Movie Review: Super Size Me

Creator Morgan Spurlock documents his heroic month-long McDonald’s binge. Three times a day, breakfast, lunch and dinner, for thirty long days, our hero ventures through the Golden Arches into the Third Circle of Hell where he must eat every puke-inducing item of processed sludge on the menu, and Super Size every time it is asked of him.

In the beginning Spurlock is a funny, energetic Manhattaner (by way of West by God Virginia) in his thirties and in above-average physical condition. We watch his descent into the abyss of American fatassery, with a gaggle of physicians documenting his decline with blood tests, scales, and measures. Spurlock’s cholesterol and weight skyrocket in a very short period of time, while the doctors continually warn him of liver failure, heart problems, and even death.

What we always knew becomes, in this documentary, clearer than ever: McDonald’s isn’t food, it’s a poisonous drug. Early in the experiment, Spurlock’s first Super Size meal, a Double Quarter Pounder with cheese meal, causes him to puke out of the driver’s side window of his car, much like a kid taking his first shot of whiskey. Then, gradually, Spurlock gets used to the stuff and morphs into a full-blown McJunkie. Beside the decline of his cardiovascular system and liver (likened, by the doctors, to that of an alcoholic on a month-long drinking binge), the McDiet rampages Spurlock’s mental health and weakens his ability to sustain boners (as told by his girlfriend, a vegan). He becomes constantly down, a loathesome worm, save the moments he is ingesting the McDrugs, illustrating the viscous cycle of junk food, fatassery, sexual frustration and depression.

Scenes cut among Spurlock’s junk food abuse feature a typical high school cafeteria with fat kids eating nothing but French fries, soggy nachos and Coke for lunch, animated stats about fast food advertising dollars and the multitude of McDonald’s in the world, and interviews with assorted lardasses (that geek Jared from Subway makes a cameo) and anti-fast food activists.

Which brings me to my problem with this film: There is a trend among some of the activists toward taking down the fast food industry through lawsuits, as in fatsos suing McDonald’s for their poor health. It worked with the tobacco industry, so why not with fast food?

The obvious argument: these people made their own irresponsible choices and should live with the consequences. Well, of course. And Spurlock doesn’t leave out the fact that most of the plaintiffs are doing it just for the money (in fact, he addresses many of the inevitable arguments against the movie in the movie – including the point that nobody eats that much McDonald’s).

But the reason you may be seeing more and more lawsuits against McDonald’s is because you will be SEEING them. Lawsuits get media attention, shedding light on the problem of fatassery in this country, they say. And it is at this point I disagree: The lawsuits will only bait people into bringing up the obvious argument about personal responsibility, and it will only cloud the health issue and invite the shitheads to simplify the whole thing by slapping straw man-labels on any common sense food movement. And when the shitheads get involved, the issue goes to shit.

So I must point out that not all of the activists in the movie are so devoid of common sense. Many are pushing simply for more education about food through labels with nutritional information, real physical education and the most basic and obvious thing, healthy food in elementary and high school cafeterias. If people are going to put this shit into their body, it’s only reasonable to suggest that an educated society should teach them what that shit does to them.

But that’s assuming fatsos want to become healthy. I’m a fatso, and rather than becoming a thinso I could join my local chapter of NAAFA (The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance – a real and 100% serious organization) and sit around with other lard buckets and fart and whine about how people don’t accept me. That’d be super. Deny your failings and invent an enemy.

Back in the day, America was a lean mean hardworking and hardpartying Freedom machine, with a thirst for education and good music and a nose for the bullshit the Man used to sling our way, knowledgeable about our place in the world and our responsibility toward future generations, sacrificing comfort and security for the good of the country, eating our old-fashioned vegetables before we pussified them with chemicals and hormones, and devouring wild animals that we killed and grilled ourselves. Not anymore. Now that 61% of American adults are obese, America can be personified as one of those mega-porkers you see at the amusement parks, wearing sweatpants all the time because we can’t fit into anything else, smelling like crap from sweating and smoking, not disciplining our young because we’re too fucking lazy to get off the couch, buying whatever the hell they throw at us without question because we have too much fat around our brains to even think, stuffing our face with toxic waste that hardly even resembles food.

Elvis is the story of America. He started out young and healthy in the same decade McDonald’s was coming to power. Then rabid consumerism killed King Elvis, in more ways than one, and it can kill us all. There’s junk food everywhere, and not just in the burgers. Big Macs for the mind saturate our daily lives, on television, in politics, in music and movies, all contributing to the cycle of fatassery and dumbness, of momentary pleasure over quality of life. The solution is not lawsuits, but a little bit of education and self-sacrifice, getting your ass and your mind off the couch. Simple.

Super Size Me is funny, and very effective. Morgan Spurlock offers himself as a sacrificial lamb for the purpose of comedic argument. He is clearly influenced by Michael Moore but is more down-to-earth, and Super Size Me is not prone to melodrama and suspicious editing to give “weight” to the argument, like some of Moore’s work. It may be labeled as “liberal propaganda” by shitheads, but folks like Ted “Kill it And Grill It” Nugent are on the same side of the argument. The Motor City Madman once told a classroom of kids that McDonald’s was “not food” and never to eat anything with ingredients you can’t pronounce. (http://www.tednugent.com/news/healthy2.shtml). Screw that tired old political spectrum anyway. It’s a Big Mac for people who got F-crap-minuses in History. The only aspects of both political wings worth keeping - the right’s self-determinism and the left’s intellect - can come together on this one to form a new philosophy of sacrifice and wisdom, echoing our best generations - the Revolutionaries and the World War II generation Washington finally decided to thank.

I don’t eat at fast food places anymore. It’s probably been 8 months since I’ve been to one. An hour or less on any given night at home can give me a meal 1000 times better than the best thing McDonald’s ever had. A lot of the food I eat is from people I know by name. For example, the other night I made a pizza from scratch with Alex’s tomatoes, Ken’s onions and Cathy’s garlic. I never knew what a tomato or an onion or a pepper or a potato or an egg or chicken or a Thanksgiving turkey tasted like until we got involved with the local farming community and became farmers ourselves. Fresh food that isn’t mass produced and processed to death is the kind of thing your grandparents rambled on about but you never understood why.

But people do what they want. All I can do is eat American and maybe one day quality will become hip, or something. Maybe Sheetz will expand across the country and people will start to become familiar with Sheetz’s quality and demand it of other rest-urnts. Sheetz is built on quality and service and can only do good. Sheetz will rise to the zenith of American food and become it’s messiah. Sheetz will be glorius.

Ah who cares, right? Born to die, all men and all nations. All I can do is plant some seeds and hope they grow. If worse comes to worst and twenty years from now the hordes of fat, stupid yuppies are closing in on our land in Liberty, with their clone housing and strip malls with shitty chain restaurants and the inevitable McDonald’s or three, when their useless chemicals are oozing onto our Eden, all I hope to be able to say is that I took the opportunity to squeeze every last drop out of the fruit of Real Americanism I could possibly get before I was smothered by the trans fat of tasteless McCulture.

But, of course, it doesn’t have to go that route. If we want to, Americans have every opportunity to dedicate ourselves to a new Americanism built on our value in independence to replace our lazy philosophy of Cancerism, that is (props to Ed Abbey), growth for the sake of growth, evident in these aforementioned malignant tumors of “progress”, endless shitheads with Xerox brains, giant mutated tomatoes with no flavor, decrepit old people on fertility drugs having babies, and my own bulbous ass.

My ass must be destroyed. Stay tuned…