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Guts
Supersize Me struggles with some excess flab
by Jack Neely
Supersize Me is the documentary of an appalling pseudo-experiment. A young, healthy man chooses to live, for one full month, entirely on food available at McDonald’s. The camera follows him from one McDonald’s to another as he travels from his home in New York around the country, thence back to his three doctors, a cardiologist, a gastroenterologist, and a general practitioner, as they give him repeated checkups. That’s the movie. There’s a great one-hour PBS “POV” special in here.
This is a 96-minute feature film, and a more interesting 96 minutes than you might expect it to be. Morgan Spurlock, a young filmmaker better known until recently as an MTV personality, clearly intends to be the next Michael Moore. Like the films of the already super-sized Moore, Supersize Me comprises some valid criticisms of American society, a pageant of startling facts and figures, some memorable imagery, and a big helping of self-indulgent, semi-rational hyperbole. Like Moore’s films, this one exhibits more guts than analysis.
Few would question the film’s basic premises. America is fat, the fattest nation in the world, and getting rapidly fatter. And we know a diet of McDonald’s isn’t ideal.
Fast-food joints are well-known suspects, but hardly the only ones, or even the chief ones in the New American Rotundity. Grocery-store food prepared at home is also said to be less healthy than ever before. And at the same time our food is more junky and fatty and we’re drinking soft drinks on a scale unimagined by the inventors of Coke and Pepsi, we’ve also been busy inventing more and more reasons to sit still for hours at a time. E-mail, the Internet, VCR’s, DVD’s, and suburban sprawl; a recent study makes a startling mathematical link between time spent in a car and obesity.
Spurlock does nod at the exercise factor: the month he chooses to eat only at McDonalds is the same month he chooses to stop exercising. But because he’s eating only at McDonald’s and drinking every drop of giant-sized Cokes and getting no exercise—and is putting himself under an extraordinary emotional stress by having a camera follow him around all day—we can’t know exactly what causes the horrible effects on his body.
We do know they are indeed horrible. Eating at McDonald’s, Spurlock gains 24.5 pounds in only four weeks. Worse, his previously healthy cholesterol count is through the roof. And worse still, his liver is showing signs of hardening. He is, according to his GP, suffering “liver disease beyond anything I would have thought.”
But where did Spurlock get the confidence to invest in this movie? None of his doctors predicted this effect; one told him flatly that nothing very bad would happen. If anything less dramatic had happened to his body—if he’d put on only 10 pounds, for example, or suffered no liver disorder—the film would have been a flop.
Sometimes you sense this gonzo documentarian is tipping the scales just a little. It’s hard to take very seriously some of his vaguer symptoms. When he suffers chest pains and has a “weird feeling” in his penis, you wonder if hypochondria is serving the film’s purposes well.
The fact that some of the most loyal McDonald’s devotees Spurlock interviews aren’t fat at all seems to raise questions that Spurlock doesn’t address. A couple of healthy-looking street kids who love McDonald’s insist that McDonald’s is OK if you get a lot of exercise. It seems plausible and is one of the movie’s several loose ends.
The thing seems less an experiment than a David Blaine stunt. In his own way, Spurlock does point out that living like an American is sort of an Extreme sport.
But the fact is, he’s not really living like an American, but like the cloddish middle American pictured by New Yorkers. Spurlock cites the fact that one in four Americans eats at a fast-food place in any given day. But some of those places, famously Subway, do have some healthy choices; and one in four Americans eating some sort of fast food at least once a day doesn’t begin to approximate what Spurlock does—submitting himself to a strict diet—which, even for an American, is more unusual than veganism.
The film does have some grace notes; a graphic depiction of stomach-reduction surgery to the strains of the Strauss waltz, “The Blue Danube,” almost works.
Spurlock is occasionally, but not consistently, funny. He often wanders away from the narrative, and when he does, he leaves it to the talking heads saying, for the most part, things we were hearing 20 years ago on 20/20.
Naturally, McDonald’s is crap. We knew that. Spurlock obviously wants to dramatize the fact. This film has already been credited for influencing McDonald’s elimination of the Supersize portion. But it may even backfire. I haven’t been to any McDonald’s in a couple of years. But by the end of this film, McDonald’s was starting to seem kind of dangerous and exotic, like an opium den in Shanghai, and I was craving a Big Mac.
Until Mr. Spurlock reminded me, I’d forgotten how wonderful they were. To induce so many millions to risk their lives to eat them, they’d have to be.
June 17, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 25
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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