Morgan Spurlock on The American Way
Supersize Me’s Morgan Spurlock is no stranger to brand warfare. (He and Ronald McDonald probably still aren’t speaking.) Spurlock’s new documentary, The Greatest Story Ever Sold, is both about the evils of product placement and entirely funded by product placement. The Guardian just reviewed it, saying “We onlookers seem to be expected to wallow in a kind of knee-jerk indignation that we don’t actually feel” and “For your next trick, Morgan, why not try something less tricksy but a little bit more consequential?”
I interviewed Spurlock about this little while ago for triple j magazine, and found him A) very charming and B) pretty candid about the film’s goals. Here it is.
So this interview is just part of the ‘media impressions’ required by your sponsors, right?
That’s right. You’re complicit in this whole process.
I feel like a DVD extra or something.
You are a walking, talking DVD extra! But it’s not just you. What I love about the film is that it shows you how things are marketed, how that marketing turns into awareness, how that awareness turns into attendance…
In Greatest Movie, we see you getting your Don Draper on and trying to sell the concept to brands. Is this something that comes naturally, or do you hate the business of movie-making?
What I’ve learned is that if you’re going to be in this business, you really need to understand how to manoeuvre in this business. Pitching is one of those things that they don’t teach you in school. You’re thrown into the deep end as a filmmaker when you graduate from college and you’ve got to figure it out. I made it up as I went along.
Your last film, Where In The World is Osama Bin Laden…
Question answered by the way. President Obama, you’re welcome.
…that movie was also a kind of sales pitch, just one for tolerance and understanding. Greatest Story feels different because you’re compromised from the start.
Yeah. That’s part of what makes the film work. You see the corruption take place. After making this, I told people that when you get into business with a brand it’s not a 30% or 40% chance – it’s a 100% chance they’ll somehow infect the content.
“Transparency is the new objectivity”. Do you agree?
I think we live in a time where people have been jerked around and lied to for so long that the new thing is just to not jerk people around and lie to them. To finally say: “You know what? I’m going to do something nuts and tell you the truth.” We’re at the end of that rope, and people are tired of being bullshitted.
Is that really where we’re setting the bar? “I know you’re going to screw me, but at least you’re honest about it”?
Yeah! I think it is! That’s exactly where we are!
The movie shows how everyone has their own line between ‘what’s okay’ and ‘what’s selling out’. Where’s your line?
The line I didn’t want to cross was giving up control of the film. The greatest asset they got out was the movie marketing their products, but the greatest asset I got was the film itself. The minute I gave final cut over to a brand or a company, I compromised my ability to tell the most honest and open story I could.
Did a number of sponsors want final cut?
All of them. Every single contract.
They should at least put more money on the table. “Final cut? Ten million dollars!”
I would happily have given it to them for ten million dollars.
Are you worried the film makes product placement seem sort of fun and harmless?
There was a great thing that happened after the premiere of the movie at Sundance. We got a standing ovation for the brands. It was one of the most insane things you’d ever seen. A woman came up to one of the brand representatives and said “First I want to thank you, all your companies, for supporting this movie. I’m going to buy more of your products because you did – but I’m conflicted about it.” Luckily the irony wasn’t lost on her. And I hope that when people watch the movie, just like her, the irony of the situation isn’t lost.
While a lot of the doco is funny, I found the last ten minutes strangely moving, especially with that OK Go song rising up behind it.
What I love about the film is how it comes full circle. Everything I’m critiquing at the beginning of the movie are the tools I’m using to market the film at the end. So you see the snake eating its tail. The lyrics of that OK Go song are “We solved all our problems with bigger problems”. That’s the American way.
This interview first appeared in triple j magazine #53.
To Look Like Superman
Every week, the internet selects a zany news report to pass around like an infectious yawn, and this week it was Herbert Chavez. He loves Superman so much he’s had multiple plastic surgeries in order to look more like his hero.
Buzzfeed summed it up like this: “So this is Herbert Chavez, who looks normal and not at all creepy. Strike that. Reverse it.” (Bizarro would be proud.) Andy Khouri, much more sympathetically, described it as an “unsettling quest” symptomatic of Body Dysmorphic Disorder. “It is of course within this man’s rights to alter his body in any way he sees fit,” he writes, “but it’s not hard to imagine the Man of Steel disapproving of Chavez’s actions.”
Ignoring empathy for a moment – sorry, Superman – this makes me think about Superman’s face. All the faces of comic book superheroes look wildly different depending on which artist happens to be drawing them. And I asked last year if we were willing to accept the ever-changing facial features of superheroes “because we instinctually think they’re only different artistic interpretations of the one, concrete, real-world face? A ‘secret identity’ that we’ll never actually get to see?”
But Superman isn’t a human being with a human face, caricatured onto the comic book page. The page is where he was born. Pencil and ink are his origin story; his planet Krypton. So what, in essence, does this Superman look like? He has a square jaw. A cleft chin. A spit-curl. Dark hair, white skin. That’s about it. Everything else can change on whim.
I’ve always wondered why Hollywood’s obsession with plastic surgery is only ever used to look young. One day, an actor will go under the knife to give themselves new emotive abilities: anime-sized eyes for augmented empathy, or expanded tear ducts to better gush during tragic third acts…
Writer Peter Milligan and artist Duncan Fegredo explored this idea in their fantastic mid-90s horror comic Face. It’s the story of David, a plastic surgeon who is summoned to perform surgery on an aged, reclusive artist named Andrew Sphinx. But Sphinx, who was a personal friend of Picasso, wants something different from the surgery. Something a little more… cubist.
If someone wants to look like Christopher Reeve or Dean Cain or Brandon Routh – sure, that’s one thing. Truly resembling the comic book Superman, though, is something else. You’d need to make your nose into two quick strokes, like an upside down seven, and abstract your eyes into featureless circles attached to the eyebrows above.
Otherwise, like Andrew Sphinx says to his surgeon: “You’re still stuck in classical realism, and you’re not even aware of it.”
Outtakes: Matt Fraction
Over at Bookslut this month, I forego my usual column for an epic interview with writer Matt Fraction about the return of his comic Casanova. It’s amazing what a difference it makes when someone happily gives you over an hour to chat instead of the twenty minutes common to film and TV interviews. I hope you agree.
As always, there was plenty we talked about that didn’t make the final cut, mostly because I try to keep my Bookslut stuff from becoming too seeped in superheroes. (I fail at this with embarrassing regularity.)
Here’s a little more of our conversation about comics as cinema, accelerated storytelling, his superhero writing on Iron Man and Fear Itself, and his appreciation of Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis.
One thing I admire about Casanova is its crazy economy of storytelling. And that’s one reason why I can’t imagine Casanova: The Movie – unless it was something like Total Recall was to Philip K. Dick. Casanova feels more comic-specific than, maybe, your superhero stuff. Would you agree?
I hope not. I think that’d mean the superhero stuff fails on some level.
Perhaps it’s just that your Iron Man seems born out of the Robert Downey Jr. take on the character.
That’s an illusion of publication schedule. I had four or five issues in the can when the first film came out. I had no special access; I saw the trailer when everybody else saw the trailer.
So why does Iron Man feel more ‘cinematic’ to me than Casanova?
I think that’s the grammar of superhero comics right now – or, rather, it was when I came in. Over this last year, from issue #500, Iron Man’s started to change. You can see the pages changing, the density change. As Fear Itself came along it kind of had to grow backwards a little bit, but you’ll see change coming out the other side. That’s my own proclivities as much as anything else. That was the grammar – or the accent, maybe – of the language that superhero comics were speaking. Three, four panel pages.
I got a really fascinating note from Joe Quesada on the first issue of Fear Itself: that I write so close to the bone, I carve away so much, we had a 48-page event that read like a 22-page comic. And that was a problem. I’d cut away so much in the interest of keeping things super-accelerated that I’d crossed the threshold and he found it too brisk. Fear Itself #1 is huge. It’s a big comic where a lot of things happen. It’s not slight – it’s lean. So I did a draft where I went back and added, which I hardly ever do, you know? And he was absolutely right. It was an incredibly trenchant observation. My natural instinct is to cut away, cut and cut and cut, until acceleration is almost a character.
It’s funny that in blockbuster crossover comics like Fear Itself – or Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis – you get to have an economy that you mightn’t in regular titles. They deal with so many characters, so much appearing on every page…
Final Crisis is a great example. Look at what Morrison cut out, and look at the backlash that particular book received. Now, I’ve studied Final Crisis like the Torah. I love it for what’s not there as much as for what is there. I suspect that’s why people wail and bitch and moan that they don’t get it, they don’t understand it. Never mind the inherent absurdity they can keep track of, say, thirty years of Legion continuity or four series of Star Trek or thirteen different Doctors Who – but a single Grant Morrison comic that doesn’t take the time to point out that those are Eclipso Gems? It somehow causes paroxysms of confusion and rage.
You can read the rest of the interview at Bookslut.
New York New York
I just arrived back in Melbourne after spending a few weeks in New York, recovering from our premiere of EXIT at the Fantasia Festival in Montreal. I feel like I haven’t been absorbing much popular culture: some reading, a couple of films, and hours marvelling at America’s pharmaceutical advertising on TV.
(Why are epic lists of awful side effects paired with actors smiling silently down the camera? It makes them look like they really, really want you to develop suicidal thoughts. Like they just they can’t wait for your liver to fail.)
Anyway, I was amazed to hear the receipt printers in New York cabs make a sound exactly like the Smoke Monster from Lost. When I mentioned this I was told the opposite was true: the Smoke Monster’s sound was sourced from NYC taxis.
New York is popular culture.
Australia has always been in an odd cultural position. With such a small population, relatively speaking, it’s always been cheaper to import media than to make it ourselves. A recent Screen Australia report says this is only going to get worse in the near future.
Given the choice, we seemed to pride ourselves on preferring classier British fare. Until recently, the most generic British crime drama was somehow considered more highly than the best American one. We’ll fight to the death for David Brent over Michael Scott in The Office. Our newsreaders, for years, had mostly British accents to give them a suitable sense of authority.
My childhood, though, was composed almost entirely of American cartoons, and sitcoms, and comic books. I never cared about seeing Australian stories on screen – no doubt part to a hefty dose of cultural cringe.
When I was young, I remember making jokes about Spider-Man’s abilities to always find something to swing from, any time of the day or night. Maybe there was a plane overhead! Or a blimp! Or a low flying (but sturdy) bird! Young Martyn wasn’t a particularly funny kid, admittedly, and seeing New York firsthand only proved that he was dead wrong, too.
Scott Bukatman explains why in his essay ‘The Boys in the Hoods: A Song of the Urban Superhero’. “Let me propose,” he writes, “that American superheroes encapsulated and embodied the same utopian aspirations of modernity as the cities themselves.” And, later: “The superhero city is founded on the relationship between grids and grace. The city becomes a place of grace by licensing the multitude of fantasies that thrived against the ‘constraining’ ground of the grid.”
Spider-Man only makes sense once you’ve seen his city. Superman might be “the mighty newspaper”, but as Spidey says in Giant-Size Astonishing X-Men #1: “I am New York.”
Now visiting New York makes me feel like I’m starring in a kid-friendly remake of Ringu and I’ve climbed inside the TV . And sure, the puppets might be people and the soundtrack by the Ramones, but staying in the East Village is like living on Sesame Street.
I’m never comfortable travelling. I subscribe to William Gibson’s theory of jetlag from the opening pages of Pattern Recognition: that it’s side effect of your soul, lost in the slipstream behind you, yet to catch up with your body. And I’m still stuck on how passports are faintly ridiculous, too. Little books of paper and cloth, stamped with actual stamps. Wielding one is like wearing a monocle or a pocketwatch on a chain.
But all my years spent in the middle of New York’s mythology – even from half a world away – makes visiting it a strange sort of homecoming.