[Actually, this isn't so much of a critique as a plug for Michael Moore's new film, The Big One, which will be opening soon in theaters. I saw it at this year's South by Southwest film festival.]
When I was in college, one of the rites of passage was going to see Sid and Nancy, a docudrama about Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols and his hyper-dysfunctional relationship with wife Nancy, and coming home more depressed than you'd ever been in all your adolescent angst-filled life. I had decided early on that one of my goals was to escape from college without ever having seen Sid and Nancy. Instead, I got to experience the same sense of depression, misery and despair by seeing Michael Moore's Roger and Me, a documentary about the closing down of General Motors' plant in Flynt, Michigan and the resultant impact on the community. After seeing the complete and utter destruction wrought on this community by the vagaries of capitalism, I came home in a terrible funk, and found a friend who had seen the thing and had the same reaction. We concluded, during our ensuing conversation, that there was no such thing as an honest buck, all money was blood money, and that capitalism was essentially synonymous with callousness, suffering, and evil. Having done so, I then went back to the dorm room whose rent was being paid for by my father, who financed my college education with investments in companies much like the one that had eviscerated Flynt, the initial capital of which he had earned during his work as a management consultant, a job which required him to recommend to coprorations like, say, General Motors things they could do to increase their profit margins--like, say, closing down an American plant and reopening one in Mexico.
It's almost a decade later, but capitalism is still with us, and so, therefore, is Michael Moore. His new film, The Big One, was shot during the book tour he took to promote Downsize This, which must have come out sometime around 1995-1996. Part road trip, part satire, part stand-up comedy and part investigative journalism, this story isn't as coherent or as emotionally powerful as Roger and Me, but it's got the same black humor, the same audacity, and the same sense of outrage that drove the earlier movie. Essentially, it follows Moore around the country as he promotes his book in teeny weeny markets like Centralia, Ill. and Rockport, Mo., having had difficulty getting into the big ones because of a little misunderstanding with the Clinton campaign regarding a prank he pulled for an episode of TV Nation. (Moore set out to see if "a politician would take money from *anybody,*" and did so by creating 4 fictional political interest groups and sending a $100 check from each one to a different candidate. Pat Buchanan was the first to cash his--which came to him from "Abortionists For Buchanan;" Ross Perot not only cashed a check from "Pedophiles for Perot," but sent Moore a form letter thanking him and his "fellow pedophiles" for the donation; and Clinton cashed his check from the "Hemp Growers of America." Apparently Clinton's entourage didn't see the humor in all this.) Along the way he interviews laid-off workers, crashes corporate headquarters, jams with the bassist from Cheap Trick, drives several Random House media escorts up the wall, and, in what to me was the most interesting part of the film, finally gets to confront the guy he named as one of the top three Corporate Crooks in America, the CEO of Nike.
The documentary is interspersed with footage of his stage appearances and his interviews on talk radio, which are both radical and *really* funny. (One of my favorites is the digression about Steve Forbes and why he never, ever blinks...see the movie, you'll laugh.) It's in one of those segments that he explains the title--apparently in *Downsize This* he talks about giving America a new marketing package--changing the national symbol from the bald eagle to "a bald man," the slogan from "In God We Trust" to "In by 10, Out by 2," and the name from "The United States of America" to "The Big One." If you think about it, this is genius. "The Big One" just about sums up the philosophy driving both domestic and foreign policy in this country. What gives us the right to bomb Iraq? We're The Big One. Don't want to push through the "austerity measures" that would allow your struggling Third World country to pay back the money it borrowed from the World Bank? Too bad--you gotta pay The Big One. Wondering what welfare mothers are going to do once their benefits run out? Well, they can just bite The Big One.
Although the basic tune is the same--big capital is hurting the little guy, and it must be stopped--there are a few new and very disturbing variations on this theme. One of the film's more subtle messages (everything's relative; there's not much about this film that's subtle) is a critique of the corporatization of book publishing, and the complicity of the publishing industry in the same trends he slammed GM and Nike for. Early on in the film, at a book-signing at a Borders Bookstore in Des Moines, Moore is handed a handwritten, anonymous note telling him that Borders management told the staff not to come to Moore's reading and that only management would be allowed to work the book-signing table or indeed have any contact with him. The note also invites him to a "secret meeting" at night on a deserted streetcorner with some of the Borders employees who have been trying to unionize their fellow-workers. He goes, of course, and from the meeting it is clear that Borders is making a deliberate attempt to keep their employees from organizing and that they thought keeping them away from Moore would be integral to this. It's not exactly the national guard shooting workers at the Ford strike, but it does give you a sense for the amount of surveillance and suppression necessary to keep the minimum-wage service economy running smoothly. The subterfuge is funny--Moore walks to the "secret meeting" to the strains of the Peter Gunn theme, and when a car goes by the employees run to the shadows to avoid discovery--but it's also sinister.
The same can be said, in spades, for the movie's brief treatment of the privatization of prison labor, which comes up anent a chance meeting with an ex-inmate of a Ventura, CA correctional facility at the Mall of America. Apparently TWA, like many large American corporations, has figured out that American prisons are a great source of cheap labor, and has an arrangement with the California department of corrections whereby some of the inmates work for them as reservation agents. As this ex-inmate pointed out, this means that people are regularly giving out their credit card numbers, home addresses, and destination and arrival times to people who have been convicted of rape, murder and burglary. Moore then expands on this in one of his stage appearances, including various other examples of corporations using prison labor (AT&T uses prisoners to do their telemarketing; MicroSoft has some of its software packaged by prisoners...) and envisioning the perfect corporate state: by closing down enough plants and moving to other, cheaper, international locations, American corporations throw so many people out of work that a huge upsurge in crime rates eventually throws almost everyone in prison--whereupon corporations bring their business back to the US so that they can get their old workers to do their old jobs for 1/10th of the salary. He's joking, of course...except that this is what's already happening.
The piece de resistance, however, is the interview with the CEO of Nike, who I guess thought that this would end up being a big public-relations coup. I won't ruin it for you--but it goes about like you would expect it to go. The one thing you won't find out from seeing the film, which Moore talked about in the Q&A after, is that while MOore was interviewing him, a PR agent came into the office with the news that the Heaven's Gaters had just been found dead--all wearing Nike sneakers. This, apparently, rattled the guy a tad--more than Moore's questions about how he can justify what his company is doing in Indonesia. Which tells you something.
The one thing missing from most of Moore's stuff is theorization--and maybe that matters more to me than it would to most people, but I kept waiting for him to come up with some kind of explanation for why all this happens and how to stop it. This isn't his strong point; beyond pointing out the worst abuses of the system, he doesn't make too much of an argument about what it might be replaced with. In the Q &A afterwards he seemed to envision the solution mostly as a kind of kinder, gentler capitalism, where because the workers have more power they're able to rectify some of these inequalities. He asks a number of corporate PR types why their companies aren't willing to accept lower profits and continue paying their American workers a decent wage, and you get the sense that in some ways what he's really hoping for is a return to corporate paternalism--that if corporations could just be taught to treat their workers fairly, everything would be all right. Of course, he's smart enough to know that they will never do this unless they're forced to, which is why he advocates a return to labor politics and a working-class takeover of the Democratic party; but at the bottom, it seems like he really just does want GM to come back to Flynt and start paying people enough to live on. Which would be part of the solution, but is also part of the problem.
But then political economy is not Moore's strong point. What he's good at is finding and attacking the absurdities at the heart of the logic of capitalism, and dramatizing the basic injustice of an economic system that requires the many to sweat, starve and despair so that the few can keep their shareholders happy--and presenting this convincingly to an audience that is never going to read Marx or care what an egghead like me thinks about capitalism. And that makes him useful to us, and dangerous to The Man. So go see this movie, and get other people to go with you. Who knows what might happen.
Come the revolution,
The Plaid Adder
Wanna see last week's critique? Go here.
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