The movie came out today in the U.S. I was waiting for it - I am that much of a loser. I was waiting for it because I like Michael Moore (M.M., another Eminem). Well, let's say I hate his movies but I am irresistibly attracted to them. This movie did it again for me.
First of all, let it be clear, this movie, even more that his previous ones, is not a documentary, it's propaganda. I do not mean the word propaganda as a pejorative. It's not dishonest propaganda dressed in documentary style; M.M. has done this in the past, but not in this movie. This is just clearly and unapologetically propaganda. We could say advertising, but that's what propaganda in fact is: advertising of an ideology. Just to take this point home, the movie ends with M.M. in Wall Street saying (all quotations are by memory, of course, not always literal):
Capitalism is an evil system, it should be destroyed and substituted by something different. We should substitute it with....
I am not going to reveal immediately what M.M. wants to substitute capitalism with, what's is the ideology his propaganda is pushing for (though I am sure the reader has an idea), because I do not want to spoil one of my points right away.
Let me first summarize the movie. Ok, this is hard - I'll try my best.
The movie is a collection of various images, stories, clips, anecdotes, statements, which form a coherent logical narrative. Actually two.
The first narrative is a rather naive recent history of American politics. 1960: The sixties are viewed as an idyllic periods, with no shadows. A period where the middle class has steady, secure (and unionized) jobs which guarantee a happy family life even with only one paycheck (that is, if women stay home to take care of their kids). The narrative here is centered on M.M.'s own life in Flint, Michigan: his father is a blue collar worker at G.M. and his mother is at home. 1980: The Eighties are the beginning of the end: Ronald Reagan dismantles labor unions, and with them go the secure jobs; the middle class starts to suffer. Reagan is presented as a puppet for Wall Street's interests, personified by his Secretary of the Treasury, Don Regan. 1990:Bill Clinton did not really exist: he appears only once in the movie, behind his own Secretary of the Treasury, Robert Rubin, who is the new incarnation of Wall Street interests - more of the same, without really saying so. 2000:G.W. Bush ends Reagan's revolution by engineering Hank Paulson and Lloyd Blankenstein's "financial coup d'etat": the bailout of Wall Street in the fall of 2008. 2009: The new world, the "people's revolution" against Wall Street and the rich in general. The advent of the man who "lowers the oceans" himself (this is Michele Boldrin, not M.M. - let's say that M.M. would not note the irony in the definition),Barack Obama. Obama is introduced by his famous clip with Joe-the-plumber, where he argues that "spreading the wealth" is good for America. While reporting the right accusations that Obama is a socialist, M.M. explicitly agrees and argues (results of a poll are presented) that this is exactly why Americans have voted him in office, because he is a socialist, he wants to "spread the wealth", "re-distribute a piece of the pie".
The second narrative constitutes the part destruens of the propaganda; it aims at taking home the point that "capitalism is evil", through a set of distinct events (each represented by a series of stories) and authoritative statements. These events are uneven in their contribution to the argument for "evilness" (they appear extremely weak to an economists - but iii) and iv) are just flat out ridiculous). i) The industrial manufacturing base is disappearing with great losses to the workers, those who lose their jobs and those who get new insecure (he means non-unionized) jobs. Interviews with laid-off workers abound here. ii) The explosion of the real estate bubbles has brought with itself a great number of evictions and foreclosures, with great pain to families. Again interviews abound: all people interviewed are examples of re-financing, and so they all claim having been stripped of a house who had been in their possession for at least a generation. iii)Privatizations amount to form of expropriation of public goods. The main example, analyzed in great detail, is the case of a public juvenile prison in Pennsylvania which the court assigns to a private company to manage: it turns out that two judges, bribed by the CEO of the management company, go very easy with incarceration. They are all in jail now. iv) Private companies speculate even on people lives.Various anecdotes of the following phenomenon are presented in detail: companies (e.g., Walmart) open insurance policies on the life of their associates - policies which specify the company itself as beneficiary, unbeknownst to the family of the associate (this policies have a name, "dead peasants"). v) The recent crisis is the best example of the costs of capitalism for everybody except a very few: rapacious mortgage sellers, corrupt politicians in the pockets of bankers (the case of Chris Dodd and his cheap mortgages from Countrywide Financial is quite stark; a lot is also made of the political clout of Goldman Sachs), rich stock options to CEO's, incomprehensible financial derivatives to screw poor ignorant people, ..... vi) Various priests (and one bishop) explicitly claiming that "capitalism is evil" and that "Jesus would be on the barricades".
The final blow starts forcefully: the people's revolution is started and the end is near. Barack Obama is a God given present, M.M. is his prophet. As such he "will fight for the end of capitalism", because he "does not want to live in this country, but has no intention to leave". For this, however he "needs all of" us.
The part construens of the propaganda, "what should we substitute capitalism with", is implicit for the whole movie until the very end. My understanding is that M.M. simply favors a social democracy, with union which control corporations and share profits, high taxes, and a well developed welfare state. This is well represented by a nice clip of an ailing F.D. Roosevelt's last State of the Union address, when he proposes a "second Bill of Rights", which should include the right to a job, to a wage able to support a family, to a general health care, to pensions for old age, and more. M.M. even refers explicitly to "what they have in Europe" as an objective for the U.S. (Interestingly, he claim that Europeans can have this because of the Constitutions which, after the war, "Americans", meaning F.D. Roosevelt's architects of the New Deal, "have written for them". The problem is that he identifies the social-democracy with socialism (he never uses the term "social democracy" - does he not know it or does he think Americans do not know it?). And I guess he is afraid to explicitly say
we should substitute capitalism with socialism,
even though this is the logical conclusion of the whole propagandist argument of the movie (when "socialism" is intended to mean "social democracy").
And so the movie ends with M.M. in Wall Street saying:
we should substitute capitalism with ...... democracy.
What a terrible final blow to an otherwise good piece of work: empty, inconsistent, .... just terrible. As if M.M. did not have the balls to say it clear.
Ok, the movie is full of incorrect economic arguments, populist positions, sentimental rhetorics, .... but it's not economics, it's propaganda.
P.S. I would like to alert the reader to three beautiful pieces of movie-making propaganda (I know, they sound silly on paper, but they are really funny in the movie):
- Jesus in an old movie (did not recognize it) answering to Judas' (?) question about the means to reach paradise: "refinance your mortgage as much as possible" ;
- A bank TV advertisement in which a nice blond girl is pushing new financial instruments, but speaks with the voice (and over the music) of Marlon Brando's Godfather.
- M.M. getting in front of Goldman Sachs building with an armored truck, asking the policemen in front to let him go to get the bailout money back; and then posting in the plaza in front of the building the police's yellow tape saying "crime scene...".