Pop-Tarts After Auschwitz
Dom Rottman
26 June 2024
At 70 years old, Jerry Seinfeld has embraced the curmudgeon he was doomed to become. Nothing is funny, and the ones at fault are none other than those gosh darn Leftists and their woke PC agenda. In response to this comedy crisis Seinfeld writes, directs, and stars in the most mildly funny PC-friendly comedy film of the year. He makes sure to include black and female comedians in this ragtag cast who collectively have the acting talent of your average sitcom star who’s carried by jokes (looks at the camera). Seinfeld once uncharitably said that while comedic actors can rarely become good comedians, comedians can become great comedic actors. But Unfrosted supplies no evidence for this claim. The unique brand of each comedian sticks out like a sore thumb, making it seem like all he wanted to do was bring together the comedians of our age for a wacky celebration, catalyzed by a commodity that has historically marked the breakfast of American children for decades. Is that really so offensive?
Yes. It is.
Still, jokes are jokes, “funny is funny,” and, to an extent, critical is critical. Though the comedian’s life has been caricaturized as “revolving around Superman and cereal,” the ubiquitous breakfast food is a poor eucharist and its producers are not valorized. Cereal companies are no less petty and cutthroat than any other corporation; these inherited empires engage in espionage, coordinate like the mafia, and take their competition so seriously that it becomes a matter of national security (never mind the nukes, that commie Cuban sugar needs to stop) even though the rat race over sugary fruit-flavored goo could be avoided entirely were it not for the pissing contest of capitalism (“Why can’t this just be generic?”). Any nostalgic image is belied by a questionable reality; the glamour shots of bowls of cereal to idyllic snapshots of everyday life in the 1960’s compose a cinematographic and directorial veneer which has no problem admitting that it glosses over a production process which has nothing to do with health, nutrition, or anything resembling food. Breakfast is merely the byproduct of businessmen and mad scientists half-competing half-collaborating with each other to dominate the American morning for nothing but profits and pride to extents so absurd that the audience is made to believe that it’s all one big elaborate joke—because, well, it is.
Of course, far be it from me to want a more incisive critique of production in the 1960s and its pernicious effects on American nutrition. Even the most critical films must pick their battles to remain effective. However, Seinfeld has picked his battles for the worse. He has succumbed to the unfunny zeitgeist he bemoans by playing it safe with zany knee-slappers and light jabs. While it is no crime to pick the low-hanging critical and comedic fruit, the way the film plays in history past and present so surrounded with struggle displays a level of ignorance that is all but willful. Nowhere is this more evident than the film’s treatment of labor.
Again, it is no great sin to elide certain subjects for the sake of making an effective film. It would be unfair to fault the film for not taking up race and the civil rights movement, for example, despite the film taking place in the 1960s. One could argue the same about labor, although its omission in a film quite literally about commodity production is not only curious but contributes to a culture (and the culture industry itself) which benefits from the continued invisibility of labor and its struggle. Problematic as that is on its own, Unfrosted takes an egregious step further.
Disgruntled workers are nowhere to be found, but disgruntled cereal mascots–inherently silly characters–are. Their complaints, demands, and overall lack of dignity are not to be taken seriously, nor is any working-class behavior they exhibit because their image is that of an ahistorical cartoon character. The “labor struggle” of the mascot actors becomes the real life parallel to the wacky hijinks of cereal commercials. A generous viewer might be able to overlook this flippancy—until the mascots go on strike and a picket line devolves into a reenactment of the January 6 riots to stop the certification of the Pop-tart. So gross, so cheap, so impudent, so bad is this joke that it forces a scornful laugh delivered with almost as much derision and contempt Hollywood has for labor.
The difference between the January 6 rioters and striking workers apparently needs to be stated. The former are reactionary LARPers who wanted to overturn, by means unknown, a legal election, while working people are exploited daily by private institutions and have the modest demand of maybe getting paid a little bit more than the cost of not starving, and are physically unable to get within 5 feet of a corporate office without being beaten to a pulp or shot to death. The former group has, by and large, been dealt appropriate justice in the scope of the law. The latter struggles to find any private or public institution to even fight for their justice, and have been paid less attention by American media, culture, and politicians than pasty-white cultists adorned in animal skins and body paint who make for more attractive headlines posited as “real politics.”
The offense of the joke is not personal and should not be taken as such. It is a mockery, an assault that disarms its object as something not to be taken seriously. If the response is that that’s precisely the point, it is a poor excuse for a conflation which lacks even the most basic political nuance. Regardless, we must be reminded that no misdeed is ever righted by explaining it as such. Labor, its movements, and its history are by no means sacred cows which cannot be touched by comedy or critique, but jokes do not exist in an ahistorical, noncontextual bubble; nor do they need to betray reality for the sake of a punchline. A comedian can be forgiven for, say, making a joke about a fatal DUI accident in front of an audience with members who had lost family members in such a way. But when history past and present is so obvious and materially evident for a film whose fictional world and literal production depend on the real conditions of labor which are so salient today, a mockery which makes labor into a laughingstock will inevitably come off as tasteless and condescending. That this mockery comes through as a blatant false equivalency is an extra slap in the face, a gross distortion of politics and history. It borrows from reality to weave a fiction which is draped over unimaginable horrors. One need not imagine far-right extremists permitted on the steps of the Capitol, but one cannot imagine workers being faced with a force no weaker than an army of state and private goons well-trained in sticks, tasers, and projectile weapons, and much less can one imagine overcoming them without being torn to shreds, if at all.
Whether this circus act “ruins” the whole movie depends on what is meant. It doesn’t make the other jokes and bits any less funny. Effacement of history aside, this climatic joke just isn’t that funny—which is probably something you should want your climax to be. Humorlessly exposed, the final bit tips a film already teetering on the edge of pretension toppling towards an area of pompous, careless levity. The attitude of its creator of course does the film no favors. An aloof apathy which could fly under the radar in the 90’s which has now evolved into unapologetic antipathy has not survived in the same way the self-deprecating, overlyapologetic antipathy of his peer Larry David has. It makes obvious “structural” sense why anything Seinfeld might produce would be another feather in the culture industry’s cap, something conducive to a world where a comedian can strike a fortune and rest on his laurels far, far above his former peers. But Seinfeld is himself a bona fide culture warrior for a mythical past, he admits a nostalgia for a time where there existed “an agreed-upon hierarchy,” longings for which we see in the romantic, fictional façade of Unfrosted. Only in fiction could the hierarchical world of the 1960s—men over women, white over colored, class over class, and of course, boss over worker—be an idyllic social order which went uncontested and on which everyone agreed. And if only those hierarchies were in fact “absolutely vaporized” today.
Unfrosted is a dangerous, if partial, reflection of the world as Jerry Seinfeld sees it. Not literally, of course, but one which values the ideal over the real, rose-distorted childhood memories over the history which made them possible, an explicit ignorance of material conditions and implicit contempt for the working class, and an overall attitude that nothing is to be taken too seriously—because why should he? All you’ll end up doing is getting worked up over trivialities as an excuse to be angry and ruining comedy (looks at the camera). Lest I be misunderstood, however, I should stress again that this has nothing to do with being PC or personally offending anyone. It’s about how even zany, unserious films which are apparently harmless can conceal, distort, even defile the horrors of material reality. In so doing they are actually quite harmonious with a PC culture which would wipe the world’s problems away with semantics.
What makes everything from the dramatic to the whimsical barbaric is the delusional presupposition that films can exist outside of their context and historical moment. A quaint aspiration to be timeless or merely “funny” does not require an ignorance of reality, making it all the more inexcusable. A film which celebrates an overprocessed commodity in a time of widespread inequality, of hatred of gender, sexual, religious, and racial minorities, when people are rightly growing skeptical of corporations, when trials are reduced to political theater and a media feeding frenzy, when kids are murdered in Gaza, compels one to scream “PEOPLE ARE DYING.” Insofar as that alone generates intrigue, this questionable premise is not redeemed by its content.
Reality becomes a feast for culture only after it is transubstantiated. Blood becomes wine, flesh becomes grain, processed, refined, and fortified with gross chemicals in a process which at once destroys material reality and history and creates a malleable ingredient which is not only palatable but addicting. Prescribed by no doctors, created by no chefs, but only endorsed by heralds of a mythic past, whether its concoctions are huckstered maliciously or carelessly makes no difference to the fact that the culture industry invites us to adopt a point of view which overlooks the reality and history on which it rests. Today as it was then, urban pits are covered in long nights lit only by fire—and from the heights of Hollywood and Beverly Hills, it looks like Morning in America.