I know it’s become a dogma that McDonald’s is the fount of all ill-health, but I can’t help but remain a fan. I am very fond of a quarter-pounder with cheese. It once restored me from heat-stroke while reporting on a demonstration in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. There’s nothing more welcome than a pair of golden arches when you are four hours into a long road trip. And, seriously, is there anything better for quelling a hangover?
The day after Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, I went to cure my political hangover at a preview screening of The Founder, a biopic about Raymond “Ray” Kroc, the mastermind behind McDonald’s. Kroc, born in Chicago in 1902 to Czech parents, begins the movie as a down-on-his-luck hero, a struggling middle-aged salesman humping a heavy multi-spindle milkshake mixer around out-of-the-way diners. “Increase supply and demand follows!” exhorts Kroc in the film to the nay-saying diner owners who shake their heads at him. Michael Keaton plays Kroc with a shorn head and a grinning, thrusting attitude; abrasive, impatient, ambitious. It’s a classic rags-to-riches American success story.
But at another level, especially in the second half, the film transforms into a very different—though equally Hollywood—story. From hero-entrepreneur, Kroc turns into the villain of American cinema: an evil corporation. McDonald’s has long veered between the sweet and the bitter, convenient and yummy but bad-for-you; the film reflects the wider dichotomy inherent in capitalism and globalisation. The McDonald’s story may have begun with a heroic ambition, but its successful world domination has turned it into an object of derision.
The McDonald brothers opened their first restaurant in 1937, a family-friendly place specialising in hot dogs. They invented their famous fast food system in 1948, the year that little Donald Trump turned two. Then, towards the end of the 1950s, Kroc took over the franchising and the number of restaurants began to mushroom. This is the era in which the movie is set—among the Americana of gas stations, cars, teenagers, hamburgers and roller-skates. This age is nostalgically recalled as an era when everybody knew their country was great, a time when its greatest generation settled into a prosperous middle-class assumption. On the face of it, McDonald’s was a perfectly benign embodiment of all that. A family eatery—what could be more apple pie? (Caution: filling is hot). Standardised quality, cleanliness, efficiency, burgers, fries, shakes, all served within 30 seconds.
But as waistlines bulged complacently, McDonald’s became demonised as a petri dish of E. coli, obesity and sugar-laced diabetes. Super Size Me, the 2004 documentary by Morgan Spurlock during which he ate nothing but McDonald’s food for a month, didn’t help. The effects on Spurlock were hair raising and his doctors begged him to stop eating so many hamburgers. McDonald’s has had to respond to its critics: less salt, less sugar, salads on the menu, calorie counts on packaging.
Such efforts have not assuaged middle-class distaste and healthy outrage. But I remember how McDonald’s first opened in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, when I was living there in the late 1990s. It was a time of post-Soviet drear, the economy had flatlined and electricity in winter was down to four hours a day. When McDonald’s opened, it was as if an alien spaceship had landed from planet civilisation. It was such an important event, representing the future, hope and, more concretely, foreign investment, that the president of the country, Eduard Shevardnadze, the former head of Foreign Affairs for the USSR, attended the opening. I gatecrashed; it was the hottest ticket in town. Inside was a revelation: brightly lit, warm in the winter, air conditioned in the summer, clean toilets and—a first for incredulous Georgians—a no-smoking zone!
It was expensive, it was aspirational, it was American. The arrival of McDonald’s does not bring democracy; but it does mean that a little piece of the American Dream has come to a location near you. The opening of an outlet in a new country heralds change, economic opportunity, optimism, a new era. What signalled the end of the Cold War more clearly than McDonald’s opening in Moscow in 1990? The lines went around the blocks for days; 35,000 people applied to work there.
McDonald’s has been at the vanguard of globalisation—its very emblem. In 1986, The Economist created the Big Mac index which compares the prices of a Big Mac in different countries, as a way of gauging a country’s relative purchasing power. (McDonald’s signature burger was originally sold as the Aristocrat; its inventor, Michael Delligatti, just died in November, at the impressive age of 98.) Thomas Friedman, a high priest of the global liberal order, even came up with the Golden Arches theory in his 1999 book The Lexus and the Olive Tree. This states that the establishment of a McDonald’s indicates a healthy middle class; economic prosperity engenders political stability. No two countries with McDonald’s restaurants have gone to war with each other, he said.
That was almost true when he wrote it, if we ignore the US invasion of Panama in 1989 and ongoing clashes between India and Pakistan. Since then, however, we’ve witnessed the war between Lebanon and Israel in 2006, Georgia and Russia in 2008, and then Russia and Ukraine in 2014. So much for Globalisation dovetailing with the End of History to bring about Peace in Our Time. But there’s no doubt that McDonald’s represents an American economic model of consumerism that has come to be increasingly translated—by different narratives, from Islamic State to Anonymous—into its political evil-twin: American hegemony.
But it was the backlash against globalisation within the US itself that landed the country with its businessman President-Elect—and not without accompanying ironies. Because for Trump—a one man corporation, for whom no brand can be too big—there is no ambivalence about McDonald’s at all. He loves the stuff. Back in the 1990s he even did a McDonald’s ad: “This thing you’ve pulled off, it’s amazing,” he says, posing behind a broad master-of-the-universe desk, burger in hand, a “yuge” letter “T” behind him in the corner-office window. “A Big ‘n Tasty for just a dollar? How do you do it?” he asks. It’s odd to watch the now. His voice is lighter, and his head honcho shtick played for laughs. He’s lovin’ it. During the election campaign he was even photographed eating McDonald’s on his private jet. “One bad hamburger, you can destroy McDonald’s,” he said, “they’re out of business... I like cleanliness, and I think you’re better off going there than maybe some place that you have no idea where the food is coming from.” Simultaneously on corporate message while playing to mainstreet values like he’s just a regular guy.
During the election Trump managed to cast himself as the underdog hero. It’s a familiar Hollywood character, a cultural trope. American movies have always illustrated how the country sees itself. They shape and project the American dream. They map the evolution of American experiment, reflecting and refracting its politics, economics and society. Good guys and baddies genre-hop between Westerns and conspiracy thrillers and tear-jerker redemptions. But the tough guys, wise guys, gunslingers, and crusading whistle-blowers have this in common: the leading man is invariably cast as an individual, a maverick, the guy with the big idea—like that he wants to “Make America Great Again,” for example.
In The Founder, Ray Kroc is initially framed the same way. The director, John Lee Hancock (who has spent a career producing sentimental popcorn stuff: Saving Mr Banks, The Blind Side) has produced a standard hagiography. Kroc drives cross country to investigate a hamburger stand in San Bernardino that is doing such a roaring business it has ordered six of his milkshake mixers. “OPPORTUNITY OPPORTUNITY OPPORTUNITY!” Kroc shouts at the McDonald brothers—like Apprentice finalists under the spotlight—as they take in the long line queuing for hamburgers. He tours the kitchen and sees how the brothers have applied Henry Ford’s assembly-line principles to hamburger production. Close up on ketchup and mustard delivery nozzles. Innovation! Technology! The future! The art of the deal! When Kroc persuades the wary McDonald brothers to let him be their franchise manager he tells them, “Do it for your country! Do it for America!” Expansion, enterprise is patriotic.
The second half of the movie, however, gives way to a counterpoint to the might-is-right portrayal of American capitalism. Kroc gets the franchise deal and successfully rolls out more restaurants, but the McDonald brothers are obstructive; they won’t amend agreements or let Kroc play around with the original recipes. Enter a financier who comes up with a new economic model in which Kroc’s new company buys the land for the new restaurants and then leases it to the franchise holders for a percentage of their profits. (Did you know that McDonald’s is now one of the world’s largest landowners?) Soon Kroc buys out the brothers. But he never honours his handshake promise to give them a share of future profits. They no longer own the rights to their name and he puts their original San Bernardino restaurant out of business. From hero-entrepreneur, he has morphed into the evil corporation. It’s a complicated, queasy tale of two halves. Is Ray Kroc the good guy or a baddie?
"McDonald's does not bring democracy; but it does bring a little piece of the American dream to a location near you"But Eric Rentschler, who teaches a course on Hollywood and the American Dream at Harvard, is not surprised by the ambivalence. The narrative of The Founder, he pointed out to me, is echoed, for instance, in The Social Network, the film about Facebook. The Winklevoss twins (Cameron and Tyler) who had the original idea, lose out to Mark Zuckerberg, the guy with the vision to execute it on a giant scale. The Steve Jobs movie—same thing. His brilliantly inventive partner, Steve Wosniak, is left behind to languish. “There Will be Blood,” added Rentschler, mentioning the Daniel Day-Lewis masterpiece of ball-breaking frontier entrepreneurialism. “Another marvellous American dream narrative. The darker side of the American dream is a bloody entity. It’s a kind of social Darwinistic scenario.”
“Greed is good,” said Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. “Dog eat dog, rat eat rat,” says Ray Kroc in The Founder. “My life has been about winning,” Trump told Time magazine during the Republican primary campaign. In all these stories there is a price to be paid for what Rentschler calls “the wreckage you leave behind in your quest for success.” In The Founder, Kroc’s marriage disintegrates, (in real life he was married three times), Zuckerberg betrays his friend Edmundo, Steve Jobs cuts his daughter Lisa out of his life. But “the cost is personal, it is not society, not people, not the masses. And the masses want Apple computers and social media and cheap fast hamburgers.” The films never settle whether the price is worth paying. After all, I admit, I have an iPhone, a MacBook and a Facebook account.
At the end of the movie Kroc airbrushes the innovative McDonald brothers out of the story by having “Founder” printed on his business cards. Kroc made billions but he also gave billions away in his will. How to unpick and understand American myth making? Is McDonald’s good or bad? How did we get from fast food to junk food, from broadsheets to fake news, from land of the free to Guantánamo, Abraham Lincoln to Donald Trump?
For Americans, though, this election, as divisive as it was, is only another episode in a long-running series. As far back as the 1940s Hollywood was exploring the conjunction of the mass media, entertainment and politics. Elia Kazan’s terrifying and prescient 1957 film A Face in the Crowd follows a homespun guitar twanger from jail to television fame and political influence. Kazan said the film was meant as a warning “of the power TV would have in the political life of the nation.” In the 1980s, he wrote that the film “anticipated Ronald Reagan,” the logical convergence of performer and politician. Trump’s election makes the film look even more perceptive. “Instead of long-winded public debate,” says one character, “people want caps and slogans... punchlines and glamour.”
Trump seems to have grasped this especially well, but politics as entertainment is an old saw. Politicians have long sold themselves through their stories as much their straplines: Barack Obama cast himself as an embodiment of the American dream, the son of an immigrant who rose to the presidency; Bill Clinton played on his humble roots in a nowheresville town called Hope. Hillary relied on her competence and policy—and failed to connect. Trump, conversely, inherited a property empire, went practically bankrupt, but bounced back with a business which is more a brand name merchandising outfit than anything else. He has more in common with Citizen Kane (media manipulation, sexcapades, cynical ambition) than with the outsider Jimmy Stewart in Mr Smith Goes to Washington.
So why didn’t voters—or enough voters—identify Trump with big bad corporate America? Maybe because he was decidedly individual; the corporate narrative didn’t quite fit. He had room instead to play different versions of the leading man: the buccaneer, the maverick, the accidental politician. As rural and Rust Belt America lost its economic footing, millions of voters who once voted for Obama picked Trump. Politics has always been a seesaw between perception and portrayal; demagoguery and democracy. Voters swing one way and then another.
McDonald’s still has 36,000 restaurants worldwide. At home, the nation worried after watching Super Size Me still eats their hamburgers. But its revenues are falling. In 2015, McDonald’s reported a 10 per cent drop in sales. In November, Fitch, the ratings agency, downgraded the firm, pointing out that the company has “approximately $26bn of total debt.” Like Trump, its finances are not necessarily what you’d expect. McDonald’s may be big, but it is also a big target. It has had to respond to its critics and customers. Supply side economics has had to give way to demand. It remains to be seen how Trump manages his political “customer base.” Will smart marketing be enough?
