The genre of documentaries is generally associated with dusty classrooms, the mating rituals of the South African bumblebee or the relief of a tedious day being interrupted by an hour's worth of merciful darkness. Never very exciting, but always, you know, 'kinda interesting', the documentary was bound to suffer a slow and painful death at the hands of all those Miss Schroeders (my fourth grade teacher) and Mr Forsters (maths teacher first and second grade) who seemed to be just as glad to get a break from the pretend enthusiasm about the microcosm of life as illustrated by a beehive as we were.
Along came Morgan Spurlock, or was it Michael More?, here's to that the chicken or egg question, and introduced us to a new genre of documentaries which celebrated the documenter as much as it denounced the ethically suspect interviewees. It wasn't exactly witch-hunt material, but surely was more exciting than boring observation, coupled with a healthy sense of objectivity.
Spurlocks' latest pop-doc looks into the world of product placement or 'co-promotion' as it is referred to nowadays. This is a film within a film, as Spurlock is depicted trying to get brands to fund his film all the while placing products and adverts within it. In the meantime he is making a film about these companies and how modern marketing is taking over creative production. Get it? Remember that scene from The Lady from Shanghai, with the mirrors? Well, this is similar on a conceptual basis.
The audience then follows Spurlock through what seems like endless board meetings and pitching of ideas, up to the point he finally manages to get his first sponsor on board, which eventually leads him to land the juice manufacturer POM wonderful for one million dollars. In exchange, Spurlock not only has to appear in an advert for POM within the space of his feature, he also agrees to include the sponsor's name in the title.
All of this is done with a tongue-in-cheek attitude, which one cannot help but feel is a certain reassurance on Spurlock's part to the audience that even though he might be 'selling out', he is doing so ironically for the sake of exposure, in an attempt to affirm his own sense of integrity. Spurlock claims that his film is all about transparency, and this might be considered valid in his attempt not to influence the audience. At the same time, however, this 'transparency' is never challenged and introduces a notion of shallowness, as the film fails to convincingly engage in the most obvious of questions raised by 'co-promotion', namely the corruption of artistic integrity. Granted, Spurlock conducts a series of interviews with the likes of Quentin Tarantiono, J.J Abrams and Brett Ratner, getting a neat, tightly edited point of view from each one of them, conveniently covering all bases of the argument, from the director who embraces product placement as part of popular culture (guess which one of these...), to the one that takes it as necessary evil, to one who sees it as the death of artistic integrity. Tick the box!
Spurlock's film is not bad as such, rather, it remains aimless and ambivalent throughout, never really committing to any one stance. The structure of the documentary is poor in its slightly odd juxtaposition of themes and its mixing of tones. First it relies heavily on Spurlock himself as a brand, selling him as a commodity, not only to the companies, but, moreover, to the audience itself. Sperlock possesses the charm of a used-car salesman, rendering the overall tone one of gimmicky entertainment, rather than serious investigation.
All of a sudden, however, as if realizing that he wants to be taken seriously as a documentary film-maker, Spulock attempts to induce some intellectual weight into the equation, including what can only be called snippets of discussion with, for example, Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader. In a painfully obvious, if slightly charming in its boyish enthusiasm, pun on modern marketing and subjective branding, Spurlock, with blatant glee, meets Donald Trump, who comes to represent a symbol rather than interviewee, important in his presence rather than his vague answers. All throughout the interviews, Spurlock can be seen drinking POM juice and even entangling Chomsky in a lively discussion about the merits of the brand of the shoes funding the very scene Chomsky is in. Self-referential nods like this, provide the film with genuinely funny moments in which the audience chuckles at Spurlock's obvious enjoyment in this admittedly quite simplistic form of irony.
There are glimpses of what seems to be almost the film Spurlock attempted to make within this accumulation of semi-witty comments on the nature of the marketing machinery. These moments sit odd within the structure and tone of the documentary. Spurlock visits a school affected by governmental cuts and reacts by taking matters into its own hands by selling space for advertisement purposes. One of the most critical and shocking scenes reveals the introduction of free TVs in classrooms, in exchange for twelve minutes of corporate broadcasts, in which the adolescent students are targeted with specific adverts of, for example, skin products and blockbuster trailers marketed to their specific age group. It is here, that the audience truly glimpses the ugly nature of marketing as it clearly reveals how an individual is brainwashed without personal choice. For a brief moment, corporate marketing raises its ugly head, as the film treats it, not with tongue-in-cheek mockery, but illustrates how in our age of so-called individualism, we are in the end, nothing but specific targets in a machinery which classifies members of society by their buying power in terms of age, gender or lifestyle.
By the same token, Spurlock shows us an alternative reality in visiting Sao Paulo, a city which has bravely put a ban on all public advertisement. In seeing the pure, almost naked, space of this city, the audience comes to truly realize the degree of its desensitisation in regard to the appropriation of space by marketing. Sao Paulo's people re-appropriate their living space, commenting on the fact that they are finally able to focus on the space they inhabit, without being targeted at all times. At the same time they literally inscribe their city in the form of artworks on the walls of their buildings. All of a sudden, the audience is confronted with an awareness which is as simple as it is shocking, namely the fact that a city or any space for that matter should be a construct of its people, rather than a corporate reality in which its inhabitants are walking marks of their individual economic capital.
Even though these moments sit quite awkwardly within the general construct of the film, they are, nevertheless, the only 'real' moments of reflection and come to present the film most of us would have liked to see. The rest of the film comes to appear as a mere means of appeasement for the sponsors. Interesting as the procedure of getting funding for a film might be, in itself the depiction of this process reveals nothing original and leaves the film somewhat without depth and a curiously hollow framework.
As such, Spurlock's work presents an entertaining account of the marriage of modern marketing and cinema, it does, however ultimately fail to resolve the real issues at stake, such as the corruption of a sense of artistic integrity, the marketability of the modern notion of individualism and the all-pervading presence of advertisement in modern life. The film awkwardly lingers on the surface and even while providing some moments of genuine entertainment, the rare moments of authenticated interest fail to merge homogeneously within the text. Spurlock becomes the master of the obvious, meanwhile, however, this might be a reflection on the desensitization of its audience's viewing habits as a result of the constant surrounding of adverts or product placements, invisible by its visual omni-presence.
This reviewer is going to leave you with two warnings: first of all, you are going to want a POM juice by the time you leave the cinema: do not give in, if you want to look in the mirror while brushing your teeth by the time you get home! Secondly, you are going to notice all product placement for weeks to come, which on the one side, might spoil your favourite programmes, on the other, what is the primal purpose of a documentary if not the raising of awareness and who knows, maybe you'll reinvent your life and can be found in Brazil in a year's time, drinking Mojitos in a street café, blissfully aware of the naked purity of the space surrounding you.
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