The Fast Food Effect in Filmmaking

It seems like everywhere you look, there’s a fast food restaurant tempting you with mouthwatering photos of cheeseburgers, french fries, and milkshakes. These establishments have perfected the art of capturing your attention with glitzy neon signs and the promise of a convenient meal that hits all of your cravings: salt, fat, sugar—flavors that deliver a whopping punch to your taste buds. But while fast food can be satisfying in its own right, there are always other options that are able to cater to a sense of nuance, depth, and substance.

How does this approach translate to filmmaking? Like the surface level attraction of a greasy meal, movies are often produced to attack your basic instinctual responses with sex, violence, suspense, and danger, interspersed with small breaks but overall maintaining a level of constant, breathless excitement. Having come up through the ranks as a broadcast tv commercial editor attuned to attention-grabbing techniques, I think a lot about the importance of finesse and moderation in filmmaking. These fast food films take the easy road with an approach that disregards storytelling in lieu of short exclamations like “Bang!” and “Wow!” So why do they dominate the film industry? Because these stimulant-saturated movies are geared towards teenage boys, an audience that makes up roughly 90% of theater revenue.

“A whole set of values comes with fast food: Everything should be fast, cheap and easy; there's always more where that came from...It's uniformity and a lack of connection.”
— Alice Waters

That’s why it’s so vital, in an age of purposefully ostentatious films, to seek out movies that glow with powerful storytelling. One shining example this year is Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, which avoids the fast food approach by smartly incorporating moments of violence, fantasy, and sexuality not to cheat viewers into staying in their seats, but to add depth to the film's rhythmically balanced storytelling. The film’s blend of fantasy and realism enhances the themes of isolation and intense longing, juxtaposed against current social issues of otherness and prejudice.

The Shape of Water creates a subtle landscape of loneliness and companionship, masterfully navigating emotional cues without hitting the audience over the head by lingering unnecessarily. The movie builds its metaphors into stunning visual poetry as del Toro invites viewers, through an ambivalent ending that continues the sense of space in the story, to open their minds and reassess what otherness means to them.

Unfortunately, insightful films like The Shape of Water are an outlier in today’s movie industry. So many movies from student screenings at colleges to blockbuster hits on the big screen focus on technically advanced special effects, flashy explosions, and complex camera movements. Filmmakers gloss over romances without evoking first date jitters, or display killers without a sense of their humanity (it can be a breath of fresh air to see a murderer making pesto!). The soul of the story is sacrificed and viewers walk away without gaining a deeper perspective of anyone or anything.

It’s so vital, in an age of purposefully ostentatious films, to seek out movies
that glow with powerful storytelling.

So while there is a time and place to hit up a drive-through for your late night cravings, know when your body is asking for something with a little more nourishment—it can be just as easy and convenient to feed your senses as it is to feed your soul. A thought provoking film can always be found on the menu.

Here are a few I’d put on today’s “Specials:”

Beasts of the Southern Wild - modern mythology

Departures - life through death

October Sky - father/son/love/hate

Moonstruck - neighborhood love

Chicago - musical story-selling perfection

Get Out - horror re-visioned

Ladybird - mother/daughter/love hate

Online film class with Eric Pomert