Super Size Me really fucked me up as a kid. I am a fat, bummed out person who was a fat, bummed out child, and my mother was worried.

Some of you may be familiar with this story: the trips to the nutritionist, the measured surveillance of food, the panicky love that turns every meal into a catalog of trespasses that becomes part of your body. When you open the box of Honey Nut Cheerios and find its sweet-but-not-too-sweet contents divided into single serving plastic baggies that have been piled back inside of it like segregated organs, your suspicions are confirmed whether you realize it or not. You are the worst version of yourself, your own abject conclusion. You cannot be trusted to care for the trillions of cells you have to pilot every day, and as such, you are not made to eat for your own nourishment, but the nourishment of your future perfect form. The person they feed is not the person you are, but the person they believe you can become.

I was eight when my family rented Super Size Me from the video store cum tanning salon up the street from our house, the one with the porn tapes hidden behind a shower curtain that never ratted me out by crinkling when I went to commune with the impossibly thin women wearing nothing but spiky TOO HOT FOR TV stickers. It’s clear to me now that my parents rented the movie as part of their healthy eating crusade, that my horrified response was, in some ways, part of the plan. But at the time, I just thought it was cool that someone made a whole movie about eating McDonald’s.

I was fascinated by the movie and terrified of it. I had nightmares for months afterward, my first experience with the kind of fear that keeps you awake against your will. I know that the brain is part of the body, that the mind is never separate from the thing that houses it, but the afterimages of those creepy paintings and Morgan Spurlock’s palpable misery seemed to come from a place beyond me, a void whose depth was only betrayed by how quickly its presence jolted me back into exhaustion. During the day, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was slowly killing myself every time I ate something I enjoyed. Though I didn’t have the language to articulate the intrusive thoughts, I became obsessed with the idea that living was nothing more than an agonizing series of microscopic trades against my own mortality, that each of the small, delightful things I thought I loved about being a person was fueled by irreplaceable crumbs of my soul. I was not afraid of being dead, but I was afraid of dying. I was afraid of the electric meat I was forced to be cradled by, afraid of how I always seemed to be trading wads of it for every individual moment of joy.

It’s a funny family anecdote that I refused to look at anything having to do with McDonald’s for weeks after watching Super Size Me, that I would turn away from signs and leave the room during commercials as if out of some twisted reverence. The older I get, the more I think of memory in terms of places, and thus feelings, that I can no longer occupy, the classrooms and basements and corners of friends’ houses I will never have access to again. Me belonging in my body and my body belonging in a place until it no longer does. Me trying to act nonchalant in the back corner of a tacky video store. Me sitting in the family minivan, averting my eyes from the golden arches’ omniscient glow. Me staring out the window of my childhood bedroom, watching the Midwest sunset paint the neighbor’s house an unspeakably tragic shade of yellow as I wondered if tonight would be the night I would finally fall asleep.

It’s undeniable that the movie traumatized me, but in exacerbating the depressed, anxious thought spirals I barely understood, the movie also gifted me a perverse kind of orientation. We do not get to choose the things that give us access to ourselves, not really. Spurlock was never a good enough filmmaker for his work to have created these feelings in me, but he was just good enough to help me recognize them from an indirect distance, good enough for his work to ignite the dry, existential detritus of my disordered eating, turning it into something with heat, power, meaning. My psychic pain didn’t have a name or a shape or a voice, but maybe it had a zipcode, a designated voting district, a favorite lunch spot.

***I am uninterested in rehashing the ways the bullshit methodology of Super Size Me has been debunked. That conversation has been had many different times in many different places, and ultimately, I find it to be beside the point. Spurlock’s intellectual dishonesty is inherent to the film’s premise. Eating nothing but McDonald’s three times a day for a month while moving as little as possible and deliberately failing to strategize your caloric intake, what Spurlock calls “every eight-year-olds dream”, has nothing to with the kind of questions the movie flirts with regarding fast food production and personal versus corporate responsibility. Spurlock’s stunt isn’t a science experiment or a politically sound demonstration or a thoughtful way to engage with the cultural moment he claims to be responding to — it’s just fucking stupid.

And make no mistake, the stunt is the movie; it’s the only interesting thing that happens during its 98-minute runtime. The film’s overall rhetoric is laughable and depressing: The framework of Spurlock’s “investigation” is petty, cruel, and uninformed, and though I’m sure he would be the first to tell you he’s not trying to make high art, the pretentious condescension baked into the movie’s perspective makes it obvious he’s not trying, period.

Super Size Me is partially about Spurlock’s stunt and partially about the pop-nutrition questions surrounding American obesity in the early aughts, but, mechanically and structurally, it’s mostly about stretching edgy cartoons and B-roll of random fat women’s asses over deliberately misleading statistics and contextless snippets of stilted talking head interviews. In a review of the film published in Slant Magazine in April 2004, Ed Gonzalez highlights the fundamental disconnect that ultimately sinks Spurlock’s shallow enterprise:

Forget that this stunt is completely irresponsible: Spurlock seems like a healthy guy, and he succeeds only in trivializing people with real eating disorders. The main hypocrisy here is that Spurlock takes on McDonald’s for exercising little to no ethical responsibility when selling burgers just as he’s needlessly getting fat in order to be able to sell a documentary. Spurlock knows he wouldn’t have an audience to pander to without the stunt (what doesn’t [sic] Super Size Me reveal that hasn’t been detailed on countless “Give Me a Break”-style news segments?), and as such he reveals himself to be as savvy and self-interested as that clown who’s feeding your children everyday.

The thing people often fail to understand about fatphobia is that it’s not just about beauty standards or bullying or individual measures of self-acceptance. Rather, it’s an impossibly complex ontological construct, an invisible morality that damns some bodies and sanctifies others in service of honing and perpetuating cultural and political hegemony. It’s not just about who’s hot and who’s not, but about how and why and in what form people get to exist, about how endlessly nuanced concepts like gender, race, health, success, etc. get to look, and thus be understood through the lens of truncated, commodifiable signifiers designed to encourage some questions and erase the chance to ask others.

When I say Spurlock’s approach in Super Size Me is fatphobic and narrow-minded, I mean that the movie doesn’t make any sense unless you accept that fatness is the physical manifestation of a kind of spiritual curse that both comes from and affects nothing besides the individual shortcomings of the person in question. Even on my umpteenth rewatch, I am unable to stop myself from audibly begging Spurlock’s grainy spector to ask some goddamn follow-up questions. He totally ignores the intersecting political and industrial factors that one would need to consider when talking seriously about the “supersizing of America”: the economic forces and evolving realities of labor that impact people’s ability to exercise and eat in healthy ways, systemic infrastructure problems like redlining and gentrification that contribute to the creation of food deserts and food swamps, or the myriad environmental factors and living conditions that contribute to people’s poor health across decades. Spurlock has no interest in these things, and so they don’t exist.

But as with the movie’s pseudoscience, getting bogged down in these rhetorical blindspots only serves to distract from the thing no one ever talks about when discussing his work, the grim, unpleasant engine that drives Super Size Me specifically and much of Spurlock’s filmmaking in general. I keep returning to the movie not because it’s good or nostalgic or ironically compelling, but because I am drawn to Spurlock’s aforementioned stupidity. I am obsessed with the blantantness of it, the macabre ways it soaks into every aspect of his filmography to the point of total possession. Super Size Me isn’t just dated, it’s desiccated. The meat of the film, its noxious framework, was rotten from the beginning, never designed to hold up to time or basic scrutiny. Two decades out from the film’s release, everything else about it save for the white, hard knot of his suicidal McDonald’s binge has finally finished melting into the dirt. There is nothing else to witness besides the extended spectacle of Spurlock’s self-harm. Watching the movie today throws this fact into such stark contrast it almost hurts your eyes: as an auteur, as an muckraker, as a documentarian, Spurlock’s stupidity, his willingness to hurt himself and call it a conversation, is all he’s ever had. I do not find this to be noble or productive or beautiful, but there is something about it I find vital, important.

***It feels like Spurlock and his work have been following me around my entire life. Not just in how I think of him narrating his first “McStomachache” every time I inevitably fall back into my disordered eating habits, or the ways Super Size Me contributed to my interest in the theatricality of “nonfiction”, but in weirdly specific ways that echo throughout my family history.

Spurlock is from the same parts of West Virginia both my parents’ families are from: he was born in Parkersburg, a city up north along the Ohio River, and raised in Beckley, an old mining town an hour south of Charleston. My father’s uncle Miller was the first Black principal of Woodrow Wilson High School where Spurlock was a student, along with my maternal grandfather in an earlier era. It is not uncommon for Appalachian families to have distant relatives scattered across the land, for the history of these families to be a history of migration, exoduses of all sizes daisy chained across generations as people move from town to town for work and love and opportunity. One such exodus brought my parents to Columbus, Ohio.

In June of 2005, during the same month I first watched Super Size Me, Spurlock’s reality show 30 Days premiered on FX. The show followed the movie’s formula, documenting people as they participated in “unfamiliar lifestyles” for a month. In the pilot, Spurlock and his then-current fiancé move to Franklinton, a neighborhood in Columbus, to try and live off the era’s minimum wage of five dollars and fifteen cents an hour. The neighborhood, also called The Bottoms, is just up the road from the hospital where I was born, separate from my body, separate from my family home, separate from myself.

In 2017, Spurlock would release what would ultimately be his last film, Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!, in which he opens a fast food chicken restaurant to explore the validity of the industry’s health conscious rebranding. The restaurant, another stunt that barely has anything to do with the questions the film raises, took over the abandoned husk of a Wendy’s at 2405 Schrock Road. The building is technically in Columbus, but is in reality part of the suburb of Westerville, just a three minute drive from my undergrad campus. As I watched the line of eager customers standing in the parking lot under the building’s ugly new lime green awning, I thought of how I had once stood in that same parking lot as the sun was setting, watching my dead 1999 Ford Windstar get pulled onto the bed of a tow truck. It was Valentine’s day, and me and the girl I was dating at the time had evening plans that my car’s shitty battery had ruined. She had showered me with gifts earlier that day, one of which was a full size strawberry sheet cake I was forced to brandish along with my license and insurance info. I thought about how ridiculous I must have looked sitting up against the wall of Spurlock’s future restaurant, feeling my chances of getting laid dwindling with the sunlight as I ate bits of cake with my fingers and waited for my friends to come pick me up. This, I remember thinking, is so fucking stupid.

Which is all to say that I feel a certain kinship to Spurlock and his work, a connection that isn’t love or admiration but has the shape and weight of those things, the stubborn kernel of a bond that I am forced to keep in my back pocket. I am not from West Virginia; I’m from people who are from West Virginia. I know the place not by the land, but by the way my folks carry the land’s lessons with them. There is something about Spurlock’s work that feels quintessentially Appalachian to me, animated by a scrappy kind of self-loathing that is, in its own way, comforting. Spurlock’s obsession with limiting the scope of his interrogations to the mechanics of his stunts, his impulse to shrink daunting social and ethical issues down into tchotchkes, tiny decorative monuments to his own asinine endurance, speaks to something beyond self-interest and mediocre filmmaking. The personal perspective of his films isn’t an issue because it jeopardizes journalistic integrity or taints some platonic ideal of objectivity, but because it proves Spurlock’s ultimate muse to be his own degradation. There is, to me, a certain kind of Appalachian impulse toward self-definition via self-harm. It’s often misunderstood by folks who are unfamiliar with places that are so thoroughly defined by the realities of addiction, poverty, systemic health issues, and corporate exploitation, defined too by all the outside narratives surrounding the abstract idea of those realities. If death is the only option, let me at least choose it for myself. To be faced with decay and seek dignity instead of rejuvenation, to seek freedom not in change but in the chance to rot on your own terms, is very West Virginia.

Spurlock’s work that best encapsulates this debasement-as-dramatic-question aspect of his artist ethos is his 2002 MTV reality show I Bet You Will. Originating as a webcast in the post-Jackass, pre-YouTube internet landscape, the show involved Spurlock and his assorted co-hosts offering supposedly random people money to publicly humiliate themselves. The stunts consisted of things like a woman asking beachgoers to stick gum in her hair, a woman bobbing for duck eggs in a vat of watery gravy, a woman jumping rope in branded underwear while Spurlock shoots her with a super soaker filled with milk, etc. At the beginning of Super Size Me 2, when Spurlock refers to him “making a career out of questionable life choices”, this is what he’s talking about. In a 2005 interview, Spurlock said he amassed close to a quarter million dollars in credit card debt over the course of a year leading up to the show’s cancellation just three months after it aired. Some of the money he made from I Bet You Will was put toward paying off these loans, and the rest was used to fund Super Size Me: “When they canceled the show and I was down to about two hundred thousand dollars, I said ‘Well I could either throw this money into that bottomless pit of debt, or I could make a movie.” He grins as the audience begins to chuckle. “That was my logic. Those were the only two possibilities.”

The fact that Spurlock was making the kind of derivative, uncomfortable TV destined for the hard drives of Russian fetishists right up until the release of Super Size Me shouldn’t come as a surprise. Spurlock has said that the original plan for the movie was to have someone else go on the fast-food diet, but that he decided to do it himself once he realized there was no other way to guarantee the guinea pig’s commitment. It was always about the stunt, about the performance of the stunt. In so many ways, the movie’s success was a fluke. Going back through his filmography, it’s clear that Spurlock never really grew as an artist or a journalist, that his movies all follow the same formula and fall into the same traps, that Spurlock’s career as a C-list documentarian hinged entirely on taking clumsy advantage of a brief cultural moment.

As I fuck up my YouTube algorithm to watch Spurlock wear a t-shirt that says STUPDITY PAYS as he cheers for “Trish” to shove an entire large pepperoni pizza slice by slice into her 240p skinny jeans, it becomes impossible to forget that Spurlock was both a confessed sex pest and a rampant alcoholic. In a 2017 blog post titled “I am Part of the Problem”, Spurlock details his history of sexual misconduct, infidelity, and at least one instance of presumed sexual assault. Spurlock also mentions he had been “consistently drinking since the age of 13” and  hadn’t “been sober for more than a week in 30 years” which, among many other things, renders Super Size Me even more meaningless than it already was. He also references being sexually abused as a child, his life-long battle with depression, and his absent father, mostly in the form of rhetorical questions. I don’t doubt the sincerity behind the post, but the whole thing is a textbook non-apology, a way of acknowledging past harm without truly growing or owning up to anything.

I wasn’t able to articulate my feelings about Spurlock and his work until he died earlier this year. That’s the thing about making a career out of hurting yourself, about making a living finding your own ways to scorn death: once death finally comes, everything will be revealed to have been for nothing. I am not here to defend Spurlock, and yet I find myself so desperate for his work to amount to more than it does, for his obvious self-hatred to be as meaningful in reality as it is to me personally. I have never known a version of myself who didn’t want to die, who doesn’t feel every pound of her existence all of the time. It is embarrassing to admit that I am still so desperate to find purpose in pain. I want to get in touch with the ancient parts of myself that allow me to aim my rot. Yearning for death is an entire country, a chilled continent whose primary export is sharp corners. What does it mean to “get better”, anyway? What does it mean to love your body, to love what your body houses, to love what your body needs to survive?

Because McDonald’s discontinued the Super Size option shortly after the film’s release, my understanding of the phrase has nothing to do with food. The song Spurlock commissioned for the movie by MC Doug Ray, AKA Toothpick, has been stuck in my head for 20 years. It’s named after the movie and is also total garbage, just over four minutes of half-assed rapping and cartoonish fatphobia (“Now I can’t get out of bed and I have to order in / I’m a triple fat fatty and I have a triple chin”). The back half of the chorus is what’s stuck with me: it’s just Toothpick saying the film’s title over and over again, but the repetition slowly twists the ostensible request into something sadder, more anguished. It’s so stupid, but there is a pleading to the words I can’t shake. He is begging for an impossible thing, and the begging is all he has. He’s craving purpose, death, a new form that can keep up with the world around him. Attention, understanding, a taste of what you got. Super Size Me. Super Size Me. Super Size Me. Super Size Me.