Naked Lunch

Susan Sontag wrote that the medium of photography led to a diminution of reality. When repeatedly captured through photos, she claimed, the world loses its veracity. Men at Lunch, a documentary exploring the iconography of a well-known picture featuring eleven workmen nonchalantly eating their lunch on a steel girder 840 feet above the ground, is an attempt to restore reality to an image which has become so ubiquitous as to be banal. Unfortunately, director Seán Ó Cualáin’s film succeeds only in shoring up the hokum of a portrait that can be bought from any discount poster shop.

The exalted photograph was taken in New York during 1932, a year in which the Great Depression was crippling America. According to research, the image was staged by the Rockefeller Centre, one of whose buildings was in mid-construction when the snap was taken. The image was published in the city’s Herald Tribune and achieved legendary status thereafter. Ó Cualáin’s doc buys into the propagandistic nature of the photo, wheeling out a succession of experts to proclaim its sincerity as an emblem of the hard-working nature of Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants. A voiceover informs that an average of forty steelworkers died each year from the precarious job but this is somewhat brushed over in the film’s rush to pay homage to the American Dream. A cynic might point out that marketeers at Rockefeller were further risking their employees lives by getting them to pose hundreds of feet above the air for the sake of a few publicity shots.

Adding to Men At Lunch’s proselytising untruth is its inclusion of an Irish village claiming to have borne two of the characters in the photo. One of their alleged sons whips out a snapshot of his father, who bears scant resemblance to the gentleman swinging his feet off the beam. We also learn that literally thousands of other star-spangled banner-struck Europeans regularly testify to being the progeny of one or the other of the men dining in the sky. The fact that this film has zeroed in on some unlikely lads from Shanaglish in Galway probably has nothing whatsoever to do with its funding from the Irish Film Board. Ironically, the latter has effectively replicated the original exploitation of the image by using it to make an eighty minute long advert for sleazy tourist-baiting jingoism. Perhaps Sontag was right after all.