posted by Scene -- @ 3:10 AM

The Body Politic – Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me

Going to the movies with my friend Suzanne is always a throwback experience. We do such juvenile things as sneaking into shows, theatre hopping, drinking alcohol out of paper bags, and pointing and laughing at characters in X2: X-Men United that remind us of people we went to high-school with. In that Grade 9 kind of way, we’re gangsta, yo.

And so this past week we decided to justify our thug by sneaking a couple of Happy Meals into a showing of Morgan Spurlock’s award-winning anti-fast food tirade, Super Size Me. Like Spurlock in the film, I had an experiment to conduct: Would the film be successful in making me sick to my stomach? Would I toss my beloved McNuggets into the aisle, disgusted, disgruntled, and feeling dissed by the clown with the Grimace?

My uncanny ability for alliteration and Spurlock’s own endearingly goofy grin aside, Super Size Me is serious business. Spurred on by lawsuits against the McDonald’s Corporation claiming that the company’s fast food directly resulted in the plaintiff’s problems with obesity, Spurlock takes on the challenge implied by the case’s final verdict: That the McDonald’s Corporation would only be liable could the plaintiff prove that their daily diet consisted of McDonald’s foodstuffs.

And so Spurlock tasks himself with a set of rules and conditions that by now have been rattled off verbatim at water coolers across America. For exactly one month:

1) Spurlock must eat McDonalds food, and only McDonalds food, three times daily.
2) Spurlock must try every menu item at least once.
3) If asked to super size, Spurlock must acquiesce.
4) Spurlock is limited in his exercise to the (pathetic) daily average number of steps taken by Americans during a workday.

Though the premise is simple and the information provided common knowledge, the result is nonetheless startling, disturbing, and above all else, brilliantly visual. Spurlock, a skilled visual storyteller, has the foresight to wear the same clothes throughout the thirty days. Aside from the health problems his many doctors inform us he has encountered (high blood pressure, liver problems, depression, low sex drive), we actually witness with our own eyes Spurlock’s once tiny frame swell to impressively fill out his once baggy fitting shirt and pants.

The film intersperses Spurlock’s tale with talking head experts, sidewalk interviews, and a seemingly endless supply of fat-people footage. The best of it follows children – kids chillingly singing along to McDonald’s jingles, school cafeterias showcasing the fat-saturated sludge they feed their students, young kids recognizing Ronald’s painted mug more readily than that of Jesus Christ or George Washington. The film’s sharp and playful editing keeps the facts, laughs, scares, and Spurlock’s own tale flying seamlessly.

The film’s one flaw is its reliance on the image of obese persons. At first the film deftly makes the normal seem shocking, the sober realization that there are fat people everywhere. But by the third quarter the endless barrage of big bottoms and too-small t-shirts seems mean spirited at worst, tedious at best, the finger-pointing mise-en-scene seemingly influenced by one talking head’s assertion that it will one day be as socially acceptable to harass fat people the same way it is acceptable to harass tobacco smokers.

Spurlock himself repeatedly picks on the state of Texas, pointing out that they are the fattest state in America (immediately followed by a shot of fat Texan McDonald’s employees, whose consent to being filmed was probably given without being informed of the “fatty-fat-fat” context it would be presented), that they super sized him the most often, that they invented the artery plug known as the McGriddle, that they added more cities to the country’s fattest by the end of the filming. And while facts are facts and fats are fats, Spurlock’s roasting amounts to nothing more productive than the sort of Texan-bashing made available and easy to the Left since Dubya took office.

Spurlock, a natural comedian, is at his best when making fun of himself. He gamely barfs on camera, mugs for our attention in a way that is best-friend familiar, cracks wise and witty about his food and condition. Spurlock’s endearingly cheerful disposition makes even more chilling and frightening the scenes where he encounters his first bout of depression, or where he awakens suddenly in the middle of the night, exasperated due to chest pains and breathing restrictions. Equally disturbing is when we realize Spurlock’s amiability is later on fueled by the food, like a dull friend suddenly made the life of the party after a few puffs of weed. Lethargic and sad one moment, Spurlock comments how full of energy and verve he is the next after chugging down some burgers, making the connection between fast food consumer and drug addict (while his vegan chef wife, equally as disturbed, backs away from him and out of the frame).

Besides offering looks of concern and disgust for us to bounce our judgments off of, Spurlock’s wife performs a successful function within the film. Super Size Me, in large part due to her, succeeds in temporarily changing Hollywood paradigm. Here, for perhaps the first time, Hollywood’s habit of poking fun at vegetarians, of making them seem deviant and Other, effeminate, homosexualized and subversive (see the recent examples in SWAT and Cheaper By the Dozen), is reversed. The film, even though Spurlock himself debates the point, does a good job of making meat eaters (more specifically, processed meat eaters) look almost villainous.

At the end of the film, Spurlock’s didactic conclusion places the onus squarely on our shoulders. What are we going to do? How are we going to change?

My own experiment had failed. My McNuggets, too tasty to describe, had been gulped down by the time the opening credits had concluded – not enough time for Spurlock’s film to have had any effect on my appetite. But the ending shots of Spurlock’s juxtaposed profiles, one from the beginning of the filming (skinny, in tip-top shape) and one from the end (soft, squishy, and round), served to cement my own conclusions. Spurlock’s experiment might have been extreme, sensational, and perhaps even unnecessary, but the point is that his experiment is not solely his own. We are all consuming this food on a scale that is much too large for our health, most of us more closely resembling that second photo rather than the first. Not just an entertaining, well made film, Super Size Me performs a rare cinematic feat – it directs the gaze towards our own bodies, and places the narrative’s conclusion firmly, fresh out the oven, in our own hands and mouths.

Jef.Catapang