Michael Moore 2 of 2: Manufacturing Dissent

 

Summary

            Structurally, Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine’s Manufacturing Dissent has two parallel storylines.  The first investigates Moore’s life and career from birth, and the other trails Moore on tour in 2004 attempting to speak with him.  The film opens with the beginning of the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, and the following Academy Awards in which Michael Moore famously criticized the “fictitiousness” of American motivations for this war of aggression and fictitiousness of President Bush’s election.  The filmmakers state that they admire Moore and are setting out to produce a documentary about him and begin by going to his small hometown in Michigan, following his career in local politics from a young age into his time at the “left” magazine Mother Jones that criticized the Sandinistas for, of all things, fighting a war against Reagan backed slaughterers on the grounds that it was not representative of “perfect social democra[cy].”  In supporting the Sandinistas, Moore is fired and controversy ensues over his legal battle with the magazine.

            Leaving print journalism, Moore finds work in documentary and goes on to produce Roger and Me, which becomes an international success.  Later, it is found that he took liberties with the way he presented chronology, invented fictitious events to make his points and may have misrepresented the central plot point of his film in which Roger Smith denied to talk to him.  There is a debate regarding the merits of his approach with some people advocating the film’s overall honesty and others who hold him more strictly to the tenets of documentary film, and those who think he made a highly individualist film out of a collective struggle against Roger Smith and Gm.  He goes on to work on TV Nation a short series of documentary works that are “left leaning.”  Bowling for Columbine in 2002 brings him more international accolade and makes him the face of the American “left,” but faces the same criticisms that Roger and Me did over the staging of events and polemical stance.   Their investigation and interpretation of Fahrenheit 9/11 yields similar results. 

            On Moore’s college speaking tour the filmmakers find some agreeable points in his speeches (“Where is our media?  Why isn’t it doing its job?”) but they also find his rhetorical tactics to be hypocritical- evoking the same fearmongering sensationalist preacher character that he criticizes.  Repeatedly, Michael Moore’s security personnel prevent Melnyk and Caine from speaking to Moore and do not allow them to film him or record his voice.  One of his conservative opponents that show up to his rallies expresses their disappointment in his platform-light and rhetoric-heavy speech.  All the while, they are unable to speak to him in person.  Finally, under the guise of representing local press they manage to participate at an interview where he says he is too busy until after the election.  At his speech later, they are removed from the premises and not allowed to record.  In the end, the do get to talk to him for twenty minutes but only show him dismissing a claim made about a foundation he set up for alternative media being funded by investing in particularly controversial American corporations.

Analysis

When in Bowling for Columbine Moore rightly indicts the US as a racist nation where the white hegemony frantically and zealously tries to hold onto power in every means possible (domestically including, among brutality, economic oppression, cultural disenfranchisement and theft are gun laws), the filmmakers dismiss this as paranoid conspiracy theory instead of even a debatable possibility.  In contrast, they entertain nearly every possibility his detractors offer.  While mourning the death of the left, the filmmakers who do not demonstrate legitimate left leanings take issue with Moore’s methodology of making ultimately sound “left”[1] points.  This is the general pattern within the film in which Melnyk and Caine attempt to “rise above” Moore’s misleading documentary form but stay well within it. 

Realistically, the filmmakers owe a lot to Moore in their individualist approach and pop-documentary form.  In addition to borrowing his tactics of reimagining and recontextualizing old stock footage for dark comedic effect, their overall strategy for this film mirrors his without much irony or subversion.  For example, they place themselves in the film parallel to Moore’s Roger and Me where they are on the heels of a behemoth with no interest in addressing criticism or failures.  They also attempt throughout the film to pathologize Moore as a paranoid schizophrenic and career driven egomaniac.  This is supposed to explain his tendency to edit his films in ways that present reality in skewed ways to make his points.  Historically, however, documentary has always struggled with representation of reality and it is more dishonest and individualist to blame one person for this (Voynar).  Moore’s films are one part of a large spectrum of documentary approaches that have roots are far back as Nanook of the North and taking issue with this does two things.  One, it implicitly takes issue with his politics because as documentarians, they are acutely aware of this process and issues with the form and they are challenging Moore in particular.  Two, it is a similarly careerist move to take on an easy target with a large base of vocal detractors without much innovation on their part.

Manufacturing Dissent with its wholly inaccurate title is a failure on several fundamental levels.  They are right to point out factual inaccuracies in any media work, but they did not achieve the goals they set out to do as they stated in the beginning (profile Michael Moore and his life) or came to toward the end (prove Moore to be a paranoid manipulator, and ultimately a wrecker for his branch of liberalism).  Their main claims to back this up are that he lies at fault for Bush’s election and re-election.  Whether Moore influenced any election is highly speculative.  The ultimate result in 2000 was not caused by the number of votes cast (which they argue he influenced), but by voter fraud and a heinously unethical Supreme Court decision. 

As one interviewee states, “Michael Moore could only become popular in a vacuum.  If there were a vibrant left in the United States his milquetoast radicalism would be laughed at rather than laughed with.”  This is deadly accurate.  Moore’s work is hardly more left than the “leftist” Revolutionary Communist Party (USA) that finds American NFL players who make tens of millions of dollars a year to be oppressed (MSH).  With all of his freedom, capital and popularity, not one of his films has had a focus on peoples outside of the United States or their suffering to the greater benefit of Moore’s “Average Joes” that he claims in footage in Manufacturing Dissent to be of a different class than snobby Toronto film critics.  In leftist class analysis, this is unacceptable.  The first world’s class position at the top 20% of the globe (even the poorest of Americans fall in this category) renders Moore’s entire vision of political economy childish and pathetic (Prairie Fire).  His solutions of so-called responsible capitalism and nationally socialized programs amount to greater oppression and entail more imperialist action military and industrial alike.

Another interviewee says, “If you want true social change in America… it’s not going to come from celebrities… It was always about him rather than the movement.  Everyone wanted to hold Michael up as the savior of the left when he wasn’t trying to save the left, he was just trying to create an image for himself.”  Melnyk and Caine need to take this into consideration for their next film.  If they seek any fundamental change politically or even in the small bounds of documentary ethics, they need to broaden their investigations from a single man to the history of the issues they hope to tackle.

 

 

 

Works Cited

Voynar, K. (2008, September 4). What’s the Truth About Objectivity in Documentaries? In Movie City News. Retrieved April 14, 2009, from http://www.moviecitynews.com/columnists/voynar/2009/090408.html

 

MSH. (2009, March 8). RCP elaborates on the tragic oppression of NFL millionaires. Message posted to

http://monkeysmashesheaven.wordpress.com/2009/03/08/rim-elaborates-on-the-tragic-oppression-of-nfl-millionaires/

 

Prairie Fire. (2009, April 20). Global Inequality or Socialist Equality. Message posted to http://monkeysmashesheaven.wordpress.com/2009/04/20/global-inequality-and-socialist-equality/

 

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[1] “Left” in quotations refers to American liberals and Moore types.  Left without quotations refers to either the historic American left or more generally, legitimately leftist peoples

Michael Moore 1 of 2: Sicko

Summary

            Michael Moore frames the film by starting with two anecdotes about men without health insurance- two grim accounts of the price of health care in an emergency- but clarifies that this film is about people fortunate enough to be insured.  First though, he makes a point to demonstrate how restrictive it is to get insurance regardless of class.  People are excluded for being thin, fat, diabetic, anemic, and other common conditions, as well as an extremely long list of instant denial diseases and ailments.  Talking to industry workers and taking their emails and letters reveals that HMOs and insurance companies as institutions care little about taking care of people and much more about safe customers to take on to profit.  Among the insured, the story is over and over that insurance companies deny their customers help they thought they would receive through a byzantine system of loopholes designed for the companies’ maximized profit, dropping patients for unreported medical history or conditions even if they are unrelated, isolated or as insignificant as a yeast infection. 

            Moore indicts Richard Nixon for approving the greater privatization of health care in the United States.  His meeting prior to his announcement to the public reveals that he knew that this was a system that would operate by giving less, or as little care as possible to its patients.  Nixon claims on television that it is designed to give Americans the best care possible, and accessible to everyone.  He contrasts this to Hillary Clinton’s plan for government healthcare programs and its ensuing backlash.  Resistance to Clinton’s plan echoed old cold war scare tactics, promising a slippery slope into a nightmare of all encompassing control and bureaucratic waste; archival footage the American Medical Association (which lobbied hard against Clinton) even suggests a mutually understood disdain for egalitarianism, sarcastically saying “After all, the government has to treat us all equal, don’tcha know!”

            Comparing the United States to Canada and its system, he finds that theirs works well and people are content.  People needing emergency care are granted it without hesitation or deductible, as well as people with long term conditions like Parkinson’s or heart problems.  Moore also visits the UK, where their program provides similarly.  In even starker contrast to the US, UK doctors are rewarded for providing better care to their patients, instead of less.  France has a likewise successful system that subsidizes time off for maternity leave, day care, recovery time for serious illness- all regardless of income. 

Moore asks if these, the most similar first world nations to the US have these kinds of successful programs, why can’t we?  Additionally, where is the unrest that would occur there if healthcare would be nationalized?  He suggests that the typical trajectory of middle class American life reflects this phenomenon well.  After being born into a marginally functional health care system with more infant mortality than some third world countries and making it out of a similarly lackluster education system, Americans are so deeply indebted that they are afraid to cause any problems for their much needed employers and are relegated to hoping for the best.  Lastly, he visits Cuba and finds a remarkably efficient, generous and quality national healthcare program.  In a health system unconcerned with profit, people win, he finds.

Analysis

It is not inherently wrong to be overtly political.  Michael Moore’s track record has been consistently in the realm of the American “left,” and no one denies this.  It would be problematic if there were misinformation, deliberate or not embedded into his messages.  In this case, (ignoring any other Moore works) there is not much to manipulate factually aside from the typical emotional pandering of documentary film, but it is incredibly misleading or deluded in terms of political economy.  In particular, this implies that Americans at large, among whom the poorest fall in the top 20% of global wealth, are part of a persecuted, exploited demographic.[i]  There is a scene where a table of Americans are discussing their good fortune regarding healthcare living in France compared to their relatives in the US.  A woman says, “It’s really hard to know that you’re here in such privileged position- not living the high life but… it seems unfair.”i  She is right, in the sense that Moore is right- it is unfair, but not in the sense she intends.  Without extolling apathy for people who cannot afford to keep all of their fingers, this film can be analyzed in a light that reveals much about the current American “progressive” movement.

By comparing wealth and income related to productive labor of Americans to the third world, one finds that Americans take part in an exploitative relationship with its people.  In terms of productive labor and its value, the lowest paid American worker is unlikely to be an exploited person, and more likely to be an exploiter.  Mathematically:

The nominal GDP of the entire world was $31.9 trillion in 2002. This figure represents everything produced in the world, including services (which tend to be overvalued), in a year’s time. The population is about 6.4 billion people. Assume that 2/3 of them work full time on a typical US schedule of 2000 hours per year. Then the value of average labor is $7500 per year, or about $3.75 per hour… What is the implication? In the US, the minimum wage is $5.15 per hour, and even higher in some states and cities. If average labor is worth $4.20, then even people making the minimum wage are overpaid on average by about 23%. The average wage in the US is about $18 per hour, which is more than 4 times the value of labor.

 

This little exercise shows that no one legally working in the US is likely to be exploited. On the contrary, US workers receive superprofits extracted from the Third World by the imperialists and thus benefit from imperialist exploitation. The same goes for most Western European countries, where the minimum wage is generally even higher than in the US.

 

To disprove this claim, it would be necessary to show that US workers were more productive than average. The truth is that they are probably less productive than the international average, since the intensity of labor tends to be much higher in the Third World.[ii]

 

In addition to the intensity of labor being lower here, it is also in generally non-productive sectors like services, entertainment, communications, advertising, finance, etc. This is not to say that people who are denied basic healthcare or life saving medicines, procedures or anything else are not victims of the capitalist structure of non-nationalized healthcare.  They are.  Clearly it is pernicious on even the most intimate of levels- one’s own body.  This does mean, however, that the people Moore champions as the underdog, the so-called American working class, overwhelmingly benefits materially from the same system that stands to kill them prematurely.

            Ignoring the international division of labor that props up countries in the western world leads to this kind of thinking, that people at the “bottom” deserve a bigger slice of the pie.  In placing a greater burden on the Third World for the sake of nationalized services and programs, Moore’s vision amounts to national socialism- Nazism, prosperity at the expense of the darker nations.  Healthcare is an inalienable human right, but it is not to be paraded out to call Americans to national socialism in the way Moore does by contrasting the American dream with capitalist ruthlessness upon the people it is so benevolent to.  What lets institutions like private healthcare prey on people is not independent or essential; it is part of capitalism at large, which overwhelmingly benefits Americans materially compared to the other parts of the global system.

           

 

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i Another American woman at the dinner scene in France suggests that the reason it is so much better in France is that the government is afraid of its people, instead of the other way around.  French protests are massive and active in domestic sectors like labor and healthcare.  Americans probably could change their lives for the better by calling for nationalized healthcare in this way, but yet again, this ignores the hurdle of class structure.  The US has not had unified movements across class in its history.  The black movements were proletarian, the women’s movements were middle class, and little else has happened of effective significance.  In France, there is less stratification and aside from ongoing conflict with French Arab populations, there has not been the kind of recent history of division (ie black and white) that the US has.

 

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[i] Global Rich List. (n.d.). Retrieved April 26, 2009, from http://www.globalrichlist.com/

[ii] It’s Right to Rebel. (2008, July 6). From IRTR: A rough estimate of the value of labor. Message posted to http://monkeysmashesheaven.wordpress.com/2008/07/06/blast-of-the-past-from-irtr-a-rough-estimate-of-the-value-of-labor/

[iii] Prairie Fire. (2009, April 20). Global Inequality or Socialist Equality. Message posted to http://monkeysmashesheaven.wordpress.com/2009/04/20/global-inequality-and-socialist-equality/

The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl

The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl is a problematic film. It brings up many contradictions to deal with. Are Riefenstahl’s groundbreaking aesthetic achievements praiseworthy in light of their use? Is she, the documentarian, telling the truth both/either in film and/or in person? Is documentary film even a proper medium to interrogate what may be the most harmful documentarian of all time? The film itself displays its construction, but begs the question if it should be so obsessive with craft as Riefenstahl. Many of these are questions about responsibility, negotiating where media stands in our lives as an “empowered” public.

Director Muller makes an interesting point, asking “If one works in the media, mustn’t one be interested in politics?” Riefenstahl’s refusal is typical of the laissez-faire economic model that media systems operate in, pushing for governmental distance while advancing stronger and stronger agendas. Suggesting that it is too difficult or perhaps pointless to determine what political responsibility is as an artist, she equates herself with Eisenstein and other Soviet filmmakers, implying that they were propagandists in her vein. She ignores the polar opposition that they stand in ideologically, which includes their approach to film (her only conscious concern). Soviet arts were extraordinarily concerned with political responsibility, the tenets of “Socialist Realism” includes that work must be “typical.” “An artist should depict typical characters in typical circumstances” (Stetsky). Riefenstahl was all about larger than life characterizations, displays of supreme power, not proletarian concerns of social problems, labor, or exploitation.

The film constantly reminds its viewer of its own construction. It does this by showing the camera work going into the film, the lights, the careful setting of the stage, the various people surrounding Leni and her interviewer. It even shows in one scene an argument over very staged direction, where she vehemently does not want to speak while walking but as shown in the following footage does it with a smile for the camera. This is a ploy used in documentary film often. This tactic attempts to give full disclosure to the viewer, to earn their trust by revealing the construction of the reality they present. Ultimately, this is misleading. Objectivity in documentary is widely viewed as too problematic or unattainable in entirety.

“What we see is only what’s within the frame, but what’s outside that rectangle of screen may tell another story entirely. Sometimes, what the director chooses not to show us may, in fact, be more important than what we do see — or might have changed our perception entirely, had we seen it” (Voynar).

Luring viewers to believe otherwise is dishonest or at the very least naïve, ominously mimicking the dilemma facing interpreters of Leni Riefenstahl’s life and work. Propagandist of the highest order or clueless and skilled? She does come across as obsessed with technique and visuals to the point that she loses sight of the message at times, but the explicit and implicit points of Triumph must be known to its creator.

If I may editorialize a bit, Leni Riefenstahl in this film strikes me as a liar. When confronted with documents that portray her as more sympathetic to Nazi causes than she would like, she explodes or dismisses them as fantasy. Her accounts of herself as against the “bad parts” of Hitler’s plans come across as weak as well: her film work glorifies the fascist system, with its emphasis on strength, power, and superiority. When she smiles remembering Hitler laughing at her criticisms, stomachs should turn. No sympathy should be given to her as “misunderstood,” or “taken advantage of,” because she was a master of her message, the meticulous aggrandizing of strength and power, and did just that for Hitler. She could have left, and was clearly enough a part of the intellectual aristocracy to know the consequences. If she genuinely had a problem (how was her friends’ departure from Germany not some kind of red light?), there would not be a Triumph of the Will, or at least not so influential a piece. Perhaps fewer people would bear the guilt of being convinced supporters of Hitler. At the very least, filmmakers would not have a Nazi to thank for stylistic conventions.

Bibliography

Stetsky, A. I. (1934, August). Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934. In Marxists Internet Archive [Speech]. Retrieved April 14, 2009, from http://www.marxists.org/subject/art/lit_crit/sovietwritercongress/stetsky.htm

Voynar, K. (2008, September 4). What’s the Truth About Objectivity in Documentaries? In Movie City News. Retrieved April 14, 2009, from http://www.moviecitynews.com/columnists/voynar/2009/090408.html