***1/2 (out of ****)
A documentary directed & written by Morgan Spurlock
2004
96 min NR (should be PG13 or R)
Documentarian Morgan Spurlock is, so far, not as probing or challenging as Michael Moore, but he’s also not a tenth as irritating as Moore. Moore may be a fantastic artist, but he’s so smug and sarcastic that I always get the feeling that I could only spend about five minutes with him before throwing a cup of acid in his face. And that has absolutely nothing to do with his politics. Spurlock comes across as a good way to split a six-pack.
So it should come as no surprise that Moore’s enemies hate him so much that they can’t even begin to take him seriously, while a week after Spurlock’s fastfood-critical documentary “Super Size Me” opened McDonald’s stop serving the grease-calorie-fat atom bomb known as the Super Size. McDonald’s claims it’s just a coincidence. Okay. But instead of playing the role of the chosen one out to show us lowly mortals how the world ought to work, like some other tubby documentary-makers, Spurlock is self-deprecating. His decision to spend a month eating nothing but McDonald’s doesn’t come from lofty self-righteousness, but is more like a dare. One is reminded of Cool Hand Luke’s decision to eat 50 eggs in a hour “because it was a thing to do.” You catch more flies with honey.
So that’s the set-up: nothing but McDonald’s for 30 days, eating everything on the menu at least once, and us poor bastards in the audience start to feel sick watching fry after fry after fry, so many squished burgers, so much oniony ketchup glop. Spurlock drags a few physicians down with him and the results are even worse than they all predict: he puts on 25 pounds, he’s exhausted all the time, he turns his liver into pate, and he’s depressed whenever he’s not at the Golden Arches. But when he’s munching crap he feels like a million bucks.
Along the way Spurlock treats us to an abbreviated history of fast food, including how the cups of soda and fries keep getting bigger and bigger. He also demonstrates how children are targeted by fast food advertisers—first-graders do not recognize pictures of George Washington and Jesus, but they know who Ronald McDonald is—and he talks about how increasingly sedentary Americans are becoming. Spurlock mentions the suits against the fast food companies and doesn’t take sides; he is not incensed that the suits failed but is pleased by the changes all the publicity has brought to the fast food industry.
We also meet Jared the Subway guy. After watching Spurlock put away 40 oz of soda every day, Jared seems like Francis of Assisi, and is an interesting segue into how much fat, sugar, and calories public schools feed their children. I work in public schools, where two cookies and a bag of greasy, fried chips are treated as a good lunch. No wonder that kid has ADHD.
Spurlock does not hit every possible nook and cranny. The fattest city in the country, at the time of shooting, is Houston, and maybe it would have been on a tangent for Spurlock to mention that Houston, because of its lack of zoning, is also the only major city in America without good public transportation. New Yorkers tend not be as fat because walking to your garage is not nearly as much effort as walking to a bus stop or a subway station. Also, as informative and exuberant as “Super Size Me” is, a fair amount of it is stuff I already know, and the movie isn’t exactly a challenge to our understanding of the cosmos. And Spurlock is also surprisingly reticent about the various healthy options most fast food restaurants offer—by that I mean grilled chicken sandwiches. But that might just be because once you cream it with mayo and get fries and a sugar-saturated Coke, it doesn’t really matter.
I’m proud to say I’m about six feet tall and have never broken the two hundred-pound mark. I thank my mother, who was the only mom in apparently my entire grade school who packed fruit in my lunch instead of a bag of potato chips. But you can also navigate the fast food universe without getting a heart attack, if you keep your wits about you. At Taco Bell, get the Chicken Soft Taco Supreme, no sour cream. At Burger King, get the Grilled Chicken Whopper, hold the mayo. It’s all about grilled chicken, no fries, Diet Coke, soft tortilla instead of fried. And at Subway, get any of the 6 subs under 6 grams of fat, 6 inches long, and pile it down with veggies.
But all this seems pretty obvious, right? Except for the low-carb craze that’s swept over America in the last few years, this is all basically the same nutrition stuff we learned in elementary school. And can’t you just taste how unhealthy fast food is? Does it taste like orange juice or asparagus, or does it taste like hyper-processed salt? Can’t people, parents especially, read the labels on anything? Don’t you realize most lemonades and Minute Maids are not really juice, but sugar-water with some juice flavoring thrown in and are as unhealthy as Pepsi, except without the caffeine?
And here is where “Super Size Me” is the most satisfying: Spurlock puts the blame for the obesity epidemic squarely on us, the consumers, because this is part of our national character. The food business is a business, and as long as there is a market for garbage food, there will be people to produce it. Perhaps that’s why Spurlock keeps a jovial attitude through the whole thing and isn’t seriously damning of McDonald’s, although he certainly mocks its image. His film isn’t about something wrong with the world so much as it is about the way we are, and the way we’ve always been, that we’ve never quite noticed before. We like things that are bad for us because we are weak. Just reading this puts me in the mood for a Big Mac.
Finished May 30th, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Friday & Saturday Night
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