend among critics to reevaluate the film more favorably. For instance, in 2011, Time Out London staff named it the 12th greatest western of all time. The following year, in the New York Times, Dennis Lim argued that "present-day viewers may well find that time has been kind to 'Heaven’s Gate,'" describing the film as an "elegiac rethinking of the myths of the West and the western." Writing for the Guardian in 2013, Peter Bradshaw called it a "spectacular western epic," both "colossally ambitious and mysteriously moving." Despite my sincere desire to join this positive reassessment, I can't honestly do so. Admittedly, I haven't seen Cimino's most recent, 216-minute cut, which the 2012 Venice Film director called an "absolute masterpiece." But if it's anything like the 219-minute version available on Amazon, I can say that though the movie is beautifully shot, it remains tremendously boring and overlong.

Further, the allegations of animal cruelty perpetrated during its production should not be forgotten or ignored. According to the American Humane Society's review of "Heaven's Gate," the movie "includes an actual cockfight, several horse trips, and a horse being blown up with a rider on its back. People who worked on the set verified more animal abuse, such as chickens being decapitated and steer being bled in order to use their blood to smear on the actors instead of using stage blood." Ultimately, this led the actors' guild and the producers' association to authorize the American Humane Society to monitor all animal use in film. But as a recent expose in the Hollywood Reporter demonstrated, the oversight is far from adequate. One hopes that if "Heaven's Gate" were made now it would rely solely on CGI animals.

What the film does offer is an illustration of how violence against humans and animals has historically overlapped. As sociologist David Nibert put it, "harms that humans have done to other animals — especially that harm generated by pastoralist and ranching practices that have culminated in contemporary factory-farming practices — have been a precondition for and have engendered large-scale violence against and injury to devalued humans." Primarily Nibert traces European colonization, showing how violence against indigenous populations was often made possible and motivated by animal exploitation. "Heaven's Gate," set in 1890s Wyoming and loosely based on the Johnson County War, follows a similar pattern, though the human victims in this case are European immigrants. In Cimino's film, rich cattle barons, whose wealth is generated through the murder of cows, kill those impoverished settlers who threaten their herds.

But this unintentional representation of a historic phenomenon is not nearly enough to save "Heaven's Gate." Thirty-five years after its release, don't fall for the revisionist hype. Because it's still a bad movie — purely on artistic terms. Worse than that, the production involved willful torture of animals. 

By Jon Hochschartner

Goldfish Enrichment and Wildlife Rehabilitation

As a Virginia resident, I follow the "wildlife"¹ rehabilitation efforts of the Wildlife Center of Virginia, efforts which often entail heartwarming stories about bear cub rescues (something I've always found ironic, as it is completely legal to shoot and kill bears in my state). There is also a lot of focus on saving eagles, and the Center's social media site often posts links to webcam feeds of animals healing and playing in their enclosures or inspiring videos of eagle releases. Today they posted a video of "fish enrichment" for eagles on the mend.

In the video, we see a crude plastic pool imprisoning several fishes² with no filter, no pebbles, no air pump, and no plants or hiding places. The fishes seem to be treated as though they have no interests and they exist solely for the eagle to jump on, harass, terrify, and kill. The Wildlife Center posted the video as a cute update on the rehabilitation status of Buddy the eagle, but all I could see was the cruel and tortured existence of the goldfishes who have been completely objectified for the Virginian fetishization of eagles. Indeed, no commentator to date has expressed any unease with the well-being of the fishes on Facebook or YouTube. Viewers simply see this video as "cute" and entertaining.

It should go without saying, but the goldfish industry is one that imposes great amounts of suffering on fishes, and goldfishes are a highly sensitive animal who easily succumb to inferior habitats, water that has not been treated, and stressful conditions.

Like bears and eagles, goldfishes are sentient and social animals.

"Wildlife" rehabilitation reinforces the notion that some animals (usually charismatic megafauna) are more important than other animals (like goldfishes and the animals we kill for food, clothes, sport, and entertainment).  I've also seen the Wildlife Center asking Virginia "hunters" to please switch to non-lead ammunition, so that scavengers will not be poisoned by ingesting the corpses of deers, turkeys, and other animals who matter less. The notion that "hunting"³ might be a problem in itself is never addressed. Our thinking about other animals is quite compartmentalized. Compartmentalization helps us to reconcile our inherent empathy for other animals with our existence in a society that systemically exploits Nonhuman Animals for our benefit.

What's to be done with animals like eagles that need to consume the corpses of other animals to survive? I believe there are alternatives that can be explored. Goldfish "enrichment," however, is most certainly not a requirement for eagle rehabilitation and cannot be morally justified.


Notes:
1. "Wildlife" is an objectifying pejorative best replaced with "free-living animals."
2. I avoid mass terms like "deer" or "turkey," which work to deindividualize some species.
3. "Hunting" is a euphemism for systemic violence against Nonhuman Animals.

What Can Buster Keaton Teach Us About Animal Abuse?

This year marks the 90th anniversary of Buster Keaton's pastoral comedy "Go West," which in its own clumsy way explores humanity's domination of animals. The 1925 silent film, that Pauline Kael described as one of Keaton's lesser works, and which I will momentarily spoil, centers on a lonesome ranch hand who befriends a cow. In a bizarrely-triumphant finale, he rescues her from death, while leading the rest of her herd to slaughter. I'm genuinely unsure what one is supposed to make of it.

It should be mentioned the production clearly treated its non-human cast in an egregious manner. Sadly, one doubts Keaton saw anything objectionable in this. After all, much of the abuse was likely standard practice in his era's flesh industry, which has since only grown more brutal. Further, Keaton himself was no stranger to rough treatment, having worked in vaudeville from a young age. As Roger Ebert noted, "by the time he was 3, [Keaton] was being thrown around the stage and into the orchestra pit, and his little suits even had a handle concealed at the waist, so [his father] Joe could sling him like luggage. Today this would be child abuse; then it was showbiz." Given his past and societal speciesism, one can easily imagine how Keaton might rationalize animal abuse for the sake of entertainment.

In "Go West" the ranch hand Keaton plays, called Friendless, removes a troublesome rock from the hoof of a cow he oversees. The animal, named Brown Eyes, subsequently saves him from a charging bull. So their bond begins to form. The movie's laughs are designed to come from Friendless' ineptitude at ranching, with his seeming inability to objectify Brown Eyes as a mere head of livestock perhaps being the prime example. When he sees the cow is slated to be painfully branded, Friendless attempts to hide her behind some shrubbery. After being discovered, he shaves the desired marking into her hair, creating the illusion of scorched tissue, which successfully fools the owner. Eventually, it's time for Brown Eyes to be shipped to slaughter. Keaton's character violently opposes this, drawing his pistol on another ranch hand and shoving his boss out of the way. But it's no use. The owner refuses Friendless' offer to purchase the animal with his remaining wages, saying, "You can't buy her, she'll bring twice that much."

The herd is then loaded onto a train for a Los Angeles stockyard. During the trip, the transport is attacked by bandits, leaving Keaton's character to manage the animals on his own. Upon arrival, he initially moves to escape with Brown Eyes, leaving the rest of the herd in confinement. But remembering his boss' financial insecurities, Friendless decides to bring the herd to the abattoir. When I first saw the film, I initially thought in releasing the animals from their boxcars he intended to bring them to freedom and safety. I was surprised when he ultimately brought them to the stockyard gates, for which the boss granted him ownership of Brown Eyes, something he could not have counted on.

So why did Keaton's character, despite apparently valuing one of their kind, choose to bring the animals to slaughter? Broadly I see three explanations. The first is he valued the entire herd, but saw their deaths as inevitable, and for whatever reason thought bringing them to the stockyards himself was the best option for all. The second is he only valued Brown Eyes, as an exception to his overarching speciesism. And the third is Keaton's character didn't transcend the anthropocentric paradigm at all, and rescued his chosen cow merely for the benefits she could provide him, in this case, companionship. Regardless, the film's cheery ending does not seem to match the facts of the situation. 

By Jon Hochschartner

"Never Let Me Go" mirrors animal exploitation

"Never Let Me Go," a sorely-underseen film from 2010, can be easily read as an allegory for the exploitation of animals. The dystopian romance, based on what I hear is a masterful novel, stars Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield as a couple who belong to a class of humans raised to be forced organ donors. While the story could serve as a specific metaphor for xenotransplantation, in a broader sense it mirrors the plight of all domesticated animals, whose entire existence is predicated on their use by others.

The film, which I will necessarily spoil, begins in the 1970s at Hailsham, which appears to be an idyllic British boarding school, attended by Mulligan and Garfield's characters, Kathy and Tommy. A guilt-wracked teacher tells them they're fated to die as young adults, after their bodies have been harvested for medical purposes. When they turn 18, Kathy and Tommy are moved to a group home for future donors, where they hear a rumor that loving couples can seek a temporary deferral from their duties. Despite their long-held feelings for each other, Kathy and Tommy do not share a romantic relationship. This changes after Tommy starts the donation process. Seeking further time together, the couple pursue the rumored deferral only to discover it's a myth. Tommy dies as a result of harvesting. The film ends with Kathy scheduled to begin the same process.

In discussing the movie, it should be mentioned that Tommy himself explicitly compares the lot of his kind, who are the product of cloning, to the victims of animal agriculture. "I suppose you both heard that Hailsham is closed. The only schools left now — you hear they're like battery farms," he says, suggesting other institutions treat donor children exceptionally poorly. "I'm sure that's an exaggeration though." The comparison is apt. Like farmed non-humans, Tommy and Kathy are brought into the world solely so they can be objectified in a very literal sense.

If other schools in the story are akin to factory farms, Hailsham is the equivalent of a more 'humane' operation, such as those championed by locavores like Michael Pollan. Without the proper context, a viewer could be forgiven for thinking the posh Hailsham was filled with privileged children. And yet like these gentler forms of agriculture, Hailsham ultimately raises its wards so they can be killed and dismembered. When the headmistress castigates students for smoking, it's not for their own benefit, but rather because they are damaging bodies which are seen as belonging to others. "Never Let Me Go" reminds us that regardless of the conditions provided on 'humane' farms, animals exist in such places to be exploited.

Like speciesism, which emerged to justify human exploitation of animals, an elaborate ideology exists in Kathy and Tommy's world to rationalize the violence done to clones like them. When the couple visits their retired headmistress as adults, they wonder why their artwork was saved at school. "You have to understand," she replies, "Hailsham was the last place to consider the ethics of donation. We used your art to show what you were capable of, to show that donor children are all but human. But we were providing an answer to a question no one was asking...We didn't have the Gallery to look into your souls. We had the Gallery in order to see if you had souls at all." It should be pointed out that despite this deep-seated enmity to clones, the organ-harvesting process seems to have existed less than fifty years into the film's setting. In contrast, speciesism arguably originated with animal domestication and thus is infinitely more entrenched in our culture.

Ultimately, "Never Let Me Go" is the story of a human couple reduced to the status of animals. It's a heartbreakingly sad film. But it's the exploitation that's sad, not the species of the victims.

 by Jon Hochschartner