Atomic Nerds

If you’ve not seen it, most of you have probably heard of Super-Size Me, Morgan Spurlock’s polemic against McDonald’s that launched his intermittent career as a political version of Jackass. The basic premise of the film is that in addition to hard-hitting investigative journalism revealing that soda, cheeseburgers, and fries are unhealthy and McDonald’s is a corporation that looks after its bottom line, Spurlock put himself on a diet consisting purely of three meals a day of a super-sized combination of Big Mac and fries, and subsequently gained a lot of weight and became very ill with all sorts of interesting pathologies. There’s a graphic scene of him puking out his car window- it’s fun for the whole family!

In case you couldn’t tell, I’m not fond of this movie. So much so that I came over all bitchtastic in Son of Grok’s comments just at the mere mention of the movie. Going off on a perfectly innocent health-blogger caused me to pause and contemplate just what it is about it that pisses me off so much; it’s not as though Spurlock were exactly WRONG about fast food. Most of it is, in fact, deeply unhealthy and far too many people make it a staple of their diets without quite being cognizant of that. Sure, there’s the overweening self-congratulation and sense of moral superiority that Spurlock seems to get out of bashing McDonald’s, and the fact that it’s Morgan Spurlock, who irritates me on a molecular level, but that’s not quite enough to explain why a mere mention of the movie that happens to be neutral in opinion is enough to set me off. Contemplating the matter, I finally realized why: despite the way it presents itself, as a documentary meant to make you think, it’s very much NOT- and it’s aimed squarely at the same grass-eaters it claims are being somehow victimized by McDonald’s.

The central problem with the movie is that Spurlock destroys his own point via his methodology; eating seven thousand plus calories a day of the exact same thing will make you fat and give you health problems no matter WHAT you’re eating. The precise health problems you acquire will change depending on what it is, but regardless, it’s fundamentally Ungood For You to binge on so many calories with so little variety. He could have chosen to focus on the sheer caloric density of most fast-food meals (and lack of accompanying density of micronutrients), but instead he chose to go for the puke-inducing stunt that would make his doctor look appropriately grave and his liver appropriately foie gras-ed. It’s meant to shock the viewer into revulsion at the The McDonald’s Menace- NOT think. If the viewers are thinking, they notice that he’s doing a pointless stunt rather than proving that McDonald’s will kill you; nobody makes a film intended to make people think that falls apart as soon as they do.

“Grass-eater”, if you’re one of the people that missed reading the linked post, is a term describing those individuals to whom personal responsibility (and therefore the possibility of blame for consequences) is a terrifying thing- don’t blame people for their choices, blame the things that enabled them to make those choices, such as guns, car corporations that manufacture SUVs, or, say, corporations that sell fast food. Spurlock is simply one of many that is either a grass-eater himself, or sees people in general (people less smart and enlightened than his anointed self) as them. The way to deal with a grass-eater is not to make them think- heaven knows they can’t do THAT- but to apply a cattle prod to their ass, whether the cattle prod is a sensationalistic flick meant to make the Bad Thing feel scary to them, or a law banning new fast-food restaurants from opening in areas Caring People have defined as populated by particularly vulnerable grass-eaters.

The problem is that people are a lot more complicated than cattle, a lot smarter no matter what the Caring People think, and nearly impossible to herd successfully. If you’re not going to actually keep people in pens and dictate exactly what they will do at all times*, they keep on making choices, and quite often they will be choices contrary to what those who believe themselves to be smarter than the grass-eaters in their care have deemed optimal for them. And thus, the cattle prods don’t work: obesity is still a problem. People still smoke no matter how many sin taxes they pile on to tobacco and how many places they force smokers out of. People still take drugs no matter how many times and in how many ways they’re told it’s bad, mmkay.

Nobody can possibly live healthily- or safely, or morally- if they don’t think, and think more or less constantly about the choices they themselves are making. The restaurants and video games of the world most certainly aren’t making any choices FOR them, even if it’s more comfortable to think so. Those that mean to make a difference need to put down the cattle prods- though the odds that they WILL are pretty darn low. They’re awfully gratifying to zap with, and seeing people going around making choices all the time is so stressful to Caring People.

*Although some people think moving futher toward this is a good idea.

Posted Ranting |