this isn't a review, just a rambling reaction to the film.
went to see Moore's latest, Capitalism: A Love Story. While I've never had money to go to the movies that often (so I can't judge), I did think it unusual that, of the small crowd of about 40 people at a 10p.m. showing, about half stayed to see the credits and then some seemed to gather to talk about the show in the aisles afterward. I don't think this typically happens at the movie theater. Can others comment on that kind of thing?
Typical Moore fare, though I think he pumped this one out quickly to address contemporary events and the film suffered for it.
Moore opens with scenes of foreclosure, the opener is video footage of people in a house watching about 10 cop cars cruise up the road toward the house, a nondescript ranch --not some McMansion. The occupants talk to the sheriff on the phone explaining that they know they're on the way but they aren't coming out. The cops will have to break the door down.
They do.
I didn't actually understand what was happening in this first scene until the scene shifted to Detroit as people in a neighborhood harass a guy posting a foreclosure notice on a house.
me personally? I would have just shown a rapid-fire succession of one foreclosure after another - big homes and small, ghetto and suburb, Detroit and Ft. Lauderdale, NYC and Indianapolis, San Francisco and Gooch Hollow.
Next (I think I have events correctly), footage from what appears to be an educational film produced for high school history classes about the fall of the Roman Empire. The point is meant to compare the two. Ho hum.
Moore talks to the guy who runs Condo Vultures, a company that unabashedly sets out to show foreclosed properties to people who are looking only to buy homes dirt cheap in order to turn them over later. The owner of Condo Vultures just tells it like it is. This is capitalism man. All the while, you're viewing condos in Miami in neighborhoods where some have been trashed. As he's showing the property, the camera pans out to another condo in the neighborhood, roof ripped off. Another, right next door, appears to be burnt out.
Moore then moves into a story about how we got here, arguing that we have had a love affair with capitalism. History seems to begin in the 20th century, with the U.S. becoming the most economically powerful nation on earth, doing so out of the ashes of destruction visited upon Europe and Japan during WWII.
He then describes his father's and his world in the 50s and 60s. Single earner family, enough money to get a mortgage and pay off the house by the time Moore was in kindergarten. It's all hunkey dorey: the great middle class. Dad had a pension no one could touch. He didn't have to pay to send kids to college. he had four weeks vacation.
It all comes crashing down -- unexplained in the movie as to why. The fatal crash is signaled by Jimmy Carter's national malaise speech. You really wouldn't understand why Carter was making that speech if you either hadn't lived through it hadn't read about it. It was poorly presented, but I suppose most people could figure it out since the whole point of introducing Carter was as springboard to focus on Reagan.
(Aside: I do not remember that speech. I have read it and about it. But, lord, that was ugly. That was a truly awful speech, a truly awful delivery. I can't even begin to explain it, but Carter came off as one of those speakers on one of those educational 50s propaganda films Moore likes to use in his footage. *shudder*)
Next: some truly hilarious footage of Reagan portrayed not primarily as a movie actor, but as a Hollywood pitch man, shilling for everything from hand soap to coffee. Reagan, capitalist tool in his first career, is a natural as capitalist tool in his second.
Reagan represents the wanton destruction of the 50s American dream. A series of charts shows the grim statistics. As the fat cats make more and more money, the little guy's pay has flatlined. The flatline of our paychecks is then contrasted against the upward growth of productivity. etc. Crime up. Incarceration up. CEO pay up. Paychecks stagnate.
Reagan is showing making a speech on the stock exchange floor, rambling on about free enterprise. Don Regan by his side, Moore points Regan out and explains his ties to big finance. Then you hear Regan say: "you need to hurry it up" (paraphrase)
"who else would tell Reagan to hurry it up?" implying that Regan represents forces that have the power to tell presidents what to do.
I think several people criticized Fahrenheit 911 because it propagated a vulgar marxist position that could too easily slide into a kind of conspiracy theory of capitalism.
This film is subject to that critique. I don't think Moore actually thinks this way, that Don Regan was Reagan's puppet master. It's just that he's trying to illustrate a concept -- the one we were just arguing over about the relationship of the state to the market. In the final analysis, the government is subject to the rule of capitalism. It may not accomplish this in any uniform, straightforward way, but the state generally operates in the service of capital.
How do you do that for the uninitiated?
It's a really tough one. How do you explain this really complex relationship between capitalists and politicians?
While I don't think Moore has a simplistic view, that there is some conspiracy going on, he does seem to allow his interviewees to do that for him. He talks to that congresswoman from Ohio who's given her colleagues in the house and senate shit for the bailout bill. Can't recall her name. But she and another congressman both say that they think shenanigans were going on. They both say that the bill was rammed through and the nefarious forces behind this were the financial industry.
Moore buttresses that point by connecting the Bush administration's use of fear to ram through a war, to ram through the patriot act, to try to get elected to the use of fear to ram through the bailout bill.
In another section of the movie, Moore seems to obsess over dead peasant insurance. This is insurance that a company takes out on its employees. When an employee dies for whatever reason, company collects. Moore pulls heart strings, spending a lot of time with family members crying over the loss of the loved one, as if this crying is *about* the dead peasant insurance. It would have been enough to just speak to one family and then explore the ramifications, but he ends up talking to another family, dragging it all out. It's only toward the end of the segment that Moore gets to the point: life insurance is for beneficiaries who have a stake in the person being alive. I can't take out insurance on my neighbor for no reason. It's illegal. Moore and others think dead peasant ins. should be illegal as well.
(Of course, it is prob. legal be/c companies will argue that they are merely insuring themselves for the cost of losing the employee. Their logic is likely that it will cost X to replace that employee, so the insurance pay off defrays their costs. This isn't explored in the film since it would be too complicated. But that difficulty is precisely why it makes it hard to imagine doing Marxism 101 for the general population without using a reductionist vulgar marxist approach.)
Moore does the right thing. After presenting a bleak analysis, he points to peole actually fighting back. But, to you and me, this fighting back looks kind of anemic on film. The people who fight back are the people at Republic Window and Doors, as well as a group that reclaims homes that have been foreclosed, helping families move back into their homes, and then standing around jeering and finger wagging at anyone who tries to operate as lackeys for the bank by evicting them again.
He also points to a couple of examples of democratically run companies to make the case that it doesn't have to be this way. There are successful enterprises operating where everyone owns the company, everyone has equal input and voting rights, etc.
He also impresses upon people that, when the U.S. assisted Germany, Italy, and Japan in revising their constitutions, they actually created constitutions that were more advanced than our own, recognizing rights of workers. it raises the question in the viewer's mind: why did we support such things for *them* and not us?
You then learn about how much better off everyone is in Japan and Europe where, Moore's film argues, you have a much better social safety net.
I'm not sure exactly of the sequence, but at some point Moore discusses the U.S's own history of recognizing the rights of workers and people more generally to a social and economic safety net. In a rather stunning bit, he reveals footage of Roosevelt arguing for a 2nd Bill of Rights. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Bill_of_Rights
This footage was taken of Roosevelt just before he died, 1994. In it, he argues for a 2nd Bill of Rights, expressing what became known as Welfare Liberalism in its emphasis on extending to people the right to a *good* education, the right to a job with a decent wage, a right to medical care, etc. If you're old and politically aware, like me, you are not surprised by this. You remember a time when these things were embraced by ordinary people and no one was ashamed to say it -- as they tend to be now.
I think Moore should have played on this one a lot more. Why did the footage get buried? What happened? Why did these sentiments become so unpopular> He has sort of already explored this, but he hasn't made it crystal clear. It made me wonder ifthere was something weird about the footage.
Anyway, what I found unusual, though I shouldn't be surpised, is that it's the theme of democracy that moore presses hardest.
I was floored by the name he gave to the system that was the opposite of capitalism. For Moore, it's democracy.
uh....
While he hints at the "other ism" in another scene, he chooses to avoid direct confrontation with it by saying that we need to have a democracy, not capitalism.
He tells people he's tired of protesting, alone basically. You see him wrapping a Wall St. enterprise with police crime tape, trying to make a citizens arrest of the finance fat cats inside. He's doing it all alone, while people stand by and watch, taking video footage with the phones.
He wants some help with this. We can do it. We can fix this problem like the people at Republic Window and Door and like the people who reclaim foreclosed homes. We have to get together.
And then the film closes, with some interesting quotes and factoids interspersed among the credits.
But you are never given an opportunity to find out how to do something.
There is no organization, no web site to which you are directed. Zippo. I think that was the most tragic part of this film. Why get people interested or try to, and then provide nothing for them? Why get people fired up, or try to, and then expect them to figure out what to do on their own. What? Are they supposed to go to meetup.com and type in a search, "burn down capitalism" or something?
Oh, and BTW: Yes, Moore does go after democrats. He says it was democrats who made the whole bailout thing work.
As for Obama? Well, you see, capitalists didn't know what to do about him. Seemed kind of dangerous. Lots of people thought he was a socialist during the campaign. You get footage of the wingnuts espousing such views. you get Obama talking with Joe the Plumber, talking about equitable distribution.
And yet the attempt to brand him socialist didn't work, Moore shows. The polls kept going up for Obama.
Moore says that capitalists still didn't know what to do about this guy, Obama. In the end, they do what they always do: they threw money at the guy. And then Moore throws out the names of all his financial backers, one big corporation and financial firm after another.
To me, of course, this was unsatisfying. To the average viewer, I'm not sure. Of course, your average politically aware person going to see this film is going to think that most politicians are on the take, bought and sold, anyway.
Sure. But there's always that "Not my Nigel" thing going on. Oh sure, politicians are ratfuckers, just not *my* favorite politician-cum-fuckstain. :)
Anyway, I'm sick of typing. :)