Our Brands Are Crisis

In a year where 'Barbie' reigns supreme, American culture and corporate culture have become one and the same.

Everyone involved in the making of Flamin’ Hot knew it was bullshit. 

Two years before the Los Angeles Times published its long investigative piece headlined “The Man Who Didn’t Invent Flamin’ Hot Cheetos,” Frito-Lay informed the film’s producers that Richard Montañez, the janitor-turned-executive who claimed to have developed the snack, had greatly embellished his contribution. This did not stop the film from going into production or from winning the Audience Award at SXSW earlier this year or from premiering on Hulu and Disney+ on a wave of mixed-to-positive reviews. It was simply too spicy an underdog story to resist, even if the lies stained their souls like so much pepper-red Cheeto dust. 

But the fact that the film moved forward with bullshit is not the most troubling aspect of it. So let’s print the legend here and pretend that everything that happened in Flamin’ Hot is more or less true. In the film’s telling, Montañez (Jesse Garcia) is a go-getter from a hardscrabble background who lands a job at a Frito-Lay factory in southern California, despite some fanciful claims on his application. The humility of his janitor gig doesn’t blunt his curiosity and ambition, however, and he takes a special interest in the machines and how they’re maintained. His “Eureka!” moment arrives during a down stretch at the company when Frito-Lay CEO Roger Enrico (Tony Shalhoub) releases a video imploring his employees to “think like a CEO” and offer ideas to him on how to make improvements. Montañez, inspired by Mexican street corn, suggests that Frito-Lay could open up an untapped Latino market by spicing up their products. And the rest, as they say, is fake history. 

Montañez’s elevation from janitor to executive is a perfectly benign story of hard work and hustle paying off. But Flamin’ Hot is also about being seen. The triumph of the Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, from the film’s perspective, is that the Frito-Lay corporation has recognized a culture that was hidden in plain sight. With a Wonka-esque twinkle in his eye—and not a trace of the malice—Enrico, a bootstrapping son of immigrants in his own right, has validated Montañez and brought Latino culture into the mainstream. The inspiring message of Flamin’ Hot is that Frito-Lay has made room on the shelf for a different kind of snack food, one that will brighten the dreary homogeneity of grocery aisles. Our strength is in our diversity of junk food. 

2023 has been the year of brands at the movies, with features about the triumphs of Mattel (Barbie), PlayStation and Nissan (Gran Turismo) and Nike (Air), as well as wilder tales about the licensing of Tetris and the rise and fall of the Canadians who made BlackBerry smartphones. All of these films have different relationships to the products at their center, but the lingering bad taste of the brand takeover is that it reflects a culture that’s mediated by corporations, even when the depiction is less than flattering. Though none of these films are quite as crude about it as Flamin’ Hot, the trend suggests the degree to which big companies are understood as if they were America herself, a place where dreams are validated and great strides can be made (or rebuffed). And they’re not even faceless corporations, either: You get the friendly smiles of Tony Shalhoub as Enrico or Ben Affleck as Phil Knight or Orlando Bloom as a Nissan executive. These are the arbiters of American identity, inclusion and ambition. If a tree falls anywhere outside a board meeting, does it make a sound? 

The brand boom is a natural step for a risk-averse industry looking to stake its fortunes on things that are already a popular, comforting presence in everyday life. (Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, Nike shoes, Gran Turismo, Barbie dolls—all happen to be in the Tobias household right now!) But it also reflects how much we lean on corporations to arbitrate the culture, how much we plead (or boycott) in service of agendas that they’re morally incapable of processing. If Frito-Lay wants a friskier Cheeto on the market, they’re going to put it there because it’s going to make them more money, not because Roger Enrico is a champion of the little guy. It should go without saying that, in the words of Lester Bangs in Almost Famous, “these people are not your friends.” And yet we’ve become oddly accustomed to the movies treating them as such. 

To the extent that these films are advertisements for the brands they’re dramatizing, only Gran Turismo is shameless about it, to the point where there’s little difference between the movie-chain pre-roll and the actual start of the feature, which trumpets the game as a next-level racing simulator before introducing a Nissan exec keen to make gamers’ dreams come true. Air is a more interesting case, because it’s concerned with industry and cultural issues beyond Michael Jordan and the ascendance of Nike as an emerging giant in the basketball shoe market. It could be understood, fairly, as a story about a transformative moment in the NBA, when the greatness of one individual reshaped the game and empowered players well into the future. Then again, it gawks at the billions that have filled the company’s coffers and hails Knight as a colorful risk-taker whose big gamble paid off. 

Beyond BlackBerry—which is a special case, because it’s about a product that ultimately fails—the only film with serious brand self-awareness is Barbie, which also happens to be the biggest international hit of 2023. Mattel is keen on spinning its success into multiple movies around its products, with Lena Dunham’s Polly Pocket and Daniel Kaluuya’s Barney among many others in development, but Barbie does everything it can to add dimension to what might have been a mindless, hot-pink revivification of the popular doll line. It’s not just director Greta Gerwig’s willingness to bite the hand that feeds her by turning Mattel executives into an all-male board room full of fake allies who keep the doll’s creator in cold storage. The film also examines Barbie’s impact on young girls who get to imagine themselves as women, but will soon learn about the contrast between the Dream House materialist utopia of their bedroom and a real world that’s far less accommodating. 

The charitable view of Barbie, which is one I share, is that Gerwig has entered into a massive cultural arena with the understanding that compromise is inevitable, but she can still make a personal, thoughtful, entertaining film that can speak to an audience infinitely larger than any she’s gotten before. She cannot wriggle away from the fact her film is boosting a toy with an iffy track record for setting unattainable standards of beauty and encouraging a consumerist frenzy of lifestyle accessories. And, in her excellent review of the film, Vulture critic Alison Willmore concludes that Gerwig cannot thread this impossible needle: “The trouble with trying to sneak subversive ideas into a project so inherently compromised is that, rather than get away with something, you might just create a new way for a brand to sell itself.” 

That’s a fair thought, supported by a headline (“We Shouldn’t Have to Grade Barbie on a Curve”) that could apply to so many occasions in which filmmakers have to twist themselves into knots to make a product seem personal. We can admire Gerwig’s ingenuity and the sheer scale at which she’s bringing her ideas across, but she’s having to put herself in shackles in order to Houdini her way out of them. Barbie is a work of integrity, but the cultural arena Gerwig has entered is, like every physical arena across the United States, emblazoned by a brand name. There’s no escaping the fact that our summer discourse on feminism was sponsored by Mattel.