Popular Culture Review Vol. 3, No. 2, August 1992 | Page 68

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The Popular Culture Review

McDonald's success are always already tied up in the politics of
representation.
"Reading is easier than you think," said Linda, "and it's not
just for signs-----"("Reading is Fun"). McDonald's encourages its young
readers to look beyond the sign to the "real"; the corporation's
seductive narrative lulls its audience into forgetting that how the
sign represents the "real" (the ideology of the sign) is important.
McDonald's pupils are thus prepared to enter the McDonald's
marketplace where employees are actively discouraged from
thinking. A McDonald's manager describes the company's hiring
policy: "The only qualification to be able to do the job is to be able to
physically do the job . . . . Let me qualify that qualification. It takes
a special kind of person to be able to move before he can think. We
find people like that and use them till they quit" (The Electronic
Sweatshop 33).
If Jameson's and Baudrillard's "before the fall" narrative is
side-stepped and if McDonald's assumptions about reading are
challenged, the corporation is no longer a blank reflective surface
which resists interpretation; it is a participant in the process of
representation, representation that can then be read not only in terms
of what is included but what is excluded in the production of the
"real."
The urge to exert absolute control is at the root of McDonald's
philosophy and runs counter to the image it promotes of respecting the
"local" and accommodating difference; "postmodernism" in this
context becomes one more discourse that McDonald's coopts in order to
distract the gaze of its critics from its capitalist narrative.
McDonald's merely masquerades as a postmodernist. Despite its
floating arches, the corporation is very much grounded by "sacred"
doctrines. God is not dead at McDonald's. He is reborn in the image of
Ray Kroc. The dead founder of the corporation comes back to life on
the video screen to answer his disciples' questions and to spread words
of wisdom about his business philosophy. At the Hamburger
University students are further initiated into the secrets of
McDonald's, which include lessons in seventeen languages on the
exact number of pickles allowed in each pickle barrel ("The
McDonald's Mystique" 118). And despite its playful approach to
language, McDonald's interest is in ownership and control-facts
become McFacts, days become McHappy days, senior employees