In “The Founder’s Paradox,” a late chapter in his unusual business book Zero to One, Peter Thiel discusses the tendency of successful tycoons to contain multitudes — to “oscillate between sullen jerkiness and appealing charisma,” to be dorkish outsiders one moment and consummate insiders the next, and to be adulated one moment and scapegoated soon after.
In The Founder, John Lee Hancock’s smoothly ingratiating origin story about a little restaurant chain called McDonald’s, we get a fascinating variation on the Thielian paradox. The movie’s subject is Ray Kroc (played energetically by Michael Keaton), the man who put the golden arches in every town and strip mall and rest stop in this fair land. And Kroc is, indeed, a creature of paradox: a lifelong failure who suddenly found astonishing success, a gee-whiz salesman who turned out to be a ruthless corporate infighter, a man who sold McDonald’s as the most all-American and family-friendly of restaurants and eventually saw it become the epitome of soulless, mechanized fast food.
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