Scene Analysis of Supersize Me

The documentary that I chose to analyze was 2004’s “Supersize Me”. This Morgan Spurlock documentary explored the risks of living the “fast food” lifestyle by having Spurlock himself eat nothing but McDonald’s for thirty days. While undergoing the diet Spurlock also works to explore the fast food industry itself, as well as the examining the causes and affects of the ever increasing obese population in the United States and World wide. The scene that I decided to analyze was the opening scene of “Supersize Me”. This scene seemed most appropriate because it introduced the issues the documentary would be examining, provided very interesting facts and statistics, and was very attention grabbing. The scene begins with a large group of young children singing a playground song about fast food restaurants in which they state “I like food, I like food”. The camera starts by focusing on the whole group, but eventually singles out two very obese children. I found this to be a very affective opening shot because it is interesting to see how much children really love fast food, and provides a shocking appeal by centralizing on over weight children. This shot fades to black and a quote by Ray Kroc, the founded of McDonald’s displays on the screen. This quote says “Look after the customer and the business will take care of itself”. I found this quote to be here for irony purposes because it seems from the obese children, and the following shots of this scene that McDonald’s no longer seems to care about the customer at all. The quote then fades into a shot of a large American flag gloriously waving while Morgan Spurlock begins his voiceover discussing how everything is “bigger in America”, especially the people. This part of the scene sets up that the documentary will mainly be focusing on the unhealthy lifestyle of American citizens, it also gives a sense of “hitting home” for audience members who are from the US. Spurlock continues his voiceover, giving statistics about the United States recent climb to being the fattest nation in the world while showing various shots of obese people from the neck down. Giving statistics while showing obese people is very affective because it gives more a human quality to simple numbers. This technique also has a way of creating shock appeal by showing many very overweight people, a quality that people have come to see as unappealing and over all unhealthy. Spurlock continues to give statistics about obesity and American, as well as the increasing access and use of fast food restaurants and eventually comes to tell about a law suit that occurred in the United States in which two teenaged girls sued Mc Donald’s for making them obese. Spurlock shows enlarged copies of the legal documents of this case which helps provide him with the basis of his experiment. He shows that in the legal documents it is argued that if one could prove that Mc Donald’s intends for an individual to eat there for every meal of everyday and that this would be in fact dangerous, that the case against McDonald’s would stand. This brings us to the introduction to Spurlock himself, and introduction of his diet experiment. Overall I found the opening scene of this documentary to be very attention grabbing, shocking, and appropriate for this film. It introduces many issues related to obesity in America, and World wide. It shows that American corporations do not truly care about the health of their customers, but rather the bottom line. This scene provides important information that the audience can carry with them throughout the documentary as well as long after watching this film.

>- April Morrison