AN EXTENDED RUN: We’re re-upping this review of one of our favorite films from this year’s Seattle Jewish Film Festival, The Automat, as it screens at AMC Seattle 10 starting this Friday, April 1.
Utopias are easier to find in the past than they are in the future. This, I think, is the source of The Automat‘s greatness. The Lisa Hurwitz-directed documentary, which impressively runs at this year’s Seattle Jewish Film Festival, is about a possibility that has already been realized—and it is the nature of time that makes the past more real than the future.
The possibility was expressed by a 20th-century American business model for selling meal items through vending machines with small glass doors that popped open with a slot-inserted nickel. The vending machines lined the walls of eateries that were often palatial in size. You could find real food in these machines, which, though requiring engineers to design and operate, were not automatic or serviced by robots. You just did not see the workers. They were on the other side. They rushed back and forth small plates of sweet pies, meat pies, clam chowder, Salisbury steak, and creamed spinach. The utopia here was each plate, though costing only a nickel, wasn’t fast food. This is why the often-made claim that the Automat was the first fast food (meaning, junk food) chain is misleading.
