Jumping on the viral marketing bandwagon, Michael Moore latest documentary, Slacker Uprising, enters the world as a free download, clearly with the intent of reaching as wide an audience as possible prior to U.S. presidential election. The aw-shucks showman is of course known for such politically savvy tactics; the documentary itself is an account of his college campus tour in the months prior to the 2004 presidential election, where he visited twenty battleground states bearing clean underwear, romen noodles, and a lot of rhetoric to entice the notoriously lax voting demographic on campuses into the registering booths. Opinions aside, a certain reverence is owed this level of engineered activism, inspired stunts that have their roots in TV Nation, lifting the messages off the placards and onto the world stage in absurd confrontations with the status-quo.
Slacker Uprising, while of feature length, is a fairly slight and unusually humorless effort by the creator of such incendiary works as Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine. While it begins in the traditional way with a newscast montage to tongue-firmly-in-cheek music overlay (here recounting the rise and fall of John Kerry), it very quickly establishes a one note exercise of merely documenting the highlights of these campus encounters, an auditorium full of fervent fans and the man himself pontificating platitudes with the occasional quip. Every so often a celebrity is brought in to add his/her voice to the Democratic endorsement (a highlight being Eddie Vedder’s acoustic performance of a Cat Stevens song). The whole project is tinged with a sadness in the recognition that despite its best efforts to invigorate an anti-war campaign to get John Kerry into office, even the modest success it had with the young vote was not enough to make it happen.
While I do appreciate the message of promoting citizen participation in democracies, the idealistic ethics that Moore sentimentalizes about so often in his speeches comes without much concern for the practical implementation, and for me this is where I side with the detractors of his political views, despite still enjoying much of his showman theatrics. If organized religion has showed us anything it is that it is very easy to persuade people of moral certitudes that can go so far in their imagined reality that no amount of reasoning will dissuade them. Moore, in his heart string tactics, taps into this live wire of belief and shepherds the evangelicals of the Left, seeing only right and wrong and a system in need of assimilation. But there is a huge disconnect between theory and practice, and the idealism of say, for example, leaving Iraq immediately because one more soldier’s death is morally wrong, does not take into consideration the probable ramifications of the act and the other side of the scale which such actions may induce. While I agree in spirit with some of the ideals that Moore promulgates, they require more than moral righteousness to be utilized; they require a pragmatic means to an end, which inevitably is wrought in a compromise that someone like Moore cannot accept. So as he agitates his flock into a fervor that is willing to run headlong into political actions due to their moral value, he bears the same guilt of shortsightedness that he accuses Republicans of, both putting ideals over practical solutions.
In a choice line of Slacker Uprising, Moore defends his films as being ‘anti-propagandistic’ in that they provide the opposing voice to what is a constant deluge of false information in the media and in the talking points of the Bush administration. That to me is no different than the semantic confusion Chomsky noted between the American government distinction between terrorists and freedom fighters. It’s the same shit, different package.
Thoughts?
Without getting into it, I generally agree with Jay’s general statement on Moore made during a recent FJ Podcast. I think the left allowed Moore to be painted a certain way and gave up defending him entirely because there’s enough cracks in the facade and Moore is enough of a loudmouth to feel its not worth it. As such people started taking ANY critique of him as if they were more truthful than anything Moore says, even when the anti-Moore books and “Bowling for Truth” essays were coming from actual gun lobbyists and republican speechwriters. Apparently if you find enough fudged facts in Moore’s work, people start assuming everyone pointing them out must be entirely honest. Specifically, David T. Hardy has made shitload of money off of Moorebashing, and he’s infinitely more full of shit.
I think Moore always asks a lot of good questions and his entertainment style has helped documentaries overall more than it has hurt (yes, in some cases it has hurt, and I mean Morgan Spurlock). Saying Moore is without substance because he is also snarky and gimmicky is just a flat out lie.
But as for this film, I think if it was any good he would have released it, even if it’s long past relevant. I don’t particularly have any interest in it also for the same reason I’ll never see the John Kerry: Going Upriver documentary that is apparently excellent. It’s a little bittersweet with so much going on, and only if the country changes direction, and I dont mean just changing presidents, I mean actual success after the fact, will it be easier to re-explore the past failures.
well he is not just a loudmouth he is a symbol of blue collar ‘straight talk’. Which I find worrisome, but probably inevitable, if not Moore than someone else… there is this strange draw towards absolutes in the working class. They like things black and white, they respond to what other people would consider the most obvious of pandering and they take it as insightful. The world is not so simple, and the rhetoric does not fit the real world, and so you get people like Bush, a guy you want to have a barbecue with, or Palin, a hockey mom that you may be able to identify with her story, and its a complete and utter resistance to reality, to nuance. Moore perpetuates this same delusion only from a different angle, its rarely about the complexity of problems and pragmatic strategies to overcome them.
Obama in tonight’s debate was brilliant in his injection of nuance while still dancing to the attention deficit crowd, hitting also some of the keywords that hit home, but not at the expense of having something substantial to say. I am in awe of this man.
Jay and I disagree about the value of Maher’s Religulous, and this sort of plays into the topic of Michael Moore’s documentaries. For me Moore’s best film is Sicko, because it was able to be entertaining, be comedic, but not give up some of the credence to its persuasive argument, it hit that sweet spot. Bowling for Columbine is a more enjoyable film, but a far messier one, a film that goes for the laugh at the expense of the integrity of the argument. Its merely a comedy, whereas something like Sicko has the potential to be both comedy and pensive critique. Jay is delusional when he said in the podcast that Maher’s Religulous had no ambition but to be a comedy, that it aimed at that and succeeded, and that one need only look at where he comes from to know that. First of all, Real Time with Bill Maher is a political show that intersperses comedic bits. The bulk of it is about really digging into the topics and exploring various sides of them. Maher, for all of his comedic talent, is actually an incredibly bright person, and it is not far-fetched to suppose that his film on religion was to carry on this same balance of comedy and insight. Maher and Larry Charles said in person that they wanted to change the way people thought about religion, they wanted to make a dialogue about it, and Religulous is a total failure on that front. He even has scenes exploring his religious upbringing trying to ingratiate himself into the dialogue and it just hangs there in the film because all around it are cheap jokes at the expense of the strangest of the strange. That to me is a film that fails at what it aspires to do, but gets a partial pass because at least it is funny. I would equate it with Fahrenheit 9/11, in that both work comedically but fall apart whenever they try to be convincing of something.
read the post, no major fights to be made as far as i know, especially since i havent seen Religulous yet but am walking into it with a similar stance that Jay walked into it.
I just want to make the point that Moore didnt all of a sudden become blue collar guy once the Republicans started raping them up the ass and then appealing to social values to make up for it. Moore was a pretty tough Clinton critic through the nineties. Moore is a populist not entirely unlike how Lou Dobbs is a populist. It reflects in different ways obviously, and there are downsides to it and there are upsides to it. Moore is cynical and sometimes flat out intellectually dishonest to appeal to the populist streak in so many people, but he’s doing what neither party will do – put a camera in front of regular people (maybe selectively, but its there nonetheless) and let them express their hardships for themselves. For all people want to shit all over F911 now, the stuff with Lila Lipscomb is still devastating to me, and it doesn’t need any camera tricks, editing or sappy narration to do the trick. Following the eviction guy in Roger and Me, or the mom crossing the border in Sicko, doesnt require ideological devotion to recognize as valuable footage.
don’t get me wrong, I love that Moore puts faces to the issues and there is a benefit to his populist rhetoric, and I think his greatest success at this was in Sicko, because it was less about showmanship and more about telling these stories. He has the right subjects, the right ‘valuable footage’, but he tends to occassionally resist the intellectual argument for the sake of the obvious joke.
The two ideas of being insightful and funny are not mutually exclusive, and politically charged figures like Maher and Moore are not above the basic fundaments of sound rhetoric. Its a double standard to say when the evidence works that it is supposed to be thought-provoking but when it it is lax, hey its a comedy. Thats lame Bush-esque spin-doctoring, and something the two of them should be above doing.
The Daily Show and Colbert get a lot of credit for mixing the two, and even though they are leftist shows they do stick it to their own side. Moore has historically, even within Sicko, done the same thing, but he doesn’t get nearly the same amount of credit. If (and for that matter, when) Moore has done it on TV – TV Nation and The Awful Truth, people seemed to be a lot more lax on that style. Somehow with film since its supposed to be more singular and definitive and there’s the stigma of what a documentary is meant to be, I think they are being held to a different standard.
Obviously I can point to where Moore has been more focused in certain films, with F911 being the most ramshackle potshot taking unfocused of all of them – however and maybe this is wrong but when I’m watching them I kind of feel like I’m watching a condensed series all at once on a big screen rather than a movie. A different version of the expectations game maybe but it is what it is.
And yes, I agree Sicko has been his most ‘responsible’ film.
if theres one thing Moore HAS done to piss me off over the last several years, its been in ways he’s handled himself outside of his movies, such as his subtle placating of the 9/11 conspiracy theory crowd, who I personally can’t stand, and for a time back in ’02 I flirted with myself, and I am embarrassed of now.
If you have a chance to read Matt Taibbi’s new book where he infiltrates a conspiracy group, among others, I recommend it.
Now Taibbi, that guys a misanthrope and if he was more well known would probably be considered an even bigger shit disturber, but for how he’s considered some underground hero rabblerouser who isn’t afraid to shit on anyone.
Taibbi’s a misanthrope, thats my kind of guy. Regarding the 9/11 conspiracy stuff, they fall into that trap of putting the hypothesis before the facts and whenever possible shoehorning facts into scenarios. I have not followed the conspiracy beyond the loose change doc and a few youtube debates between those guys and a representative from Popular Mechanic… but I still feel like something is missing in the official story of the Pentagon hit.
I would never expect the government is being completely honest about everything either, but it doesn’t make the alternative true. I’m all for people throwing out their ideas, but the jumps in logic in most of these theories are harder to swallow than most government propaganda i’ve ever been confronted with.
are you trying to tell me that the passengers of Flight 93 were not whisked away to an airport in Cleveland and deplaned prior to the decoy explosion in Pennslyvania?
Everyone knows the real Flight 93 was warped into the Phantom Zone by the overlard reptilian illuminati, and Bizarro Flight 93 was flown by the Kamikaze Mole People with the coverup help of the Reverse Vampires. Also something involving the number 23, tiny living helicopters, Skull & Bones and a loophole in the tax code. The only people who can save us are Alex Jones, Ron Paul and wave after wave of constantly re-edited internet documentaries.
It should go without saying of course all of these people are merely puppets to a dozen jewish bankers, amirite?
Sherlock McHitler has solved the case of 9/11
http://davidbyrne.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/11_24_05_a_fagin.jpg
[I am copying this from the Religulous TIFF thread - rot]
I have read a couple of reviews for this movie and pre-release online criticism and everyone raises the same complaint; “But he doesn’t give the religious people a fair chance!*sniff*” What fair chance? Does anyone intelligent actually think that you can have a reasoned debate between believers and nonbelievers? Nonbelievers don’t have any reasons for their belief based on observable, testable reality. In fact, the best argument I have ever heard in defense of religion is that it gives people solace (ie ignorance is bliss). This isn’t a debate about economic theory or the role of government, debates in which I would freely admit that people I completely disagree with may have rational reasons for their opinions. This is a debate between observable reality and moronic whimsy. If you can’t accept religion as being as equally ridiculous as “Cinderella” then you have been indoctrinated beyond the point of repair. As Lewis Black so eloquently put it, “We just need to look at [something] and all agree on what the fuck reality is!”
Comment by DB — October 1, 2008 @ 12:22 am
A few points:
1) all rationality is fundamentally faith-based, and the far more dangerous fanaticism is that which the fallacy of scientific realism perpetuates because they have the capacity and the wider ‘moral authority’ to lead us astray and potentially annihilate us all. None of that nuance, none of that looking at oneself in the mirror is done here.
2) To what end is Maher/Charles applying their rhetoric? To simply make fun of the fringe behavior of people? I mean this is the equivalent of a circus freak show. That is the high watermark of their ambitions? This is a complete misuse of rhetoric, it has no persuasive power, because it is clear to even a ninth grader that all they are doing is ridiculing, which will have no effect on believers, no effect on level-headed nonbelievers (who are not frothing at the mouth themselves), it’s a pure and simple stand-up routine, make’em laugh and go. You would say a level playing field is not deserved, well then do not pretend that you have aspirations of that, what is all this pretense of Maher revisiting his childhood, what is the occasional sprinkling of rhetorical argument in the film if everywhere around it is the equivalent of making faces at the other side. It’s endemic of this punditry that wants only to hear its own voice, and to be honest Maher is above that, his show above most all else gives floor time to contrary opinions. Persuasion comes from a place of trust, if this film had any aspirations of changing the influence of religion in the United States, or if it had any aspiration for inspiring the nonbelievers into a state of activism then it really should have given the impression (rhetoric has a lot to do with how things are perceived) that some fair opportunity was granted the opposing side. In the end it is about balance, its an art, to take a swipe, make a joke, but in the end be able to compensate for the liberty with some kind of substantial argument.
3) Maher/Charles never approached the idea that there are levels of literalness to the founding stories of religion. I took a class in Catholicism in university and it became very obvious to me that, at least in Roman Catholicism, the story of Genesis (‘a talking snake’) is often thought of as a metaphorical interpretation of things far beyond human comprehension. That seems to jive with the notion of an omnipotent maker trying to explain to simple-minded beings that He would have to use abstraction to convey the message.
To be clear, I am not religious and I think there are serious flaws in how they determine what is true, but the wedge between them and the average person is not nearly as wide as this film would have you believe. Look at the faith in the free market, a complete fanciful ideology and look at reality on Wall Street today. I welcome serious debate on the subject of how faith influences all of us, and maybe we could correct the rationalists and the faithful all in one go.