Lee Siegal vs. Morgan Spurlock
The New Republic's TV critic, Lee Siegel (who, excepting Dissent Magazine's co-editor Mitchell Cohen, is possibly America's last surviving honest-to-God jaded goo-goo) took on indie director Morgan Spurlock, who has a new miniseries called 30 Days on the FX network, yesterday in his always-fantastic weekly "Down the Tube" column:
Seven years after Morgan Spurlock graduated from film school in 1993, he came up with an idea for an online proto-reality show called "I Bet You Will," which eventually was picked up by MTV. The premise for the series was that, as Spurlock told an interviewer at the time, "people will do anything ... and I mean anything ... for money." The "anything" consisted of, for example, a woman dancing in public for $150 wearing just a thong with the words "I Bet You Will" printed on it, and a man eating dog shit for $400.
Spurlock waxed eloquent about his brainchild: "People love to watch this. It's the public forum, it's the idea of seeing something new and original out there. And to see a regular person who's coming up and getting the chance to win $300 if he eats an entire jar of pigs' feet and wash it down with a pint-glass of corn oil, you know ... it's ... not something you might do, but it's something that somebody else might do, and something, you know what? I'd wanna watch that, too! I'd wanna watch that happen!" Other episodes had a woman drinking a can of condensed milk followed by a can of chicken broth, and then four shots of cod liver oil. Spurlock spurred her on: "Yeah! Four shots of cod liver oil. Want another one?" One of the anythings people will do for money is also to invite other people to humiliate themselves. Spurlock was a pioneer in this new public style of humiliation. Our new American imperial style, as the career-minded Niall Ferguson might put it.
...Once he justified "I Bet You Will" as being part of the "public forum." Now Spurlock has perfected the depressing art of humiliating people under the pretext of performing a public service. The first episode [of 30 Days], in which Spurlock and his fiancée try to live on a minimum wage--just as Spurlock took the idea for Supersize Me from Eric Schlosser's incomparably superior Fast Food Nation, he took the idea for his debut segment from Barbara Ehrenreich's incomparably superior Nickel and Dimed--says it all.
Throughout the entire hour, Spurlock and his turgid fiancée look at the camera and ask, "How can people live like this?" It's rough all right. Rising to a mountain peak of indignation, Spurlock--he can't stop smiling the entire time--offers this searing reproach to society: "We're educated, articulate, white"--and they have to work at lousy minimum wage jobs. But educated, articulate, white people don't apply for those kinds of jobs. Not unless they're slumming for 30 days, followed around by a cameraman and technician, at the end of which it's back to a really great lifestyle, with a juicy paycheck and an even fatter moral payoff. As Spurlock puts it in the show's final scene, staring meaningfully into the camera (and barely suppressing that peculiar smile): "I've been affected. And I'm better for it." Supersize you.
Siegel really is the last of a dying breed, one of those liberals who noisily weds a perfectly justified world-weariness born of watching too much bad (and bad-faith) art to a pervasive faith in social responsibility, pluralistic concensus, and all those old-school liberal (as opposed to left-libertarian) values. In the past eight months, he has nailed the presidential election, and the media circus surrounding the double-whammy deaths of Terri Schiavo and John Paul II, pitch-perfectly. Like Sarah Vowell (who has a new book out), Siegel is chicken soup for the goo-goo's soul, a moderate liberal's late-night guilty pleasure, not to mention the neo-snarky New Republic's old-Dem conscience. Reading him on politics and pop culture is a lot like listening to The Cure when you were fourteen: you're glad not all music is like that, but you're sure as hell glad some of it is.
Anyway, Siegel's take on Spurlock reminded me of my reaction, and then of the review I wrote, of Spurlock's first feature-length film, Super Size Me when it first came out about a year ago. Rather than write something original on the state of the world today, I'm going to repost it (with an edit) in honour of Siegel and of deliciously humourless liberals everywhere:
***
In this year of lefty "social conscience" movies (there was The Corporation which I haven't yet seen because I missed the bus the night I was supposed to go; and Michael Moore's F911, which we're assured will change the whole dynamics of this election season from a slim Kerry lead into a Democratic landslide, is due in just a couple of months), Morgan Spurlock's new anti-McDonalds film, Super Size Me, is winning praise as another must-see entry in the Thinking Liberal's canon. The high-brow premise is that the documentarian will subsist soley on McDonalds for 30 days while scrutinizing both his own physical condition and the condition of corporate food-obsessed America, trying to figure out what makes it tick, and what makes us crave those Big Macs. Spurlock started on this intellectual journey after reading about a lawsuit filed (and dismissed) against McDonalds by two overfat teenagers. That sparked the film's central question, which Spurlock poses at the beginning of his story: "Where does personal responsibility end and corporate responsibility begin?"
This premise sounded pretty dicey to me, but I wasn't prepared for the sheer glibness of the follow-through. In answer to the film's central question, it very quickly becomes evident that, in Spurlock's documentarian worldview, responsibility shifts very quickly from the individual onto the corporation. This might not be so bad if Spurlock didn't put himself and his completely self-imposed ordeal -- eating french fries until long after it stops being enjoyable -- at the center of the tale. As it is, Spurlock and his "vegan chef" girlfriend really are two of the biggest yuppie self-parodies imaginable. Spurlock is one of those directors who thinks its envelope-pushing to make the audience watch him barf out a car window. After 20 days of the junk food lifestyle, he treats us to a long scene of himself moaning to his mother over the phone about various McDonalds-induced aches and pains. Earlier on, the girlfriend complains into the camera that her boyf's unhealthy diet is cramping her style, preventing him from "getting it up" anymore. Which goes to show that those McNuggets really are more sinister than you think.
But at least these elements of the film are mildly entertaining, and, of course, a matter of taste in protagonists. It's the movie's psuedo-social commentary that is really appalling. How embarrassing does it get? Spurlock employs a nutritionist, a personal trainer and three doctors to help with his experiment. The film contains scene after scene of these professionals running tests and clucking at him and the numbers he turns up on their charts. Spurlock's doctor informs him solomnly about 15 days into the overfeed that he's "pickling his liver" and suggests that if the whites of his eyes turn yellow, he should consider getting himself to an emergency room. All of this is in service of exposing the effects of a corporate consumption culture that preys on groups of low income Americans who, more often than not, don't have regular access to any doctor. Spurlock interviews a few of these people inside and outside, on their way to and from, the McDonalds. They are invariably more interesting than he is, but they fail to cast much light on why society likes McDonalds so much because, with the exception of the skinny Wisconsonite who makes a habit of eating two Big Macs a day with the hope of getting into the Guinness Book of World Records, they don't really think about it much.
Still, the film's potential, and its best moments, lie in its man-on-the-street sociology. Rather than focus there, though, Spurlock aims to be a Rennaissance Man, albeit adapted to the Upper East Side lifestyle. The movie is full of junk nutritional-science, in full-throated praise of organics and bemoaning the evils of processed food...though little is actually divulged about why processed food is so bad. Spurlock and the slim vegan chef girlfriend certainly think so (he in theory, she in practice) and the audience is simply assumed to share their values. Spurlock supposedly gains 25 pounds of extra body fat in a month -- a humanly impossible feat for a fit man in his twenties eating three squares a day (no non-Mickey D snacking is allowed), even if they are "super size". Almost certainly, Spurlock is retaining water because of the high-salt diet. But such details are not the stuff of socially conscious poetic license.
Later, Spurlock heads out into the public schools to look at how the food culture perpetuates itself there and how public school policy fails to deal with the problems. This allows for lots of gratuitious Michael Moore-esque shots at conservative politics -- No Child Left Behind is blamed for "elminating recess" so that children can prepare for all that testing, a totally bizarre, and unsubstantiated, claim even for a NCLB-hater like me. What about the more subtle, but serious, claim that public school kids often head for cheap comfort food in the cafeteria because they are...poor? What about the still unequal regional funding, or chronic underfunding, that has prevented urban public schools from taking a stand against the soft-drink companies that provide desperately needed sponsorship in return for keeping a vending machine in the hall? There's not a word of serious discussion about these issues. At one point, Spurlock rather strongly insinuates that the government ought to mandate organic food be served in public school cafeterias...never mind that that's simply too authoritarian-socialist an idea for even most European societies to stomach, let alone free-market, anti-government America. And if there's a market for fast food in schools, is it government's job to close that market? I lean toward answering yes, but a morally serious film on food culture and social responsibility would take the question and its underlying libertarian-vs-statist debate seriously. And really, doesn't Spurlock's tut-tutting over lifestyle choices border on the sort of Joe-Lieberman-type moralizing that lefties supposedly hate?
The film's various condemnations are easy, but they don't make a lot of sense. George W. Bush is blamed twice for general evils (in one pointless scene designed to show that kids identify Grimace before famous cultural figures, a five year old confuses Bush with Jesus so that the audience can have an ironic laugh), even while the movie profiles clearly healthy government-run cafeteria lunch programs for low-income kids, part of a popular federal program that's been in existence since the Truman administration. In 2003, the Bush Admin tried to tighten eligibility requirements for the NSLP, but without actually cutting funds to the program. To substitute for any real information, we're divulged the shocking fact of how many calories there are in a McDonald's yogourt parfait (information McDonalds isn't exactly trying to hide from the public). And at one point, Spurlock expresses dismay about how the food administered by the NSLP, or an affiliate, isn't cooked from scratch like his mom used to do. Instead, it's just reheated from frozen (and it doesn't even look appatizing frozen!) For shame. Maybe Spurlock really should run Lieberman's next campaign.
But the worst thing about this movie -- the really offensive thing -- is its casual cruelty toward its corporate scapegoats...where Spurlock really is the new Michael Moore, but with less descretion. Toward the end of the film, Spurlock, having failed to win an audience with a McDonalds exec, manages to wrangle an interview with a Washington grocery store lobbyist. That's right: not a Coke-in-schools, not a fast-food industry lobbyist, but a grocery-store lobbyist. In Bowling for Columbine, Moore at least took aim at a few people who deserved it at Michigan K-Mart corporate headquarters and at the NRA (Charlton Heston can look after himself.) By contrast, Spurlock's target is clearly well-intentioned, working for a comparatively benign industry, and he tells Spurlock in obviously good faith, while giving his lobbyist spin, that the industry too must work to "promote responsibility", that it's "part of the problem", but also (he stumbles a bit here) that it's "part of the solution."
A ha! At this point, Spurlock pauses the tape on the man's face looking shifty as food brand labels start to pop up on the screen. "Did you hear that?" the documentartian crows in overdub as if a shadowy figure has just told him about a break-in at the Brookings Institution. Those corporate behemoths are "part of the problem!" Even their own spinner says so! In the epilogue, Spurlock gleefully informs us that the interviewee "no longer works for" the behemoth in question. Brilliant. Spurlock has managed to use a man's good faith to get one of those evil corporate bastards fired... or at least thinks he has. Score one for the progressive left, comrade! (In another moment of end-credit self-congratulation, Spurlock says that McDonald's "claims that its recent decision to end its Super Size-gimick had nothing to do with this movie." He obviously doesn't believe them.)
Why am I ranting like this? Because this sloppy, nihilistic, self-indulgent piece of shit is getting rave -- rave! -- reviews, scoring a 73 on MetaCritic. The dominant critical view seems to be that Spurlock is more socially responsible: a "more benevolent" (Owen Glieberman), "more personable" (Adam Caro), less "grating" (Michael O'Sullivan) Michael Moore, a good thing in theory.
In theory. But the argument is false. Super Size Me is not any less irritating and intellectually dishonest than "Bowling for Columbine" was in its worst moments. At the same time, though, it has none of the latter film's redeeming merits. In fact, Moore's willingness, and ability, to make intellectual arguments, to at least probe at real social issues that divide people and take intellectual risks, is commendable in comparison to this piece of flyweight dillitantism. Mainstream liberals are wary of Moore at the moment, as they are of the entire muckraking left that might upset the Democrats' delicate balance this election season. So Moore is offered up here as Spurlock's strawman. Spurlock, new meat without Moore's anti-Clinton, all-encompassing-critical baggage, is raised as the pillar of good humour and moderation. It's hard to imagine a glibber, more facile and less deserving recipient of those kudos.
Seven years after Morgan Spurlock graduated from film school in 1993, he came up with an idea for an online proto-reality show called "I Bet You Will," which eventually was picked up by MTV. The premise for the series was that, as Spurlock told an interviewer at the time, "people will do anything ... and I mean anything ... for money." The "anything" consisted of, for example, a woman dancing in public for $150 wearing just a thong with the words "I Bet You Will" printed on it, and a man eating dog shit for $400.
Spurlock waxed eloquent about his brainchild: "People love to watch this. It's the public forum, it's the idea of seeing something new and original out there. And to see a regular person who's coming up and getting the chance to win $300 if he eats an entire jar of pigs' feet and wash it down with a pint-glass of corn oil, you know ... it's ... not something you might do, but it's something that somebody else might do, and something, you know what? I'd wanna watch that, too! I'd wanna watch that happen!" Other episodes had a woman drinking a can of condensed milk followed by a can of chicken broth, and then four shots of cod liver oil. Spurlock spurred her on: "Yeah! Four shots of cod liver oil. Want another one?" One of the anythings people will do for money is also to invite other people to humiliate themselves. Spurlock was a pioneer in this new public style of humiliation. Our new American imperial style, as the career-minded Niall Ferguson might put it.
...Once he justified "I Bet You Will" as being part of the "public forum." Now Spurlock has perfected the depressing art of humiliating people under the pretext of performing a public service. The first episode [of 30 Days], in which Spurlock and his fiancée try to live on a minimum wage--just as Spurlock took the idea for Supersize Me from Eric Schlosser's incomparably superior Fast Food Nation, he took the idea for his debut segment from Barbara Ehrenreich's incomparably superior Nickel and Dimed--says it all.
Throughout the entire hour, Spurlock and his turgid fiancée look at the camera and ask, "How can people live like this?" It's rough all right. Rising to a mountain peak of indignation, Spurlock--he can't stop smiling the entire time--offers this searing reproach to society: "We're educated, articulate, white"--and they have to work at lousy minimum wage jobs. But educated, articulate, white people don't apply for those kinds of jobs. Not unless they're slumming for 30 days, followed around by a cameraman and technician, at the end of which it's back to a really great lifestyle, with a juicy paycheck and an even fatter moral payoff. As Spurlock puts it in the show's final scene, staring meaningfully into the camera (and barely suppressing that peculiar smile): "I've been affected. And I'm better for it." Supersize you.
Siegel really is the last of a dying breed, one of those liberals who noisily weds a perfectly justified world-weariness born of watching too much bad (and bad-faith) art to a pervasive faith in social responsibility, pluralistic concensus, and all those old-school liberal (as opposed to left-libertarian) values. In the past eight months, he has nailed the presidential election, and the media circus surrounding the double-whammy deaths of Terri Schiavo and John Paul II, pitch-perfectly. Like Sarah Vowell (who has a new book out), Siegel is chicken soup for the goo-goo's soul, a moderate liberal's late-night guilty pleasure, not to mention the neo-snarky New Republic's old-Dem conscience. Reading him on politics and pop culture is a lot like listening to The Cure when you were fourteen: you're glad not all music is like that, but you're sure as hell glad some of it is.
Anyway, Siegel's take on Spurlock reminded me of my reaction, and then of the review I wrote, of Spurlock's first feature-length film, Super Size Me when it first came out about a year ago. Rather than write something original on the state of the world today, I'm going to repost it (with an edit) in honour of Siegel and of deliciously humourless liberals everywhere:
***
In this year of lefty "social conscience" movies (there was The Corporation which I haven't yet seen because I missed the bus the night I was supposed to go; and Michael Moore's F911, which we're assured will change the whole dynamics of this election season from a slim Kerry lead into a Democratic landslide, is due in just a couple of months), Morgan Spurlock's new anti-McDonalds film, Super Size Me, is winning praise as another must-see entry in the Thinking Liberal's canon. The high-brow premise is that the documentarian will subsist soley on McDonalds for 30 days while scrutinizing both his own physical condition and the condition of corporate food-obsessed America, trying to figure out what makes it tick, and what makes us crave those Big Macs. Spurlock started on this intellectual journey after reading about a lawsuit filed (and dismissed) against McDonalds by two overfat teenagers. That sparked the film's central question, which Spurlock poses at the beginning of his story: "Where does personal responsibility end and corporate responsibility begin?"
This premise sounded pretty dicey to me, but I wasn't prepared for the sheer glibness of the follow-through. In answer to the film's central question, it very quickly becomes evident that, in Spurlock's documentarian worldview, responsibility shifts very quickly from the individual onto the corporation. This might not be so bad if Spurlock didn't put himself and his completely self-imposed ordeal -- eating french fries until long after it stops being enjoyable -- at the center of the tale. As it is, Spurlock and his "vegan chef" girlfriend really are two of the biggest yuppie self-parodies imaginable. Spurlock is one of those directors who thinks its envelope-pushing to make the audience watch him barf out a car window. After 20 days of the junk food lifestyle, he treats us to a long scene of himself moaning to his mother over the phone about various McDonalds-induced aches and pains. Earlier on, the girlfriend complains into the camera that her boyf's unhealthy diet is cramping her style, preventing him from "getting it up" anymore. Which goes to show that those McNuggets really are more sinister than you think.
But at least these elements of the film are mildly entertaining, and, of course, a matter of taste in protagonists. It's the movie's psuedo-social commentary that is really appalling. How embarrassing does it get? Spurlock employs a nutritionist, a personal trainer and three doctors to help with his experiment. The film contains scene after scene of these professionals running tests and clucking at him and the numbers he turns up on their charts. Spurlock's doctor informs him solomnly about 15 days into the overfeed that he's "pickling his liver" and suggests that if the whites of his eyes turn yellow, he should consider getting himself to an emergency room. All of this is in service of exposing the effects of a corporate consumption culture that preys on groups of low income Americans who, more often than not, don't have regular access to any doctor. Spurlock interviews a few of these people inside and outside, on their way to and from, the McDonalds. They are invariably more interesting than he is, but they fail to cast much light on why society likes McDonalds so much because, with the exception of the skinny Wisconsonite who makes a habit of eating two Big Macs a day with the hope of getting into the Guinness Book of World Records, they don't really think about it much.
Still, the film's potential, and its best moments, lie in its man-on-the-street sociology. Rather than focus there, though, Spurlock aims to be a Rennaissance Man, albeit adapted to the Upper East Side lifestyle. The movie is full of junk nutritional-science, in full-throated praise of organics and bemoaning the evils of processed food...though little is actually divulged about why processed food is so bad. Spurlock and the slim vegan chef girlfriend certainly think so (he in theory, she in practice) and the audience is simply assumed to share their values. Spurlock supposedly gains 25 pounds of extra body fat in a month -- a humanly impossible feat for a fit man in his twenties eating three squares a day (no non-Mickey D snacking is allowed), even if they are "super size". Almost certainly, Spurlock is retaining water because of the high-salt diet. But such details are not the stuff of socially conscious poetic license.
Later, Spurlock heads out into the public schools to look at how the food culture perpetuates itself there and how public school policy fails to deal with the problems. This allows for lots of gratuitious Michael Moore-esque shots at conservative politics -- No Child Left Behind is blamed for "elminating recess" so that children can prepare for all that testing, a totally bizarre, and unsubstantiated, claim even for a NCLB-hater like me. What about the more subtle, but serious, claim that public school kids often head for cheap comfort food in the cafeteria because they are...poor? What about the still unequal regional funding, or chronic underfunding, that has prevented urban public schools from taking a stand against the soft-drink companies that provide desperately needed sponsorship in return for keeping a vending machine in the hall? There's not a word of serious discussion about these issues. At one point, Spurlock rather strongly insinuates that the government ought to mandate organic food be served in public school cafeterias...never mind that that's simply too authoritarian-socialist an idea for even most European societies to stomach, let alone free-market, anti-government America. And if there's a market for fast food in schools, is it government's job to close that market? I lean toward answering yes, but a morally serious film on food culture and social responsibility would take the question and its underlying libertarian-vs-statist debate seriously. And really, doesn't Spurlock's tut-tutting over lifestyle choices border on the sort of Joe-Lieberman-type moralizing that lefties supposedly hate?
The film's various condemnations are easy, but they don't make a lot of sense. George W. Bush is blamed twice for general evils (in one pointless scene designed to show that kids identify Grimace before famous cultural figures, a five year old confuses Bush with Jesus so that the audience can have an ironic laugh), even while the movie profiles clearly healthy government-run cafeteria lunch programs for low-income kids, part of a popular federal program that's been in existence since the Truman administration. In 2003, the Bush Admin tried to tighten eligibility requirements for the NSLP, but without actually cutting funds to the program. To substitute for any real information, we're divulged the shocking fact of how many calories there are in a McDonald's yogourt parfait (information McDonalds isn't exactly trying to hide from the public). And at one point, Spurlock expresses dismay about how the food administered by the NSLP, or an affiliate, isn't cooked from scratch like his mom used to do. Instead, it's just reheated from frozen (and it doesn't even look appatizing frozen!) For shame. Maybe Spurlock really should run Lieberman's next campaign.
But the worst thing about this movie -- the really offensive thing -- is its casual cruelty toward its corporate scapegoats...where Spurlock really is the new Michael Moore, but with less descretion. Toward the end of the film, Spurlock, having failed to win an audience with a McDonalds exec, manages to wrangle an interview with a Washington grocery store lobbyist. That's right: not a Coke-in-schools, not a fast-food industry lobbyist, but a grocery-store lobbyist. In Bowling for Columbine, Moore at least took aim at a few people who deserved it at Michigan K-Mart corporate headquarters and at the NRA (Charlton Heston can look after himself.) By contrast, Spurlock's target is clearly well-intentioned, working for a comparatively benign industry, and he tells Spurlock in obviously good faith, while giving his lobbyist spin, that the industry too must work to "promote responsibility", that it's "part of the problem", but also (he stumbles a bit here) that it's "part of the solution."
A ha! At this point, Spurlock pauses the tape on the man's face looking shifty as food brand labels start to pop up on the screen. "Did you hear that?" the documentartian crows in overdub as if a shadowy figure has just told him about a break-in at the Brookings Institution. Those corporate behemoths are "part of the problem!" Even their own spinner says so! In the epilogue, Spurlock gleefully informs us that the interviewee "no longer works for" the behemoth in question. Brilliant. Spurlock has managed to use a man's good faith to get one of those evil corporate bastards fired... or at least thinks he has. Score one for the progressive left, comrade! (In another moment of end-credit self-congratulation, Spurlock says that McDonald's "claims that its recent decision to end its Super Size-gimick had nothing to do with this movie." He obviously doesn't believe them.)
Why am I ranting like this? Because this sloppy, nihilistic, self-indulgent piece of shit is getting rave -- rave! -- reviews, scoring a 73 on MetaCritic. The dominant critical view seems to be that Spurlock is more socially responsible: a "more benevolent" (Owen Glieberman), "more personable" (Adam Caro), less "grating" (Michael O'Sullivan) Michael Moore, a good thing in theory.
In theory. But the argument is false. Super Size Me is not any less irritating and intellectually dishonest than "Bowling for Columbine" was in its worst moments. At the same time, though, it has none of the latter film's redeeming merits. In fact, Moore's willingness, and ability, to make intellectual arguments, to at least probe at real social issues that divide people and take intellectual risks, is commendable in comparison to this piece of flyweight dillitantism. Mainstream liberals are wary of Moore at the moment, as they are of the entire muckraking left that might upset the Democrats' delicate balance this election season. So Moore is offered up here as Spurlock's strawman. Spurlock, new meat without Moore's anti-Clinton, all-encompassing-critical baggage, is raised as the pillar of good humour and moderation. It's hard to imagine a glibber, more facile and less deserving recipient of those kudos.
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