unreleased rant diluted by ennui; nuts at work; H. back in town

[fflo]

Started this week already behind here at work---and that may be part of the reason I haven't gotten around to raging against the piece-o'-crap Super Size Me. Though even by the end of the film Sunday night my pique had already largely subsided. It did most everything fat-phobic I'd feared it would do (and a little I hadn't anticipated), plus its "experiment" was badly executed (and sans even pseudo-scientific control). But I'd have had a personal antipathy for the guy even if he hadn't pissed me off with the moviemaking, just from his classic redneck moustache style and proudly-displayed fraternity paddle. So maybe I'll spare ya'll the invective about the dozens of decapitated "anonymous" bodies demonstrating fatness, and the horrid sequence surrounding one guy's stomach-mutilation surgery, and other vile bile of that ilk.

Had a phone message from H., who is back in town. Of course that comes during a crazy busy week for me.

Comments

[groovesinorbit]

That's a shame about Super Size Me. Like I said when we talked the other evening, his interview on NPR was pretty good. And the concept itself, showing what fast food can really do to your body, is a good one. How would you have presented it, if you had taken it on?

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Well, as my other reply here implies, I like the class and state-dominance perspective as a framework for criticising fast food culture. I think class is the forbidden issue of our times (these unfortunate days still in the legacy of the Reagan "revolution"---what a disgusting corruption of the word!)---as it long has been within "democracy" (read: capitalism). I reckon my world view is pretty Marxist, when it comes right down to it, and I think the people need to be awakened to phenomena---particularly commercially-propagated cultural tendencies---that are damaging to us. I just want that to happen in ways that don't themselves give the state more power over us.

Money has too much power to influence things, and too much money is concentrated in too few hands. It's morally wrong. That's the context in which McDonald's propagates its profitting from the peoples' addiction, and lack of education, and poverty. (How many wealthy people of leisure are eating at McD's several times a week?) And it uses its size/power/dominance to arrange, through advertising, to lure us in more and more.

Super Size did, again, gloss over that issue. The jackass, in addition to being a jackass, took no central focus, and pursued none of his ideas/assertions in a thorough, hard-hitting way---never even aiming at a clearly consumer-advocating sense of a mass of people needing to throw off this way in which we allow ourselves to be kept down. Instead he takes an approach that manages a vague "isn't it a shame" (a cheap, somewhat sensationalist mode), with frequent lapses into "wait---let's go watch some more fat giggle; it's been too long since I included some of that demeaning, easy/stock footage of the headless, pseudo-anonymous bodies of real people on the screen to illicit contempt, and hopefully a cheap laugh."

[groovesinorbit]

Well said, fflo! How can this film be anything other than a stunt, if the underlying issues such as class (it is indeed the forbidden issue) and corporate greed aren't brought up?

Of course, that means you would have made this movie more in the vein of that (ahem) "lardass" Michael Moore methinks.

Ahem.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Perhaps, at least to some extent. (I have my qualms about Michael, but they're either more subtlely aesthetic or refine'dly political.)

Super Size, to clarify, DID bring up corporate greed, even poking fun at it for a few minutes. But even some of that was fat-phobic. And, besides, what kind of technique is mere random fun-poking for any serious subject of a scathing documentary?

[groovesinorbit]

And, besides, what kind of technique is mere random fun-poking for any serious subject of a scathing documentary?

Not a very good one.