small screen
BY RICK LEVIN
Burn,
Baby, Burn
HBO’s Hot Coffee reveals a broken legal system
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efore I talk about coffee — and
specifi cally, a very iconic cup
of scalding hot coffee that left
atrocious, skin-melting burns in the crotch
of a 79-year-old woman in Albuquerque,
N.M. — I’d like to talk about Nazis. When
I lived in Oaxaca in 2001, I would get
together once or twice a week with Jerry,
a wiry old Jewish guy who, like me, kept
fi nding himself living in southern Mexico.
Jerry and I would meet up at our favorite
cantina and chat over beers and shots of
mescal, and one day — after hitting the
mescal a bit harder than normal — Jerry,
a spitfi re liberal, leaned in and grabbed my
arm. He’d been incarcerated in Auschwitz
as a kid, he said, and had always been
haunted by the dull, empty eyes of the SS
guards who oversaw the daily routines of
the prisoners. “I hadn’t seen those eyes for
60 years, until I saw that motherfucker,”
Jerry whispered, and pointed up to Karl
Rove’s face on the bar’s TV screen.
Rove looms large in the new documentary
Hot Coffee, a brilliant and infuriating work
of investigative journalism that takes as
its leaping off point the infamous, and
widely misunderstood, verdict in the civil
case of Stella Liebeck, who was severely
burned by a spilled cup of McDonald’s
coffee (the photos of her wounds recall
Hiroshima radiation burns). Prior to the
much-maligned Liebeck case, McDonald’s
quality control manual required that coffee
to be kept at a temperature of 180-190
degrees F, and the company had received
more than 700 complaints from customers
who’d been scalded. The jury awarded
Liebeck, an able-bodied woman who’d
only just quit working full-time, $160,000
in compensation and $2.7 million in
punitive damages, which a judge reduced
to $480,000.
And so began a very dangerous urban
legend about “jackpot justice” and “junk
lawsuits” being waged by greedy citizens
against poor, defenseless corporations
like McDonald’s and Philip Morris. As
Ashland-based director Susan Saladoff
proves so incisively in Hot Coffee, that
legend is actually an obscurantist myth
manufactured very systematically and
very deviously by corporate interests —
corporate interests with chilling reasons
for hiding from the public the full truth of
how a handful of politicians have rigged
the entire legal system to maintain their
power and line their pockets.
A hot cup of coffee is only the tip of
the iceberg. The documentary lays out
in meticulous detail the way a clutch of
sociopathic greedheads like Rove, Ronald
Reagan and George W. Bush have waged a
continual campaign to corrupt everything
from tort law (by putting hard caps on
punitive damages) to the structure of the
judicial system itself. These completely
unconstitutional shenanigans have been
achieved by everything from repetitive
propaganda and TV commercials to
funneling huge sums of money into getting
conservative, pro-business judges seated
on state supreme courts. “In my line of
work, you gotta keep repeating things over
and over and over again for the truth to
sink in, to kinda catapult the propaganda,”
George W. Bush, crouching like a
campfi re cowboy, tells a group of huddled
constituents. You should hear the laughs.
Saladoff is thorough and relentless
in the way she cuts through the fug of
misinformation surrounding the public’s
understanding of the legal system, and for
emotional emphasis she reveals the real-
life victims of so-called tort reform and
mandatory forced arbitration; for example,
there is the case of Colin Gourley, who
suffered twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome
when Lisa Gourley’s doctor failed to realize
she had only one placenta. Because of
caps on damages in malpractice suits, the
Gourleys’ intitial award of $5.6 million in
damages (what it was estimated it would
take to keep Colin alive) was reduced to
$1.25 million. All power in these instances
is wrested away from the jury by legislators
living in the pocket of the insurance industry.
But the pain you witness in the Gourleys is
beyond anger; even years later, they seemed
stunned, bewildered.
Hot Coffee is a depressing and angering
documentary, if only because the conclusions
it can only hint are so devastating: Our
democracy is rotten to the core, and it
appears unfi xable. The country is ruled by
an oligarchy of maniacs hiding behind PR
fi rms and doublespeak rhetoric. Of course,
some viewers may fi nd hope in the fact of
Hot Coffee itself — that it could be made at
all, that intelligent activists like Saladoff are
around to keep up the good fi ght. Me, I’m
not feeling it right now.
ew
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24 JULY 7, 2011
EUGENE WEEKLY
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