Entertainment :: Movies
Super Size Me by David Foucher
EDGE PublisherFriday May 7, 2004 37% of American children and adolescents are carrying too much fat and 2 out of every three adults are overweight or obese. Is it our fault for lacking self-control, or are the fast-food corporations to blame? This is the topic documented in fast-food style in “Super Size Me,” the latest Michael Moore documentary.
Oops. Scratch that. Michael Moore didn’t create this fast-food mess; filmmaker Morgan Spurlock did – in a style so similar to Moore’s it’s basically stylistic theft.
Spurlock decides – in a feat of logic defying all reason – that to solve the question of “what to do about this” he’s going to eat a diet of exclusively McDonalds’ food for 30 days. His rules: he has to eat everything on the menu at least once… he can ONLY eat items from the McDonalds menu… and he will “supersize” only when asked (but pretty much whenever he is asked he will).
Spurlock’s health degrades; this is a result about as obvious as that of an experiment depriving a person of food and water and sitting them in the sun on an eighty degree day. Fast food is not healthy food, and eating unhealthy food will result in unhealthy people. Given the high content of saturated fat, it’s an equally self-evident truth that people who eat a lot of fast food will gain weight and, if their diet is offset by an exercise regimen which mostly involves heading to the refrigerator during commercials, will become obese and likely contract Type 2 Diabetes as they age. We do not need a documentary to tell us these facts – but in large part, that is precisely what Spurlock’s film does.
Even when the film departs from the central experiment to analyze the “domestication” of American youth into this high-fat culture via school lunches, Spurlock’s probing fingers only go so deep. They never fail to explain *why* government-subsidized lunches lack healthy content – and Spurlock certainly shies away from the political issues which are the true causes: dramatic cuts in government spending. In fact, those in office who are so upset about America’s trend towards larger waistlines work down the proverbial hall from their budgetary compatriots whose efforts to preserve larger figures for military spending have so significantly cut spending on educational programs, including those that teach youngsters about nutrition and those that feed youngsters health-appropriate foods.
It’s a measure of Spurlock’s inexperience that despite fifteen phone calls to the McDonalds’ Corporation, he was unable to interview a single employee of the company who did NOT work behind the counter at a franchise; Moore would have been staking out the corporate offices until he wheedled his way into Jim Cantalupo’s office (and in an ironic twist entirely ignored by the documentary, Cantalupo died of a massive heart attack in April of this year – but then, I’m willing to bet that he didn’t eat the food served by his company exclusively).
The world needs documentary auteurs who can show us something new – not something obvious. Throughout Spurlock’s picture I repeatedly asked myself three questions: Why does a man volunteer for this experiment… What was he hoping to prove… and how in the hell can he actually enjoy eating McDonalds’ foods day after day? Ultimately, the documentary fails to answer all three questions. It clearly illustrates the problem of American obesity and ultimately fails to prove anything significant beyond the aged wisdom of health practitioners the world over: eat with balance and exercise regularly.
DUH.
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