Meat

The dependable metaphor goes back to Eisenstein, the industrial tour gives the placid blood tide behind a carnivorous order. Cowboy poses under spacious skies, the auctioneer's art (cf. Herzog's How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck), high-angled views of the corral. "Big steers, big-eyed, thin-skinned, no dirt under the skirt." Japanese businessmen are given statistics at the Colorado meat-packing plant, numbers made flesh in the abattoir—a question of how the sausage is made, or rather the burger, Frederick Wiseman takes you through it. The sanguinary disassembly line is an efficient inferno, lifeless bovine masses are summarily hoisted, skinned, gutted, dismembered by unfazed laborers. (The camera lingers on innards plopping out of a vivisected torso before noticing a football game playing on a flickering TV set.) Dispassionate montage allows for stark surrealism, hanging carcasses wrapped in white sheets evoke levitating monks or, simply, the ghost in the machine. Rinse and repeat with lambs. "What is the moral responsibility of, say, uh, the U.S. consumer as well as producer?" A literalization of the documentarian's grinding institutions, closer to High School or Basic Training than to Primate or Zoo. Smoke break in the lunchroom, special appearance by the glad-handing governor. Sales drones and Judas goats, not "La Mer" (Le sang des bêtes) but "What Kind of Fool Am I?" Circular arguments between weary union representatives and management cracking down on "too much free time," the Wiseman impasse. "Well, I tell ya what, anybody that's looking at prime is looking up a dead horse's tuckus." Future wars will be fought not over ideologies but over "shortages of essentials," it is predicted, boxed patties in a truck comprise the upshot. Burnett in Killer of Sheep takes a more philosophical outlook. In black and white.