So I'm a couple of years late. I finally got around to checking out King Corn (2007) on Netflix. What a charming film! I'm well versed with the entire local food, Michael Pollan argument, so the film was preaching to the converted. What impressed me most about the film was the tone and mythic resonance. Most progressive, personal documentaries take on a confrontational tone with their subject matter or subjects, or posit the filmmakers as aggrieved and victimized. I respect the fact that the filmmakers embraced their average white guy persona and made no effort creating a film persona that they could use to amplify the confrontation with their subject matter. These nice young men have no interest in becoming the next Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock - they aren't affecting an "everyman" persona, they ARE typical, unaffected guys with no chip on their shoulder, and sans ax to grind. They are gimmick-free. How rare!
I realize that this observation flies in the face of my very first blog post, but, hey, like Whitman, I contradict myself. There are room for all kinds in the doc world.
The tone of the film is genial and exploratory. They certainly have an opinion, and anyone who's read Pollan knows the score, yet these fellows are much more interested in recruiting new members than preaching to the converted. Their willingness to spend time with farmers and other stakeholders and hear them out ultimately yields results - rather than pointing fingers and trying to "educate" the farmers at the center of the story, they clearly listen to their subjects and gain the trust that makes the farmers fee free to confess their own misgivings and frustrations - "We grow crap" says one of the farmers at one point.
The methods are low tech and DIY. By establishing the low-tech methods - crude stop-motion animations and hand-drawn graphs - you root for these young filmmakers and appreciate their ingenuity. This approach contrasts markedly with the high-budget, preachy "Food Inc.", which covers the same material. "King Corn" has broad appeal - "Food Inc." preaches to the converted. If you're going to take an unpopular, un-mainstream position, it pays, artistically, to embrace your constraints and have the artistic media means recapitulate the populist political message. Works with humor as well - Crude animation and puppetry works well with crude humor.
King Corn also works because it accesses Joseph Campbell's theories on the Mono-myth quite beautifully. It establishes, early on, that cheap corn policies began under the Nixon Administration with a secretary of agriculture named Earl Butz. Butz is seen in archival footage, speaking of the need for increased productivity, and calling for an end to farm subsidies that paid farmers not to grow. The journey of the film's heroes is to uncover the unintended consequences of these policies. We learn how industrialization has taken over farming, how unhealthy high-fructose corn syrup is, and how life in Iowa farm towns is anything but bucolic. We learn that America's farmers are now incapable of feeding themselves!
The final act of the film is to visit the now ancient and infirmed Earl Butz. Our youthful, suit-wearing, respectful heroes finally meet the man responsible for all these changes, good and bad, in the American diet and landscape. Not surprisingly, he defends his own policies - he had grown up on a farm himself, and back in the day it was hard-scrabbled, back-breaking work. The problems of abundance, Butz declares, are far better than the problems of subsistence. Our heroes are too polite to argue - or, like the viewers, realize that it would be a waste of time. Our last image of Butz is him being assisted into a van by a minimum-wage health aid assistant.
The parallels to the mythology, particularly the Parsifal myth of Arthurian legend and the Grail - Fisher King myth are obvious - in fact they are even called the "Corn King" myths. In these stories, a young, naive hero travels through a wasteland to meet the country's king, who is incapacitated from an old wound. Out of politeness, the young hero fails to ask the king what it is that has caused his illness, and leaves the castle. He later learns that if he had asked the question, a curse would have been lifted and the fertility of the king and kingdom restored.
The clever paradox of "King Corn" is that our abundance has led to a different kind of wasteland - a world of early diabetes death, obesity, soul-dead industrial farming that decimates communities and destroys bio-diversity in favor of monoculture. The question never asked - but which the audience is allowed to figure out on its own - is if Butz fully understands the unintended consequences of his role in the transformation of farming in America. What, now, can be done to create policies that mitigate the problems of abundance as well as scarcity?
Like any good "message" film, it leaves the question to be answered by the viewers.
It's a wonderful little film.
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