System
2025 - by John MacLean
937 Words
Welcome to McDonald’s.
Come on in.
You are the sunshine of my life.
A lot to love.
What you want is what you get.
In 19th-century Chicago, Lithuanian immigrants laboured in hellish meatpacking factories. Each of these ‘beef-boner’ butchers performed a single step of dismemberment—one slice in a grotesque choreography of efficiency.
Inspired by such relentless productivity, American industrialist Henry Ford brought the dark logic of the slaughterhouse to the sterile floors of his car factories, turning the disassembly line into the assembly line: a cornerstone of the modern age.
In 1948, Dick and Mac McDonald adapted Ford’s system for their burger bar. It made food fast, at last. Big windows in their circular building invited customers to watch it at work.
Enter Ray Kroc, a flinty paper cup salesman, born in Chicago, who seized the rights to franchise the McDonald’s system. What followed was an empire: golden arches hammered into all four corners of a flattening global brandscape. But Kroc knew McDonald’s had to evolve or die. So he added fantasy to fast food, and a new visual culture emerged: a blend of Madison Avenue psychology packaged as cheerful cartoon characters.
The modern became postmodern. Logic began to lose its grip.
As a child in the mid-70s, I begged my parents to stop at every candy-coloured, yolk-yellow-arched McDonald’s we passed in our dust-streaked Pontiac. Oh, how I longed for a Happy Meal. I wanted in, without understanding why.
But my father, wise to clowning and fakery, never lifted his foot from the accelerator. My protestations faded into the freeway hum as we glided past the slogan: What you want is what you get.
Sigmund Freud would have had a picnic at McDonald’s. Imagine him—the Viennese owl—unpacking the brown take-away bag: fleshy, warm paper, baby-soft-and-sweet food; a burger with a toy. A curved maternal ‘M’…
And, after a pensive puff on his cigar, which is, after all, just a cigar, he might have concluded that my unresolved childhood desire would eventually seek an outlet.
‘Yes, yes… all in good time, John.’
Two score years later, in 2024, age 54 and living in London, I encountered something uncanny: a building that predated the first McDonald’s yet now wore its signage like an absurdly ill-fitting costume. A Tudorbethan inn on a 500-year-old intersection—red-brick chimneys, ornate eaves—appropriated by the burger empire. History overwritten with branding.
It was jaw-dropping but queasy: like an AI hallucination; a disingenuous identity retrofit; a compromise in the architecture of memory. A copy for which no original ever existed.
And I found 24 more.
Like a butterfly chaser gone batty, I began collecting them, riding trains around England, cycling and photographing each site. In my childhood, we never stopped, but now I couldn’t stop looking. It was embarrassingly enjoyable—a paradoxical pleasure: the familiarity amid alienation, the delicious mismatch of memory, the bittersweet flavour of dark nostalgia. McDonald’s, but not. Here, a variant, there a deviant… and all shocking but beautiful simulacra.
The absurdist in me was thrilled. In defiance of the visual chaos I imposed order: a strict photographic system, with a camera raised on a pole to shoot through the building’s central axis; a repeatable, Becheresque, typological perspective; Bruegelesque overviews of burger bars as if seen from a theatre’s upper circle with actors performing in front of a backdrop of Constablesque clouds.
That same sense of imposed stasis—and subtle observation—runs through my favourite childhood film, Breaking Away (1979). Written by playwright Steve Tesich, a Serbian-American from East Chicago, it follows characters who push back—gently but insistently—against a stratified society that leaves them hopeless and isolated. Dave, the main character, escapes into fantasy to sever his working-class roots—only to reclaim them, triumphantly, in the end. Tesich reminds us that authenticity isn’t inherited or manufactured—it’s something we earn, quietly, through action.
A master of incisive cultural critique, he coined the phrase post-truth in 1992 to describe a world he saw on the horizon—where objective facts would be undermined by emotional persuasion, and political identity would become performance. America, he warned, was becoming a nation of people who prefer to be lied to.
That same strategy of substitution—where performance replaces the real and branding displaces truth—has long defined McDonald’s approach to marketing. Around the same time, the company refreshed its slogan: The closest thing to home.
Like advertising billboards themselves, my photographs magnify this manufactured intimacy—the desperate insincerity that began long before McDonald’s started selling salads. Once engineered for efficiency, the brand now manufactures a form of skewed nostalgia—not memory but its simulation. Meanwhile, the system still hums in the background, stultifying the invisible workers who keep it running while spectacle takes centre stage.
By framing these hybrid buildings with clinical symmetry and theatrical perspective—and allowing accumulations of human activity to populate the image—I position my photographs within the tradition of conceptual documentary. My camera holds the tension between lived experience and corporate fantasy—neither reconciled nor denied, but suspended and flattened within the frame.
Yet for me, making these pictures wasn’t just an act of cultural critique—it was a way of staging my own internal paradox: I am an uneasy consumer of this spectacle, even as I happily reproduce it. How well have I walked the line between documenting and participating?
Perhaps McDonald’s brand engineers also found themselves in a quandary: tempted to market the humble, brotherly origin story—a return to the real—only to discover the floorboards had already been pulled up for firewood. The brand had stretched its authenticity past the point of no return, like an artist seduced by what sells, waking up surrounded by paintings they no longer recognise as their own.
Hyperreal self-parody may not have been McDonald’s intention, but now, it’s the only 99-cent flavour left. Because once we have compromised on the truth, we can never go home again.