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NEWS & LETTERS, August-September 2004Two new films focus on war and exploitationFahrenheit 9/11Directed by Michael Moore "Fahrenheit 9/11" is about conformity in the current state of America, a state-of-mind where independent-minded Dixie Chicks receive death threats for daring to criticize Bush, while complacent America, deftly depicted by Michael Moore with Britney Spears, expresses a prevalent mindless attitude: We should just trust the President. We don’t know what he knows. And we don’t need to know it. We should just let him take care of things. And with that, the pyromaniacs have ruled. What Moore has done is challenge that rule by asking controversial questions explicitly and unapologetically in his trademark "in your face" manner. How does Moore do it? What’s his ammo in attacking Bush? Moore comes from a working-class background, and that’s where he returns to in this new film supposedly about "9/11" and the war in Iraq. In order to examine the roots of this war, how the U.S. can carry on such a huge venture, where it finds the manpower and resources to do so, Moore returns to Flint, Mich., the location of his original film he produced on a shoestring budget. Called "Roger and Me", it depicted the misery and struggle in the lives of recently unemployed autoworkers when Chairman Roger Smith closed GM plants in Flint in the ‘80s. With "Fahrenheit 9/11", Moore closes the circle, and brings his latest work "back home" by not focusing so much on the latest atrocities in Iraq or on terrorism necessarily, but with a focus as the central theme, the class war that is inherent in present America. So, the film literally returns to Flint. Moore makes a philosophic connection where no other documentaries have--that fundamentally, the wars that the Bush regime has launched all across the globe in his purported "War on Terrorism," isn’t so much about the battles in foreign lands, or even about terrorism necessarily, but really is about the war back home--the continuous war against the poor, against the unemployed as well as the working poor, a chronic condition suffered disproportionately especially by African Americans. But it took Moore’s unique creativity to present on film in such a vivid way, how that class war has already brought so much damage all across the American landscape, before 9/11. He does this when he follows two Marine recruiters premeditatively targeting poor neighborhoods to literally pick up and consign scores of poor inner-city youth into military conscription, the casualties of America’s class-warfare, hanging around the empty asphalt of shopping mall parking lots. These are youth who have nothing to do, who live in such urban decay that there’s nothing left but the military as a life-option--encouraged by no less than their own parents, teachers, and clerics, since these authority figures fear these young lives may be swallowed up by a life of crime with rising urban gangs. These are people whose backs are up against the wall. In other words, Moore successfully portrayed in vivid colors how America’s imperialist wars are fought abroad by first winning its class wars and race wars back home. Such a method should remind one also of how Al-Qaeda recruiters must also be skillfully ensconced in the poverty-ridden ghettos of so many Islamic neighborhoods all across the globe, where their recruitment schemes thrive--from London to Paris, Riyadh to Karachi, Manila to Jakarta. We can’t forget that detainees like Jose Padilla and the British "shoe-bomber" were petty urban gangsters first, potential terrorists second. Somewhat atypical of most of his films, Moore stays mostly out of this one. Instead, the lingering presence comes from an unexpected "star" whom Moore relies on for most of the masterful story-telling--Lila Lipscomb, a quintessentially patriotic mom from Flint who sends all her kids into the U.S. Army for the opportunities it can provide, and lives to regret it as she mourns the loss of her son. This mainstream mom who never used to question authority, becomes the top anti-Bush figure in the film, delivering Moore’s central message better than the director himself could. Lipscomb’s public grieving becomes an irrepressible political statement, more pungent and more compelling than that any politico could make, as she reads us posthumously her son’s final letter to her, full of misgivings and deep antipathy towards the misbegotten war the misbegotten leaders have gotten young men like him into--a war based on so many lies. --Htun Lin * * * The CorporationDirected by Jennifer Abbott and Mark Achbar "The Corporation," the newest filmic manifestation of the global justice movement, represents a step beyond its previous treatment of "corporate greed." The framework of most of the movie rests on taking seriously corporations' juridical status as persons, diagnosing their behavior as pathological. Although moral arguments and reformist platitudes are presented by its narrator and commentators such as Noam Chomsky, the main thrust of one of its chapters rests on showing how the corporations' "decisions" have little to do with the personalities, the views or the wills of the people who run them. While meant as ironic commentary, the film shows how upside down it is for corporations to be conceived of as living entities able to buy and sell property. In doing so, it brings us closer to conceiving the abstractions that rule over us and the upside down essence that characterizes this mode of production. The reasons why this upside down world of appearances reigns, however, are lacking in this film. But although it ends by telling us that we can supposedly take back our government and reign in capital--perhaps even revoking corporations' charters if need be and stripping them of their legal personhood--it does a good job for most of its duration by showing how politics is subordinate to the mode of production and how the state really does operate as the executive committee of the bourgeoisie. For this it is a valuable depiction. Besides mentioning unemployment and campaigns against sweatshop labor (though mostly via the global inequalities of pay), there is not much about the labor process, its historical relation to the rise of corporations, the concentration and centralization of capital, or the subordination of the labor process to the advancing needs of valorization. The link between labor and capital is not made--the corporation is conceived merely as a legal entity. Also somewhat missing from this documentary are the forces of revolution necessary to overturn these social relations. Although it shows youth protesting both Shell Oil (with mention made of Ken Saro-Wiwa) and the FTAA negotiations in Quebec City (2001), as well as the mass uprisings resisting the privatization of the water supply in the Bolivian town of Cochabamba in early 2000, when we get to the U.S. the only actors seem to be non-governmental organizations and those attending town hall meetings airing their complaints. So while the documentary tackles the personification of capital, it remains at the juridical level for much of the film. --Josh Skolnik |
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