#MeToo claims unlikely casualties
Super Size Me sequel deserves to find a wide audience, writes James Croot.
The #MeToo movement has affected audiences for Woody Allen’s Wonder Wheel and Matt Damon’s Downsizing, tainted movies like The Disaster Artist and Baby Driver and forced Ridley Scott into extreme measures by re-casting Kevin Spacey with Christopher Plummer.
Now Hollywood’s grand exorcism of misdeeds has had an extremely unexpected casualty – and it falls to us, a bucolic nation, to provide at least a partial remedy. We have a forum, in the form of New Zealand’s Documentary Edge Festival, to right the wrong poured on Morgan Spurlock’s latest doco, seemingly consigned to the ‘‘unlikely if it’ll ever get a release’’ bin.
Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken was the main loser after the director’s self-revelations in December, when he told fans he was accused of rape at college, settled a harassment claim and had been unfaithful to ‘‘every wife and girlfriend’’ he has had.
Almost immediately, the doco was pulled from the recent Sundance Film Festival, dropped by YouTube Red and will now most likely never be released for general consumption.
While that’s understandable, given the current climate in Hollywood and Spurlock’s reprehensible revelations, it’s hard not feel some sympathy for the farmers who also gave their hearts, souls and trust to the oncepopular documentarian and it seems a shame that viewers around the globe have been denied the chance to view a fascinating and rage-inducing documentary.
I’m all for the #MeToo campaign and the entertainment industry finally being forced to clean up its act, but this feels like an unfortunate consequence that no-one could have foreseen.
Maybe Spurlock should never work in ‘‘that town’’ again, but this feels like an important piece that doesn’t deserve to be scrapped entirely. I’d far rather the current purge resulted in Hollywood stopping making borderline misogynistic claptrap like Better Watch Out, which fortunately Kiwi viewers gave a wide berth too back in December.
I was lucky enough to see Holy Chicken! at its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September.
While much of this Super Size Me follow-up focuses on the new tricks fast-food companies use to persuade us to buy their products (mainly around the use of language), Spurlock’s quest to open his own chicken restaurant was at its most powerful when detailing the injustices faced by third-generation Alabama chicken farmers like Jonathan Buttram, who helped Spurlock raise his flock.
He and many others had hoped their ‘‘mistreatment’’ at the hands of ‘‘Big Chicken’’ (the five powerful corporations which control 99.9 per cent of the birds raised, sold and eaten in America) would gain public exposure from the release of Spurlock’s documentary Holy Chicken.
Not only do ‘‘Big Chicken’’ (Tyson, Pilgrim’s Pride, Sanderson Farms, Perdue Foods, and Koch Foods) make other conglomerates look extremely benevolent by comparison, they also allegedly punish farmers who complain about their ruthless practices.
Farmers have to pay to buy land and build chicken houses and are then subjected to a ‘‘tournament system’’ that arbitrarily ranks them against their neighbours to see who can grow the fattest chicken for the least amount of money – even when one farmer might have been given stale feed or sick hatchlings by the company. Holy Chicken also details how farmers who want to give their chicken better living conditions, fresh air and sunlight, for example, are forbidden, ‘‘because happier birds don’t get fat enough’’.
Speaking at the premiere, Buttram detailed the toll these draconian and punitive practices had on his fellow farmers. ‘‘Two weeks ago, I had two farmers calling me threatening to commit suicide. One of them was a cop who was threatening to commit suicide and murder. I drove several miles to meet this guy in a restaurant, took my Bible with me, and spent an hour with this cop showing him that he could not do this and should not do this. The poultry company doesn’t care.’’
Urging the hundreds in attendance to help them ‘‘speak out’’, he said he was delighted that with Holy Chicken ‘‘our story is finally beginning to be told’’.
Now, thanks to Spurlock’s admissions and behaviour, hardly anyone else is likely to hear it and that’s frustrating and disappointing.
While a massive setback, it doesn’t seem to have deterred Buttram and others. Various smalltown US newspapers reported either side of Christmas that he and others have filed a lawsuit against the US Department of Agriculture aimed at preventing them from removing what little protection they have against Big Chicken. If eliminated, as the National Chicken Council wants in the interest of saving ‘‘consumers hundreds of millions of dollars’’, the Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration rules’ absence would mean farmers could not sue the companies for any ‘‘mistreatment’’.
Such a suit would surely have the support of more consumers had Holy Chicken survived the backlash against Spurlock.
I know he’s been a polarising figure at the best of times and it’s hard to separate the man from his work, particularly in this case where it is so integral to the movie (there’s no chance of subbing in Christopher Plummer here), but it really does feel like the only winners in all of this are Big Chicken.
So maybe now it’s time for our own Documentary Edge Festival to live up to its name, risk the potential backlash, and seek it out for screening here later in the year.