Directed by Alan Parker, 1994, 118 minutes

Eleanor (Bridget Fonda) and William Lightbody (Matthew Broderick) travel to Battle Creek, Michigan in 1907 to recover their health at the Sanitarium (or ‘The San’) under the care of Dr John Harvey Kellogg (Anthony Hopkins), health guru and inventor of the cornflake.  On the way, they meet Charles Ossining (John Cusack) who is travelling to Battle Creek to launch his own cereal brand and capitalise on Kellogg’s success.

Each January in the wealthier parts of the world a strident barrage of advertising interrupts the contented snores and fitful flatulence of exhausted consumers as they snooze in their armchairs. As shrill exhortations to buy more Christmas pudding recede like distant sleigh bells a new and noisome clamour urges us to join a gym or start a diet as businesses capitalise on our feelings of guilty self-indulgence. Alan Parker’s screen adaptation of T. Coraghessen-Boyles’ novel playfully anatomises the relationship between money, morality and health revealing attitudes that have changed very little over the past century. Hypocrisy and ignorance continue to undermine pragmatic political debate about healthcare, fostering social policies that distinguish between the deserving and undeserving poor. Indignant taxpayers blame the unhealthy lifestyles of the poor for costly public services whilst complacently ignoring the social inequality that fosters overwork, poor nutrition and addiction. Meanwhile chicanery and profiteering abound as corporations deploy images of sporty, healthy bodies to sell sugary soft drinks and fast cars, peddling ‘clean’ diesel whilst ignoring the proliferation of dietary disorders, diabetes and asthma. Parker’s raucous satire mocks the rich minority that enjoys the means to buy a better body whilst many of their fellow human beings struggle on the brink of starvation.

Business has always harvested hypochondria for profit: From medieval pardoners who sold the promise of heaven to the snake-oil merchants of the carnival circuit.  Affluence encourages self-indulgence, self-indulgence fosters guilt, and guilt is assuaged by spending money. Kellogg’s sales pitch relied on a mixture of didactic moralising and quackery: He advocated vegetarianism, believing that carnivores risked constant disease and premature death. He taught that sexual abstinence was essential for the maintenance of physical health; sexual arousal, particularly masturbation (‘the sin of Onan’) was dangerous. Kellogg failed to recognise that when sex becomes shameful, it also becomes more alluring. Many of the treatments depicted in the film mingle pain with pleasure. Flagellating massage and electrical therapies offer a source of furtive sexual release for some of the San’s customers; the screenplay suggests that Kellogg relishes his regular enemas which conflate bodily cleansing and sexual stimulation.

The film portrays 1907 America as a painfully repressed and deferential culture: When Kellogg requests volunteers to assist in his lecture, his audience simultaneously looks downwards to avoid his gaze. We watch as rows of patients in stiff, formal clothes perform awkward calisthenics; given the straitjacket fit of respectable dress in this period, it is no surprise that flatulence was such a problem but bodily emissions (of any kind) represent a source of acute embarrassment. In contrast, Kellogg is comically candid as he smugly describes the superior quality of his own bowel movements in far too much detail. Alan Parker’s screenplay abounds with double-entendre, provoking audience embarrassment for comic effect whilst playfully testing the parameters of polite conversation.

As affluent cultures created enough domestic space for personal privacy, shame about bodily functions came to distinguish the rich from the poor who had little room for embarrassment in their overcrowded homes. Fear of disease combined with religious morality that presented dirtiness as sin and cleanliness as virtue to feed an increasing demand for cleaning products. Soap and bleach developed alongside medicine; the aspirational poor bought these products as much to feel part of society as to combat disease. Subsequently, aggressive exploitation of these markets has left our environment saturated with plastic waste, detergents and CFCs. Mankind purchased freedom from the germ and body odour at high cost as allergies and cancers thrive in our toxic, chemically dependent culture. Kellogg’s contemporaries witnessed the environmental impact of industrialisation at first hand; a century later wealthier cultures have traded coal fuel pollution for internal combustion engine emissions. Despite advances in medical science physical decay and disease remain an inevitable part of life and the prospect of catastrophic climate change undermines our faith in the inevitability of human progress.

Parker contrasts the wealthy but worried inmates of the San with the denizens of downtown Battle Creek who enthusiastically swill beer, gorge on steak and smoke cigars. The patrons of the Red Onion are cheerfully unconcerned about bowel troubles or heart failure, they eat to survive or for simple, sensual pleasure.  Kellogg’s son George (Jacob Reynolds), adopted from a poor home, refuses to eat the vegetarian fare provided by his well-meaning foster parents, instead he aggressively demands the ‘meat and potatoes’ that he recognises as real food. The unwashed poor with their red meat and noisome bowels are an affront to middle-class politesse. In the period leading up to the First World War, the growth of industrial cities and social mobility provoked fear and loathing of the poor. The constant harping of the moralising press joined a wider intellectual debate as writers like George Bernard Shaw worried about the degrading effects of unrestrained breeding on the national character. These insidious eugenic theories fed the growth of fascism and culminated in genocide.

Parker mocks our constant pursuit of happiness through shopping and technology. The early twentieth century spawned brands that have become household names, Coca Cola began life as a patent medicine. Ossining realises that brand prestige has become more important than the physical product and that he can profit from the Kellogg name itself. Kellogg is, however, fiercely protective of his brand and, like a modern business uses litigation to protect it. ‘Wellville’ portrays Edwardian machinery with the same enthusiastic glee that James Cameron showed in ‘Titanic’ (1997) but accompanied by fetishism and fart gags rather than romantic bliss and Celine Dion. Like the ill-fated liner, the Spa cruises with complacent bliss towards the social and economic cataclysms of world war and depression. Kellogg’s spa faced bankruptcy when markets crashed in the 1920s and his wealthy patrons stayed away. The San’s therapeutic technology may seem better suited to a prison (or brothel) but before we get too smug, compare the equipment at Battle Creek to the machinery of any modern gym. Fin-de-siècle faith in electricity as miracle cure is no different from our own penchant for lurid lycra sportswear and expensive devices that simulate walking without us having to leave the safety of our homes.

Production Designer Brian Morris recreates Battle Creek in a wealth of wry detail. A centre of cutting-edge capitalism at its most rapacious, the ‘Cereal Bowl of the World’ is populated by eccentric characters who might have stepped out of the pages of an Edward Gorey tome: There are hilarious turns from Michael Lerner as the appropriately-monikered venture capitalist Goodloe Bender, Colm Meaney as bumptious radical, Doctor Badger and many others to savour. The film ignores Kellogg’s interest in eugenics, choosing instead to portray him as benevolently eccentric. Anthony Hopkins delivers a rare comic performance as Kellogg, cheerfully goggle-eyed and buck-toothed, like an over-stimulated hamster, perhaps a result of his bracing regime of enemas. Composer Rachel Portman’s hyperactive kazoo score accompanies Benny Hill style chases and chorus lines of joggling buttocks (perhaps an ironic nod to Parker’s censorship troubles with ‘Angel Heart’ 1987). ‘Wellville’ enthusiastically juxtaposes images of consumption with scatology, treating us to the most grotesque comic jump cut of all time and the unsavoury prospect of gallons of yoghurt administered rather than eaten: “It’s not going in that end…”

‘Road to Wellville’ is a sometimes-awkward attempt to mix social satire and the saucy vulgarity of an English ’Carry On’ film. The incessant toilet humour alienated many viewers and the film failed at the box-office. It is remembered as a blip in Alan Parker’s distinguished career, sandwiched (like pungent meat) between the commercial success of ‘The Commitments’ (1991) and crowd-pleaser ‘Evita’ (1996). ‘The Road to Wellville’ warrants rediscovery because it encourages us to laugh at our own frailty and foolishness. Its gentle but insistent anti-capitalist message offers a corrective to the claims of businesses that sell unattainable dreams and a timely reminder of our own gullibility as we try to buy our way to happiness. Viewers with a robust sense of humour will discover that laughter is better therapy than a bowl of green cornflakes or a yoghurt enema.

Quotes

“It’s not stealing, it’s capitalism” Goodloe Bender (Michael Lerner)

“I was massaging my colon” indignant Dr. Badger (Colm Meaney)

“An erection is a flagpole on your grave” John Kellogg (Anthony Hopkins)

“My own stools, sir, are gigantic and have no more odor than a hot biscuit.” John Kellogg (Anthony Hopkins)

Connections

Film and Television

‘Ravenous’ directed by Antonia Bird (1999)

‘Hysteria’ directed by Tanya Wexler (2011)

‘Unfrosted’ directed by Jerry Seinfeld (2024)

Reading

T Coraghessen-Boyle, Road to Wellville, Viking, 1993

Edward Gorey, Amphigorey – Fifteen books by Edward Gorey, Berkley, 1972

Doctor John Harvey Kellogg, Plain Facts for Old and Young, 1877

Jean Stengers and Anne Van Neck, Masturbation. The History of a Great Terror, Palgrave, 2001

B C Wilson; Doctor John Harvey Kellogg and the Religion of Biologic Living; Indiana University, 2014

Ben Wilson, Decency and Disorder: The Age of Cant 1789 – 1837, Faber and Faber, 2007

Theodore Zeldin, Happiness, Harvill, 1988

Music

Tiger Lillies and Kronos Quartet ‘The Gorey End’, EMI, 2003

Radio

BBC Radio 4: ‘In Our Time’ 6th April 2001 – Literary Modernism

BBC Radio 4: ‘In Our Time’ 20th February 2014 – Social Darwinism