The Founder

One of the biggest triumphs of The Social Network is that is actually captures the anxiety of social networking. Less a glowing portrait than a grim dissection of the mythology of Mark Zuckerberg, played with vicious solipsism by Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network is that rare biopic that is truly as much about the reason for its subject’s fame than the subject itself, if only symbolically. Zuckerberg is Facebook, for the purposes of The Social Network, and in that sense the film was prophesy. But none of that matters.

The cardinal sin of the biopic is to mix up the subject and their importance. I’ve discussed transgender biopics before: these films avoid this rule in part because being trans is the subject’s whole identity and entire reason for importance in these films. Biopics of the entrepreneurial class — largely white cis men, of course — tend to keep a distance between a subject and whatever that subject did that is the reason that person is the subject of a biopic in the first place. After all, to attack the fruits of a businessman’s labors would be to attack capitalism itself, the unspoken structure in which these films take place.

Capitalist biopics are quintessentially not about the individuals themselves, or about what those individuals did. Capitalist biopics are the brick and mortar of modern neoliberal capitalism, symptoms of an age in which robber barons have become “philanthropists” and the working class is increasingly economically distant from the ruling elites who believe the answer to the world’s problems is their money, but only so long as it remains in their hands.

2016’s aptly titled The Founder is sort of like a Social Network but for people who like shitty hamburgers. This horror story of unbridled capitalism wants to have its cake and eat it, too: praise Ray Kroc for building the McDonald’s empire while pretending to critique the methods by which he built it. But even though the film has some digs at the ruthlessness with which Kroc builds his business and his brand, the lives and livelihoods he destroys, mostly the film is a blushing hagiography, less of Kroc than of Fordist capitalism itself. The ends always justify the means, as long as the “ends” are profit.

There’s not much about labor in The Founder, just like there’s not much about labor in The Social Network. The actual work that drives these companies is elided in favor of the “visionary” men who founded them. These films are secretly studies in the creation of power.

A the end of The Founder, an epigraph tells us that McDonald’s eventually returned to using real ice cream for milkshakes, as though that, above anything else in this story, is what matters. As though filmmakers intended us to miss the real point of the story. This comment is a calculated distraction.

A lot was made of Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street at the time, including the central question: does the film elevate its subject, Jordan Belfort, a man the film depicts as a ruthless, callow financial predator? Or does the film serve as a nimbly orchestrated takedown? Is depicting something the same as criticizing it?

But even this, again, misses the point. Although I think the answer is simple — Scorsese is a perpetually non-judgmental filmmaker, refusing to condemn his subjects based on moral failings, or in other words Scorsese moralizes actions, not people — the construction of the question is faulty precisely because of the capitalist system in which these films are made. Under capitalism, morality doesn’t matter. Actions don’t matter. As long as capitalism is built, expanded, reinforced, nothing else matters. Long live the founder.

The reason that the question of criticism vs. valorization misses the point in this subgenre is that these films are not about the actions of these characters, or about the characters themselves. They are not even, strictly speaking, about the products of a founder’s vision. That’s a veil. Audience members are supposed to focus on what are ultimately trivialities. The real story is neoliberal late-stage capitalism, and when you finally see that, it’s like seeing the Matrix through the code, or Pleasantville slowly coming into color.

All the narrative trappings, all the individual moral questions, are designed to distract viewers from the system hiding in plain sight. Filmmakers, wittingly or not, weave secret capitalist cosmologies that should concern us all.