Morgan Spurlock's 2004 classic Super Size Me, which, of course, I saw in a theater and then saw

in many half-assed high school classes after that. Oh my God, I saw this movie so many times.

And I mean, it in many ways is a perfect subject for the show. I think for two reasons.

It is vintage like Michael and us season 1.5 style material. One, because the two of us

watched it a ton in the early 2000s, I remember finding it wildly entertaining, which I did not

find it wildly entertaining this time. And secondly, and this is the more interesting reason,

because it was not politically anyway quite as bad as I was expecting.

Now, I'm not saying that to praise the film politically. I think there are a lot of problems with it.

But I'd completely forgotten the sort of gestures at kind of anti-corporate inquiry that the film does.

Now, I say gestures because it sort of, you know, waves its hands at various things.

And then in the end, its message, its prescriptions such as they are, are, you know, I mean,

they're not very, they're not very sophisticated or, you know, or very interesting at all. And so,

I actually see this film as fitting really perfectly into a very sort of 1990s, early 2000s to mid-2000s

kind of, you know, political schick. You could find in a lot of documentaries, a lot of magazines,

a lot of popular books and things like that from this time, where, you know, as we have

endlessly said on this show, there had been a sort of retreat not only from, you know,

grand narratives of actually being able to change or transform society in a fundamental way,

but also from just even having basic social democratic institutions, you know, well-funded public schools,

things like that, universal health care, et cetera.

There'd been a retreat from all that kind of stuff.

And so what you were

left with, I think, was a very sort of soupy rudderless discourse, not anti-capitalist, certainly,

...