Freegans rummage through garbage for food. Such scavenging might be expected in a scene from Preston Sturges’s Depression era masterpiece Sullivan’s Travels, in which a film director intent on making a movie about real life descends a little farther into the great melting pot than he had meant to and almost succeeds in getting his goose cooked.
Freeganism—a neologism created from the words “free” and “vegan”—emerged in the prosperous, go-go years of the ‘80s and ‘90s, when food was so plentiful that stock market profiteers and hedge fund managers regularly tossed it over their hedges. The desire to save, recycle and prevent waste came amidst the kind of prosperity in which waste was looked on as a form of social elevation, and the pragmatic values upon which America’s particular brand of capitalism was based were openly flaunted in favor of a more magical notion of entitlement.
There may have been a thousand years of Rome, but the American Empire now looks like a wobbling giant, a Gulliver pierced with arrows by hordes of Lilliputians, ready to be tied up like a roast. Now, Freeganism has turned from philosophy to survival tactic. Indeed, prosperity seems far away in these times of recessive inflation. The paralysis of our banking system calls up memories of the Weimar Republic. The shadow of death haunting the urban population in Fritz Lang’s expressionist masterpiece, M, mirrors the dread of an anemic culture.
in which a group of inmates in a draconian prison are freed of their shackles, literally and metaphorically, and allowed to watch some Disney cartoons. Sullivan’s Travels is about a big-time Hollywood director who dresses up as a hobo in order to gather material for a script based on a depression-era novel called O Brother Where Art Thou by one Sinclair Beckstein. (The Coen brothers would recycle this title for a film based loosely on Homer’s The Odyssey.) In his hobo garb, Sullivan is mistakenly arrested and convicted of assault, and no one believes him when he claims he’s a famous Hollywood director and naturally innocent. When he’s finally freed through a series of tiny miracles (really directorial sleights of hand on Sturges’s part, the improbability of which only highlights the intractability of real despair), Sullivan is chastened. Having known true misery, he realizes that neither prisoners nor the public at large want to see it portrayed on the big screen. It’s sobering to recognize that despite the great achievements of history’s Caravaggios and Genets, who found beauty in squalor, it’s neither surprising nor even reprehensible that the mass of men, personified by Sturges’s inmates, consume art for escape and release. But Sturges has his cake and eats it too. Yes, The Great McGinty
and The Palm Beach Story
are delightful treats, but the director is wily. There is a message and a dark side to his classics, which gives us pause for thought as we serve our time.
