SUPERSIZE ME!

“You can’t always get what you want” – The Rollingstones

It was a warm Sunday afternoon yesterday, when the famous phone rang again and Tony was on the other end of the line. It was time for a marathon movie trip once more. We started with Harry Potter: “The Prisoner of Azkaban”, then “Super Size Me” and lastly, “Spiderman 2”.

The Potter movie was of course another tour de force of an adventure movie, just how we want them made. The latest Spiderman series was just that, another superhero movie. The Spidy movie tried its darnest to season itself with the love angles around Peter Parker but failed to match the tenacity of Clark Kent’s whirling and swirling affair with Lois Lane in the “Superman” series shown a couple of decades ago. It only shows that even superhero movies need someone like Mario Puzo to reign over what the characters have to say and live up to.

“SuperSize Me” is not a movie in the regular sense of the world but it is. I mean it was a true-blue documentary that got shown in Hollywood due to the surprising albeit, well-deserved accolades it had piled up starting with the “Best Director Award” in last year’s version of the Sundance festival.

Upstart director Morgan Spurlock took hold of the main tasks behind the camera and wowed audiences with crisp images and well-thought of monologues and dialogues. Between the beginning and the end of the movie, we are jested incessantly with a good amount of humorous illustrations notably that of Mr. Ronald MacDonald as an evil clown. I snickered every time the caricatures interrupt lengthy scenes. Morgan Spurlock style reminds as heavily of Paul Thomas Anderson in “Magnolia” and Steven Soderbergh in “Traffic”. If he ain’t a big one yet, Mr. Spurlock should be the “next big thing” going on in Hollywood. You can say he surely learned his craft from the two film masters mentioned herein.

The movie is mainly about the director himself hypothesizing upon a premise surrounding a new American problem: Obesity. In the words of Mr. Spurlock himself, “every thing in America is ‘supersized’. Supersized here. Supersized there.” In recent health studies, America is increasingly becoming the fattest nation on earth, if it is not still. 37% of American children and adolescence are obese and in the Manhattan area alone, there are four McDonald’s food store per square mile that for every New Yorker walking towards his or her place of work, he or she would have to pass by at least three McDonald’s food store. This is not counting the many other also-popular American food brands like Wendy’s, Burger King, and Taco Bell. All in all, that is just a lot of burgers in America.

The documentary takes off from a certain civil claims filed by two obese American adolescence against the MacDonald’s company averring among others that the giant food company has been offering its consumers high-risk foods without prior warnings. I guess they must be likening these foods to tobacco that requires health hazard precautions from the U.S. Surgeon General. This particular claim has been dismissed for lack of merit although the judge who penned the decision challenged the plaints that “if they can prove that McDonald’s had intended that its consumers to be compelled to eat their meals in their food store every time and at no other place, then the claims may be successfully instituted”---or something like that. This condition appears to be not a condition at all for it is almost impossible. Like Catch 22, there ain’t just no proving that McDonald’s has somewhat compelled the food buyers to eat their meals in their outfit exclusively although by tenacious advertising, they clear wish it. The issue should have been whether or not the food they serve is proximately dangerous to the health of the consumers or not.

The director then goes on interviewing various subjects mostly, people who looked obese or are actually heavy on their tummies. To top it all, Mr. Spurlock goes on an experiment on himself by a procedure where he would take only McDonald’s food in a 30-day period, and nothing else. By the end of the movie, and at the end of this “landmark” experiment, Mr. Spurlock’s body has become an 18% body fat consistency from a low of 5%. His risk of contracting heart impairment and other diseases has increased dramatically by 200% and his “sex life” had become worthless. Nearing the end of the 30-day, he had complained of pressures on his chest, “not pains” he asserted “but just pressures”; whatever that means. And he had developed depressive tendencies and mood swings. Therefore, a theorem was proven at the end of the flick. Eating too much fastfood items affects the health in a very grave manner.

To me, the greatest proof to the theorem/hypothesis mentioned in the preceding paragraph is the fact that in the beginning of the movie, Mr. Spurlock was in the lightest of mood---smiling easily and snickering even by just the sight of huge Big Mac. At the end of the movie, he was not the same man. His eyebrows are furrowed and dire worry was apparent on his face. The smile just disappeared. At one point, the doctor was urging him to take aspirin for a cardiac problem is high at that particular moment. “Just take it!” the doctor nearly hollered at him when Mr. Spurlock refused to take aspirin, which is known to lessen the chances of blood clotting.

Cinematically, it was a satisfying movie because of the clever dialogues and sharp camera takes and angles. You can say, a genius was at work. Content-wise, it was very informative and eye opening. It deserves all its awards.

And yet, I have some reservations about the dogmas presented by the movie like for instance, the 30-day experiment is itself irrelevant when we already know from common knowledge that too much eating of high-caloric food really makes the body weaker by a mile and bigger as a mule. It doesn’t have to take a genius to know this. And what did it prove against McDonald’s distinctively? How does McDonald’s become different from the other food companies? I am pretty certain that eating food from Wendy’s or Taco Bell with similar density as it was in the subject experiment will almost certainly lead to the same result.

This is not the only time that we are made aware of consumer actions against food or tobacco companies. Of course, we are not left uninformed about the huge billion-dollar tobacco payback that the American consumers had won from the Philip Morris cigarette company. It was in fact the subject of the famous movie, “The Insider”. In 1992, there was the scalding coffee case which an American plaintiff won against the same company we have been talking about here, McDonald’s. In that case, the judge awarded the sum of $150,000 to certain Stella Liebeck of Albuquerque, New Mexico when the coffee she ordered got accidentally poured at her lap, giving her third degree burns and a whole year of therapy. The court here decided that the McDonald’s should have been more alert and vigilant in the manner and method of serving food items to its customers like a super hot coffee. It further stated that as a company long acclimatized to the business of serving fastfoods, McDonald’s should have realized long ago that its consumers are mostly busy and highly mobile individuals who order items like coffee on their way to work and school, and that since items like coffee are insidiously harmful when mishandled, the company should have taken a degree of care above what is ordinary. The result for this coffee case is in stark contrast to the “obesity case” presented in “Super Size Me". And yet, we can see some parallels.

In the obesity suit against McDonald’s, the main claim is the dangerous content of its food items, which was of course could not be proven easily since it is universally accepted that although certain foods contain high amount of elements like calories and sugar, they are not considered as “dangerous” or “toxic” like tobacco, which the court found out to contain noxious elements intentionally added to the product to make it more tempting to the buyers. In burgers and chicken nuggets, there is no such intentional addition of foreign elements. They are cooked in the manner universally accepted.

In the coffee case against the same food company, the main issue is not the content of the food item served per se (whether it is harmful or not) but rather, how the item was handled and served. This is not a health complaint but an ordinary tort case concerning breach of care and the incident of negligence in the performance of duties.

In Philippine jurisprudence, we have not heard of any complaint against any consumer companies similar to those attending in the United States, at least not in a grand scheme. Yet, our laws are rich in provisions that regulate the conduct of individuals including those in the food business. We even have a Consumer Law Act to protect the buyers from harm due to breach of care and negligence. As our society evolves, our courts may soon take in a whole specie of suits concerning the effect of items we buy from numerous food companies.

Under the Civil Code, breach of care and negligence cases hangs on the following provisions:

Art. 19. Every person must, in the exercise of his rights and in the performance of his duties, act with justice, give everyone his due, and observe honesty and good faith.

Art. 2176. Whoever by act or omission causes damage to another, there being fault or negligence, is obliged to pay for the damage done. Such fault or negligence, if there is no pre-existing contractual relation between the parties, is called a quasi-delict.

Knowing these basic entries in our personal laws makes it more prudent for the companies to exert further improvement in their service while allowing consumers to protect themselves from being at the receiving end of poor service and substandard products peddled in our markets.

Aside from being very informative and stylish, "Super Size Me" is a must-see for all diet fanatics because at the end of the of it, one is hugely compelled to take every precaution on anything you take into your mouth and to have more frequent exercises in your waking hours. It’s like a horror movie about zombies. Once you saw it, you become terrified with the living dead and turn away from them the farthest. Once you saw the horror of obesity, you’ll want to turn away from it by the farthest of distance.