Super Size Suckage

Well, here's an uncontroversial post. I saw Super Size Me the other day. And I thought it sucked.

I'm not the first to do so, but that's what I have to say today. So I might as well detail my criticism a bit more, to make it more constructive.

The premise itself is kind of funny, and the main reason I watched it was to see how much weight this guy could gain in a month. Little did I know that this was to be the subject matter of only thirty percent of the movie, whereas the rest... sucked.

My experience based on previous such documentaries (Michael Moore, i'm looking at you) is that when the documentary maker has a very specific axe to grind, you just end up disbelieving everything that is presented, and you're actually trying to find flaws with the presentation. This is what I ended up doing. And the reason was that I very quickly got a lasting impression of the documentary film maker, which can be summed up thusly: "My vegan girlfriend hates McDonalds and I want to make a documentary. Why not kill two birds with one stone?" Seriously, that girlfriend should have been left out of the movie. I cringed everytime she said anything, because it was always about how superior organic and vegan food was. In the end, when she said she would 'cleanse' Morgan's post-experiment system with her special vegan diet, I cringed doubly.

Now, the above was mostly a gut reaction, but it is symptomatic of one of the biggest problems with this movie: It's not clear what in the world it's trying to say.

On the one hand, it seems to say that McDonalds is bad, and that's the take-home message. On the other hand, it seems to say that organic? vegan? food is the best. And then on the third hand, one premise of the movie seems to be that a guy is trying to eat as much fast food as he can for a month and see how that affects his health and well-being.

Then you might say, 'Well, all of these are tied together and they make up one coherent story'. But they don't. First of all, McDonalds being bad is not the same as vegan and organic food being the best. In fact, I think you will find a lot of people who would agree with the former (to some extent) but not to the latter statement. Second of all, you don't prove that McDonalds is bad by EATING TWICE AS MANY CALORIES PER DAY AS RECOMMENDED. That just proves you're bad at cause and effect.

A much better demonstration that eating McDonalds is bad for you would be to eat the recommended number of calories each day, but eating only McDonalds. If he had eaten five thousand calories worth of vegan food each day he would also gain weight.

As for the 'results' of this exercise, they're pretty much worthless as scientific facts towards demonstrating how McDonalds is bad for you. Very few of the changes that happened to his body can be said to be due solely to the fact that he was eating McDonalds and not to the fact that he was eating way too much. And some of them were pretty subjective. "I feel horrible". "My arms are twitching due to all the sugar". How do you know that?? "My sex life went down". Well, when you're binging on McDonalds food and have a vegan girlfriend, what do you expect?

Also, the most interesting result - how fat he got, was pretty underwhelming. He gained around ten kilograms, and I hardly noticed him getting fatter.

Another underwhelming result was how many times he had been asked whether he wanted a super-size menu, which was something he touted in the beginning of the movie. That was presented as one of the 'dramatic post-movie facts', you know - the ones that accompany some picture of whatever illustrates the fact best at the movie's end. He ate ninety times at McDonalds during this month, and was asked about a super-size menu nine times. Out of ninety. That's ten percent. I'm underwhelmed.

In addition to these things, you had the stock-standard Michael Moore-ish strawmen interviews, tying together unrelated facts to make a point, etc. that generally simply helped discredit the maker of the movie.

In short, I wish documentaries like this didn't get so much attention. I want to be on the right side of issues like this, but when the people who are supposedly on the right side use the same dirty tricks as those we claim to be fighting against, the lines get blurred. If what is presented is truly something that we should be shocked and appalled about, the facts will speak for themselves, and we don't need some dude or his vegan girlfriend to mix them together into a milkshake of dubious factual value.