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).

Religion, Atheism, Body Counts, "Foma," and a "Vital Lie"

         Among the comments on The Diane Rehm Show for Friday, 15 January 2016, one complains that Derek McGinty, the guest host, had much too quickly dismissed a call for (ultimately) eliminating religion to eliminate terrorism and other bad things. McGinty said the idea was — if I heard right — a "nonstarter."

         The commenter was right to resent the offhand dismissal, but McGinty had a point, given the numbers. Atheists are a small demographic, while believers' numbers are massive. The world may be moving toward the secular — and a recent book called Big Gods suggests that there is the possibility of an ethical, post-religious world — but currently the idea of large numbers of people giving up their beliefs and accepting a life of "Emptiness! Emptiness! All is empty" and futile is a nonstarter.

         A relatively objective, scientific, realistic assessment of the human condition is that the human species is trivial even in just our universe, to say nothing of a multiverse in which the vanishingly small significance of our galaxy approaches literal nothingness in what may be an infinity of worlds. Statistically normal people want significance for humanity and even individual human lives, and it's difficult to justify such ideas without some sort of leap into the absurd. Believing in God is a leap of faith; beginning that in The Big Picture some individual human is significant is just "counterfactual," what Kurt Vonnegut labels a "foma" in Cat's Cradle (1963): a comforting lie.

         Other numbers that need to be looked at are body counts, conveniently tabulated by Matthew White on line and in The Great Big Book Of Horrible Things. Religion (God knows ...) has produced an impressive number of human corpses and other atrocities, with the monotheistic, Abrahamic religions no slouches in slaughter. Still, humans are capable of killing humans in massive numbers for reasons less rationally elegant than religious fanaticism. Simple greed and arrogance led to the small-scale genocides of California Indians during the Gold Rush, and — unless you buy the Christianizing and "Civilizing Mission" bullshit propaganda — the large-scale murder in King Leopold's Congo and other places in colonized Africa. Genghis Khan felt the Mongol form of the Mandate of Heaven, but his conquests with their forty million dead were mostly nitty-gritty political. And, of course, Stalin was officially an atheist and didn't pay a whole lot of attention to spreading the doctrines of the Russian Orthodox Church.

         Certainly Idealists and Guys With Theories and Weapons are major threats, especially when they believe that the real human reality is in a soul separable from the body and of infinitely more value than the body. The Theory, though, doesn't have to be specifically religious, just idealistic enough to get fanatical about. Or, as with slave trades and slave economies, millions can suffer or die for other people's profit and joy in power. 

         It is probably a "foma" to believe that God exists and cares about human life and indirectly gives our lives meaning and purpose. To use an idea from Henrik Ibsen's Wild Duck (1884), that human life has value may be a kind of species "vital lie," or "life-lie": a necessity for survival.

         Ara Norenzayan observes in Big Gods that most psychological research has been done on the "weird brains" of people who are "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic." That's a minor point for me; the major one is that the great majority of people are not weirdly wired and part of such statistical normality is religious belief. That's about as close as you'll come to an objective fact, and atheists who want the world to "get real" need to deal with that fact. They also need to deal with the implications of a rigorously materialist view of the human condition. The "Emptiness! Emptiness" of Koheleth ("Ecclesiastes") is one starting point for that discussion; so is the rigorous philosophy amid the twisted pornography of the Marquis de Sade in the "Manners" pamphlet — "Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen …" — in Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795). The mad but logical Marquis can argue that murdering someone doesn't really destroy life, on balance, since if you bury the body and dig it up later, what we'd call biomass has, if anything increased; and there's no particular reason in nature — only in humans' bias in favor of humans and human consciousness — to prefer the biomass of a living human to that of the organisms of putrefaction.

          Me, I am by temperament a vulgar Pragmatist — I check out where logical premises are going before accepting them — and one who read some Existentialism for Dummies at an impressionable age and took a fair number of courses in the life sciences. I'm also a Vonnegut fan. There's much bracing stuff in Koheleth and de Sade and Vonnegut and Jean-Paul Sartre in simplified translation. Still/So, as a practical matter, I'd prefer it if my fellow humans carefully follow beliefs that hold down body counts; and I'd prefer it if people who see themselves as tough-minded toughed it through the implications of their beliefs.

Prayer-Book Meditation 2: Human Worth (∞ and Zip) [16 Sept. 2013]

            According to my prayer book for the Jewish High Holidays, the Hassidim of the 18^th century taught, "Keep two truths in your pocket, and take them out according to the need of the moment. Let one be: 'For my sake was the world created.' And the other: 'I am dust and ashes.'"

            I liked this teaching and intended to write on it, but my rabbi liked it more: she had cards printed up suitable for literally keeping in one's pocket.

            Realistically speaking — which for me means viewed in terms of post-Enlightenment science — realistically speaking, neither assertion is correct, but the "dust and ashes" one is closer to reality. We humans are the product of evolution and mostly water and microorganisms with unique DNA defining us as a species. Eventually we will all become like dust and ashes, but first we'll compost and become food for worms and putrefactive bacteria and such; meanwhile, though, it's more scientifically accurate to say something like, "I am a living variation on the theme of the primate, a larger but weaker chimp, with language and some other talents."

            The Enlightenment, however, is part of what the 18^th-c. Hassidic movement was in reaction against, and even on what Medieval Christian theologians would call "the Literal Level," the assertions are figurative: hyperbole with metaphor. Plus, when one talks of Creation and the purpose of Creation, one is in the world of mythos, not logos: stories of the sacred, not of logic.

            Most of all, though, the Hassidic teaching is of practical use, psychologically. That "need of the moment" for most of us, much of the time, is to be brought down several pegs — a point I'll return to — but for most of us also, some of the time, we need reassurance that we're somehow of worth.

            If you are Hassid, one of the pious ones, you can believe, fairly often, that the Creator of the universe loves not only the world and humankind but also you, personally, individually: "For my sake," in the wording of the card, "the world was created." Now such a belief is probably delusional, but to recycle an idea and a half from T. S. Eliot and Henrik Ibsen, "human kind / Cannot bear very much reality," and pretty much all of us need a "vital lie," starting with that idea that we and our lives are somehow significant.

            At least now and then, "the need of the moment" is reassurance.

            More often we need our gratuitous lies undermined: our cockiness, our arrogance, our inevitable but dangerous Illusion of Central Position; then, "the need of the moment" is to remind oneself "I am dust and ashes": in Modern terms, I am one of seven billion human beings living on a pretty but minor planet on the edge of a pretty but unexceptional galaxy in a universe doomed to the Big Crunch of final collapse or — if the currently less fashionable theory proves right — the Big Fizzle of the final entropic winding down. Or, if there are an infinite number of universes — then I'm worth even less, like approaching zero-value as a limit and pretty much arriving at zero.

            And with such thoughts in our hearts as well as our minds, take out the card and read, "For my sake the world was created."