I have a confession: I love McDonald’s food. When I was a kid, I constantly pestered my parents to take me there. When I was in high school, I once ate four Big Macs in one sitting. In my university days, I gave semi-serious thought to living on nothing but McDick’s and multivitamins. But after watching this film, I seriously doubt that I’ll eat at McDonald’s again. Ever.
Super Size Me is partly a documentary about America’s alarming epidemic of obesity. According to the film, 60 per cent of adult Americans are either overweight or obese. If that number seems ridiculously high, you should know that the film rounds down the actual estimate: according to CDC’s website, it’s more like 64 per cent. (Here in Canada, only about half of us are overweight or obese. Pat yourself on the back, if you can reach it.)
The film is also partly a hilarious video diary of one man’s voluntary descent into fast-food gluttony. Writer-director Morgan Spurlock, an affable-seeming New Yorker who has written and produced everything from plays to webcasts, makes himself the guinea pig in a month-long diet experiment. The diet? McDonald’s food, three meals a day.
To add secret sauce to the goose, Spurlock sets himself three rules: he can only eat what the various McDonald’s outlets he visits have on offer; he must accept the super-size option if it’s offered; and he must try everything on the menu at least once. He also decides to cut back on his physical activity, to better reflect the lifestyle of the average American. His girlfriend—a Vegan chef, of all things—is not amused.
Some of the best moments are the impromptu scenes of Spurlock cracking wise while chowing down on his latest fast-food feast. (His direction reveals a delightfully tasteless sense of humour; the first time he tries to eat an entire super-size combo, he pukes out the window of his car. The camera considers his awful complexion for a moment, then gives us a nice long look at the vomit lying on the pavement.)
Spurlock justifies his focus on the Golden Arches by pointing out that the company controls almost half the fast-food industry’s market share—and almost all of the nation’s mindshare. (Kids can immediately identify Ronald McDonald well before they can read.)
As a documentarist, Spurlock owes much of his style to Michael Moore. He isn’t nearly as confrontational—he settles for a brief recorded phone conversation with a McDonald’s PR flack—but he does share Moore’s love of the spotlight. And like Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, his film occasionally betrays a paradoxical love-hate attitude toward his fellow Americans. The underlying message seems to be that all those people who tried to sue the fast-food industry for making them fat might not be such idiots after all, but Spurlock can’t quite find it in himself to absolve them of blame, either.
That said, the most intriguing bit of speculation in the film is that McDonald’s food may be addictive. In the later stages of his enforced McDiet, Spurlock begins to show symptoms of what looks suspiciously like physical dependence. He even quotes internal McDonald’s documents that refer to frequent diners (like yours truly) as “heavy users.” As the damning evidence mounts, Ronald McDonald starts to seem like the most heinous clown since John Wayne Gacy.
But the facts and figures aren’t what make this film so effective. Ultimately, it’s the shots of Spurlock’s rapidly growing belly that do the trick. Nothing drives a point home like watching a fit and trim young man turn into a lazy, pot-gutted channel surfer over an hour and a half of screen time. I won’t give away the test results Spurlock receives at the end of his month of real time; let’s just say that by that time, the doctors monitoring his health throughout the experiment have joined his girlfriend in begging him to quit before he ends up in that big Playland in the sky. But Spurlock, caught between a grim sense of duty and the onset of his next Big Mac attack, sticks it out to the end. The way I look at it, he did it so I won’t ever have to.
(3.5/4)