Day Two: Politics as Usual

Super Size Me

::	FILM DAY TWO: Politics as Usual By Tobias Peterson

Documentaries have long been a staple of SXSW. Since few, if any, docs make it into national release, the festival is an important vehicle for these films. While many viewers may be simply satisfying their reality TV cravings, the films often focus on socially minded subject matter. (Last year’s expose on an attempted coup in Venezuela, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, is just one example of such.) And though Revolution was a departure from last year’s musically themed documentary selections (Rising Low, Lubbock Lights, Off the Charts: the Song-Poem Story), this year, the focus returned squarely to politics.

For the most part, this brand of politics is left-leaning and (for the past four years at least) pissed off. Hosted in the heart of Dubya country, SXSW (like a good many of its fellow Austinites) has long had an uneasy relationship with the conservative stances of the current President, who occupied the Texas governor’s mansion before he took office in the White House. Fittingly, the stately manor is just a stone’s throw from the Paramount Theater, which this year hosted the world premier of Bush’s Brain.

Unlike in 2002, when George Jr. was a portrayed as an affable goofball in Alexandra Pelosi’s Journeys With George, reporters James Moore and Wayne Slater have a much more sinister take on Bush. In their book of the same title, Moore and Slater (the latter a figure that Journeys viewers might remember as the Dallas Morning News reporter who broke the Bush D.W.I. story during his campaign for the presidency) expose the “co-president” of the United States, a ruthless politico who shadows George Bush and informs his every move: Karl Rove.

The film is ostensibly a video version of the book’s arguments, but they are compelling and disturbing in any medium. In the film’s introduction, Bush is shown strolling confidently toward a podium amid cheering soldiers and blaring fanfare, a pertinent question flashes onscreen: “How did this happen?” The remainder of the film answers this question with a litany of anecdotes that stretch all the way back to Bush’s first botched attempt at state Congress. Although the stories are different, they are tied together by the thread of Rove’s purposefully downplayed influence.

The film traces the authors’ arguments in the book, illustrating Karl Rove’s dangerous and unmitigated influence on the President and, hence, the rest of the nation. Tracing Bush’s rise to power, the film interviews a host of Texas politicians and newspaper writers, whose collective commentary paint a portrait of an evil genius in the form of Rove, an arch-conservative who will stop at nothing to win political victory. Democrats like former Texas governors Mark White and Ann Richards are shown as victims of Rove’s insidious whisper campaigns, the former losing an election after Rove “finds” a bug planted in his office, the latter having to deflect questions about her sexual orientation circulated by the Bush advisor.

According to the film, not even fellow Republican John McCain is spared the wrath of Rove, who reportedly circulated questions about McCain’s mental state (as a former prisoner during the Vietnam War) to push Bush over the top in the 2000 South Carolina primary. Rove, of course, has vehemently and consistently denied all of these allegations. Tellingly, however, he denied many of them in a letter to Moore and Slater before the book was even released. Allowing that he had received a manuscript copy “in circulation,” Rove is countered by the authors who claim to never have circulated the book before its publishing date. During the Q & A after the screening, Slater further revealed that he was just audited for the first time in his life, only after the release of the book. In light of these shadowy circumstances, Bush’s Brain may well serve suspicious minds (or angry Democrats) in the coming election in November.

And if the specter of an underhanded government run amok wasn’t enough to boil the audience’s blood, Super Size Me followed on the footsteps of Bush’s Brain, documenting the equally insidious, and potentially more life-threatening, practices of the McDonald’s corporation.

First-time filmmaker Morgan Spurlock brought this film to SXSW on a wave of publicity. His nod for best director at Sundance, coupled with the “coincidental” decision of McDonald’s to eliminate its Super Size menu options, had generated a fantastic amount of buzz around the film. Fortunately, unlike a great many festival darlings (last year’s hyping of Phone Booth springs to mind), Super Size Me seemed to genuinely deserve all this praise.

The film documents Spurlock’s decision to turn himself into a human guinea pig. Eating exclusively from the McDonald’s menu for 30 days, Spurlock also limits his exercise to mimic the slothful lifestyle of the “average” American. The results are shocking. Not only does Spurlock increase in weight and body fat substantially, his liver becomes toxic in a way the puzzles and concerns Morgan’s doctors. His McDonald’s diet is literally life threatening by Day 17.

Spurlock manages to stick things out for the remainder of the month, however, and makes some convincing arguments about the health risks posed fast food industry in the process. As he readily admits, such an extreme experiment is not the norm for any typical American, but his case is used to prove a point about the rise of obesity in the United States. (One statistic, of the many offered by the film, that stood out was that medical costs for diabetes have doubled in the past five years.) In the wake of Congressional efforts to ban lawsuits against the fast food industry, Super Size Me offers some forceful support for reforming the ways that McDonald’s and its fat-peddling ilk market to children specifically. Happy Meals are no longer the harmless treats of youth, but the insidious first steps toward a lifetime of over-consumption.

The film, however, is far from a gloomy polemic. Spurlock laughs at his growing gut throughout the film, and encourages us to laugh along with him. The result makes for a more effective argument, pointing out the absurdities of our fast food nation rather than shaming us for behaving thus.

While Super Size Me does make for a good laugh, the film, along with Bush’s Brain, is more an invitation to pause and consider the state of the nation more carefully. After these films, crowds left the theater shaking their heads in an apparent mixture of disgust and amazement, as likely to vote Republican as they were to eat a Big Mac.