Alabama BBQ Company

Barbecue as dramatized by Quentin Tarantino.

A dazed cow, a chicken stunned into paralysis, and that pig. The ringleader. (It's always the pig!) He's drugged, no doubt, but only because dosing himself with downers was the only way he could follow through on his ghoulish plot. His resolve is measured by the benzo—long practice has shown him how many for how far down.

And so, here is our standard barbecue threesome. (Notice how the chicken is the least comfortable of the bunch.) We don't know—we don't want to know!—how the pig engineered it, but it's all coming together. He will go calmly to the Great Beyond—barbiturates are like prayers for all the comfort they provide. His "friends," however... His friends must be dragged there, led by nose and beak into death.

Again—again!—we want only to understand how dreck like this can possibly attract customers! We assume, owing to its ubiquity, that it must. But how? Our ignorance is exhausting, even to ourselves. Are we too innocent to understand the engine at the center of all this, the exploitable flaws in the human mind, the minutiae of the service industry? Whatever the reason for our ignorance, ignorant we are. Time and again, we look on this visual garbage and are baffled. For here: animals, lashed together like hostages in a home invasion, plunked into the barbecue, where they can contemplate their own excruciating deaths. And this... appeals to people.