Dissident Voices in the Recent Spurlock Supersize Me - Movie Review Example

DISSIDENT This report examines dissident voices in the recent Spurlock movie “Supersize Me,” a fact based documentary which chronicles the director and main actor’s experiment of eating at McDonald’s for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day for thirty days; along with “Fast Food Nation,” a McDonald’s expose written by Schlosser. In the Spurlock movie, an additional factor of the experiment was that whenever a McDonald’s staff member asked Spurlock if he wanted to super-size his meal, he had to say yes. At the end of the thirty days, Spurlock was much heavier and was also experiencing other health problems. The movie was made to draw attention to the epidemic of obesity in the US and worldwide. In the Schlosser book, the author carefully takes apart McDonald’s, noting where the food is produced and chemically flavored, and also examining the careful marketing of McDonald’s to children. This report looks at how Spurlock’s movie and Schlosser’s book both take the perspective of an ostensibly objective anthropological view, which is actually a mode of dissent which both the movie and the book use rhetoric to criticize their subjects. Schlosser as well as Spurlock take the classic rhetorical mode of the dissenting outsider. Spurlock is not a typical McDonald’s customer who goes there because they like the food: he is an outsider to the world of this customer. Instead, he is a customer through force. He shows how eating at McDonald’s can be hazardous to one’s health because of the high caloric values and high fat content of most of the menu items. Spurlock noted how he aimed to educate the public about the obesity epidemic, but as one source points out, “if the promotional materials are any indicator, demonizing the world’s most popular fast food chain runs a very close second. Filmgoers at the Sundance Film Festival received "unhappy meals" conveniently combining information about obesity with details about McDonald’s” (Murphy, 2005). This marketing strategy of Spurlock’s shows how the movie maker is trying to reclaim and subvert the language of McDonald’s through dissent. These dissenting rhetorical voices of Schlosser and Spurlock are addressing a serious problem, because childhood obesity in the US is at all time highs, and many states are trying measures to prevent obesity “by setting nutritional standards for food and beverage items sold during school meals and/or limiting the items sold through vending machines” (Murphy, 2005). This shows the logical cause and effect relationship of positivism at work because the assumption is that the cause of obseity is the type of food available, so eliminating this cause in a logical manner would lead to lower rates of obestiy. This could then be extended to Spurlock’s and Schlosser’s examinations of McDonald’s. Spurlock’s movie does not really address these complicated issues, staying primarily to simple cause and effect relationships. Spurlock did include interviews with experts and other fast food consumers, but the whole time, he was keeping the ironic distance of the outsider or dissident. From this dissident perspective, “The panoply of conclusions Spurlock reached include such jaw droppers as "fast food is a major contributor to the obesity epidemic" and "eating fast food may be dangerous to your health” (Murphy, 2005). Obesity is a condition in which the central distribution of fat in the body, and particularly visceral adipose tissue (VAT) accumulation, “appears to play an important role in the associated negative effects of excessive body fat, including hypertension, insulin resistance, and dyslipidemia” (Castro et. al, 2002). There are varying degrees of obesity, as a disease it can have mild or severe manifestations. In severe cases, some extant sources refer to the condition by delineating it into obesity and super-obesity. Super-obesity is measured by a BMI that is significantly above the average mean. This term is the shortened form of Body Mass Index, which is one way of measuring obesity. Skin fold tests are often also used. “Body mass index (BMI), a single number that expresses the sum of all components (lean body mass, bone, adipose tissue) that contribute to body weight, is both an indicator of relative body weight and an Indirect measure of fatness” (Castro et. al, 2002). Weight is not the only indication of obesity in individuals. From some perspectives, Spurlock and Schlosser used their dissident voices simply to place themselves as outsiders who are better than the object of their criticism. “Its real target is the people who eat in McDonalds - the apparently stupid, fat, unthinking masses… Spurlock and his ilk might hate McDonalds, but they seem to loathe the McMasses even more” (O’Neill, 2009). Attention should also be paid to how McDonald’s markets its products to children, which is touched upon but not really focused upon in Spurlock’s movie, but plays a major part on Schlosser’s book. For example the fast food chain perhaps even found this perfection with its Teenie Beanie Baby Happy Meal campaign of the late nineties. “At the time McDonald’s sold about 10 million Happy Meals in a typical week. Over the course of ten days in April of 1997, by including a Teenie Beanie Baby with each purchase, McDonald’s sold about 100 million Happy Meals. Rarely has a marketing effort achieved such an extraordinary rate of sales among its intended customers” (Schlosser, 2002). This author also argues that even people outside of the intended customer range, such as adult collectors who just want the toy and throw away the food, bought the Happy Meal too, because apparently Happy Meal Toys if in good condition and vintage or especially rare can fetch high auction prices. Overall this author also argues that the synergy that McDonald’s is looking for is also bringing Hollywood and fast food closer and closer together, an argument inadvertently and somewhat ironically backed up by Spurlock’s posturing, judgmental reportage. Schlosser also brings up the disturbing issue of the encroachment of McDonald’s and other fast food restaurants into the nation’s public schools. America already has a problem with the children not getting enough exercise because they hardly ever go outside or step on something that isn’t man made during the day, and if fast food chains are going to start advertising in public schools, one wonders how long it is going to be before they start setting up franchises there. “Not satisfied with marketing to children through playgrounds, toys, cartoons, movies, videos, charities, and amusement parks, through contests, sweepstakes, games, and clubs, via television, radio magazines, and the internet, fast food chains are now gaining access to the last advertising free outposts of American life… the first public school district to place ads for Burger King in its hallways” (Schlosser, 2002). This argument shows a disturbing challenge of the future in which people have to take sides in the argument for or against fast food and this is the overall message or argument that Spurlock also proposes. But in too many cases, it all “Sounds radical, right, taking on the Golden Arches of America and charging them with making poor folk sick and miserable by forcefeeding them junk? In fact, this comes with a generous side order of snobbery” (O’Neill, 2009). REFERENCE Castro, L.C., Weinsier, R., and G. Hunter (2002, November). What impacts visceral adipose tissue accumulation over time? Nutrition Research Newsletter. Murphy, E (2005). America and obesity. Current Events. O’Neill, B (2009). Bashing the McMasses. http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA6DF.htm Schlosser, E. (2002). Fast Food Nation. New York: Harper. Super-Size Me (2004). Morgan Spurlock, dir. … (2009). http://www.imdb.com Read More