In 2004, a man named Morgan Spurlock decided to explore the fast food industry's corporate influence on our society’s health, fitness, and overall physical well being by conducting an experiment. He came to the decision that he would limit himself to only eating food from McDonald’s for thirty days. His inspiration came from a court case where two teenage girls attempted to sue the fast food industry for making them obese. The judges ruled that they did not have enough evidence to prove that the fast food company was to blame, so they lost. Spurlock was motivated to prove that these companies were in face to blame for much of the world’s obesity, so project “Supersize Me” began.
Spurlock focused on a few specific concepts when tackling this project. He did an excellent job at pointing out the obvious arguments of nutrition, but went further into looking more in depth at the court cases to see if it were even logical to sue them for their obesity. Then he looked at the fast food industry’s affects on this world through their advertising, focusing in mostly on children. Finally he researched the addictiveness of fast food, and how it truly can be as harmful as drugs.
For Morgan Spurlock, this was his first major piece of work. Spurlock is still very young, and has only been out of school for about ten years. In the time before this documentary, he was a pretty successful playwright winning awards for his play The Phoenix at both the New York International Fringe Festival in 1999 and the Route 66 American Playwriting Competition in 2000. In 2004 however, Supersize Me was his big hit, launching his name into the business. Since then, he has had one other documentary, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?, where he looked into the fight against terrorism and viewed the argument from both sides; during this he is in search to find Osama Bin Laden. This did not receive the same positive reviews and since he has not released any other works, but he is in the process of making a documentary based off the book Freakonomics. As a whole he has not kept a steady theme throughout his pieces of work, but in everything he does, he seems to be searching for ways to better and change our world both physically and through opening society’s minds to other possibilities.
Supersize Me was for me both entertaining and appealing to watch. Spurlock does more cutaways than anyone I have ever seen, but it really works. A good majority of the film is his voice as the narrator but tons of cutaways that are dealing with whatever he is saying at that present moment. A prominent theme I noticed was hundreds of cutaway shots to different McDonalds, different signs, different angles, different interiors. It was very effective, because it showed that not only was the menu getting old, so was the buildings themselves. He also had tons of close-ups of him eating, you would see it in different lighting, different locations, different depths to really just hammer in on the fact how much McDonald’s he was eating. As a whole, the only thing that slightly bothered me was the overall grainy texture of the movie. A good part of the problem with this was probably the fact that most of the movie looked as if it was shot as a very low budget, hand held camera feel, which is exactly how it should be, made the relationship between the audience and him much closer and relatable.
Editing wise was genius, because they would take all these random shots, combine them with their interviews, and mix and match it flawlessly to make it seem like a very quick documentary. It was constantly addressing one theme at a time, but it wasn’t overloading us with information, it would state the problem quickly, give his solution, or his opinions on the subject then move on. He did a brilliant job of combining the themes with his chronological format. He would intertwine all these different themes and points he wanted to make throughout each days video log, that way you never got tired of either. It basically throughout kept the consistency of the day, then a theme, the next day, another theme. He made this transition very nicely by using three things. First and most important was music, it would always fade and music would come in. The music selection was nice too because sometimes the beat may not be what I would consider best, but the words were always directly on whatever subject was being introduced, which really tied in the pieces nicely. The second thing he did was every time he would go to the next travel log day, the screen would fade to black and nothing but the number of the day and music would come on, so it would refocus you to what was about to happen. Finally, anytime he would introduce a new theme, he had these amazing as well as disturbing paintings of McDonald clowns, which served two purposes. One to continue to prove a point at how evil the fast food industry is, as well as each painting had action that had to deal with whatever theme was coming up which was very helpful.
Overall, this piece is not only extremely well thought out and carried through, it is also just such an amazing, interesting topic. I have always heard so much about it, but I am truly thankful that I finally watched it for myself. At the end, Spurlock explains some of the changes that just happen to occur after the release of his documentary. He alone made a difference, and affected how the fast food industry conducted business, it just leaves inspiration to the rest of us that anyone, no matter how crazy or simple the idea is, even just eating a lot of fast food can change the world, we just have to do it.
Bibliography:
Supersize Me. Dir. Morgan Spurlock. Narr. Morgan Spurlock. 2004. DVD. Showtime Networks, Inc, 2004.
"Supersize Me." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 13 April 2009<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me>.