Posted
by
Leonard Pierce
When you think about it, the movie that made Morgan Spurlock famous — Super Size Me — wasn't that much of an accomplishment. All he did was eat McDonald's food for every meal for a month. There are probably millions of Americans who eat the equivalent of McDonald's food every day for most of their adult lives. His follow-up movie, Where in the World is Osama bin-Laden?, set the bar a lot higher, however. This time, he was going to do something that no one in America — indeed, no one in the entire world — seems capable of doing: finding the world's most sought-after terrorist.
Spurlock's not the first person to give it a whirl. Plenty of journalists make the finding of America's bogeyman their job one, and another noteworthy documentarian, Michael Moore, made a half-assed attempt at it himself in Fahrenheit 9/11. (That Spurlock and Moore's efforts may be little more than glorified publicity stunts doesn't diminish the fact that, unlike a number of right-wing documentarians who make terrorist fearmongering their stock in trade, at least they gave it the old college try.)
We doubt we're giving away much by revealing that, at least according to Slash/Film, Spurlock has considerably less luck in locating Osama bin-Laden than he did a McRib sandwich. According to their man in Sundance, Where in the World ends with Spurlock approaching a tribal camp in Pakistan marked with a huge warning sign telling unauthorized visitors they will be shot. Thinking of his newborn child, the director decides to turn around and head home.
Leaving aside the plausibility of this conclusion (would bin-Laden's people really put up a huge sign alerting strangers to their presence?) and the questionable dedication Spurlock seems to have to his craft (hey, pal, bin-Laden may have as many as two dozen children, and he still finds time to get shit done), we'd like to suggest that America's documentarians are taking the wrong approach in the hunt for Public Enemy #1, with their high-tech recording equipment and expensive digital cameras. We think they should trade down for a cheap hand-held tape recorder and a first-generation VHS video camera; that's what everyone who's actually laid eyes on the guy in the last 6 years or so has used.
About Leonard Pierce
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