Morgan Spurlock

As a committed lifelong vegetarian, I can tell you that there is no more chilling sound than your offspring sweetly crooning a medley of McDonald’s commercials and
‘Rowche Rumble’.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. I ought to lock them away with only Crass’ ‘Yes Sir, I Will’ for company to stave off future contamination by the corrupting forces of late global-capitalism. And yes, in truth, it’s just plain wrong, isn’t it? Children should be seen and not heard promoting noxious meat-products. Especially when one considers what a militant bunch of mammal-lovers my brood are. The ages of reason and consent concern them less than the point at which they can start hunt-sabotaging, and any poor souls unfortunate enough to enter their elevated sphere with so much as a chicken sandwich are frequently treated to purposely loud disparaging remarks like, “Mother, don’t you feel sorry for people who eat meat and believe in God?” Naturally, I respond by telling them not to be so impertinent and intolerant, but secretly, deep down, I’m always thrilled by their intransigence on such matters.
Still, their dogmatic position makes their susceptibility to the strains of whatever the latest ‘Lovin’ it’ Happy Meal jingle happens to be all the more troubling. Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, for one, is in complete agreement. His breakthrough opus, the anarchic, corporate-baiting, multiple award-winning documentary, Super Size Me, a movie triumphantly billed as “doing for McDonald’s what Bowling For Columbine did for the NRA”, opens to the strains of school-children belting out overly familiar choruses from McDonald’s advertisements, in addition to the immortal fast-food anthem ‘Oh Pizza Hut, Oh Pizza Hut’. The organisation that Ronald built, it would seem, gets us all in the end, if not right at the beginning. Just to underscore the social and cultural prominence of the outfit, a survey among a similarly youthful demographic later in Mr. Spurlock’s film disturbingly reveals that school children can identify pictures of Ronald McDonald’s more readily than depictions of Jesus Christ or George Washington. These fledglings presumably grow into the same adults who are seen fluffing the Pledge of Allegiance while effortlessly rattling out the ingredients of their favourite corporate meat sandwich.
Aside from proving that my instincts to run screaming from clowns were always on the money, it’s a disquieting illustration of the insidious nature of the Golden Arch Empire. However, in Super Size Me such No-Logo-rithms are secondary to Morgan Spurlock’s purpose. This is not a scathing critique in the manner of Eric Schlosser’s excellent Fast Food Nation. You won’t find any ranting about the company’s questionable employment policies or – have mercy – the components of their product. Rather, this is a highly palatable, if thoroughly unappetising film, tackling the processed and sedentary American way of diet, with irresistibly impertinent charm.
“I wasn’t interested in making a big film about globalisation” Morgan explains, “I just wanted to look at lifestyle, and the choices we make. I get really buzzed when I see people leaving screenings and talking about food, and talking about staying away from junk food.”
Spurlock’s genial personality – well evidenced when I caught up with him in London recently – is one of the movie’s big selling points. An affable Virginian born chap with a languid physicality and attentive, lively manner, the 32 year old is even polite enough to laugh at all questions or points ventured, though you know damned well that the very nature of his pop-doc has entailed his hearing every conceivable enquiry several bizillion times before. As the director and star of Super Size Me, his quasi-performance art methodology is highly reminiscent of Michael Moore’s more jocular antics, but he might equally be compared to Johnny Knoxville, a hardcore fraternity prankster capable of endearingly masochistic showmanship.
That said, the rigours that Morgan Spurlock was prepared to endure make the Jackass crew’s collective groin injuries look like Monty Python’s comfy chair torture, and Super Size Me’s cause is considerably more noble than entertaining stoned, insomniac students. (Not that they won’t delight in the thoroughly revolting gross-out scenes depicting freshly regurgitated cheese-burgers and stomach surgery.) Taking inspiration from the bloat engendered by a typically vast Thanksgiving spread (“I just called up my friend and said, ‘I have a really bad idea – a really great bad idea”, grins the director) Morgan set out to live on a McDonald’s-only diet for an entire month.
Ironically, his eating plan was every bit as rigid as the most stringent crash variants of the Atkins or Zone regimes. He had three square meals per day, and the entirety of his nutritional – if that is the appropriate word – intake, including water, came from the McDonald’s menu. All items on the menu, right down to – oh, the torment – those gloopy barbecue sauces, had to be consumed at least once over the four weeks. On each occasion that the Super-Size option was offered, he was obliged to say ‘yes’. And just to more accurately simulate the exercise habits of the average American, Morgan’s walking – a rather indispensable activity for a resident of New York – was kept under a mile per day.
It’s an undoubtedly extreme method for demonstrating America’s potentially hazardous feeding habits, but the endless parade of waddling vast flesh-mounds that wander into shot – especially during Morgan’s visit to Texas, the most gluttonous place on Earth – provide ample evidence that three Mac-based meals daily isn’t all that far removed from the way many Americans eat. Behemoths of one gender or another – it gets kind of hard to tell after the hundred kilos mark – are frequently seen riding around on motorised buggies, their legs having long since buckled beneath the strain.
“What was really bad,” Morgan tells me, “is that after a while you can eat more and more of the stuff. When I started out I couldn’t even hold down that first super-sized option. But after a couple of weeks, I found that I was always hungry. I’d eat and I’d feel satisfied for about an hour, and then I’d need more food. I’d get light-headed and really moody. So it wasn’t just the three meals a day, anymore. I’d have to pop in for an extra apple pie, or an extra shake, or something between burgers. And then you get that sugar rush, immediately followed by the dizziness again.”
Of course, the central premise – that eating nothing but fast food for a month is rather unhealthy and likely to leave you a good deal heftier – is up there with ‘Jordan has implants’ or ‘Roy Keane out of World Cup qualifiers’ as revelations go. Equally, the film’s wealth of statistics are likely to be familiar to the nutritionally minded. Yet even the most jaded viewers will be hard pressed not to raise an eyebrow at some of the baffling facts offered – the number of people fed daily by McDonald’s exceeds the population of Spain; 60% of Americans are overweight; 40% of Americans eat out everyday; French Fries are the primary national ‘vegetable’, and a cup of ‘Double Gulp’ soda contains forty-eight teaspoons of sugar. Shudder.
As the creative force behind MTV’s I Bet You Will – a show where contestants eat mustard and chilli concoctions for money and fifteen seconds of notoriety – Morgan has crafted an incredibly buzzy package around these particular McNuggets. The kitsch riffs on Mc Ads through the ages have successfully wooed an audience far beyond calorie stat fanatics and smug vegetarians such as myself. In particular, Super Size Me’s campaigning instincts are pitched squarely at a youth demographic not noted for standards of gastronomic excellence. Hence, indigestible facts and figures are delivered across Ronald McDonald ‘Last Supper’ parodies, and one sublimely subversive moment has images of the ubiquitous clown dancing demonically to ‘Pusherman’.
“It’s like Shaw says,” explains Morgan, “if you’re going to tell people the truth, you better make them laugh, or they’ll kill you.”
In between bouts of buffoonish agitprop, Morgan takes time out to speak to such distinguished gentlemen as Wisconsin’s own Don Gorske, the remarkably slender Guinness Record holder who has happily consumed two Big Macs a day for 30 years, and John Robbins, the heir to the Baskin Robbins Ice Cream fortune, discussing his health problems and quadruple bypass surgery. A lifelong affiliation with the deadly white stuff has transformed the former snack-executive into the born again health fanatic behind Diet For A New America. On a related note, the filmmaker tries and repeatedly fails to get McDonald’s CEO Jim Cantalupo on the phone. (As it happens, Mr. Cantalupo lost his chance to reply when he died of a massive heart attack last April, aged 60.)
The logic of this cheeky – as opposed to ideological – approach is clear. As Super Size Me is at pains to point out, in between binges and purges, our taste for processed crap takes hold early. Rather appropriately, the director’s excursions into the dietary demilitarised zone of US school-cafeterias provide the film’s most gob-smacking moments. A veritable quagmire of Gatorade, lard laden swill and sinister brand placement, they make your average helping of McFodder look like brown rice and lentils from the knit-your-own-yoghurt brigade.
“The way these companies manipulate children is disgusting”, says Morgan, “the money they spend on advertising is incredible. And a lot of that is aimed at kids – the toys with the Happy Meal, the happy, dancing clown, the parties, the sponsored playgrounds.”
Would he favour something akin to the long mooted European Union plans to outlaw advertising aimed directly at children?
“No, I wouldn’t go that far,” says Morgan, “I don’t really have a problem with companies like Mattel advertising toys. I mean I had Hot-Wheels and Scalextric, and I had good times with those things. The film isn’t attacking advertising per say. It’s not even an attack on fast food. It’s about the mentality of how we eat. Most Americans overeat and they under exercise, and if you live like that, then you’re cutting years of your life. And here in Europe, and in Australia too, it’s no longer the case that you can be complacent or think that this is just an American problem. This is a wake-up call. You can go to McDonald’s or Taco Bell or KFC anywhere on the planet. And people need to think about what’s on their fork. They need to get away from thinking, ‘I’m hungry, I need something right now,’ and think about the long term effects.”
So what happened to Morgan once he started taking fries with everything? “I felt terrible, that’s what,” he laughs. “Basically, before we started shooting, I went around three different doctors, and they all said, ‘Well, you’ll gain some weight and your cholesterol is going to go up a little’. And I thought, ‘There’s the film right there. If I gain ten pounds and my cholesterol goes up five points, then I can ask ‘What would this be over a year?’ 120lbs and 60 points on your cholesterol. So what will that be over the course of a lifetime?”
As it happened, the consequences of the director’s diet proved considerably more startling than anyone had anticipated. His baseline perfect bill of health – 165lbs, 168 cholesterol, blood pressure 120/80 – was quickly blotched while a team of specialists (a G.P., a cardiologist, a gastroenterologist, and a nutrionaliist) watched in dismay. After the first seven days he gained ten pounds, and was suffering from thundering headaches and mood swings. By week three, his weight was 202lbs, (210lbs on the final weigh-in!) his cholesterol a whopping 225 and his blood pressure an astonishing 150/110. His pig-outs also left him clinically depressed, and his liver enzymes, spluttering to contain the surges of fat and sugar, increased ten-fold, with the organ on the verge of total collapse.
The damage incurred, particularly the degree of liver deterioration, may seem downright implausible. Nonetheless, the assorted medical personnel in the film seem genuinely alarmed by Morgan’s deteriorating condition. His General Practitioner falls just short of dropping to his knees as he pleads with the willing, yet ailing guinea pig to end his perverse regime. Even by the end of week one, the physician is heard sternly and despairingly comparing Mr. Spurlock’s liver to a pate. By week three, the patient is apparently on the verge of cirrhosis inflicted by a bombardment of Big Macs. The by now possibly irreversible effects prompt the doctor to evoke Nicolas Cage’s fatalistic pickling binge in Leaving Las Vegas. Does Morgan quit? Does he hell. The film cuts to our couch-bound hero, sprawled on his now considerably lardier derriere, despondently unwrapping his next, gag-inducing Big Mac.
When faced with such entreaties from the medical team, not to mention a barrage of concern from his long-suffering vegan girlfriend, Alex, and worried mother, surely Morgan felt obliged to call the whole enterprise off? Wasn’t he a bit to close to betting the farm once the chest pains and throbbing headaches kicked in?
“I did start to panic a bit,” he admits, “I woke up several nights with really constricted breathing and a tightness around my chest. And I have never experienced anything like this before or since. You see it in the movie, but I don’t know if you can see how freaked I am.”
His dedication to the cause is commendable, if foolhardy, but as the project advances, Morgan is so visibly zonked, it’s difficult to determine how compos mentis he actually was during filming. By the final week, he’s shuffling around like one of Romero’s zombies or a long-term valium housewife, in a permanent state of nausea and fatigue. And Achtung Mac-devouring boys, for much worse was to occur. The torturous side effects included a flagging libido.
“I always have to go on top now” whines Morgan’s live-in lover and vegetarian chef, Alex, during one of the movie’s more distressing comedic moments. A strong contender for the most put-upon screen heroine since Mildred Pierce, her boyfriend’s situationist experiment has literally, as Jello almost sang, left him too junked to fuck.
Still, the four weeks of sexual inertia, depression and near liver failure seem to have been worthwhile. Six weeks after Super Size Me premiered and won at the Sundance Film Festival, McDonald’s announced their intentions to scrap the super size option completely. A total coincidence, they claimed, and Nothing Whatsoever To Do With The Film. Their introduction of ‘Healthier Options’ including a range of salads, and a delightful free pedometer presented with every meal (on the very day Super Size Me went on release) was also said to be resulting from “something that was in the pipeline for a long time.” Hmm.
The corporation’s European equivalents have been considerably more vociferous on the eve of the movie’s release here. The past month has seen McDonald’s take out advertisements in most major newspapers referencing the film. Goodness, can you buy publicity like that? Naturally, they’re keen to promote their new menu options (Anybody going to McDonald’s for a salad? I think not). But they also venture the notion – in the cuddly spirit of corporate responsibility - that McDonald’s products need to be part of an overall balanced diet. It’s hardly locking horns with the enemy, is it?
Super Size Me has also taken heat from free marketers and fat acceptance activists who claim the film is (weary sigh) size-ist.
Has such criticism and those daring new leaf of lettuce menu options forced him to repent?
“Hell, no,” he exclaims, “the truth is that McDonald’s is guided by commercial imperatives, and they also live with the fear of tobacco-style litigation. They’re going to tell you what you want to hear. But, the reality is that their salad options are often no better than their burgers. In the film we look at the Chicken Caesar Salad and that’s got over 400 calories (425 to be precise) in it, and more grams of fat than a Big Mac. How is that supposed to be healthy?”
By the way, Morgan’s now back to his svelte former self, and in no rush to hit any fast food emporiums anytime soon. “If it were a McFood or starvation, I’ll probably lean toward starve. But I still love cheeseburgers – not the Mac variety, with that day-glo yellow cheese, but like those big, juicy ones, made with proper steak. Oh wait, you’re not liking this, are you?”
No, and I can’t imagine Alex does either. How does she feel about such hulking masses of meat in their mutual home?
“Oh God, I can’t take them home! You gotta be kidding. There are no meat products allowed through the door. Do you allow them around your place?” Er, yes, for I have omnivore friends that are bigger and stronger than me, what with their higher iron intake.
“Let me tell you something. Our kitchen is a green paradise. No saucepan has ever been contaminated by part of an animal. That’s the rule. As far as she’s concerned, if she’s cooking, then you’re eating what she’s cooking. And she’s cooking vegetarian, and that’s great.” I point out how extremely blessed he is to have a vegan girlfriend who loves him dearly enough to keep him under the thumb like that, but of course, he knows that already.
“Yeah, and what’s really great is that she’s now getting a sexual thrill from watching me reading food labels. She’s like, ‘Oh wow, he’s reading the nutritional information’. But it’s cool, because I really think about what I’m eating now. And I know the fat content for everything. She’s gone from being revolted by my eating, to being pretty proud.”
So I guess Alex isn’t slaving away on top anymore?
“No, I’m back pulling my weight”, he grins.
And with that, I wave Morgan goodbye, and stroll out into the streets of the English capital entertaining fantasises of completely green, untainted kitchens, and breaking boys in for the purposes of carb-counting.