Supersize+Me

Some general comments regarding your posts to this wiki... We need to be critically engaged with the films we discuss here. Although the wiki is an informal arena in which thinking and writing are practiced, it is also a public place to present your ideas; thus, you should consider the effectiveness of your argument by thinking about the ways that you present your ideas. That is, you need to be mindful of the organization and delivery of your engagement so that it is not a loose collection of thoughts but an attempt to think publicly //through// some ideas.

So, to post your supersized, awesome engagement with the film, click "discussion" and get going.

Or, here's a starter...

Of the first two modes that Nichols (our author of the week) identifies, we can see that //SuperSize Me// fits squarely in the expository mode: it is overtly argumentative; VO dominates the film; it is directed to the viewer; its editing maintains rhetorical continuity; and, by continually visiting doctors, etc. it aims toward a sense of objective judgment ("the charts don't lie"). Yet, as we will see in our discussions, the film also follows some of the strategies of the interactive mode: the doctors, et al, he recruits for the experiment become the textual authority that the editing practices of another film would be (say, in //Capturing//). The ease of this assignment points to the ultimate lack of necessity of categorizing documentaries into specific modes: we know nothing more about the film by assigning it a mode. Moreover, //Supersize Me// employs techniques of at least two of the modes.

However, what we CAN get from the modes Nichols describes for us is understanding into how documentaries work, how they "make meaning." In our discussion of the remaining two modes (interactive and reflexive), we will come to understand how each operates and how the design of the modes (in a sense) becomes the argument and subject of the filmmaking and film-viewing processes.