ABSTRACT
The documentary delivers an emphatic biopedagogical message, once which, for all its avowed interest in corporate accountability, serves ultimately to reinforce the ideal of individualized risk responsibility and corporeal self-scrutiny. It aligns itself to a significant extent with the obesity science’s stress on ‘performative health’, and which privileges ‘those “risks” that are most readily quantifiable’ and can be made hypervisible, through the evaluated body. The ‘healthy’ intervention depicted in the film takes on a dyspeptic dimension when viewed with the benefit of hindsight, given that it involves former Subway restaurant spokesperson Jared Fogle. Super Size Me sees Spurlock submit himself for the scrutiny of ‘performative health’ – or more accurately, ‘performative ill-health’ in order to render visible the risks of the obesity epidemic. Super Size Me takes a trim four-and-a-half minutes to set out its core ideas and the high concept premise that will create its underlying structure and narrative thrust.
