The hotdog delusion: Sausage Party and the rise of Hollywood atheism

The movies have made a fortune out of religion over the years – and avoided the subject of atheism. But in Seth Rogen’s sweary CGI comedy Sausage Party, the idea of God is challenged. Will it cash in on America’s surge in non-belief?

John Patterson
Thursday 1 September 2016
11.50 EDT

It’s not every day we see a movie whose main characters declare violent war on their own gods, and then triumphantly destroy them. It sounds like something out of mid-period Ingmar Bergman or late Tarkovsky; po-faced, grim, unbearably pessimistic. But with hotdogs.

Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s Sausage Party, with its frathouse title and leering phallic poster tagline (“A Hero Will Rise ...”) has been marketed as the first truly adult, stoner-friendly, sex-filled, scatological and foul-mouthed CGI-cartoon comedy, nominally about a frankfurter (voiced by Rogen) who wants to get it on with his hot hotdog-bun girlfriend (Kristen Wiig).

Well, it’s all that, certainly. But it also comes with a surprisingly sophisticated side-order of philosophising about the nature of religion and why we believe – or, in this case, why we don’t. To all the sex and profanity and other outrages, add atheism, something Hollywood has avoided embracing, or even discussing, for nearly a century.

It wouldn’t be quite true to say that the dam has finally and irrevocably broken, that old-time American religious practice is about to be engulfed by a tsunami of unbelief. But in the wider culture, the spectre of atheism has been haunting us since the internet showed the wider world to the backwoods and the boondocks. And even more so since the publication about a decade ago of a trio of tracts on non-belief – The End of Faith, Sam Harris, 2004; The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins, 2006; and God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens, 2007, all of which drew massive audiences on promo-tours and ignited widespread debate – and the release of Bill Maher’s anti-religious comedy-doc Religulous.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/sep/01/the-hotdog-delusion-sausage-party-and-the-rise-of-atheism-in-hollywood