How the Monoculture Made "Super Size Me"

Morgan Spurlock’s Untimely Death and Gatekeepers’ Refusal to Call Out Film Fakery

I’ve never eaten McDonald’s food voluntarily. I don’t mean to evoke some Saw-like scene where I’m strapped to a chair while Grimace force feeds me Egg McMuffins. 

All I mean is I’ve never hungered for McDonald’s, and I’ve never headed to the Golden Arches on my own accord.

I think I’ve eaten McDonald’s food three times in my life. The first time was in high school. For reasons I can’t recall, one day our normal cafeteria food was replaced with McDonald’s. 

The second time was probably a couple years later, while I was out with some older cousins in Chicago. They wanted to go to McDonald’s, so we went. 

The third time was when I was in Sao Paulo, Brazil in my 20s. My friend Fernando was letting me stay at his place for a while. He wanted to go to McDonald’s, so I went. 

What accounts for my anti-McDonald’s attitude? Mom and Dad.

As my two brothers and I came of age in the 80s and 90s, our parents taught us to hate McDonalds. Actually, it was Dad who provided the anti-arches intensity. He dismissed the ubiquitous chain as “crap,” and we kids knew we were to never, ever eat there. (I hope my dad will forgive the transgressions I outlined above—I didn’t want to do it, Dad!) 

You might think that denying us the famous grub would make us crave the forbidden fruit pie even more, but it didn’t. That’s where my mom came in. She’s a masterful “old country” Slovenian cook, and she expresses love with food—meat, potatoes, sauerkraut, chicken soup, legendary apple strudel, and massive, colorful salads sourced from my dad’s vegetable garden. 

The difference in taste between a home-grown carrot and a store-bought one is so great, they should be categorized as different things. Imagine squabbling over second helpings of salads. Ours were so good, we’d do just that. My parents were “real food” proponents long before influencers were invented. 

I recalled this slice of family history because Morgan Spurlock, the filmmaker behind the smash hit documentary Super Size Me, recently succumbed to cancer at age 53. He died as a celebrity filmmaker and one of the world’s most recognizable documentarians.

Although Spurlock made other films and shows, it was Super Size Me that made him a star. And it all started with the hook: Spurlock would eat nothing but McDonald’s for a month, and if an employee asked him if he’d like to super size his meal, he’d always say yes. Along the way, he’d document how the fast food experiment changed his body. 

It’s almost like I was raised to be a Super Size Me superfan. Not only was I steeped in anti-McDonald’s ideology, I was also a budding documentary filmmaker. 

But when Morgan Spurlock’s hit rippled through the world in 2004, I was puzzled. Why all the fuss? McDonald’s is crap, so of course eating lots of it will pollute your innards. To me, Spurlock might as well have documented the health effects of stepping in front of a speeding bus. 

But lots of moviegoers disagreed with my take because the movie grossed more than $22 million on a tiny $65,000 budget. The film achieved the one-two punch so many documentary filmmakers dream about—financial success and real-world impact. 

The movie has long been a fixture in high school health classes, and shortly after its release McDonald’s pulled the plug on super sizes. The official company position was that the move had nothing to do with Spurlock’s movie, but I wonder if execs really expect the rest of the world to believe that. 

So how did one newbie filmmaker accomplish so much? 

Irresistible Ingredients

No doubt hard work, talent, and a strong hook were important, but those ingredients wouldn’t be enough to cook up a blockbuster. Perhaps Spurlock knew his most important audience wasn’t the American public, but industry gatekeepers. The filmmaker was savvy enough to dangle irresistible ingredients in front of them.

Film industry gatekeepers love a good David and Goliath story—that is, as long as the roles reflect the “correct” worldview. That was no problem for Spurlock. He, the independent filmmaker on a shoestring budget, assumed the role of David, daring to step forward to challenge the corporate Goliath—McDonald’s. 

Many other elements play to Eight Percenter tastes: The film takes some swipes at Texas. It includes reflections from progressive public health superstars like Marion Nestle, Kelly Brownell, and lawsuit machine John Banzhaf.

Even Spurlock’s girlfriend plays an important supporting role as the noble vegan chef who tries to steer him toward what she regards as a more ethical lifestyle. And her impact stretches beyond food. 

She’s so free from hang ups that she speaks matter-of-factly about how Spurlock’s stunt has hindered their sex life. In pre-Kardashian America, flouting bourgeois norms on camera was still fairly avant garde.

And to top it off, a photograph of a nude woman hangs conspicuously above the couple’s dining table. 

Burgers and Stakes

And, of course, we can’t forget the stakes. The movie’s success hinged on stakes. 

If the filmmaker didn’t face serious health repercussions, Spurlock’s film would be dead on arrival. A five pound weight gain and some heartburn just wouldn’t cut it. 

But here crafty Spurlock delivers again. 

Not only does he gain 25 pounds, but he engages in all kinds of theatrics including throwing up on camera, and reporting troubling symptoms such as chest palpitations and difficulty breathing. 

Spurlock’s doctors express horror at how his experiment has affected his blood tests. Most dramatically, they declare that it seems as though his liver had been flooded by alcohol. 

Here’s how one doctor put it:

The results for your liver are obscene beyond anything I would have thought. You know that movie [Leaving Las Vegas]—Nicolas Cage? Pickled his liver during the course of a few weeks in Las Vegas. I never would have thought you could do the same thing with a high-fat diet.

Bloodwork that evokes Nic Cage at his boosiest? Now that’s what I call high stakes!

Spurlock’s recipe worked.

He cooked up Super Size Me in order to attract Eight Percenters, and it did just that.

The Monoculture’s Movie

Spurlock’s low-budget feature doc was accepted at Sundance, the Harvard of film festivals. And that’s not all. Festival muckety-mucks awarded Super Size Me the Grand Jury Prize. That big splash was enough to attract two major distributors—Samuel Goldwyn Films and Roadside Attractions. 

Next came the media cheerleaders. Rotten Tomato critics embraced the film (92%!) and a New York Times headline snarked, “You Want Liver Failure With That?” Zing! 

Then came the bestowers of awards. The film nabbed seven trophies (including the Critics Choice Award) and many nominations. Academy members even rewarded Spurlock with a Best Documentary Oscar nom. 

The Eight Percenters who swooned over Spurlock’s flick largely ignored those like Tom Naughton who went about the relatively easy task of poking super sized holes in the blockbuster doc.  

In his rebuttal documentary, Fat Head, Naughton chronicles how he lost 12 pounds on a month-long all-fast food diet. He also calls out Spurlock on many misrepresentations, from his refusal to make his food log public to his fishy calorie counting.  

Even the central concept of supersizing played a small role in Spurlock’s experiment. Spurlock said he would supersize his meal whenever a McDonald’s employee offered. That happened just nine times, a tidbit Spurlock notes only in the “Where are they now?” sequence at the end of the movie.

Gatekeepers were so unmoved by Naughton and other critics that Spurlock released a sequel. It didn’t succeed to the level of the original, but it still premiered at the Yale of film festivals (the Toronto International Film Festival), and scored a $3.5 million distribution deal. 

In the end, only Spurlock himself could undo the juggernaut that he and the monoculture created. 

Spurlock’s Downfall

In 2017, Spurlock figured the #MeToo movement was coming for him. So in a preemptive move, the he released an open letter where he admitted to many incidents of sexual misconduct, including repeated infidelities and the sexual harassment of an assistant. He also noted a one-night-stand. He regarded it as consensual, but the women he was with accused him of rape.

The letter included a detail that reflected on his private and professional life. As Spurlock questions what drove him to behave so badly, he asks, “Is it because I’ve consistently been drinking since the age of 13? I haven’t been sober for more than a week in 30 years.”

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, filmmaker Phelim McAleer wonders if that’s what explains why his liver resembled that of an alcoholic: 

Mr. Spurlock’s 2017 confession contradicts what he said in his 2004 documentary. “Any alcohol use?” the doctor asks at the outset. “Now? None,” he replies. In explaining his experiment, he says: “I can only eat things that are for sale over the counter at McDonald’s—water included.”

Would that revelation spur the monoculture to finally disavow the project it had done so much to champion?

In obituaries of Spurlock, CNN makes no mention of the filmmaker’s admission, and Variety soft pedals it. The New York Times comes closer to giving the revelation the attention it deserves, explaining that, “in addition to his ‘McDonald’s only’ diet, he was drinking, a fact that he concealed from his doctors and the audience, and that most likely skewed his results.”

Years after Spurlock’s admission, two Rotten Tomato critics reviewed Super Size Me. Neither one mentioned the filmmaker’s alcoholism, and their verdicts on the movie? Fresh.

Ted Balaker is a filmmaker, and former network newser and think tanker. His recent work includes Little Pink House starring Catherine Keener and Jeanne Tripplehorn, Can We Take a Joke? featuring Gilbert Gottfried and Penn Jillette, and the new feature documentary based on the bestselling book, The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. Stream the very first “Substack Presents” feature documentary here.