On the week of March 12th, we watched “30 Days” for our Global Media seminar. “30 Days” is the brainchild of Morgan Spurlock, writer and director of the widely popular and hugely successful “Supersize Me.” The idea of his six episode series is to address contentious issues by placing individuals in “living environments that are antithetical to their upbringing, beliefs, religion, or profession.” In both “Supersize Me” and “30 Days,” individuals basically become test subjects who undergo an experiment of living under alien conditions over the course of a month. Since the two endeavors are so similar, I will critique “30 Days” (specifically the “Immigration” episode) by comparing and contrasting it to the documentary that brought Spurlock to the national media scene.

What makes Spurlock’s film so captivating is that rather than portraying for us the experiences of a third party, he instead supplies himself as a human test subject (he provides his body to test the effects of a diet consisting solely of McDonald’s). Most documentaries can be considered secondary documents as far as historical analysis is concerned. “Supersize me,” on the other hand, is a primary document – Spurlock breaks down the wall between experience and human analysis. With little gloss about it, he turns the camera lens upon himself, allowing us to more or less walk through his experience alongside him. I would contend that knowing that the subject and producer/director are the same entity in “Supersize Me” leads us to resist a certain degree of skepticism about the credibility of the documentary that normally arises when the director and subject are separate.

The point of the last paragraph was to point out the key departure that “30 Days” makes from “Supersize Me.” While the TV series still consists of experiential documentaries, these are documentaries that give us a third person rather than second person perspective. The line of transmission has changed from “individual experience to audience (with necessary film edits),” to “individual experience to off-screen editors to audience.” In the first, not only are we closer to the subject of the experience, but by the nature of the fact that he is his own editor, we are relatively confident that all that is being conveyed is what the subject actually intended. In the second, we as an audience are at a disadvantage because we are much less certain of the honesty with which the interlocutors will convey the experiences of the documentary subjects. This is especially important when we think about footage that is left out of the final cut – in the case of the “Immigration” episode, a whopping 299 hours.

For me this point of departure is the grand failing of “30 Days- Immigration.” This story about how a Minuteman and illegal immigrants live together is incapable of providing us with a credible insider perspective like the one that Spurlock made possible with “Supersize Me,” primarily because of the lack of control the individuals portrayed have over their images. The main subject of “Immigration” wrote a letter (http://www.vdare.com/misc/060718_jorge.htm) after his involvement in the episode addressing misconstrued images and misplaced sound bytes (thanks Henry Shepherd). Regardless of the motives he had for writing it, Frank Jorge’s letter in response to the final cut of the episode is ammunition for a lack of confidence in the credibility of Spurlock’s experiential documentary program.

Speaking of all the failings of this series would probably lead people to think that I believe it is an endeavor that should be discarded. Quite the opposite. Spurlock’s experiential documentary technique, in which individuals are really test subjects, simply needs a more flexible arena than television can provide. In about forty five minutes he has to make us feel some sort of affinity with the characters, develop some sort of interest in the issue being problematized, and make the conflicts and resolutions exciting. At the same time, we are expecting the portrayal to be truthful. This is simply too much to ask. During the majority of the “Immigration” episode I felt that the events were rather contrived. It was hard for me to disentangle television time from the “real” time over which the events took place, and thus I was continuously thinking about how Frank and the immigrant family got comfortable with each other way too quickly. I was equally unsettled by the predictability of the conflicts that emerged. At many points I was annoyed by how easily some of the sound bytes fit into the greater plot of the episode.

Spurlock’s documentary outstrips the capabilities of television. So much crucial information must be cut from the final episode that he is unable to equal the impact of “Supersize Me.” If he wants viewers to feel the kind of affinity to the issues that he was able to create in his film he needs to retain the organic aspect that made his film work. He needs more time, or a different structure. To address this, I return to the discrepancy between TV time and real time. On your average sitcom, what happens when our favorite characters are off-screen is relatively unimportant. In documentaries, conversely, what the producers leave out may be just as important as what they decide to show. Sometimes we can determine a significantly greater amount about the producer’s intentions by discovering what they decide to omit (Frank Jorge’s revelation that the production team that filmed this episode was all nominally pro-immigration is particularly enlightening). While even ten hours of footage is only one third of a percent of the “full” story of a Minuteman’s experience with an illegal immigrant family, could we imagine that Spurlock could have aired the “30 Days” over twenty daily thirty minute segments, and retained a greater level of “truth?” Or maybe “30 Days in 30 Days?” Surely, with a subject matter as compelling as immigration this could have been feasible. Or perhaps Spurlock could brand himself like a Steve Irwin of sorts? I brought this up with the director/producer when he was here for our global media lab and he was quick to bring up the immense figure of 300 hours of filming. Certainly, he would become a walking experiment for half of his life (should he make six episodes per season as he has thus far), but the appeal cannot be dismissed.