People who watch documentaries assume the existence of a timeline, of a chronological order and of a proper relationship between cause and effect. The film Roger & Me is supposed to be about the consequences of the GM layoffs of May and December 1986, but these layoffs occurred at least a full year after many of the events that Moore would have us believe were responses to the layoffs. Film clips of Ronald Reagan visiting Flint were from his visit as a candidate in 1980, a full six years before the layoffs. Moore’s movies are tossed salads of film clips edited for ideological and emotional effect; any resemblance they may have to the truth is coincidental. When Harlan Jacobson, editor of Film Commentary pressed Moore on the matter of his invented timelines, Moore retorted: “Okay, so you can say that the chronology skips around a bit!” This is analogous to a surgeon admitting that his hand jumps around a bit during surgery. The result is the same: a hack job. A documentary with no respect for chronology is just a fantasy.
Moore does no better with location than he does with time. Locations he identifies as Grosse Pointe were actually shot in Flint; scenes identified as Flint were shot in Detroit. Moore records his pursuit of Roger Smith at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City, a hotel at which Roger Smith has never stayed. Moore stakes out the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club, of which Roger Smith is not a member. Moore knew all this; he was simply gulling his ticket buyers.
source
Roger is Roger Smith, the chairman of General Motors, who, in Moore’s account, closed eleven GM plants in Flint, Michigan, in 1986 (despite big profits), laid off thirty thousand workers, and set up plants in Mexico, where the wage rate was seventy cents an hour. In the film, he’s directly responsible for bringing about the city’s (unconvincingly speedy) deterioration. Flint, GM’s birthplace, is also Michael Moore’s home town, and Moore, a journalist, previously inexperienced in film, set out, with a camera crew, ostensibly to persuade Roger Smith to come to Flint and see the human results of his policies. This mock mission is the peg that Moore hangs the picture on: he pursues Roger Smith over a span of two and a half years, from February, 1987, to August, 1989.
Moore is the only one the movie takes straight. (Almost everybody else is a fun-house case.) This standup crusader appears to be the only person in town who’s awake to the destruction of what used to be a thriving community. And we in the audience are expected to identify with his puckish sanity. The way he tells it, the people who run the town are incompetent twerps. (That’s always popular with movie audiences.) He reports that the civic leaders have been thinking about solutions for the decay of the city and have come up with lamebrained fantasy schemes to attract tourism: a Hyatt Regency hotel and convention center; AutoWorld, a theme park; the Water Street Pavilion, a mall. The three projects are actually built; roughly a hundred and fifty million dollars is poured in, and all three are fiascoes.
I had stopped believing what Moore was saying very early; he was just too glib. Later, when he told us about the tourist schemes, I began to feel I was watching a film version of the thirties best-seller A Short Introduction to the History of Human Stupidity, and I began to wonder how so much of what was being reported had actually taken place in the two and a half years of shooting the film. So I wasn’t surprised when I read Harlan Jacobson’s article in the November-December, 1989, Film Comment and learned that Moore had compressed the events of many years and fiddled with the time sequence. For example, the eleven plant closings announced in 1986 were in four states; the thirty thousand jobs were lost in Flint over a period of a dozen years; and the tourist attractions were constructed and failed well before the 1986 shutdowns that they are said to be a response to. Or let’s take a smaller example of Moore at play. We’re told that Ronald Reagan visited the devastated city, and we hear about what we assume is the President’s response to the crisis. He had a pizza with twelve unemployed workers and advised them to move to Texas; we’re told that during lunch the cash register was lifted from the pizza parlor. That’s good for a few more laughs. But Reagan visited the city in 1980, when he wasn’t yet President--he was a candidate. And the cash register had been taken two days earlier.
source
No comments:
Post a Comment