Brad Wheeler
From Tuesday’s Globe and Mail
Last updated on Wednesday, Sep. 30, 2009
Editor’s Note: It’s interesting to watch how the mainstream (corporate) media—which certainly includes the Globe & Mail— subtly move the pieces on the chessboard to exculpate capitalism from Moore’s frontal critique. In the vast majority of cases the media misleadingly informs the audience that Moore’s film is just a denunciation of something vague, like “greed” or “Wall Street” –which certainly controls the revolutionary infection. Or present Moore as an oddball, an oxymoronic “serious clown” not to be taken too seriously. But Moore–clumsily perhaps–is right, he’s up in arms against the system, not just some bad apples in it. This is not about extirpating a cancer from an otherwise healthy body. The body itself is a walking, breathing cancer, and cannot be made right.
“It’s absolutely important to question what’s going on,” says the rumpled provocateur Michael Moore, commenting on the fourth estate. “There should be a healthy dose of cynicism amongst reporters, and there isn’t. You’re not allowed to go certain places or ask certain questions. I think that’s wrong.”
On the way into a hotel room to speak to the director about his new documentary Capitalism: A Love Story , which opens Friday, I had brushed shoulders with the elephant exiting the room.
The filmmaker inside makes it his business to air obvious but controversial truths – there are no elephants in the rooms of Michael Moore.
In a sprawling interview the showman-director talked not only about his film (an entertainingly lopsided argument against free enterprise), but about other things that irritate him. “The CBC is a bunch of wimps,” the Michigan-born Moore opines, when told Hockey Night in Canada had some time ago lost the rights to its famous theme music. “They should just play the song and then say, ‘Sue me,’ and then go to court and say, ‘There are some things that are grandfathered in because they’re part of society.”
More soberly, Moore spoke about U.S. President Barack Obama, and the backlash he faced in response to his taped address to American school children in September. “The fact that he won the election was amazing, but I realize that the 46 per cent who didn’t vote for him, many of them are uncomfortable,” he says, referring to racial unrest. “I live in the United States, and I live amongst white people. It’s not only overt racism, it’s a sort of fear of the black planet. But nobody is really saying that, are they?”
With that, the lumpy man in shorts and a T-shirt pops a grape into his mouth and shakes his head. Moore speaks in gentle tones about serious matters – his way is to rouse the rabble wholeheartedly, but softly. It’s in that rhythmically caressing voice that he narrates Capitalism: A Love Story , a film that targets corporate immorality and Wall Street greed.
Twenty years after his prescient film Roger & Me (about the destruction of the U.S. auto industry and the resulting human wreckage), Moore has made what is being hailed as his boldest movie yet. In Capitalism , the dishonourable practice of corporations taking out life insurance policies on its worth-more-dead-than-alive employees is exposed – “dead peasants” is the term used by industry insiders.
Bigger game, in the form of recession-causers former chair of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan and government economists Robert Rubin and Larry Summers (once acclaimed on the cover of Time as the “committee to save the world”) wear the drooping horns of scapegoats.
By the end of the film, after Moore cordons off Wall Street with yellow crime-scene tape, a call to revolution is made – audiences are asked to put down the popcorn and pick up the pitchforks. “Let’s go,” is what Moore urges. The film against anti-democratic economics has its lighthearted moments – and mawkish moments, including roof-topped Katrina flood victims – so it’s hard to gauge how serious the burly, ball-capped guy with the bullhorn really is.
“I feel we’re at the end game,” answers Moore, who sees capitalism as a system of legalized greed. “We’re hanging on to what’s left of our democracy by threads now.”
Moore deliberated over ending his film with such a blatant rallying call for revolt. His idea was to present evidence on what he sees as the inherent and unavoidable pitfalls of capitalism, and then let the viewers make up their minds. But, in for penny, in for a pound, he made his gung-ho decision.
“I’ve just shown them, for two hours, that it’s an evil system. So, I’m just going to say it, that [capitalism] has to be eliminated.”
Does it though? Is there not a more reasonable version of capitalism out there? “Is there a kindly form of child labour?” Moore replies rhetorically, sitting straighter in his chair now. “Is there a kindly form of slavery? Some institutions are inherently evil,” he continues. “It just takes us a little while to figure it out.”
The film proposes no solutions and Moore offers none in person, except to say that “we’re going to have to invent a different kind of economy based on democratic principles and have an ethical core.”
