The Menu Board Is a Work of Fiction

You know the moment—drunk enough that the fast food place around the corner seems not just acceptable but genuinely inspired, possibly the smartest decision you’ve made all night. You point at something on the illuminated board, something architectural, something with extra bacon that exists in its photograph as a precision-stacked tower of engineered excess. Then the thing that arrives is a collapsed, apologetic suggestion of that photograph, wrapped in paper already going translucent with grease.

Filmmaker Greg Benson turned this experience into a proper comparison: fast food advertising images set against what actually gets handed to you across the counter. The results are less surprising than they should be, which is maybe the most damning part. The lettuce has surrendered. The bun has the structural integrity of a sigh. The gap between the photo and the reality isn’t a mild exaggeration—it’s a different object entirely, the first one existing only in a studio under carefully managed lighting, the second assembled by someone who has done this fourteen thousand times and feels nothing. And yet here we all are, back at the counter, pointing at the board again.