art objects the works of michael moore.pdf

Art Objects: The Works of Michael Moore

and Peter Watkins

M A R K P O I N D E X T E R

IN HER PLAYFULLY NAMED BOOK OF ESSAYS A RT OBJECTS (IN WHICH

the second word is a verb, rather than a noun), Jeanette Winter-

son stresses the role of art as a means of seeing beyond the mun-

dane. The hallmark of both Michael Moore and Peter Watkins as

filmmakers is that they challenge conventional frames through which

contemporary issues are seen (or perhaps ignored). The works of both

Moore and Watkins would fall into the realm of art envisioned by

Winterson as explicated in such passages as the following:

It is necessary to have a story, an alibi that gets us through theday, but what happens when the story becomes a scripture? Whenwe can no longer recognize anything outside our own reality? Wehave to be careful not to live in a state of constant self-censorship,where whatever conflicts with our world-view is dismissed ordiluted until it ceases to be a bother. (59 – 60)

Michael Moore and Peter Watkins both attempt to break down

conventional social and political assumptions in their works and both

rise above mere exhortation in opposition to or in support of specific

policy. Their scope is broader than harangue or polemic, even though

their work is politically charged. They produce dissident art.

Although his film The War Game (1965) won the Academy Award

for Best Documentary in 1967, Peter Watkins has never had a block-

buster film in hundreds of theaters in major release, as Moore has had

with Bowling for Columbine (2003), Fahrenhype 9/11 (2004), and Sicko

(2007), or a film that has brought him the personal notoriety or

received the sustained popular attention of Roger & Me (1989).

The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 44, No. 6, 2011© 2011, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

1268

After attracting a good deal of attention with his first feature

length film, Culloden (1964), a work for the BBC that applied con-

temporary news coverage techniques to a re-enactment of the last

major internal battle fought on British soil (in 1746), Watkins made

a documentary (also for the BBC) on nuclear war. The British net-

work got more than it had probably expected and in the end more

than it was willing to put on the air when Watkins turned over The

War Game, a forty-eight-minute production that consists mainly of a

graphic enactment of what the likely consequences of a nuclear bomb

dropped on Britain would be. He employed nonprofessionals as actors

who dealt with such troublesome issues as, not only the physical

aftermath of a bomb, but the police killing those who could not

possibly survive, the loss of hope and the breakdown of social order.

With this dramatization were mixed facts and comments from

experts on the survivability or nonsurvivability of nuclear attack.

Although the BBC publicly emphasized at the time that it was the

upsetting nature of the depiction that caused it to withhold the work

from broadcast, it was suspected — and in retrospect now appears con-

firmed — that the British government quietly intervened to keep the

work from television screens in fear that it would prompt public reac-

tion against Britain’s nuclear arms policies, which were very close to

those of the United States during the Cold War. In a compromise,

the film was eventually shown in theaters in Britain, but not on tele-

vision until the 1980s, despite the Academy Award that the work

received in 1967 (Cook; Murphy).

Watkins continued to develop the techniques used in Culloden and

The War Game, specifically the use of nonprofessionals to portray

ordinary people in stressful times in his only American film, Punish-

ment Park (1971). It is based on the fictional premise that both the

War in Vietnam and domestic opposition to it have escalated dramat-

ically and that President Richard Nixon has used executive powers to

declare a state of national emergency that allows for special courts of

citizens (perhaps somewhat reminiscent of draft boards) to sit in

judgment on people engaging in civil disobedience to oppose the

war. In one series of such pseudotrials in California, those convicted

are offered the choice of lengthy prison terms or volunteering to

participate in police and military exercises at a desert site called

Punishment Park. Most of the film consists of cross-cutting between

the trials of young dissidents, some violent, some not, who seem to

Art Objects: Works of Moore and Watkins 1269

represent a wide spectrum of philosophies and issues that drew

together protestors against the War in Vietnam, social injustice, and

racism in the United States in the early 1970s. Individuals with

views and background similar to the characters they portrayed were

chosen for the roles of protestors. The same was true for the citizens

who staffed the tribunals and the police and military. There were

general outlines of what the actors were to do and say, and there was

a plot that resulted in convictions of the dissidents and prolonged

confrontation as they struggled to make it across rough terrain to

their goal while pursued by police and military units. Much of the

actual dialogue and, in some cases, even the interaction involving the

killing of protestors, was extemporized by the nonprofessional actors

(Adams). The film became not only a political and social statement,

but also a psychodrama for those in it. While the sympathies of the

filmmaker and the film appear to be with the protestors, the antago-

nists, ranging from the citizen members of the tribunals to the police

and soldiers, are not mere caricatures. Most of them most of the time

seem more misguided than inherently malevolent and some of the

reaction of the “establishment” engaged in repressing the protestors

appears to be at least partly provoked. Some of the incarcerated prot-

estors when they are in Punishment Park, assuming that they are

likely to be killed rather than given a fair chance to make it through

this sort of obstacle course, decide to strike first and kill one of their

opponents, adding to the developing antagonism and paranoia of the

police and military pursuing them.

Watkins has made quite clear in the years since Punishment Park

that his goal is to make films that differ in many ways from what he

has come to call the Mass Audiovisual Media or MAVM. Watkins

appears to want his films to be a collaboration in which the actors

identify with their roles and provide a dynamic internal voice or

voices that combine with the director’s own creative vision to result

in a film that does not present a unitary vision, but preserves some of

the ambiguities and subtleties that Watkins seems to believe get lost

in more conventional approaches to the creation of mass media con-

tent. Watkins derisively refers to most of what ends up passing

through mass media channels as “the monoform” (Adams; Bowie;

Cook; Murphy; Watkins). As depicted in a Canadian film celebrating

his resistance to conventional approaches to media production called

The Universal Clock (2001), directed by Geoff Bowie, Watkins’s chief

1270 Mark Poindexter

objection to mainstream video and film production seems to be the

high degree of control utilized to achieve a predetermined objective

— to provoke a specific outcome in the audience, generally by assault-

ing it with the typical tools of production, including fast cutting,

dramatic music, and a unitary vision designed to achieve a

predetermined effect.

Watkins’s own progressive political perspective is definitely of the

Left, but differs from classical Marxism in his antiauthoritarian

stance, as well as his insistence that the bourgeoisie need to be

engaged and converted rather than merely seen as intransigent

(Grant). Despite his political orientation that would seem to call for

major structural reform in post-industrial capitalist societies like the

United States, Great Britain, and France, and certainly opposition to

wars like those in Vietnam and Iraq, Watkins has had far from kind

words for fellow cineastes who may share his political perspective in

some ways, such as Michael Moore or Mark Achbar, whom he sees as

adopting the tactics of the enemy and ultimately enfeebling the

potential of the mass media to bring about positive change.

One of Watkins’s most ambitious works since Punishment Park,

and probably his other work that most resembles it, is La Commune

(Paris, 1871), which was released in 2000. La Commune suffered

somewhat the same fate as The War Game more than thirty year ear-

lier when one of its investors, the Franco-German television network

Arte, chose to show it in the middle of the night (Universal Clock).

While some critics may find the film to be an artistic achievement

and to push Watkins’s notion of community involvement and of

engagement of ideas to new levels, the audience for which this may

occur may be quite limited, at least in the United States, compared

to Punishment Park. Some of the reasons for this may be technical and

have to do with the steps he takes beyond what he did in the earlier

films. In La Commune, Watkins has his characters not only extempo-

rize, but he shoots them out of character, talking about their personal

lives and relating themselves to the character they play, especially

relating current social and political issues to both current context and

what the nonprofessional actors have learned about the events of

1871. Sam Adams writes of the film:

The most interesting interpretations . . . come from the partici-pants themselves . . . In the most thrilling sequences, clustered


near the beginning of the second half, actors slip imperceptibly,almost unconsciously from past to present and back: Abandonedartisans ask after their errant master, then muse how nowadays, it’shard to even know who you work for. It may sound frightfullyself-conscious, but there are moments when Watkins’s “livinghistory” threatens to leap from the screen.

For some, watching La Commune can be a powerful experience but

for others, it appears not to be. When the film was shown at the

Toronto International Film Festival in 2001 it was sold out. People

almost fought physically to get into the screening, attracted by pro-

motion and perhaps the novelty of seeing a film that ran nearly six

hours (a total of five hours, forty-five minutes for the version in

Toronto). Following what might be described as highly assertive

behavior of those standing in the rush lines trying to get seats, the

festival staff acquiesced and allowed a sizeable overflow audience to

come in and stand in the back of the theater or sit in the aisles to see

the film. Within an hour or so enough people had left so that it was

fairly easy to claim a seat. By the intermission near the middle of the

film, the audience had declined more and by the end of the film,

nearly six hours after it had begun, at least half of the initial audience

appeared to have left. An observation from Winterson’s Art Objects

may help frame a possible explanation for the film’s loss of much of

its audience at the Toronto screening:

Communication between you and me relies on assumptions, associa-tions, commonalities and a kind of agreed shorthand which no-onecould precisely define, but which everyone would admit exists. (79)

It may be helpful to assume a sort of calculus that sets the effort

taken to understand a work of art, in this case a film, against the degree

to which the work appears to have potential to connect with the

assumptions, associations, and commonalities of the audience in such a

way as to offer insight or provide some sort of emotional engagement

for the audience. Especially, if the objective of the artist is to defamil-

iarize something in order to offer a new perspective, it may be difficult

or impossible to achieve this if there is too little that is familiar for the

spectators to begin with. The commercial mass media industry has long

been criticized for its unwillingness to take risks in what will engage

audiences and how such engagement can be achieved. Witness the long


history of criticism that includes such comments as H. L. Mencken’s

“No one in this world, so far as I know . . . has ever lost money by

underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain peo-

ple” (Quote/Counterquote). But to accept the assumption that an audi-

ence’s level of engagement affects its willingness to work at

understanding is not the same thing as stereotyping the public as a boo-

bus americanus, again to use Mencken’s terms (Columbia Encyclopedia). It

is merely recognizing that certain emotional and semiotic threads must

exist between what is on the screen, in the case of a film or television

program, and what is in maps of the world in the heads of the audi-

ence, to evoke Lippmann’s explanation (3 – 20) of how people live in a

pseudo-environment that determines their actions (including whether

or not they continue to pay attention to a film or go to see it to begin

with, for that matter). To take up the same idea in a slightly different

context, the multifaceted Tony Schwartz (who was responsible for the

famous Daisy commercial for the Johnson Campaign in 1964) asserted

that, when setting out to influence an audience, it was first necessary

to engage that audience, not so much by conveying new information,

as by evoking pictures, sounds, or ideas the audience already has. In his

book The Responsive Chord , Schwartz called this phenomenon resonance.

This is not a revolutionary idea, as Aristotle defined rhetoric as

“observing in any given case the available means of persuasion”

( Aristotle’s Rhetoric ). To use the more contemporary psychological

terms, the schemata, frames, templates, and/or paradigms of the

intended audience must be taken into consideration. If one accepts

James Carey’s definition of communication as “a symbolic process

whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired and transformed”

(23), it is easy to see any of these outcomes — including those that

result in frames and paradigms being changed — starting with the real-

ity that already exists within the listener or viewer of a film or other

media content. The best explanation of the different effects of Wat-

kins’s La Commune may simply be that, especially for an audience with

little or no prior knowledge of the 1871 Commune or of contemporary

life in France, the gap between what is already familiar and what is

presented on the screen simply becomes too great. Add to this the need

to deal with subtitles in a film where ideas conveyed through speech

are at least as important as what is seen and that the contemporary

issues — while not totally different from Canadian or US concerns — are

in a French context, the film may simply ask too much in too many


different dimensions to engage a sizeable percentage of North Ameri-

cans for as long as the film lasts. For some La Commune works and for

some, it does not. This is not to imply that it simply needs better mar-

keting to maximize its penetration of its niche. It may have something

important to say to many and that alone (for reasons that extend

beyond marketing) may well justify it having been made.

The most conspicuous difference between Moore and Watkins is

that while Watkins has distanced himself from what he calls the Mass

Audiovisual Media, Moore has adeptly managed to insert himself into it . In

addition to critical acclaim, Moore’s works have: (i) reached millions of

people; (ii) made money, in some cases a lot of money (Fahrenhype 9/11

cost six million dollars to make and in its first month grossed over one

hundred million dollars in the United States alone); (iii) established a

high enough profile that opponents have launched counter offensives

with at least other films directly attacking Moore, among them Fahen-

hype 9/11 (2004), Celsius 41.11: The Temperature at Which the Brain…

Begins to Die (2004), Michael Moore Hates America (2004), and Michael

& Me (2005). Printed works also attack Moore, among them Michael

Moore is a Big Fat Stupid White Man (Hardy and Clarke).

Although, as of this writing, Moore and Watkins have never had a

direct confrontation, Watkins has specifically mentioned Moore’s work.

In a message to the Gijon Film Festival in November, 2004 in the wake

of the critical box office success of Fahrenhype 9/11, Watkins writes:

The films of Michael Moore, Mark Achbar (“The Corporation”)and others, indicate a heightened use of the Monoform to manipu-late audiences for “progressive” ends. The process used by thesefilmmakers entails an endless barrage of ultra-rapid and aggres-sively edited soundbites and dislocated interviews, the narrativetricks of Hollywood including background music to heightentension, commentary employing the rhetoric and conclusions of the tabloid press, clips from old feature films to reinforce points(or titillate the audience), etc. etc. The plaudits for this divisiveprocess — and consequent placing of Michael Moore onto an iconicpedestal — indicate yet again a marked lack of critical debate aboutwhat is really happening here.

In the same message, Watkins later states:

How can we separate the media methods used by the establish-ment from those now being used by the so-called “left”?


Both “camps” blatantly use the Monoform, which is designed toprevent reflection or questioning, and to maintain a hierarchicalrelationship to the audience — and both thereby show completedisdain for the public.

In his letter to the Gijon Film Festival, Watkins expresses the

belief that since the 1960s when “TV was a medium full of possibili-

ties” that “we slid into a world of extreme audiovisual manipulation,

coupled with an increasing standardization of TV and filmic form,

and a repression within the media to maintain this conformity.” (He

goes on to express the fear that the public has been manipulated to

accept “increasingly centralized control from reactionary political and

corporate forces on the national and multinational level” and that

there is an encouragement of “ever greater levels of consumerism, all

with dire consequences for the planet.”)

While such documentary filmmakers as Michael Moore and Mark

Achbar might agree with the immediately proceeding statements by

Watkins, there is a clear parting of the ways between Watkins and the

documentary filmmakers in today’s limelight when it comes to the use

of the media themselves. Watkins finds the more overtly reactionary

social and political environment to be coupled with and “grievously

compounded by a second (and largely invisible) layer of manipulation

— that which comes about through the manipulation of time, space,

rhythm and structure in the language forms used by the MAVM [mass

audiovisual media].” He goes on to complain that “since the education

systems have also become tools of the marketplace preventing critical

media analysis, and encouraging students to unquestioningly accept

the consumer popular culture, the silence has become deafening.”

Watkins finds the structure of the media to be profoundly anti-

democratic and calls for attention to the process of media production

and to the relationship between media and audiences.

While it is difficult to believe that Michael Moore applauds the

hierarchical media system, the oligarchy of ownership or the rationale

upon which decisions to fund and distribute projects are made, Moore

makes quite clear that he is willing to play by some rules of the sys-

tem in order to be seen and heard. While he has not directly replied

to Watkins, one can find statements Moore has made about his rela-

tionship to major media organizations in such places as his interview

in The Corporation, in which he states he is trying to use the system


against itself. Moore views capitalism’s concern with profit as a weak-

ness that can be exploited by making critical and progressive media

content that opposes the very system that funds and distributes it. In

an interview with Joe Lockhart distributed with the DVD of Bowling

for Columbine, Moore portrays the interests that fund and distribute

his films as having no love for the content of his work, but still will-

ing to do anything that will make them money, perhaps because they

believe that the work will not have any significant impact anyway

(which, he says, he is betting against). Likewise, Moore goes to great

lengths in the introductions of two of his books ( Stupid White Men

and Dude, Where’s My Country?) to point out the obstacles he has had

with publishers not wishing to distribute his work, which he claims

to have overcome with a combination of pressure (in one case from

librarians objecting to the temporary refusal to distribute Stupid

White Men immediately after 11 September 2002) and greed (because

of the profitability of his work). In the interview with Lockhart,

Moore also pointedly states that he is not making movies for the

“church of the Left,” but is attempting to have some impact on a

much larger population.

Perhaps a major difference between Moore and Watkins is that

Watkins takes a much different view of public space. Having spent

decades attempting to open up cinema as a public arena at both the

production and exhibition stages, it is understandable that Watkins

reacts as he does to what seems to be the tacit assumption of Moore

(and perhaps others who have been less successful) that there is no

way the ideals of Watkins could be realized within the present sys-

tem. The audience does have limited frames of reference and media

content has become primarily a consumer commodity (with notions

of citizenship and community receding as those of consumer and

market dominate). Entertainment has become the dominant use of

mass media. In a hegemonic environment that militates against civic

engagement and in favor of reactionary political solutions, one should

not be surprised that the kinds of works Watkins would like to see

face a double barrier — first a barrier of resistance for ideological rea-

sons by those who fund and distribute media content and secondly a

barrier posed by the limited ability or unwillingness of the popula-

tion to engage in critical study of the social and political environ-

ment. If to surmount these barriers, the rhetor must use familiar

idioms and work within the limitations of the intended public’s


frames of reference in order to resonate, then Watkins seems to

believe the battle is lost a priori. He certainly does not seem to agree

that corporate interests can truly be hoisted on their own profit-dri-

ven petard by appealing to the desire for ratings or box office success

and profits, as Moore has argued.

If one sides with Moore in this debate, one might be tempted to

reject Watkins’s work as esoteric, quixotic or self-indulgent. On the

other hand, if one agrees with Watkins, one is led to reject Moore as

having become too much like those he claims to oppose and to be

concerned that his work contributes to the demise of democratic com-

munication by creating dissident messages that are delivered through

the existing structure and commercially developed idioms of address

in mediated popular culture. It is possible, however, to avoid this

dichotomy and to see both Watkins and Moore as serving comple-

mentary purposes. To do this, one must adopt somewhat the position

Watkins himself does in his films and allow for some fine distinctions

and at least the possibility of finding something of value even in the

works of those with whom one disagrees or whose political position

one opposes. It also lies in an understanding of how Moore’s work

resonates with the popular culture and media habits of his audiences

in a way that does not repair or maintain ideological hegemony (to

borrow terms from James Carey’s definition of communication), but

which rather, through emphasis, through the intertwining of the

familiar and of the new, carries Moore’s audience on a journey that is

both familiar and enlightening and, to apply Schwartz’s concept of

resonance, is able to stimulate progressive elements of popular culture

that are already part of the schemas, cognitive maps and conceptual

paradigms of his audience. As Schwartz puts it:

A listener or viewer brings far more information to the communi-cation event than a communicator can put into his program, com-mercial, or message. The communicator’s problem, then, is not toget stimuli across, or even to package the stimuli so they can beunderstood or absorbed. Rather, he must deeply understand thekinds of information and experiences stored in his audience, thepatterning of this information, and the interactive resonanceprocess whereby stimuli evoke this stored information. (25)

Moore seems to apply the kind of approach described by

Schwartz to subvert or challenge reactionary politics. Moore does


not concede the territory on those cognitive maps so rapidly as

Watkins would.

Let us examine briefly what are probably Moore’s three best-known

works prior to 2007: Roger & Me, Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenhype

9/11. Perhaps individually, but even more so collectively, they show

just how much of a hybrid form Moore’s work is. All three of these

films mix genres freely. If one looks at previous works, where does one

place these films? While documentaries, they lack the traditional

pretense of objectivity of the television works of Edward R. Murrow or

even of the more engaged Hearts and Minds (1974). Yet they are in

some respect documentaries. They are satirical, yet they are not mere

parody or burlesque. They engage in political advocacy, but are not lin-

ear intellectual arguments like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. They are

in the broad muckraking tradition that includes such expose s as The

Washington Post’s celebrated coverage of the Watergate scandal, yet

they are also in the tradition of another kind of muckraking: the politi-

cal cartoons of Thomas Nast. Moore’s targets are presented at times in

conventional news clips, in interviews (as is common in more conven-

tional documentaries), and at others times as Nastian caricatures (albeit

through the editing of film rather than with pen and ink). There is a

storyline maintained (some might say imposed) in Moore’s films that

gives coherence and sustains attention (somewhat as in fiction), pulling

Moore also into the muckraking line of Harriet Beecher Stowe or

Upton Sinclair or, especially, in the case of Bowling for Columbine, of

Sinclair Lewis. Comedy, satire, the expose , a little sensationalism,

attention-holding pacing, political advocacy: all of these elements

come together in Michael Moore’s films in ways that are not unlike

what was present in Joseph Pulitzer’s newspapers of the late nineteenth

and early twentieth century, which combined entertainment, political

advocacy, information, and education about public issues (Stephens,

Leonard). One of Moore’s creative leaps has been in bringing this fusion

to the cinematic screen which, if one applies the same principles to

cinema as she advocates for literature, would seem likely to please

Jeannette Winterson. In Art Objects, she writes: “Ours has been a

century of change, and if literature is to have any meaning beyond the

museum, it must keep developing” (39). Later in the same work, she

advocates a breakdown of the barriers “between poetry and prose” and

calls for “a form that answers twenty-first century needs” (191).

Perhaps Moore’s work does in cinema what she calls for in literature.


Roger & Me begins with a nostalgic return to the 1950s of

Michael Moore’s childhood in Flint, Michigan. Speaking in the first

person, Moore shows family movies with himself in them. Both the

images and the voiceover are typical of the TV form of address

(folksy, seeking to establish contact and rapport with the audience

through commonalities). Next there is a montage evoking (especially

for anyone Moore’s age or older) bits and pieces of a US popular

culture of the 1950s and 1960s that was capitalist, corporate but

also somehow at least slightly communitarian. Some might call it

the “we’re in this together” mentality of World War II, carried over

to the corporate capitalism of teamwork (a word used in one of the

clips Moore features at this point) within a community where state,

civil society, and business easily intermingle and cooperate in some

great cause. Moore reminds his audience of post Depression opti-

mism and presumed upward mobility. He tells us that his whole

family worked at the auto factory. The tone remains chatty,

chummy and informal. Cynics would call it perhaps the false

Gemeinschaft typical of TV. But it is a familiar idiom. Moore then

slips into a more personal montage about his early adulthood and

how he wanted to leave Flint (and did for awhile), but then there is

his return to Flint and the layoffs at the auto plant. The device used

to move along the story is eventually Moore’s attempts to find

General Motors CEO Roger Smith and get him to come to Flint to

see the effects of plant closings on the city. There are many shots of

dilapidated houses. There is a news clip about the rat population

exceeding the human population. We see people evicted from their

homes. Within these montages are strains of music, sarcastic voice-

overs, and humorous seasoning of various types. But Moore isn’t

selling soap. He is using familiar form and commonalities to

reframe issues. A close examination of what to some at first viewing

might seem like a loose pastiche of serious and amusing sequences

reveals a highly coherent intermix of a very small number of themes

or discourses.

The first of these themes or discourses could be called “discontinu-

ity” and deals with the inconsistency between Flint’s situation in the

1980s and what came before, including the emotion-laden efforts of

GM in the 1950s and 1960s to emphasize a notion of “we’re in this

together,” a communitarian approach to automobile production and

an emphasis on its close relationship to its community. Then when


the layoffs come and plants are closed, a completely different para-

digm is suddenly evoked by GM about the need to remain profitable

and General Motors not owing anything to the city of Flint, no mat-

ter how many people it may need to lay off (almost the exact words

of a General Motors public relations representative who himself ends

up losing his job in the cutbacks of the 1980s). The warm, fuzzy

notion of the avuncular corporation is now replaced by the idea of the

corporation’s primary obligation to maximize profits. It is not just

the new way in which GM and its relationship to its employees and

Flint is framed, but the utter discontinuity with what existed previ-

ously, that becomes jarring. The discontinuity is there even before

Moore introduces his metaphor of pets or meat when he visits a

woman who sells rabbits for pets or for food. The comparison,

whether the audience may immediately seize upon it or not, is to

GM and its Flint employees: first the employees were pets and, when

no longer needed, they became meat. When a pet becomes food there

is the same discontinuity. A rabbit cannot be thought of (at least not

easily) as both food and a pet at the same time. It takes a shift of

schema to go from one to the other. A similar type of discontinuity

occurs in the speech of Roger Smith at a corporate Christmas gather-

ing, bizarre even without Moore’s framing of it, when Smith refers to

Charles Dickens and praises the pursuit of nonmonetary values in a

film where the exact opposite of those values appears to drive GM.

Moore juxtaposes the speech and the GM Christmas event with scenes

of misery in Flint, including yet another eviction just before

Christmas.

Two themes related to what is here labeled discontinuity are: (i)

the recurrent contrast of the rich and poor — the better off of Flint

partying in the jail that will house the criminal population that is

growing along with unemployment, for example, and (ii) the general

approach to Flint’s problems by various segments of the community

that seem to be forms of denial/avoidance/displacement characterized

by unrealistic and ineffective responses to the economic crisis in the

city. These two themes sometimes intermingle. We see parties where

the elite have the less fortunate hired as human statues. Then, within

this Dickensian contrast, emerges a subtheme. The elite, or those we

are invited to take for elite, are not so much malevolent as indiffer-

ent, themselves out of touch. Sophomoric discourse on the industrial

revolution as an art form and Flint as its genesis gushes forth from a


partygoer, presumably a member of the elite. This man is not so

much portrayed as evil, one might observe, as absurd: he has nothing

to say that can shed any light on Flint’s problems. He simply doesn’t

know what he is talking about. We see here not Adolf Hitler, Fu

Manchu, or Simon Legree, but George Babbitt.

If the haves are indifferent, ill-informed and arrogant (whose ratio-

nalization and understanding of the problem seem to have a depth

equivalent to the purported response of Marie Antoinette to eat cake

if bread is lacking), the have-nots are not often shown as much more

insightful. As their misery is presented, largely through evictions,

what we rarely see is an attempt to define or deal with the problem

at a social or political level. The unemployed, while they may evoke

sympathy, do not seem to be on the verge of any collective action or

even much understanding of the causes of their misery. The broad

category of denial/avoidance/displacement and resulting unrealistic

response includes such segments of the film as Ronald Reagan’s visit

to give the city a pep talk and tell people if they cannot find work

there to leave; the building of Auto World, which was a failure and

closed shortly after opening, and attempts to make Flint a tourist

destination in the midst of economic crisis. These attempts and oth-

ers (including bringing an evangelist to the city to cheer people up,

offering discounts to stage shows for unemployed workers, burning

Money magazine because it referred to Flint as a bad place to live in

the wake of the economic disaster, and expecting the manufacture of

lint rollers somehow to rescue the city) are ridiculed. The exposure

here is not so much of individual facts but of a mindset that some-

how seems to avoid defining the problem. Moore is not telling his

viewers anything really new, but seems to be trying to get them to

acknowledge in perhaps new ways what they already know. In this

respect parts of the film are like an intervention for an alcoholic or

drug addict in which friends and family try to chip away at the

defenses that redefine and deflect attention away from the real

problem.

Finally, there is the theme latched onto in the title and

promotional posters and ads for the film: Michael Moore, dressed as a

working class Everyman, pursuing GM CEO Roger Smith with a

kind of false naivete . He is the fool who will show the truth. A seg-

ment that can be used as a key to decoding much of the film comes

when Moore tries to visit a plant on its last day in operation and the


“spokesperson” for GM at the plant tells him she will not speak to

him because he does not represent anybody. This uncommunicative

“spokesperson” then oddly evokes a notion of family to prevent him

from entering the plant and talking with workers about to lose their

jobs (as if there is something exceedingly private about this). Moore

then is dismissed as a private concern while in the same confrontation

the closing is framed as a private event. This is the spokesperson’s

apparent strategy for avoiding public discourse. Of course, it backfires

because here it comes across as so disingenuous that it has the oppo-

site effect. Then the spokesperson has him forcibly removed because

he is on private property. (Since Moore and the camera have become

established by this point as somewhat of a surrogate for the audience,

their removal then seems to level the “spokesperson’s” reaction at the

audience). What Moore does over and over again in Roger & Me is to

show the mechanics of how GM’s insulation is achieved, and then he

denies it that insulation. He is able to frame layoffs and plant closing

and unemployment as the result of public and corporate policy deci-

sions rather than as somehow natural. What at some level the popular

culture may take for granted (that corporations are limited in their

accountability for the consequences of their actions), Moore holds up

to challenge, not by a linear intellectual argument, but by the crea-

tion of incidents in which there is conflict and through perhaps cin-

ema’s best argumentative tool, juxtaposition. In this way, although

the film associates ideas and images in a manner that more closely

resembles commercials than a traditional documentary, the goal

clearly seems to be to resonate with the viewer’s existing doubts

about the system and to reframe Flint’s crisis in ways that call for

critical thought on the part of the audience. Moore stimulates

thought about what his audience may already be aware of, but invites

a counter hegemonic framing of that knowledge.

In Bowling for Columbine, Moore continues the folksy style, the

chatty voiceover and the lively montages that throw together diverse

material to take the audience once again on an ironic, satiric and yet at

times quite serious romp through issues related to violence, guns and

American society. This film is less neatly tied together than Roger &

Me and does not answer all of the questions it raises, but, once again,

it attempts to make connections that call hegemonic frames into ques-

tion. While using everything from the Columbine shootings to

National Rifle Association (NRA) rallies to an interview with the


brother of Terry Nichols to getting a free gun at a bank as an incentive

to open an account there, Moore attempts to engage and entertain the

audience. The film differs slightly from Roger & Me, however, in that a

lot of what is in this film ends up not really being directly related to

Moore’s central concern (which is perhaps why some critics liked it

less than Roger & Me). Some of its content may serve the same purpose

as the comics or lurid tales of urban crime in the heyday of the penny

press, devices to attract and sustain the attention of an audience that

might not read or, in this case, watch, because of intrinsic interest in

the main topic. (One might call this a form of “bait and switch” in

that what is used to attract attention initially may not be what Moore

eventually wants the audience to think about. Their attention having

been attracted, however, they will be given the analysis that is the

main point of the film nevertheless.) In the end , Bowling for Columbine

frames the United States not just vaguely as violent (as some of those

interviewed in the film try to do) but (a) as violent as the result of irra-

tional fears — including fears that embody racism — that are kept alive

and intensified by specific interests that benefit from them; (b) as

ignoring and failing to relate to issues of violence such causes as the

lack of a social welfare system that other countries with much lower

murder rates have; (c) as violent within a larger context that includes a

war mentality and willingness to use massive force against people and

countries outside of its own borders.

In Fahrenhype 9/11, Moore continues his blend of humor and politi-

cal commentary, developing to a greater degree the effective mix of

entertainment and more traditional journalistic expose and analysis he

offers in Bowling for Columbine. One could argue that showing John

Ashcroft singing his own composition “Let the Eagle Soar” and Paul

Wolfowitz slicking back his hair with his own saliva are gratuitous

segments that really should have no bearing on how one receives the

political positions with which they are associated. But that would miss

part of their function. While the use of such unflattering clips does

put Bush associates in a bad light and perhaps sets the stage for more

direct challenges to Administration policy, critics who see them as

unfair ad hominem jabs, as well as some who cheer them, may be

missing the point that these segments are also intrinsically funny.

They are not there just to make these men look bad; they are also there to

get a laugh. Much of Fahrenhype 9/11 can be viewed (even perhaps some

of the segments in which Moore seems to be building a rather flimsy


conspiracy theory about rather specific goals Bush and associates may

have had related to the building of a natural gas pipeline in Afghan-

istan) as simply devices to engage attention. The main message of

Fahrenhype 9/11 is simpler to state than that of Roger & Me and Bowling

for Columbine. Moore ultimately zeroes in on one core cluster of ideas:

that the Bush Administration hijacked the national outrage over the

attacks of 11 September 2001 into pursuing a war against Iraq that

was part of an existing agenda; lied or at best had a cavalier concern for

the truth about the military capabilities of Saddam Hussein, and has

embroiled the nation in a quagmire in Iraq that is sacrificing its

soldiers and the Iraqi population to policy goals that have little or

nothing to do with the values in which most Americans believe and

for which they may actually think their nation is fighting. This is a

rather specific message, although it is contained in a very large and

entertaining envelope. The film itself may not be cohesive in a logical

sense. However, it is constructed not just to state its message, but also

to deliver it as effectively as possible to a large, general audience.

When one takes into account the funding and distribution of their

work and the reception of it by the intended public, it is clear that

Watkins and Moore take quite different approaches. While Watkins

aspires to work within a public space that is healthy for a democracy

to have and his works do clearly exhibit enormous potential to

engage audiences and to embody real public participation, as well as

to help redefine the relationship between media and the public, their

potential to do any of this is severely limited. With funding for pub-

lic service broadcasting challenged worldwide and with commercial

models and definitions of markets seemingly in ascendancy, a prere-

quisite for creating the environment in which Watkins or his succes-

sors can successfully build new and more democratic models for mass

media is a major change in the political and commercial climate. It is

difficult to see how Watkins or those who are similarly marginalized

could help bring this about. Moore may not go so far as to adopt

“any means necessary” but he does seem quite focused on using many

of the means available in the current environment in ways that reach

large audiences with alternatives to currently dominant paradigms for

social policy issues, including corporate public obligations, health

care, foreign policy, racism, and the traditionally taboo subject of

socioeconomic class. He does so in a business environment that is cer-

tainly not friendly to his own ideological perspective, while attracting


large audiences from a population that is decreasingly informed and

increasingly unlikely to seek even basic current events knowledge.

In his recent work Tuned Out , David T. Z. Mindich calls attention

to what he considers a crisis in US democracy. Echoing conclusions

drawn earlier by Postman, Entman and others, Mindich documents a

continued “decline in news consumption” over the past forty years that

“has produced two generations of young adults who, for the most part,

have barely an outline of what they need to make an informed decision

in the voting booth” (ix). Mindich provides a statistical portrait of a

population under forty in the United States that not only prefers, but

greatly prefers entertainment to news and public affairs, and that has

disengaged from the political and community sphere to such an extent

that fewer and fewer even feel the need to justify their lack of knowl-

edge of current events, applying the same standard to news and public

affairs programs they would to entertainment. “Forty million people

watched American Idol’s conclusion, but only 37 million watched the

second debate between Bush and Gore in the 2000 election campaign,”

Mindich points out (2). Disturbing as that comparison is, there are

other statistics that paint an even grimmer picture:

It would be less troubling if the 80 percent of young people whodo not read newspapers every day watched TV news or logged onto news Web sites. Most don’t. The average viewer of prime-timeentertainment is 42 years old . . . roughly the median age of thepopulation as a whole. At CNN, which recently changed its for-mat to attract younger viewers, the average age ranges from 59 to64. At the broadcast networks, the median viewer age for theevening news has been climbing steadily — from the low 50s in1991 to 60 today. (3)

In a society like Mindich describes, where knowledge of public

events and issues is quite limited, it is difficult to engage in serious

discourse through mass media that can be understood by, much less

engage, large audiences. Most of us have probably seen TV comedians’s

jokes bomb on audiences that failed to catch references to major events

or topics covered extensively in the news. To use Winterson’s words

those “assumptions, associations, commonalities” that a filmmaker

like Moore or Watkins could take for granted as widely shared in the

United States are probably quite few in the political arena, but are

abundant in other areas related to personal lives and commercially


disseminated popular culture. Moore seems to understand this and

attempts to resonate with existing schemata and/or paradigms to

engage his audiences and to challenge the way received knowledge is

framed. Watkins may find this to be a compromise that only perpetu-

ates the reactionary political trends Moore claims to oppose. Without

challenges like those made by Moore, however, the prospects of

Watkins or his artistic progeny gaining the opportunity to develop

and distribute alternate forms would seem quite slim. Far from

perpetuating the monoform and centralized ideological control

Watkins so deplores, Moore’s strategy may have the potential to help estab-

lish the conditions under which Watkins and those who share his philosophy

could prosper or provide a more hospitable climate in which they could create

and their works could be distributed . If Moore’s type of documentary

becomes no more than another commodity and does not have conse-

quences beyond simply finding another market segment to entertain

without major impact on the political climate or exercise of power,

then indeed the techniques Moore uses may, as Watkins fears, in the

long run merely help imbed the monoform more deeply in American

media culture. But it seems to me excessively pessimistic to assume

that to be the only possible outcome.

Works Cited

Adams, Sam. “History in the Making.” Philadelphia City Paper . 11 –

17 Dec. 2003. Web. 22 Sept. 2011.

Aristotle. Artistotle’s Rhetoric . Trans. W. Rhys Roberts. Book I, Ch. 2.N.d. Web. 21 Sept. 2011.

Carey, James. Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society.New York: Routledge, 1992. Print.

Celsius 41.11: The Temperature at Which the Brain…Begins to Die. Dir.Kevin Knobloch. USA, 2004. Film.

Columbia Encyclopedia (online entry for Mencken, H.L.). N.d. Web.22 Sept. 2011.

Cook, John R. “The Last Battle: Peter Watkins on DVD.” Film Inter-national 1:1 (1 January 2003): 54 – 56. Print.

The Corporation. Dirs. Jennifer Abbott and Mark Achbar. Canada,2003. Film.

Entman, Robert. Democracy Without Citizens. New York: Oxford UP,1989. Print.

Fahrenhype 9/11. Dir. Alan Peterson. USA, 2004. Film.


Grant, Jacques. “Interview with Peter Watkins.” Cine ma 73.182(1973): 108 – 12. Print.

Hardy, David T., and Jason Clark. Michael Moore Is a Big Fat Stupid White Man. New York: Regan Books, 2004. Print.

Hearts and Minds. Dir. Peter Davis. USA, 1974. Film.

Leonard, Thomas C. Power of the Press: The Birth of American Political Reporting . New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Print.

Lippmann, Walter. Public Opinion. New York: Free Press Paperbacks,1997. Print.

Lockhart, Joe. Interview With Michael Moore. Bowling for Columbine: Special Edition. DVD.

Michael & Me. Dir. Larry Elder. USA, 2005. Film.

Michael Moore Hates America. Dir. Michael Wilson. USA, 2004. Film.

Mindich, David T.Z. Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don’t Follow the News. New York: Oxford UP, 2005. Print.

Moore, Michael. Dude, Where’s My Country? New York: WarnerBooks, 2003. Print.

——. Stupid White Men… and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation. New York: Regan Books, 2004. Print.

Paine, Thomas. Common Sense. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1997. Print.

Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Ageof Show Business. New York: Viking, 1985. Print.

Quote/Counterquote. 7 Apr. 2011. Web. 22 Sept. 2011. <http://www.quotecounterquote.com/2011/04/5-things-you-wont-go-broke.html>.

Schwartz, Tony. The Responsive Chord . New York: Anchor Books,1974. Print.

Stephens, Mitchell. A History of News. New York: Penguin Books,1989. Print.

The Universal Clock. Dir. Geoff Bowie. Canada, 2001. Film.

Watkins, Peter. “Greetings From Peter Watkins to Gijon.” Nov. 2004.Web. 27 Dec. 2004.

Winterson, Jeanette. Art Objects. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.Print.

Michael Moore Filmography

Roger & Me (1989)

Pets or Meat: The Return to Flint (1992)

Canadian Bacon (1995)

The Big One (1997)


And Justice for All (1998)

Bowling for Columbine (2002)

Fahrenhype 9/11 (2004)

Sicko (2007)

Peter Watkins Filmography

The Web (1956)

The Field of Red (1958)

The Diary of an Unknown Soldier (1959)

The Forgotten Faces (1961)

Culloden(1964)

The War Game (1965)

Privilege (1967)

The Gladiators 1969)

Punishment Park (1971)

Edvard Munch (1974)

The Trap (1975)

The Seventies People (1975)

Evening Land (1977)

The Journey (1987)

The Freethinker (1994)

Commune (Paris, 1871), La (2000)

Mark Poindexter (PhD, University of Minnesota) is professor of Broadcastand Cinematic Arts at Central Michigan University, where he teachescourses in mass communication history, theory, and criticism.


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