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Is Morgan Spurlock’s Over-Sponsored Doc An Ingenious Exposé or a Sell Out?

By Peter Simek |
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One thing that’s undeniable is that documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) is a funny guy. He is funny in the way a class clown is funny. He mines laughs by breaking rules and pushing buttons. He has an innate charisma that is likable in a sloppy, jestery kind of way. And Spurlock makes documentaries that feel like highbrow Jackass stunts. Rather than simply mortifying his body for dropped-jawed amusement, Spurlock wraps his stunts into the complicated web of consummeristic American culture, playing sacrificial victim to a world that values product over people. The results are undeniably compelling.

In Super Size Me, Spurlock subjected himself to a month of McDonald’s — much to the detriment of his physical health. Now, in The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, Spurlock completely sells out to make a point, subjecting his movie to a glut of sponsorships, advertisements, product placements, and corporate promotion. The result is an intriguing, entertaining, and troubling movie-product that dances on a delicate line between satire and cynical prank. The question at hand: can an inside joke about the forthrightness of commercialized art withstand the undermining erosion that product promotion can have on the integrity of an artistic statement?

On one level, The Greatest Movie Ever Sold is an ingenious spoof on the creeping power of commercial interests in movies and on television. In it, Spurlock opens the doors wide for all the corporate sponsorship he can swallow, and the movie itself tells the story of how he was able to attain the sponsorships to make the movie happen. This leads to some hilarious scenes. In a meeting with executives from POM Wonderful, the pomegranate juice that purchased naming writes to the film and will therefore receive product promotion through every movie review written about it (as I have just unwittingly done), Spurlock pitches advertising campaigns that betray his goofy, college prank sense of humor: the POM bottles doubling as breasts, Spurlock appearing naked. Then there is Mane N Tail Shampoo, which advertises itself as working on both humans and animals, enough of an oddity for Spurlock to dream up a hilarious commercial involving a Shetland Pony.

In these scenes, Spurlock has some success in unlocking the way corporations buy covert advertising space in the entertainment mediums we consume willingly without being aware that we are being sold a product. He talks with expert agents who connect movie productions and corporations. He even goes into a Florida school district and exposes how willing they are to invite corporate donors into the classroom, cluttering the school day with ads for whoever is willing to shell out cash.

In short, Spurlock’s attitude here is “if you can’t fight ‘em, join ‘em.” But despite Spurlock’s flippant attitude towards the powers of commercial culture, his movie is no less a marketing tool for the various products featured in it. That makes the movie similar to last year’s Exit Through the Gift Shop, Banksy’s documentary about street art. Like that film, The Greatest Movie Ever Sold generates its power through a head-spinning self-reflection: making the movie the subject of the movie. On the one hand, Spurlock is pulling one over on the corporations, having them fund a movie that exposes the mechanisms in which they coerce the public into buying their products. On the other hand, Spurlock pulls one over on the audience, making us think we are included in a joke, while nonetheless being bombarded with a glut of advertising.

Walking out of the screening I attended, I received a bottle of POM Wonderful. In chatting about the film, I’ve mentioned the pomegranate drink brand numerous times. Despite the jokes and good-natured humor, POM Wonderful got its money’s worth when it purchased the naming rights to the film.

And that’s the real problem here. For all of the advertising Spurlock forces us to sit through, he doesn’t really pull the curtain back on too many hidden wizards. Most savvy movie watchers are aware of product placement. Most lovers of TV enter into an implicit contract with the boob tube: this will be entertaining, but somewhere along the way I will be sold something. All Spurlock manages to do is tell us that it is out there while forcing us through a dizzying hurricane of ads.

The problem with the creeping influence of advertising is not awareness; it is whether art can work outside of that influence — if movies can be made without subjecting themselves to some amount of corporate branding or product promotion. In this way, Spurlock doesn’t solve a problem, he merely acknowledges it. Sure, he does so in an entertaining way. But isn’t every good commercial entertaining on some level?

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