Sausage Party (2016): Serious, Open-Minded, Open-Ended, "Dialogic," Raunchy (Strongly Theological) Satire

Sausage Party (2016): Serious, Open-Minded, Open-Ended, "Dialogic," Raunchy (Strongly Theological) Satire

Sausage Party. Dir. Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon. Story by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Jonah Hill. Script by Rogen Goldberg,

        Kyle Hunter, Ariel Shaffir. USA: Annapurna Pictures, Columbia Pictures, Nitrogen Studies Canada, Point Grey Pictures

        (production) / Columbia Pictures (US distribution), 2016.

            Sausage Party is far from a subtle film, but it is complex — satires tend to be overstuffed — and nuanced: "dialogic" in a rich sense suggested by Dustin Griffin of debating with itself issues in contention in our culture.

            For example of an issue: religion. There is indeed a religion in Sausage Party, with ethnic variations.

            As Jordan Hoffman summarizes the premise in a brief review in The Guardian (10 August 2016), the main action of this very adult cartoon is set in a supermarket (one in a chain in a chain called Shopwell's): a supermarket world that competes for our attention, in traditional satiric fashion, with the plot and characters.

The supermarket is what Erving Goffman might call a total institution. Its occupants (food from around the world) are kept compliant by an unprovable belief system. If they are good and obey the gods, they will one day be chosen and taken to the “Great Beyond” (outside the gleaming automated doors) in a cart. But they will only get picked if they remain pure of spirit; the “unfresh” get tossed into a dusty bin by a sadist tormentor (actually just a teen bored with his job). This fear prevents sausages and buns from getting intimate, despite their urges to conjoin.

Of course — spoilers here, if you're really fastidious about such things — of course, the "Great beyond" is a human world where the denizens of the supermarket are almost all food, or items to be consumed in other ways, e.g., as a vaginal douche or a condom.

            Unless seriously messed up from injected bath salts, the "gods" of the world of Sausage Party are humans blissfully unaware of their (our!) monstrous cruelty to foodstuffs — we have the horrific early shot of a woman munching on carrots, baby carrots! [i] — and the myth of the Great Beyond is not imposed by the store's human management but is introduced as an act of kindness by a small group of stoner "imperishables,": a Native American Firewater, African-American Grits, an apparently Euro-American Twinkie (called "Twink"), and a drummer. In the world of this Shopwell's, these immortals share the same … let's say ontological status as the fresh and canned foodstuffs, except they are relatively eternal, enlightened, and serve like demigods intermediary between the food characters and the unthinkingly cruel human "gods.

            The "real" situation of the food (and I'll justify those "scare quotes" later) — the real situation of the denizens of the supermarket is horrible. The first victims we see in the very non-Great Beyond are those baby carrots being chomped on raw and a nice Irish potato being flayed ("peeled" in the human euphemism), partially blinded (as some eyes are plucked out), and boiled.

            These food folk need what one of Henrik Ibsen characters in The Wild Duck (1884) calls, in English translation, a "vital lie" or "life-lie": the "Basic Lie that makes life possible." The lie of the Great Beyond shields the food characters from the horror of their existence and, embodied in their morning song ("The Great Beyond") gives hope, joy, and a touch of musical beauty to their lives.

            On the other hand, in addition to being a lie, the myth of the Great Beyond as it has evolved on the various food aisles also underlines a food-stuff morality that has become puritanical and stands in the way of  many of the characters' shucking their wrappers and engaging in sex. Not all the characters, but very definitely the leads have their sexuality blocked by what they believe is the demands of the gods for their purity. Of course we real-world supermarket-shopping humans do want our food pure, but not in that way, and the foods' focusing in on purity as a sexual matter is an astute comment on the bad happy of religious folk to take the word "morality" to mean "sexual morality" and bodily purity to refer mostly to sex.

            If you know Plato's Allegory of the Cave, or grew up on stories and narrative films, you know that someone will come back to the supermarket with the Truth of the foodstuff condition and that there will be a more or less Heroic quest to confirm the Truth. And both occur. A jar of honey mustard is returned by a careless shopper-god who wanted regular, and Honey Mustard (the character) warns the other food of their fate in a very non-Great beyond when the shoppers get them home. The lead frankfurter, Frank, quests for the Truth and gets it from Firewater and the other imperishables and a large recipe book — there may be a classic Twilight Zone episode lurking in the background here — and mal-formed frankfurter Barry returns from the Great Beyond to tell his experiences with the baby-carrot-eating shopper and later with a doper who's used bath salts like heroin and broken through to communication with his food. Barry brings back confirmation of what Frank has learned, plus the head of the doper. (It's a long, funny sequence, and a detailed synopsis can be found on line.) But what do you do with a Truth that's way more than inconvenient? One that's downright awful?

            That is a serious question in the film, and its relevance for the audience is signaled by having a definitely un-mad scientist in a chewed or otherwise mutilated piece of gum in a powered wheelchair talking a whole lot like Stephen Hawking and elegantly serving as a character-correlative for a scientific worldview and cosmology.

            "The Great Beyond" is the supermarket version of "You'll get pie in the sky when you die," and "that's a lie" (although some of the fruit going to the Great Beyond may end up as pie) — and a lie that blocks pleasure in the here and now, before the food gets bought and prepared — chopped up, skinned, cooked to death, to be more graphic. And, verily, even so for real-world religions that block pleasure and resistance to injustice now and promise eternal happiness "Beyond": beyond our lives and our world, in this case for a soul separable from one's doomed body.

            On the other other hand, a purely materialist, up-to-date scientific cosmology renders the human species radically insignificant and trivial, and most of us studiously ignore the probable impending extinction of our species — most species do go extinct — and, in realistic, "Big Picture" terms, the utter meaninglessness and triviality of any human individual.

            How should we handle bringing that sort of news to anthropomorphic cartoon foodstuffs or to most real-world people?

            Sausage Party wisely answers the question by suggesting we should bring such a discouraging, hope-killing word gently and in a way that respects people's desire to avoid the inevitable pain of mortality and the quite possible possibility of that mortality coming in really awful ways.

            Frank delivers the Truth initially via the store's extensive TV screens and speaker system, with little effect: the food won't believe his blasphemy nor his page from that gruesomely illustrated (from a food point of view) recipe book. But small, mal-formed, underappreciated Barry — this folk motif was a moldie-oldie when it appeared in Beowulf — frankfurter Barry has returned with news of liquefied and injected bath salts opening the doors of perception between food and the evil gods, and proof that the shopper-gods can be killed.

            The Shopwell's inhabitants prepare the bath salts, use the liquid to poison the points of those long party toothpicks you use to skewer appetizers, and rebel. The result is a Twilight of the Evil Gods as a kind of Ragnarok at Ralph's — okay, its "Shopwell's," but "Ralph's alliterates — followed by a food orgy of roly-poly-polymorphous sexual perversities of impressive ingenuity and energy — which is presented as a happy dramatic climax and a Good Thing.

            And yet … Well, Gum/Stephen Hawking, that voice of Reason, has told the lead foods and us of other supermarkets, and the more cynical among audience members might rejoice in the joyful killings of customers and crew in this Shopwell's but wonder about the others or even what the upshot will be at this store. The action of the film is set in the US on the 3^rd and 4^th of July, and older Americans anyway might start thinking about what will happen on The Day After this Revolution.

            Or not.

            There is a nasty habit in big-money apocalyptic films that you can kill off huge numbers of people and have an upbeat ending so long as the main characters come through all right and there's some restoration, usually of a family, such as at the end of the Tom Cruise War of the Worlds (2005). If you want to take a jaundiced view of Sausage Party, you can accuse its makers of simply not inviting the audience to think about — or care about — what will happen to most of the foodstuffs "the day after the revolution" (and orgy) when/if the outside world impinges on the world of this Shopwell's, or, if audience members do think about it at all, to just rejoice in the survival of the lead foods. A more generous reading could place Sausage Party in  the tradition in serious satire of a final turn that denies any kind of simple, didactic, moralistic closure — happy or sad. At the very end of Sausage Party, in the After the Revolution/After the Orgy Coda, the main characters are told by the reliable Gum that the real reality is that they are cartoon characters and can reach the real "Great Beyond" through a kind of stargate into the world of their makers, the world of the producers, directors, actors, and crew who made the film Sausage Party.

            In the final action of the film, Frank and the major characters join hands and go through the stargate-ish portal to get at Seth Rogen and Edward Norton (imaged as cheap versions of the giant head of the Wizard of Oz) to, in the on-line words of a guy or gal called Jeremy, "cut the strings loose from these puppet masters." Or whatever; the truth we see is the main characters' walking together into an unknown future in a totally different reality, leaving the aftermath of one hell of an orgy for sure but also a victory that we may believe will endure, or not.

            That is what we see at the end of the film, what we see while still caught up in "that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith" (my emphasis). Members of the audience know we are watching a cartoon, and we're reminded of that fact and that it was made by Rogen and Norton and a large group of other real-world human beings. And we know, if we think about it a moment that the real real real reality is that we are sitting in a movie theater watching flickering lights on a screen and listening to recorded sound telling a wildly improbable tale of fucking sentient, anthropomorphic talking foodstuffs!

            In Sausage Party, Seth Rogen, Edward Norton, Kristen Wiig, and their merry band/Usual-Gang-of-Idiots list of very talented collaborators give contemporary audiences a fine example of what effective satire can deliver: a serious, seriously raunchy obscene kick in the assumptions that can get us laughing and should get us thinking. The film reduces to the absurd and the grotesque any happy faith in comforting lies, and also targets arrogant attempts to force upon fictional foods and real-world humans Truth and "truths" that may be at best only part of larger realities.

            Bad and even most mediocre satire give us "monologic," one-voiced propaganda or pedantry insisting on a simple truth seen from one point of view. Great satire gives us a combination of voices, several views, and open endings.

            And I haven't even mentioned the politics in Sausage Party.

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Note

         [i] Note Roald Dahl's "The Sound Machine," The New Yorker, 17 September 1949: 29 f., where a man invents a machine that may, or may not, allow humans to hear "sounds beyond the normal human range, including screams from plants when they are cut or trimmed." I had not read the Dahl story but had read a comic book variation on it, allowing me to tease a vegetarian friend about his fiendishly eating vegetables, explicitly mentioning his munching on baby carrots. The comic may have used a Harvey Kurtzman script, "The Sounds from Another World," Weird Science #14 (September-October 1950), a piece cited by Bill Schelly in Harvey Kurtzman: The Man Who Created MAD and Revolutionized Humor in America, whom I quote above in this note (p. 154).

THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN and the Rise of Modern Fundamentalisms

So close - the infinitesimal and the infinite.

But suddenly, I knew they were really

the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the

unbelievably vast eventually meet - like the closing of a gigantic circle.

 I looked up, as if somehow I would grasp the heavens.

The universe, worlds beyond number,

God's silver tapestry spread across the night.

And in that moment, I knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite.

I had thought in terms of man's own limited dimension. […]

That existence begins and ends in man's conception, not nature's.

And I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing.

My fears melted away. And in their place came acceptance.

All this vast majesty of creation, it had to mean something.

And then I meant something, too.

 Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something, too.

To God, there is no zero. I still exist!

— Scott Carey, The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)

         For a while there — let's say 1400-1650 C.E. — educated folk could take a wide view of the saying of Protagoras that (drumroll here), "Man is the measure of all things," or as a character of E. M. Forster's puts it, "Man is the measure." Since then it's been pretty much downhill and rolling out of center stage for "Man."

         First off, the meaning of "Man" got complicated with the "voyages of discovery" that helped put European White men at the center of things geopolitically, in positions of power, but "things" just in terms of human politics got much bigger much faster.

         Educated folk had known since the ancient Greeks that the Earth was a large ball, but they came to learn just how large a ball it is, both physically and socially. "It's a small world / After all" the Disney song may tell us with maddening persistence, but our planet isn't small on a human scale. The ball of Earth was a whole lot bigger than, famously, Christopher Columbus thought and larger still in terms of its peoples. Back when civilization was getting started, kings could proclaim themselves Lords of the Universe when they controlled territories the size of New Jersey, and even Alexander the Great could see himself at times as a world conqueror. But not even Genghis Khan and his successors, however much of the landmass of Eurasia they conquered, could see themselves as conquering the world.

         Just as "European Man" set himself on the road to being top dog, he started to learn just how big the kennel was.

         And how diverse.

         If your goal was "One God, One Land, One Culture, One King," well good luck, to that! The more European Man came to control more and more peoples, the more he came to learn — if damnably slowly — that his culture was but one among many. The Prime Meridian may've been placed at Greenwich, England, UK, but another 359 of those meridians went around the Earth. The sun may've never set on the British Empire, and it was commonly the attitude that "The wogs begin at Calais," and that the "wogs" of the Earth — like Barbarians to the snootier ancient Greeks — really didn't count. But there were a hell of a lot of them thar "wogs," and as time moved on from the Medieval through the Early Modern into the modern, a lot of those "wogs" got their freedom and the vote, and started to count — and then doubled in number when women were added in. So Britain, say, could've been great, but that greatness had to be shared among a lot of other Brits, and the British may've been less top dog in a small pack as at the top of the heap, and the heap one more like ants or termites.

         If scarcity value is part of value, "Man" as an individual was getting diminished just by discovery of our numbers — and that's over seven billion as I write — and an individual's being the wonder of a whole society diminished in value against the large number of societies, many of whom have never heard of you and might not think much of your accomplishments if they had. (Like, Alexander the Great isn't so great by the standards of the Amish, and Amish kids are unlikely to have seen movies about him).

         "Man" as species fared little better as Earth moved out of the center of the cosmos and the cosmos kept increasing in size.

         Now, a Medieval astronomer could wow an audience with the size of the Ptolemaic universe, and I had a teacher who had a lot of fun with a spiel from the time on how an anvil dropped from the Sphere of the Fixed Stars would take nine days — nine full days! — to fall to the Earth. It was a big world, after all, but Earth was still the center.

         And then came Copernicus and Galileo and evidence for a sun-centered cosmos and hints that there might be reason to believe one or two of the wilder bits of Renaissance mystic speculation that had not only the Earth not at the center of the universe but suggested a universe with no center and no end. Or at least the possibility of a "plurality of worlds": i.e., a number of planets beyond the known Solar system, some of which might have life, even intelligent life, making Homo sapiens, the "Wise Man" just one intelligence among many.

         Meanwhile, though, back on Earth, even as the cosmos was expanding in volume, "Man's" world was expanding in time.

         In the 19^th century, truly ancient languages were deciphered and in a sense human history doubled: Egypt was an ancient kingdom when the Hebrews arrived, and even older were Sumer and Akkad and the civilization that could produce an epic like Gilgamesh ca. 2100 BCE. If a human person was to be a historical big shot, there was now even more competition, plus a reassertion of the old question of Ubi sunt, "Where are they now." You could be a world-historical character indeed, but so was Ramses II, perhaps best known, to the few who know the name, as the Ozymandias ironically celebrated by Percy Bysshe Shelley. 

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,

Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies[…].

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains: round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,  

The lone and level sands stretch far away.  (1818) 

         So, Hey, Big Man: If you want to get "world-historical" you have to compete with Ramses the Great among a whole lot of others. Chances are you'll lose, and even if you win at that game: "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Eventually, even the pyramids will wear down. Fame is fleeting, and nothing human-made will last very long, let alone "forever."

         And the human species …? That was the bigger blow during the 19^th century, reverberating down to our day far more than the extension of history through early scientific archeology and philology (ruins and word studies).

         During the 19^th century scientists got an inkling of, and then strong confidence in, the great age of Earth, and, along with confidence, some idea of the large form of the history of life on our planet and, eventually, where Homo sap. fits in.

         It's not a reassuring picture. And wasn't even before Alfred Wallace (1858) and Charles Darwin on evolution (Origin of Species 1859).

         Finding all those fossils of extinct species was itself a major downer.

Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life [* * *]. 
‘So careful of the type?’ but no.From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.‘Thou makest thine appeal to me:
I bring to life, I bring to death [...] The spirit does but mean the breath[...].’
And he, shall he, Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,Such splendid purpose in his eyes,[...] Who trusted God was love indeedAnd love Creation’s final law–Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and clawWith ravine, shriek’d against his creed– [...]  [Shall he] Be blown about the desert dust,Or seal’d within the iron hills?

                             [i.e., as just one more extinct species]
                                   — "In Memoriam A. H. H.," by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1849 [LV-LVI])

Tennyson's question is apt: If all those species are extinct, will Man — God's and/or Nature's "last work" of creation — also go? Well, not if we're special, not if in us humans the animating "(life)breath" (ruach, anima, spiritus) is spirit in the sense of immortal soul, separable from the body and immortal: immortal in individuals and thereby, in a sense, the essence of an immortal species. But if Homo sapiens is just a recent work of Nature, evolved by variation and natural selection from precursors who in turn had evolved; if we're only the top of a tree of life, or just another twig on the a biological bush? Well, then we get to the allusion in Tennyson's "The spirit does but mean the breath," that is, we get to some hard words from Koheleth, the Preacher, "Ecclesiastes," words I like to quote so often because other religious folk quote them so rarely. So as the Bible saith, in the words of the Preacher: "So I decided, as regards men, to dissociate them [from] the divine beings and to face the fact that they are beasts. For […] the fate of man and the fate of beast [are] one and the same fate: as the one dies so dies the other, and both have the same lifebreath; man has no superiority over beast, since both amount to nothing. Both go to the same place; both came from dust and both return to dust. Who knows if a man's lifebreath does rise upward and if a beast's breath does sink down into the earth?" (Tanakh 1985; cf. KJV 2000: 3.18-21)

         In the 20^th and 21^st centuries we can say that humankind evolved on a small planet orbiting an unremarkable star on in one arm of an unremarkable galaxy of perhaps 400 billion stars in an observable universe of perhaps 170 billion galaxies or more. And there may be much more to the universe than we have yet observed or perhaps can observe, and there may be more than one universe. Indeed, there may be a "plurality of worlds" in the sense of a multiverse. And how many worlds to a plurality of worlds, universes to a multiverse? If it is a multiverse and not the uni- sort, there's no reason in simple logic to put a limit on "multi," and we'd need to consider the possibility — and some physicists believe in the actuality — of an infinite number of universes.

         And the value of a man or Man or a woman or humankind in such a multiverse? Well, a realistic view might be whatever the value we put on the best of beasts, "the paragon of animals" in Hamlet's nice phrase — whatever value we put on the greatest achievement of the material world evolved over time, placed as a numerator over some denominator that is minimally humungous, up to infinity.

         I value nonhuman animals more than Koheleth did, but, in our universe, the arithmetic means "both" — both human animals and nonhuman animals "amount to nothing."

         So we are invited to "face the fact" of The Incredibly Shrinking Us, look into the Abyss of the Real, and despair.

         Except we don't. We just don't often face such facts. Most of us, most of the time (including astrophysicists and philosophers) just ignore the vastness of the Real and stick to our petty little lives on a human scale: as we evolved to do and as we usually should. Sometimes, though ….

         Well, here I will tell an insensitive but useful joke.

         A kid has grown to be twelve, and his parents think he's autistic or otherwise neurologically or mentally impaired because he's never said a word. Doctor after doctor has failed to find anything pathological in the kid's brain or the rest of his body, but he says nothing, nada — bubkis! Then, one day, at breakfast, he looks up from his oatmeal and says, "This oatmeal sucks." And here you throw in as much as you like of parental amazement that the kid's finally communicated and you get to their demand for an explanation for the silence, and the punch line from the kid: "Well, up to now, everything's been okay."

         Clichés on the value of suffering are mostly cruel bullshit, but this much is true: in times of disruption, when social networks come apart and people find themselves in pain — though sometimes pain from just boredom — in some sense increasing numbers of people find themselves in pain and unfulfilled and alone, then they sometimes (some of them) start questioning and get an inchoate intimation of that abyss.

         And at times like that, times such as our own, you get one answer to that pain in "Fideism" — choosing faith over reason — various fundamentalisms, and, with a small but significant minority, fanaticism.

         Fideism and fanaticism have one actively denying anything that goes against the Faith — any Faith — and are highly effective ways to give one's life direction and a sense of meaning. After their fashion, fanatics and the unquestioning faithful are highly comfortable in the universe. They tend, however, especially the fanatics, to make the human-scale universe very uncomfortable for others.

         Alternatively, one could accept one form or other of secular humanism, which in most contexts I do, but secular humanism requires starting with the idea that human life is somehow special and valuable, and it should be clear by now that believing that is a statement of faith and a leap into not only the Absurd but the "counter-factual."

         Other, and better answers — more intellectually respectable answers, safer-for-the-world answers —include a healthy Existentialism ("Human life begins on the far side of despair") or a calm spirituality or restrained religious faith.

         With atheistic Existentialism one can "face the fact that" we humans "are beasts," if very special kinds of beasts in our neighborhood of the galaxy, and then get on with life — insisting that our being a special kind of beast includes a practical requirement for law and ethics of postulating that creatures with consciousness, starting with humans, have value in themselves and are not to be merely used, like insensate (unconscious, unfeeling, inorganic) things.

         With calm spirituality and some variety of mysticism, one can groove on nonBeing; with a calm and restrained religious faith, one can say with Scott Carey, "To God, there is no zero."

         What is a bad idea, though, is the symbiotic complement of the various religious Fundamentalism: i.e., a very bad idea is the militant atheism that insists on a scientific view of the universe and then refuses to deal with the philosophical implications of a rigorous — in a broad sense of the word "materialism" — materialism.

         You want a really rigorous materialism? Well, the Marquis de Sade is far out of date in his science and was far, far out of his mind — psychopathic serial killer and all — but he was strong on intellectual daring and pushing an idea to its conclusions. "What we call the end of the living animal," Sade notes in a very long philosophic pause from a pornographic novel, what we call death and killing of a human or other animal (or plant) is not "a true finis" — end, finish — "but a simple transformation, a transmutation of matter, what every modern philosopher acknowledges as one of Nature's fundamental laws" ("Manners" section of "Yet Another Effort Frenchmen, If You Would Become [Real] Republicans" 1795). Modernizing the argument: Kill someone, bury the corpse, let it rot, dig it up, and weigh it, and the biomass of the human remains, putrefactive bacteria, maggots and such will show no significant loss.

         If you feel that a living human being is superior to a mass of putrefactive bacteria (and I certainly hope you do), how is that feeling any more than the product of our "small human vanities," species chauvinism, and "stupid notions of pride"?

         I don't think 10^th grade science teachers or Neil deGrasse Tyson ought to read aloud excerpts from de Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom when discussing cosmology, but in extolling the glories of the vast universe of the scientific world-view, they should show sympathy for those who resist a totally secular understanding of the human condition. Many people wish to look at the universe and multiverse and say, "I still exist!" and not have to add too emphatically, "If only in a trivial and vanishingly small way."

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ADDENDUM, 1 Jan. 2018: Tyson does get into human smallness, but in a cheerful, upbeat way <http://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2018/01/01/neil-degrasse-tyson-brings-astrophysics-down-to-earth>.