Anti-Corporate Argument and the Spectacle of the Grotesque Rhetorical Body in Super Size Me

作者：Singer Ross^*

来源：Critical Studies in Media Communication, 2011, 28(2): 135-152.

DOI：10.1080/15295036.2011.553724

• Anti-Corporate Activism
• Grotesque Realism
• Body Rhetoric
• Film Documentary
• Food Studies
• Carnivalesque
• Bakhtin

This essay examines how the documentary Super Size Me (2004) renders the body a site of anti-corporate resistance. My close reading intervenes in a debate on the value of Bakhtin's notion of carnivalesque critique for democratic culture and contributes to a theory of the rhetorical body. Super Size Me highlights the instability and malleability of theatrical techniques of empire and possibilities for activism that reflexively manage contradictions of new cinematic forms of commodified dissent. Central to the film's appeal is what I call spectacular self-subjugation-an activist tactic by which the body is given up temporarily to an exploitive system as a means of staging carnivalesque resistance against that system before a mainstream audience.

• 出版日期2011