To be bluntly honest, I don’t care much for Morgan Spurlock. I find his strenuous efforts to charm us to be utterly charmless. He’s essentially an All-American wiseguy with a propensity for making pseudo-documentaries about preposterous subjects. He’s like that annoying guy in the back of the class, bound almost fatalistically to inherent his dad’s used-car dealership.
Mostly Spurlock is working the fringes of American capitalism and he ultimately achieves success because he’s pitching to his own kind—men and women who have carved out their commercial niches with harmless products of dubious value. Often enough they reject Spurlock. But enough of them recognize him as one of their own—a pitchman riding along on a smile and a shoeshine, cheekily hawking an opportunity to participate in a nonevent that, all kidding aside, cannot provably help or hinder their own enterprises.
If Spurlock’s film has any value, it is as portrait of self-deception, a point it does not overtly make. It’s all snake-oil-salesman to snake-oil-salesman—lots of people earnestly considering whether spending a decent amount of cash on an activity will have any effect whatsoever on the Dear Sales Curve.Read More
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