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Slow Food, Slow Film

In a memorable scene in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), a struggling independent filmmaker, Cliff Stern (Allen) accuses Lester (Alan Alda) a famous producer of popular television situation comedy of having instilled “values that deaden the sensibilities of a great democracy.” It may not take much to believe that television programming could have a debilitating effect upon a culture and a nation, but exactly how it can be done invokes better questions than can be satisfied by identification of ideological content. How can that enervating sitcom material be made so tasty as to lure a culture to need it over and over again? How can obsessive consumption of the same simple tastes and unhealthy ingredients supplant healthy, varied and traditional cuisine? How do these totalizations of taste in food and the visual media spread so seductively? It will be the designed outcomes of the respective industries of food and film to create the reliability of desire for the same products repetitively. Transformation of consumption is as important as control of the means of production. The classical view of labor will already acknowledge that capital will order life as thoroughly as it does labor.1 If the material determination of political structure and culture no longer suffices to explain labor and life fully, it will be because recognizably the cultural side of the relationship implicitly allows for consciousness to contest totalization.2 The political structure may nevertheless tolerate protestation as an ingredient much more readily than unidirectional ideological formation would warrant. Consumption of cultural products in which capital is invested leads to the culture being absorbed into the economic scheme without the need to regulate ideological agenda in those products. Success in these industries is rooted in how the products are sold. Capitalist reproduction latches upon every possible market that suggests a potential for multiplying investment. Where this happens, discrete use becomes obsessive consumption. That same effect will show up when the need to create fathomless markets of consumption infiltrates what we eat and the visions that we incorporate into our imagination. The whole of life has become enmeshed in the one-sided exchange originally modeled in the company town, but now well beyond the redoubling of profits in the company store and company housing. Food and film both inherit traditions with a broad range of virtue. Large-scale industry proliferation of social pabulum has come to dominate in both, because that pabulum is limitlessly saleable. Perennially renewed resistance to this domination, however, yet thrives in both food culture and film culture. The hallmark in either case is dedication to exquisite creations within the dedicated practice of an art.