Capitalism: A Love Story

A Michael Moore film is a strange beast. Neither documentaries nor essay films per se, his movies are more like frustratedly impassioned multimedia letters to some proverbial editor, raked together out of bits and pieces, torrential in their intertextual incorporation and manic dispersal of various stuff, almost never waylaid by arguments of a particularly cogent vintage, scattershot in their multidirectional takeoffs and landings, and ultimately ingeniously populist in their attempt to address a particular kind of man on the street who may or may not exist in any particular time or place. People who think he makes impotent protest pics that merely preach to the converted are, however, probably selling him short. He is the only popular fixture of the American left who manages to harness the outrage and vehemence demonstrated as a matter of routine by Fox News, Moore and his ilk’s unceasingly popular bête noire, and such an argument leaves aside the huge amount of Americans who are either too young or too clueless to have concretely made their minds up about much of anything, yet who may be compelled by circumstance or word of mouth to happen upon one of his cine-screeds. It is toward these people that Moore directs his various books, television be-ins, and movies. While he is tremendously good at righteous indignation and compassion-at-gunpoint (the people whose sad stories he routinely exploits for their pathos often feel like they’ve been lined up and shoved half-willingly in front of his lens), strong when he is leading w/ his emotions and outraged sense of irony, he is not, despite his veritable army of researchers and lawyers, particularly good at drawing conclusions or following his information where it would ultimately be likely to take him. His arguments tend to be circular, blotchy, mired in emotion, and clueless to various enormities that surround and dwarf them. Capitalism: A Love Story leads off from his last couple films, limiting the baseball-capp’d fatso’s physical presence to only a few acts of decaffeinated street theater, but foregrounding the controlling agency of his voice and editorial decisions to the extent that the viewer never escapes his presence, even when the found footage is doing the legwork. Moore’s film never feels like it wants to abolish capitalism at all, which is probably smart. It sees capitalism, instead, the same way Antoine de Saint-Exupery saw war in his famous Heinrich Böll-appropriated epigraph: as a disease not unlike typhoid or malaria. It isn’t going anywhere but it needs to be treated lest it totally undermine our collective physical integrity. And let’s indeed face it: the free market isn’t going anywhere. It’s like anal sex. Once somebody stumbled upon it humanity was never going to get rid of it. So then how do we treat it? I have no idea and Michael Moore doesn’t really either. He makes it clear that bank regulation failed, that congressional oversight was undermined by the boys from Goldman Sachs running the show under the rule of Henry Paulson, who turned the Democrats in congress into the delivery boys for his fiscal bailout coup d'état. So what we need, then, is more of the same government? More of the same ineptness and corruption, then? Moore thinks democracy should trump the plutonomy (self-admitted in a leaked Citibank memo) of the top one percent – it’s still one man one vote, after all – but this is ultimately undermined by his argument that both of the major American political parties are in the pockets of the corporate demagogues. Get up off yr ass and do something, the film demands at the end. Join me in my struggle to bitch and moan, irritate security guards, and milk reaction shots. He does show some minor victories in the form of collectivized labor and moderately successful refusenik interventions in the realm of both factory shutdowns and mortgage default evictions. These are less empowering, though, then they ought to be. Collectivized labor will simply never be the dominant Western paradigm simply because it doesn’t happen democratically, it happens from the top. And the people who refuse to leave the factories that have been abandoned or the homes that have been foreclosed upon only make us feel shitty. In fact, there is so much in this movie that will make any thinking person seriously mad (from “dead peasant” insurance policies to sentence-happy judges getting kickbacks from private corrections facilities), that any fuel thrown into the fire finally begets only more of the same grievous anger. Moore pines for the halcyon days of the 1950s when unions were strong, the rich paid 90% taxes, a middle class couple only needed one of ‘em a-workin’, and the competition overseas was still recovering from being bombed into the Stone Age. If there’s one thing I know, having watched Capitalism: A Love Story, it’s that we can never go back and stop Eisenhower from picking up where the British Empire left off. This shit is in play, baby, and when it slaps you you’ll take it like Peter Lorre and you’ll like it! Alas. Amo, amas, amant all you want. I don't feel any less fucked.