Supermarket foods discover the falseness of human religion

Rating: 9/10 (20 August 2016)

This film's unprecedented profanity points to its primary purpose — to reject and dispel the debilitating delusions of the supposed sacred.
The Shopwell supermarket products here express the human faith in some unproved heaven that will justify their self-denials in this lifetime. But when a honey mustard returns from The Great Beyond he reports his discovery: the supposedly beneficent gods are really violent demons bent upon consuming and destroying these gullible humans/products.
Hero Frank — the wiener who will take all — confirms that truth when he visits the liquor aisle and learns firsthand from Firewater that the Imperishables invented the myths that form the culture's religions.
Honey Mustard himself embodies the human conflict: Is he a honey or a mustard? The question doesn't bother him, just the naive Brenda who prefers simplicity so resists the reality as long as she can. Honey Mustard was saved by his ambivalent nature, but is so maddened by his discovery he kills himself.
It's a telling complexity. Are we flesh or spirit? The religious would have us believe we are spirits who should shun our earthly natures. This film asserts our meathood, our substance, our materiality in an unyieldingly material world, whose only fulfilment and service must be found on earth.
The only human to discover the truth is the doomed druggie who shoots up on bath salts. Only then does reality come clean to him and he realizes the character of the peripheral life he has been mindlessly and compulsively consuming.
And excreting. The abundant scatological humour provides Jonathan Swift's excremental view of humanity that no airy pretences can conceal. Hence Peanut Butter bemoans the death of his wife Butt Nutter and the Chinese take-out comes from Pu Ping.
As the narrative occurs on July 4 it points to America's Independence Day, when all the wieners and the hot dog buns they yearn to pop into expect to be liberated. But Honey Mustard has learned what we already know: the Great Beyond they so eagerly anticipate is a cover for their death and destruction.
The film's celebration of a real independence is the independence from religion, specifically the delusions, divisions and self-denials promulgated in its name. The characters come fully alive when they cast off their superstitions, overthrow their murderous gods (i.e., the humans) and abandon themselves to an impassioned orgy.
Even the Muslim pita, learning he won't get those 72 Virgin Olive Oils on the other side, discovers a fraternal and sexual fulfilment with his mortal enemy Sammy Bagel Jr (Edward Norton as his pal Woody Allen). So, too, the militarized sauerkraut is determined to eradicate The Juice.
Opposing hymns frame the narrative. The film opens with the morning prayer to The Great Beyond, celebrating the supposed gods of kindness and salvation. But it ends on an alternative prayer, Three Dog Night's Joy to the World. That hymn evokes the heady counterculture of the '60s, when OT prophet Jeremiah is replaced by a bullfrog, who was a good friend of mine, and salvation is to be found in this world, through wine, love, community, sex, and not delayed for some hypothetical afterlife.
This film's wildness is itself a celebration of the sensual, the forbidden, the indulgent, in the face of religious and any other prissy decorum. Good stuff.