The (Bad) Taste Test: The Resistible Rise of Corporate Cinema
For almost as long as Hollywood has existed, the home of motion pictures has had an obsession with making itself - and its industry - look good.
It’s no secret that awards bodies like the Oscars have a soft spot for films about Hollywood itself, like Mank and The Artist, going all the way back to Singin’ in the Rain. It sets a striking precedent whereby cinema is used as a medium to burnish image and reputation. So in a way, it’s surprising that this practice has taken so long to reach beyond Hollywood, to other stories about huge cultural entities. But if there’s one trend that seems to be emerging in the films of 2023, it’s a desire to tell stories about The Little Corporation That Could: plucky “underdog” tales about history-making corporations – like Nike and Frito-Lay – and the people that worked there at pivotal moments.
Air, directed by Ben Affleck – which reunites him with Matt Damon; the pair last performed together in The Last Duel (2021) – is about the attempts made by Nike to court Michael Jordan as the face of their brand and, through this, make one of the most famous shoes in history. There's a section of The Last Dance (the 2020 Netflix documentary about Jordan, the Chicago Bulls, and their period of NBA dominance between 1991 and 1998) which covers this, so it’s clear that the story itself is interesting. But what’s strange about Air is the way that it frames Nike: as an underdog, as an outsider to root for, maybe even as a disruptor.
Air is set in 1984, when Nike had only a 17% market share and was seen as lagging behind competitors. The company mostly made running shoes, and so the hunt for a basketball star to partner with was about achieving a certain level of cultural caché – and the money that could be made by doing so.
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Ultimately, Air moves towards its pre-destined triumph for the prickly but committed Matt Damon, and the once skeptical Ben Affleck as talent scout Sonny Vaccaro and Nike co-founder Phil Knight respectively. This victory is framed as Nike, the smaller company, succeeding despite the sheer, supposedly monolithic size of their competitors. It seems, then, that Air wants to make us feel good about a company making around $100 million a year, off the back of Jordan and his new, signature shoe. It’s hardly a particularly inspiring tale of the human spirit.
“A film like Flamin’ Hot is able to dress up capitalism as a triumph for diversity.”
Flamin’ Hot, a story that sells itself as being about a food industry disruptor, is slightly better positioned to try and make its rags-to-riches narrative feel less about the triumph of one corporation over the other. It tells the story of Richard Montañez (played by Jesse Garcia), the man who may or may not have invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. The film’s focus on staying true to your culture, and finding pride instead of shame in it, is a commendable message. But it starts to take on a slightly different feeling when that culture becomes used as a kind of bargaining chip, a promise of money for corporate overlords. With the sun setting on 2023’s Pride Month, it’s all too easy to see how this kind of corporate co-option of culture continues to play out long after the credits have rolled on another dime-a-dozen biopic.
When Montañez pitches Flamin’ Hot Cheetos to executives at Pepsi (who own Frito-Lay), he tells them that being represented through product choice is meaningful, saying that customers are “looking for themselves up on those shelves,” and adding, “I wanna know that I matter when I pick up one of those products.” In the end, however, what really matters is bottom line. Flamin’ Hot, then, dresses up capitalism as a triumph for diversity.
There’s a real earnestness to Flamin’ Hot which works on some levels but that leaves a bad taste in the mouth when you can feel it being turned into a corporate tool in front of your eyes. It wants to be about workers and the triumph of the underdog – there are references to Reaganomics and its impact on working class people, or those on benefits – but in the end it seems to get too starry-eyed and awestruck by the men in suits that run big corporations.
One of the major players in Flamin’ Hot is Frito-Lay CEO Roger Enrico (Tony Shaloub), a man who takes a shot on Montañez’s idea even if everyone else around him thinks it’s a waste of time and money, though really we never see Enrico think anything other than the fact that minority workers like Montañez could be good for his profits. And in the final moments of the film, when Montañez makes it off of the factory floor and into an office with a job title like “Head of Multicultural Marketing,” you can almost hear the studio execs patting themselves on the back for a job well done – even if all they’ve really given you is another reason to buy Cheetos.
For all of the love that Hollywood has for itself in films like The Artist or Singin’ in the Rain, there have always been subversive stories that counteract those narratives: Sunset Boulevard, or The Player. But there’s very little subverting these new stories of corporate success, which are sold to us as something to aspire to – even in the cases of films that manage to defy expectations, or take their IP in surprising directions (like 2014’s The Lego Movie), it’s difficult to shake the feeling that in the end, they’re just another way to sell you on just another product.
In Although Of Course End Up Becoming Yourself, David Foster Wallace describes the increasingly seductive power of mass-media as the idea that it becomes “more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money.” That’s turning into reality with increasing speed.
Words: Sam Moore
