Anyone who saw Sausage Party in 2016 can never forget its haunting and climactic food orgy scene in which all the foods formerly divided by the beliefs of their respective aisles come together in ways both figurative and literal (the literal part being the aspect that makes one never want to eat again unless they’re inherently sitophilic, like most Italians). At the time of the film’s release in August, it was still before America had any idea what was going to happen to it during that dark autumn. It still bore the false sense of confidence that it was already the “great” country not in need of being made great again, and that Trump didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning. They seemed to have forgotten to account for global warming with regard to that saying’s now defunct assurance. And with Trump assuming the presidency on January 20, 2017, it was as though the American population learned the same sordid truth as the food at Shopwells in Sausage Party: they had been reveling in the lie that made it easy to have a false sense of security. The one that told them the “gods” (a.k.a. democracy, in the case of the humans) would protect them instead of ravage them at the first chance they got.
Yet if the foods–and the people–had just listened to the small minority that actually knew the unpleasant facts (in this instance, the strong possibility of Trump winning) and tried to tell it to the rest of the inept masses preferring to ignore reality for the sake of preserving an illusion of contentment, they might have been spared the severity of the pain that came with ripping off the proverbial Band-Aid. One no longer able to conceal the wound that is the ugly truth. Frank (a sausage voiced by Seth Rogen) is among the first to acknowledge that something is rotten in the state of being a perishable food item. For after Honey Mustard (Danny McBride) returns to the supermarket when the customer that bought him exchanges him for regular mustard, he blows the lid off what the “Great Beyond” really is, so horrified to return back to it that when he’s put in another shopping cart with Frank and his matching bun, Brenda Bunson (Kristen Wiig), he opts for suicide instead, declaring, “I’ve got a date with oblivion,” before jumping out.
Frank and Brenda try to rescue him from the fall, prompting them, Douche (Nick Kroll), Sammy Bagel Jr. (Edward Norton) and Lavash (David Krumholtz) to fall out as well. As a result of this, Douche, who hasn’t been so much as looked at by a customer in what seems to be years, develops an insatiable vendetta against Frank and Brenda. He’s got the same mindless logic as Trump, honing in on an enemy to blame and not backing down until it’s “neutralized.” And, despite his broken nozzle, Douche finds new liquid to pump himself with, “juicing,” as it were with, well, a juice box. This is the first scene that foreshadows a sexual pillaging. One that can only serve as a grand metaphor for how the U.S. government not only fucks its own people but seems to be hate fucking internally.
With every food item playing their part–just like Volodymyr Zelensky, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, George Papadopoulos, Michael Flynn and Michael Cohen, among others–to cover up what’s really going on outside of Shopwells, the insulated Bible Belt, of sorts, where no one seems to want to know what’s actually happening beyond its borders, Frank must find a way to prove the truth to them on his own. For even Brenda abandons him in favor of being consoled by the lesbianic Teresa Del Taco (Salma Hayek). Because it seems there aren’t many same sex-oriented foods that feel comfortable coming out until the end of all the madness. Including the formerly rivaling Lavash and Sammy Bagel Jr., who, for reasons no longer so obvious to them, have been forced to feign contempt thanks to their age-old divide–one that not even the common ground of hummus can unite.
Then, of course, there is the embodiment of the average American voter in the form of “The Druggie,” an overweight, mentally non-present being who is more concerned with getting his next high than anything else. In fact, it is his injection of bath salts that allows him to break the fourth dimension and see what’s actually in front of him: sentient food with arms and legs, some of which he’s bitten off–especially Pizza. As they all rally around him to accuse him of being a monster, Druggie ends up falling asleep, awakening to the food being inanimate again and writing off the incident as a hallucination. His aloofness–his sheer inability to be moved by any sense of urgency–is the average American through and through. Which is precisely why one couldn’t possibly still be that shocked that the leader of the U.S. was ultimately to be Herr Trump, an orange blob that amounts to the perfect manifestation of the American mind, all filled with trash sound bites and reality TV nonsensicality.
The very title of Sausage Party alone is an indication of where the American headspace was still at in 2016, before the accepted male privilege of being a pervert that profited from his filthiness was reined in by the 2017 reckoning of #MeToo. There’s, indeed, a reason why the early 10s boys’ club of Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill and James Franco has disappeared in recent years. There is, quite simply, no market for such puerile male humor in the present climate. One that arose by allowing too much absurdity and insanity to persist in the past.
The culmination of democratic devolution, which, to be honest, has been happening ever since the Kennedys were put into office by the mafia, can only result in one outcome: orgiastic chaos. Just as it does in Sausage Party (at least still pertinent in this regard). Everyone fucking everyone in ways real and poetic. But mostly real. For sexual degeneracy is simply what happens during each era’s archetypal Fall of Rome. And, in that time, too, rich white males controlling “democracy” were largely to blame for the eruption of bedlam among the once comatose masses. Not to mention that government officials are constantly “in bed” with one another, as well as those corporate entities (sometimes ones that sell processed food) that represent an overt conflict of interest.
