HOW THE MONOCULTURE MADE SUPER SIZE ME:
If the filmmaker didn’t face serious health repercussions, Spurlock’s film would be dead on arrival. A five pound weight gain and some heartburn just wouldn’t cut it.
But here crafty Spurlock delivers again.
Not only does he gain 25 pounds, but he engages in all kinds of theatrics including throwing up on camera, and reporting troubling symptoms such as chest palpitations and difficulty breathing.
Spurlock’s doctors express horror at how his experiment has affected his blood tests. Most dramatically, they declare that it seems as though his liver had been flooded by alcohol.
Here’s how one doctor put it:
The results for your liver are obscene beyond anything I would have thought. You know that movie [Leaving Las Vegas]—Nicolas Cage? Pickled his liver during the course of a few weeks in Las Vegas. I never would have thought you could do the same thing with a high-fat diet.
Bloodwork that evokes Nic Cage at his booziest? Now that’s what I call high stakes!
Spurlock’s recipe worked.
* * * * * * * *
In 2017, Spurlock figured the #MeToo movement was coming for him. So in a preemptive move, the he released an open letter where he admitted to many incidents of sexual misconduct, including repeated infidelities and the sexual harassment of an assistant. He also notes a one-night-stand. He regarded it as consensual, but he women he was with accused him of rape.
The letter included a detail that reflected on his private and professional life. As Spurlock questions what drove him to behave so badly, he asks, “Is it because I’ve consistently been drinking since the age of 13? I haven’t been sober for more than a week in 30 years.”
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, filmmaker Phelim McAleer wonders if that’s what explains why his liver resembled that of an alcoholic:
Mr. Spurlock’s 2017 confession contradicts what he said in his 2004 documentary. “Any alcohol use?” the doctor asks at the outset. “Now? None,” he replies. In explaining his experiment, he says: “I can only eat things that are for sale over the counter at McDonald’s—water included.”
Would that revelation spur the monoculture to finally disavow the project it had done so much to champion?
As Ted Balaker goes on to write in his Substack column, of course not. Ed Morrissey adds:
When Nick Gillespie offered a shorter but still pointed criticism of Super Size Me last week, some commenters on social media took swipes at him for waiting until Spurlock died. The truth is that many of these criticisms have been circulating about that documentary for years and even came up at the film’s release, including criticisms of overdramatization and questions about whether Spurlock deliberately manipulated his intake for maximum impact. Those criticisms got buried by the same Eight Percenters* that Ted discusses here.
When Spurlock died late last month, we linked to James Glassman’s 2004 review of Super Size Me. The general public knew nothing of Spurlock’s alcoholism when his faux-documentary debuted, but Glassman was astute enough to smell a rat.
Incidentally, here’s Gillespie’s Reason TV retrospective from last week on Spurlock:
* “Only about eight percent of America is progressive, yet the biggest brands so often tailor their material for that demographic,” Balaker wrote last month, in a Substack column that asks (and answers) the question, “Why is Late Night Comedy One-Party Territory?”