Becoming the Change Witnessed: Strategic Use of Empathy in Morgan Spurlock's "Straight Man in a Gay World"

Then there's Ed, the gay man in the "Gay/Straight" episode. A guy came up to Ed and said, "I just wanted to let you know, I came out to my parents six years ago, and I've been estranged from my family for the past six years. My parents saw that episode and called me the next day." That was one of the most beautiful things I could ever hear. Morgan Spurlock (Malone, 2006, pp. 33-34) Thirty days of sustained immersion in a foreign situation turns out to be a sufficiently long enough period of time to document meaningful psychological, physiological, social, and/or political change. Morgan Spurlock first put this unit of time to the test in his Academy Award nominated documentary Super Size Me (2004), a film that documented the dramatic physiological and psychological effects that a 30 day long all-McDonald's diet had on Spurlock. A year later, the filmmaker took the same format to television where he served as the host and executive producer of 30 Days, an unscripted documentary-styled television program that aired 18 episodes during its three seasons on the FX cable network (2005-2008). Each episode features an individual or group of people spending 30 days in a situation that differs from their beliefs or is outside of their range of experiences. The participants are given rules that foster sustained engagement in an unfamiliar situation while a film crew documents the participants' interactions and developments. The raw footage is edited into Spurlock's documentary style, which Andrea Hayes (2006) describes as an innovative mix of "statistics, animation, graphics, fly-on-the-wall footage, and interviews with experts and people on the street" (p. 30). Each episode offers viewers an opportunity to witness what happens when people with conflicting beliefs attempt to communicate across what often seem to be incommensurable differences on issues such as abortion, binge drinking, and animal rights. Many, but not all, episodes document participants engaging in ideological compromise, substantial change, or personal growth. We examine the episode "Straight Man in a Gay World," which originally aired during the first season on July 6, 2005. The episode features Ryan Hickmott, a 24-year old heterosexual Army Reservist from a small town in rural Michigan and Ed Collar, a gay male marketing consultant living in San Francisco. The promotional blurb for the episode identifies Ryan as a "homophobic young man" who will spend 30 days in "San Francisco's largely gay Castro District, where he experiences what it's like to live as a member of a misunderstood minority that still elicits feelings of fear and hatred from many Americans." While living with Ed in San Francisco, Ryan must follow the following set of rules designed to maximize encounters with the gay community: 1.) He must familiarize himself with the city's gay culture by socializing with his roommate's gay friends 2.) Get a job in the Castro 3.) Meet with the reverend of the local "gay" church for a one-on-one conversation The episode documents Ryan going through a process of personal development culminating in what appears to be a moment of sudden transformation on day 28. The episode itself and the commentary track subsequently recorded by the participants offer evidence that Ryan retained his religious beliefs while adopting substantially more understanding and compassionate views regarding sexual orientation. Method The aim of this study is to understand how this episode functions as a rhetorical text for both its participants and for the implied viewing audiences. As a qualitative study, our aim is to develop an understanding of a "situation that would otherwise be enigmatic or confusing" (Eisner, 1991, p. 58). This study utilizes the methodological lens of close textual analysis (CTA) to analyze mediated discourse. In the discipline of communication studies, close textual analysis is a hermeneutic (textual interpretation) research method rooted in nominalism that privileges the discourse being analyzed rather than prioritizing the application of external theoretical claims (Black, 1980, p. …