Morgan Spurlock - 30 Days

'30 Days': reality with bite - The Boston Globe - Boston.com - TV

Mr. Tivo surprised me this morning by offering up last night's premiere episode of Morgan Spurlock's new documentary series "30 Days." Spurlock was the filmmaker who ate only McDonalds food for one month and made a successful documentary about the experience called "Supersize Me."

"30 Days" puts an ordinary person in a different situation for a month to examine what it is like. From articles I've read and clips I've seen on television, examples of this (and the subjects of upcoming episodes) are a hard-core American Christian living as a Muslim in a Muslim community in Michigan for a month... An ex-military guy living in San Francisco's Castro district (that's where the homosexuals are! Shhh!)... A "couch potato" focusing exclusively on working out and injecting Human Growth Hormone (HGH).

The premiere episode had Spurlock and his wonderful girlfriend Alex (Alexandra Jamieson) moving to Columbus, Ohio to live and work for one month earning minimum wage (more or less).

They moved into a shitty apartment... Alex got a job at a coffee shop. Spurlock took temp day labor work and they tried to keep things together. As you can imagine, things fell apart fairly quickly.

The experiment was genuine solid journalism and its presentation was excellent. It was also very, very depressing.

My favorite quote from the movie came from an older black guy who Spurlock was sharing a ride with - a fellow day laborer:

I’m making less money this morning than I did [on] my first job 29 years ago. I got my first job in 1976 at GM my starting wage was $7.55 an hour. This morning I’m going out in 2005 and making $7 - no insurance. They call this prosperity - I call it slavery. But you know, they say, 'We can’t pay what the big automakers paid.' I always say, 'OK can you pay me what they were paying a quarter of a century ago?'

Throughout the program, I thought about the fundamental differences between conservative and liberal dogma on poverty.

I frequently hear conservatives address poverty with a certain amount of scorn saying something to the effect of "They can't make ends meet in America - this land of great opportunity? Something must be wrong with them."

The liberal stance (or at least my version of it) is that in this land of abundance, the richest in the world, why is there such a disparity between the haves and the have nots? Isn't there enough wealth to spread some more around?

Conservative critics call the liberal position "socialism." I call it compassion.

[See Salon's interview with Morgan Spurlock about the show.]

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