R.I.P. Morgan Spurlock

[dws1982]

Spurlock was a fraud who shot to fame off the back of fat-phobia and a lot of reality-TV tricks. I found Super Size Me on Prime video, and it's really gross--within five minutes there's a montage set to "Fat-Bottomed Girls", and through the film there are more shots than you can count of fat people's torsos and asses, all played for shocking horror-comic purposes. Other people tried to replicate Spurlock's experiment and never came close to the same outcomes. Notably he never released a food diary of the month he was doing this experiment, and repeatedly refused request to do so, and when he later admitted to having been an alcoholic for most of his adult life, specifically that he hadn't been sober for more than a week in decades, it suddenly seemed like there might be another explanation for why his health was affected so dramatically by the McDonalds experiment. He made other documentaries, but I honestly think his follow-up, Where in the World is Osama bin Laden? confirmed what his initial detractors had said, that he was a dishonest hack. Plus his approach seemed much less interesting and novel after others--in TV, YouTube, and even TikTok--followed and even built down that path. He never made anything after he outed himself as a sexual predator; from reading a few online obituaries and tributes, he spent his last years as a full-time dad to his two sons. Which is a better, and maybe more redemptive, use of his last years than making more documentaries would have been.

[Sabin]

The comparison that leaps to mind is Michael Moore. Super Size Me was the perfect doc for 2004, the height of Daily Show’s zeitgeist. There are a lot of allegations that it was more of a crock than even suspected at the time, but it turned Spurlock into enough of a personality to get a little cottage industry of doc content off the ground. Unlike Michael Moore, he had no real impact beyond the first shot. I forgot he directed a film called Where In the World is Osama Bin Laden? until today. But work is work. Then he got MeToo’d (or wrote a blog post of self-admission). Then he didn’t work again. And now he’s dead. I’ve heard a recent Maintenance Phase of a much scummier dude than one might think. Apparently a very heavy drinker. I obviously don’t know that but the dude produced a lot of content. I don’t think any of it will really last.

[Sonic Youth]

The ‘Super Size Me’ director has died of cancer at 53. No one should mock someone’s death, but who can overlook the irony?


https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/24/arts ... ticleShare