King Corn

Two filmmakers spend a season in Iowa making their own corn, exploring the product chain, and learning how practices have changed over time. The documentary is a good watch, pretty enjoyable overall.

It explains very well that the U. S. agriculture policy, which heavily favors corn production, came about as a result of Americans dying of malnutrition in the 1920s and 30s and resulted in the federally-funded deconstruction of the family farm. It also sheds light on the crucial role of agricultural subsidies in sustaining the corn sector. Without these subsidies, the majority of farmers would face financial losses in their corn production.

Peeling back the layers of corn production, the subsidies emerge as a crucial player, shaping not only the very landscape of American agriculture but also what ends up on our plates (and in our hair).

King Corn is an excellent documentary of the entire process of the corn kennel, from its genetic origin to its final use in food. The young protagonists start out from their worry that the junk food they eat will make them live less years than the previous generation and use this energy to investigate the main column of American food which is corn. As they decide to grow an acre of corn in IOWA, they interview people from all stages of the process and make sure that their work is not seen as a all-out criticism of corn. Reading between the lines, you can conclude that although the corn subsidies have made food much cheaper for Americans, it has also reduced its quality. Of course, you have to figure that out yourself since they don't propose a solution.

However, they interview enough people to allow you to think. For example, when talking to a farmer that operates a cattle feed lot in which cows are given antibiotics so they can process the excessive amounts of corn that will make them fat, the man replies bluntly: "yeah, we can have our cows eat grass, but that would make it more expensive".

They also give a primer on high-fructose corn syrup, the preferred sugar in the USA food industry. Heck, it's sugar. But since it's so cheap, tons of food products contain it.

King Corn is an excellent movie for those who don't understand farm subsidies and why they were put in the first place. It's also very balanced and does not cast any of the participants as evildoers. It's just the final (baseball) scene that lets in their youth idealism and pretty much disowns the extensive work they did for the past hours.

Modern documentaries fascinate me.

In theory, the documentary category is an investigation, explanation or essay on something, presumably something both real and true. Because there is the supposition that the thing is interesting of worth hearing about for some reason, one assumes that most documentaries would be compelling things. All you have to be is a good enough storyteller and let the truth take over.

You have to pick the right story though. Al Gore's story should not have been that the planet is going amok and will kill us, but that it is doing so not because of corrupt government or greedy corporations, but because of us, and things we think are reasonable.

Rather than trust the story, most modern documentarians add in another story to grab our attention, and then slip in the real story under it. Thus, in a documentary about unhealthy fast food, we have the primary story about a goof who tries to eat nothing but fast food. I'm interested in these things because this is a modern phenomenon, and is made possible — I think — because of our desire for layered (I prefer folded) narrative.

To the movie. Here is the real story: The US constitution allowed two senators per state, and that was carried over to the new states regardless of wisdom. So we have some states with disproportionate power over the public purse. As they are farming and ranching states, that power transforms into huge, irrational farm subsidies. There are all sorts of unintended consequences, noted here. One is that food production has shifted to the creation of biomass for the sweetener, meat and ethanol industries.

Each of these has its own subsidies further distorting the balance. Another is that food has become extraordinarily cheap — the lowest cost ever in the history of mankind. This in turn has modified consumer habits allowing unnecessary luxury items not possible before.

This film only deals with the massive health problems from bad meat and sweetener. It uses two devices.

One is the story of two young guys, how they "came home" to Iowa and leased an acre on which to grow corn. They noodle about, discovering what will happen to "their" corn, and thus reveal the facts, usually as told to the boys by an expert. Its rather obvious that most of the interviews are rehearsed, and that they would be precisely the same without this framing story. Unfortunately, the two guys — who are two of the several writers for all the fiction — aren't interesting or appealing. Their host apparently goes bankrupt at the end, an extraneous unexplained fact.

We leave the boys playing on an acre of grass in the midst of a vast corn planting — their acre ostentatiously withdrawn from the system.

The other device is some stop-motion animation involving kernels of corn, a map and sometimes a toy farm set — which cleverly appears in the disposal auction of the displaced farmer at the end. This animation adds no information or explanatory value. Its there simply to be cute, and perhaps to break the monotony.

It is a strong story, this meat and sweet disaster. It could have been a strong film. It could have used folding effectively.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

The film did not demonize corn as a species. It demonized the particular strain of highly selected and genetically modified corn that we use for high fructose corn syrup and cattle feed, a type of corn that requires intensive fertilization and herbicide regimens, and which actually kills off other strains of corn such as the sweet corn we all love eating at a summer barbecue. Also, cows are ruminants, which means that they have basic, low-acidity stomachs, evolved to digest grass. In order for them to digest the starchy kernels from corn, the acidity of their stomachs have to be artificially increased, causing myriad health problems for them which can only be remedied using antibiotics and hormones. This also makes them vulnerable to diseases that threaten us. It is absolutely naive to think this doesn't impact our health. Finally, the "Harvard professor" you refer to is Michael Pollan, a UC Berkeley professor. He is the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, a book perhaps you should consider reading if you value facts so much. I think it is you who have not carefully understood the information presented by this film.

King Corn follows two filmmaker bro's into Iowa as they take on precisely one acre of land to witness the process of modern corn farming from start to finish. Filling the unexpected gaps between their work - which takes very little time using modern machinery and processes - are a number of interviews of different perspectives on the corn industry. You have the food experts who discuss the trouble with growing immense amounts of nutritionally dead corn to create products like glucose, you have other experts who describe the incredible efficiency and achievement of the industry, then you have the small town farmers who make their living doing something they are increasingly dispassionate about.

The idea of two city-dwellers bumbling into a small town to grow an acre of corn is a great way to build a narrative that the majority of viewers who don't know anything about agriculture can follow. Witnessing the process and hearing the interviews along the way helps to build a snapshot of an industry we are all participating in (via consumption) yet tend to know nothing about.

However, this narrative is also what drags the documentary down. The two filmmakers don't really do or say anything interesting, and their footage ends up creating a lot of dead space. They never express much of how they feel or react to the mostly negative information of the film, beyond trying their own corn and realizing it tastes horrible because it was designed to be a commodity rather than food.

There is something to be said for remaining ambivalent, as a filmmaker, to let the audience decide how they feel. Yet this 1.5 hour documentary obviously takes the position that there is a problem with the American corn industry. The government subsidizes the production of nutritionally dead corn that can't even be eaten, which ends up fueling an unhealthy diet of sickly meat and diabetes inducing sodas. But rather than fully executing this position and giving a direction for the viewer to go from there, whether it's how to do something or how to do more research on the topic, the filmmakers continue to film themselves bumbling about the small town doing not much of anything.

Not only does the poorly executed narrative aspect drag King Corn down as a film, it also negates its potential as a call to action. It's obvious by the end that there's a big problem in the food industry, yet the narrative reaction is basically "aww man this sucks". I think at the time the film came out, it may have seemed more appropriate to reveal shocking aspects of systems we take for granted - without much critical analyses on the way - but documentaries have come a long way in the past decade and now King Corn seems like a simplistic reaction to a complex problem.

Nonetheless, King Corn does offer a good snapshot of modern American corn and its problematic nature. Spending a year in a small town brings the viewer through something most of us city-dwellers wouldn't normally see. Overall it isn't a bad watch, but viewers should feel encouraged to dig deeper after the fact and think about how they are or aren't complacent in the issue - rather than taking the defeatist stance the filmmakers did.