Word: superealism
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Before the Super Bowl, there was the Yale Bowl. Before Chicago’s Soldier Field, there was Cambridge’s Soldiers’ Field. Before the Bowl Championship Series, there was The Game...
Some results of his ordeal, as reported in his documentary Super Size Me, are predictable: he gained 24.5 lbs., and his cholesterol count shot up alarmingly. Some are less so: the amount of damage he did to his liver was roughly the same as if he had been on an alcohol binge of a similar duration. There is also evidence that he became something of a fast-food addict, with his sense of well-being increasingly dependent on the rush his fat-and fructose-laden eats provided. You come away from his film convinced that "Happy Meal" is something more...
...Super Size Me had to offer was a portrait of Spurlock growing increasingly gray, whiny and, finally, scared about what he's doing to himself, it would be no more than an attention-getting device by a slightly smarmy man who rather lacks Michael Moore's bullying star quality. Face it, even in a nation where a quarter of the population eats at least once a week in a fast-food joint, mass emulation of his diet is unlikely...
There is, however, one mystery Super Size Me and, indeed, most commentaries on the obesity epidemic do not address. Everyone knows that fat is ugly and that it kills. The press has been all over this story for years while at the same time celebrating the svelte and the diets that make them that way. So it's not enough to say the fast-food industry's propaganda trumps our mass desire to be slender. Something else must be operative here--some desperate need for sugary comfort that all the green, leafy vegetables in the world cannot satisfy. We still...
...biggest quandary is how to solve one problem without worsening the other. The television networks--and their counterparts in radio--are under government scrutiny, after all, because of young men. They were the reason MTV produced the racy halftime show. They were the reason for the gross-out Super Bowl commercials that also got criticized. And other decency targets--The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, Fear Factor, Howard Stern? Young men, young men, young...