I don't get it

I enjoy Morgan Spurlock's work as much as anyone, but could someone explain the logic behind this?

The director of "Super Size Me," a 2004 plunge into the caloric excess of an all-McDonald's fast-food diet, has traded in Mickey D's for al-Qaida in "Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?" which opens today. Spurlock traveled from Morocco to Afghanistan, and nearly every stop in between, to ask about not only the whereabouts of bin Laden, but how the Middle East became so ripe for his brand of violent extremism.

The genesis of "Osama bin Laden" was one of the terrorist's video missives, issued shortly after President Bush was re-elected in 2004, and the public reaction to it. "People were like, 'Why haven't we found him?'" Spurlock says by phone from his home in Brooklyn. "They were saying, 'Where in the world is Osama bin Laden?'"

Spurlock was still trying to determine how to address such a daunting, complex subject in early 2006 when he learned that his wife, author and vegan chef Alexandra Jamieson, was pregnant with their first child. "That was when the movie was born," he says. "That personalized the movie for me."

I'm sure that fatherhood spurs men to all manner of accomplishment, and it's certainly uncontroversial for dads to worry about the condition of the world into which their kids will be born. But this strikes me as just the sort of casual narcissism that makes so much of the conversation about "fatherhood" so painfully dumb and so loaded with bogus gestures of masculinity. If you want to make movies in which you run a strong risk of being blown up or shot, you'll have no quarrel from me. Just don't pretend that your quest to find Osama bin Laden has suddenly become all the more urgent because you happen to have a child on the way.

That said, I'm sure that bin Laden would appreciate being turned back into the nation's great bogeyman; he must have felt somewhat marginalized over the past five years, as the current American government worked tirelessly to make the future even more terrifying and dangerous than bin Laden and a scattering of religious zealots could ever have managed on their own.

TAGS: Fatherhood
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I don't get it

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