One Moore stupid white man

In his No. 1 bestseller, left-wing provocateur Michael Moore bashes Bush, Clinton and the corporate elite. Too bad he gets his facts wrong -- again.

By Ben Fritz

Topics:Michael Moore

Michael Moore’s latest success might be his most remarkable. At a time when the public remains strongly supportive of the Bush administration — and few dissenting voices have risen above the din — his book “Stupid White Men” stands atop the New York Times bestseller list for a third week running.

And at a time when some Republican leaders are using Bush’s popularity to equate any criticism of U.S. policy with treason, Moore’s success should be a reason for any democracy-loving American to cheer.

It should be, but it isn’t.

“Stupid White Men” is full of the biting satire Moore has honed on a large scale ever since the release of his 1989 documentary of General Motors’ mistreatment of its workers in Flint, Mich., “Roger and Me,” became a hit. He followed that up with a mid-’90s TV series, “TV Nation,” the bestselling book “Downsize This!” and the 1998 documentary “The Big One,” all of which employ his trademark defense of the little guy against the unchecked callousness of corporate America. [Disclosure: My co-editor Brendan Nyhan and I helped bring Moore to speak at Swarthmore College while we were students there. Moore was paid an honorarium by the college for his speech.]

With the success of “Roger and Me” also came a critical rap: That he took liberties with the truth, fiddling with the chronology, for greater dramatic effect. But that criticism doesn’t seem to have made an impression on Moore, and that’s nowhere more apparent than in “Stupid White Men.” In it, readers are told that 10 million people left the welfare rolls during the ’90s, brutally kicked off by Bill Clinton. He writes that five-sixths of the defense budget in 2001 went toward building a single type of plane and that the recent recession is nothing more than a fabrication by the wealthy to keep down the working classes. And readers who uncritically accept those “facts” — along with a number of other egregious and sloppy distortions — will be duped. Good satire also should be grounded in fact. Regrettably, Moore gets his facts wrong again and again and again, and a simple check of the sources he cites shows that lazy research is often to blame.

Consider, for instance, his claim that “two-thirds of [the over $190 million President Bush raised during the presidential campaign] came from just over seven hundred individuals.” Given the $2,000 federal limit on individual donations, this claim is obviously false. To back it up, he cites the Center for Responsive Politics Web site (opensecrets.org) and an August 2000 article from the New York Times. As opensecrets.org clearly indicates, however, only 52.6 percent of Bush’s total $193 million in campaign funds came from individuals. The Times article Moore references actually states that 739 people gave two-thirds of the soft money raised by the Republican Party (which uses its money for “party-building” activities that support all GOP candidates, not just Bush) in the 2000 election cycle as of June of that year. Whether out of malice or laziness, Moore conflates the party’s soft money with Bush’s campaign funds.

This pattern — the very sources Moore cites proving him wrong — continues throughout the book.

In a discussion of Pentagon spending, he refers to the “$250 billion the Pentagon plans to spend in 2001 to build 2800 new Joint Strike Fighter planes” and states that “the proposed increase in monies for the Pentagon over the next four years is $1.6 trillion.” To back this up, he refers to the Web site of the peace activist group Council for a Livable World. CLW’s own analysis of the 2001 budget, however, shows that $250 billion is the total multiyear cost of the Joint Strike Fighter program, not the amount spent in one year. $1.6 trillion, meanwhile, was the total amount of money requested by the Pentagon at the time for 2001-2005. It covers five years, not four, and is a total budget request, not a “proposed increase” over previously requested budget levels. It shouldn’t even take this much research, however, to determine that out of the total defense budget request of $305.4 billion in 2001, $250 billion was never intended to go toward one type of plane, nor that an increase of $400 billion per year in military spending was never proposed.

Most baffling of Moore’s misstatements may come in a listing of categories that the U.S. tops, such as per capita energy use and births to teenagers. In a blatant misrepresentation, he states: “We’re number one in budget deficit (as a percentage of GDP).” When Moore wrote his book last year, the United States was running a budget surplus, as it had for the previous three years.

Just how did Moore get so many of his facts wrong? Lazy cribbing from media outlets and the Internet seems the most likely culprit, as evidenced by a four-page list of allegedly dubious policy accomplishments by President Bush, including cutting funds from libraries and appointing former business executives to regulatory posts. All but one of the 48 accusations appear in the same order and with very similar phrasing to a list that has been printed this winter (but before Moore’s book came out) on liberal Web sites and, according to Dr. David A. Sprintzen (often wrongly cited, though not by Moore, as its author), was circulating via e-mail last summer. Belying a lack of original research, Moore even apes many of the negative characterizations of individuals, calling judicial appointee Terrence Boyle a “civil rights opponent,” for example (the list refers to him as a “foe of civil rights”), with absolutely no context for why exactly Boyle deserves that moniker (one certainly has to wonder whether Moore himself knows).

Curiously, Moore cites no source for this list. He only notes that readers “can keep track of what Bush did and does during his administration” by reading Molly Ivins’ syndicated column and the Web sites smirkingchimp.com and bushwatch.com. The latter two did print the list, but not until this winter, well after Moore wrote his book, though before it was published.

Just as worrisome as Moore’s frequent mistakes is the distorted manner in which he presents some of his claims that have a factual basis. Consider, for example, this critique of Bill Clinton.

“[H]e has been able to kick ten million people off welfare,” he writes in a list of attacks on the former president. While the welfare rolls did drop substantially while Clinton was in office (although the total number as of June 2000 was 8.3 million), many people left voluntarily to take jobs as the economy grew or for other reasons. Far fewer were booted from the rolls by the five-year limits Clinton signed into law in 1996 or by stricter state limits.

Grossly misrepresenting the facts to make Bill Clinton look bad is a pattern in his chapter “Democrats, DOA.” Moore also derides Clinton’s record on feminism, stating “Clinton learned that by talking a good feminist line, he could arrange it so that not one feminist leader would decry the order he signed in 1999 to deny federal funds to any foreign group that discussed abortion during consultations.”

Moore is correct about the law here (although Gloria Feldt of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America did criticize the move). In framing Clinton as having a crafty antiabortion agenda, however, he blatantly ignores that Clinton eliminated the so-called “Mexico City Policy” banning U.S. funding of overseas clinics that perform or promote abortion in 1993 and only reluctantly signed it back into law in 1999 as part of a deal to pay nearly $1 billion in arrears to the United Nations. The funding was then restored in the next year’s budget, albeit with concessions to delay its implementation, which Moore also fails to note.

To truly understand how absurdly Moore twists the truth to advance his agenda, consider his description of the economic downturn. After accurately describing the hard times that have hit the country in the past year, he offers this analysis to his readers:

“There is no recession, my friends. No downturn. No hard times. The rich are wallowing in the loot they’ve accumulated in the past two decades, and now they want to make sure you don’t come a-lookin’ for your piece of the pie.”

Forget about overinvestment during the tech boom, a sharp drop in business spending or even the simple facts of the business cycle. Michael Moore has the real answer: “[The rich have] decided to perform a preemptive strike in the hope that you’ll never even think of eyeing their piles of cash.” Not content to simply berate the wealthy for their disproportionate advances in income and wealth during the ’90s boom, Moore takes his aggressive jargon to extremes by concocting a conspiracy in which the elite simply created a downturn that he claims doesn’t really exist. This isn’t satire, it’s paranoid propaganda.

For the bestselling nonfiction book in the country, “Stupid White Men” has received remarkably little scrutiny and few serious reviews. Moore is much beloved in Britain, and a review on a BBC show called his book “fantastic” with “loads of research.” Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to have read much of it — though the thousands of people who have bought his book surely don’t know that.

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Ben Fritz is co-editor of Spinsanity. More Ben Fritz

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Monday, Jan 9, 2012 8:30 PM UTC

Michael Moore and the Oscars get it right

The Academy's documentary category has been a horrible mess for years. The controversial new rules can only help

By Andrew O'Hehir

Stills from "The Interrupters" and "Senna"

Topics:Movies, Oscars, Movie Awards Season, Michael Moore, Documentaries

As multiple media sources have reported over the last two days, under proposed new Academy rules, only films that have been reviewed by the New York Times or the Los Angeles Times will be eligible for the best documentary Oscar. But that’s not the real story, and it’s not nearly as dumb as it sounds.

“Everybody’s getting excited about something that’s not the real headline,” explains filmmaker and blogger AJ Schnack, a co-founder of the documentary-centric Cinema Eye Honors awards. “The headline is that the Academy is making big changes to the way it selects and nominates documentary films, and based on what I know so far, those changes are overwhelmingly positive.”

Perhaps the first thing to understand is that the new docu-Oscar rules, which go much further than eligibility issues, were largely pushed through by Michael Moore, who sits on the Academy’s governing board. The intention behind the changes, including the bizarre-sounding NYT/LAT requirement, is to streamline a notoriously clunky and cliquey nominating process, and to ensure that the Oscar-winning documentary is “truly a theatrical motion picture, because that’s what these awards are for,” as Moore told indieWIRE.

Furthermore, the new rules are meant to minimize the possibility that major, well-reviewed documentaries will be shut out of the Oscar nominations for mysterious reasons, as has happened repeatedly in the past. As Roger Ebert wrote more than 15 years ago, the list of non-nominated documentaries is like an honor roll of classics, from Errol Morris’ “The Thin Blue Line” to Moore’s “Roger & Me,” from Michael Apted’s “28 Up” to Steve James’ “Hoop Dreams.” In recent years, you could add “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “Grizzly Man” and “Waiting for ‘Superman’” to that list. Two of 2011′s best-reviewed docs, James’ “The Interrupters” and Asif Kapadia’s “Senna,” have already been eliminated from consideration this year.

Under the current system, secret committees of 10 or fewer volunteers from the Academy’s documentary branch view groups of films and vote on them, creating the possibility that some tiny knot of dissenters — perhaps one or two voters — can sabotage a film’s Oscar hopes by giving it low marks. “That first round of voting, to go through all the eligible films and get to the short list, just seems really weird,” says Schnack. “You have small groups of people, each of which only views a small portion of the films. Instead of voting for their passions, they can end up voting against what they dislike. I think it’s pretty much true that one person can sabotage a film.”

Under Moore’s proposed new rules — at least as summarized in an admirable explainer by Dana Harris of indieWIRE — the documentary “shortlist,” and later the list of five nominees, will be selected in a vote by the Academy’s entire documentary branch, which reportedly has 157 members. “That restructuring, where the entire branch gets to vote and not just a small committee, strikes me as an incredibly good thing,” says Schnack. “That might be the single biggest change.”

Veteran documentary producer and programmer Thom Powers, who runs the prestigious Stranger Than Fiction series in New York, notes that there are legitimate concerns about exactly who’s in the documentary branch and how they will vote. “That membership remains secret, although if you’ve been paying attention over the years, you can figure out a few dozen of the names,” he says. “It’s valid to wonder whether all 157 members will really dive into the 100-plus films that will qualify. Is this system going to favor the top 15 films that are most talked about and most prominent? One unfortunate thing about that secrecy is that it does favor filmmakers with deeper pockets or more powerful distributors.”

In another major departure from established procedure, the five nominees will then be submitted to the entire Academy membership of 6,000 or so Hollywood professionals for final voting, not just to the specialists of the documentary branch. Under the current system, as Michael Moore puts it, “When people get the award for best documentary and they go on stage and thank the Academy, it’s not really the Academy, is it? It’s 5 percent of the Academy.”

While the decision to use the stodgy warhorses of print journalism as an Oscar-eligibility filter may seem arbitrary and retrograde, it’s an attempt to restore some order to an unwieldy system. The New York Times’ editorial policy is to review every film that plays at least a one-week engagement at a theater in New York City, which nearly matches the current Oscar eligibility rules requiring a New York or Los Angeles theatrical run. (If the Times revises that policy, then the Academy promises to revisit the new rule.) Those films likely to be eliminated under the new rule, like this year’s acclaimed Marine Corps documentary “Semper Fi,” are those that lack commercial distribution or are bound for TV, and play as part of the International Documentary Association’s DocuWeeks festival.

“I’m not that concerned with the eligibility rules,” says Schnack. “They’ve tinkered with those six or seven times in the last 10 years, and somehow roughly the same number of films manage to become eligible.” He points out that while a film like “Semper Fi” would indeed be ineligible for 2011 under the new rules, if it were to find theatrical distribution in 2012 it would receive the required Times review and become eligible next time around. Exactly the same thing applies to another shortlisted film for 2011, the Harry Belafonte documentary “Sing Your Song.” It has played to enthusiastic audiences at film festivals, and will open commercially in New York this week, so it would certainly have become eligible for 2012 under the new rules.

There’s a long tradition of films that are primarily or exclusively intended for television getting Oscar nominations, after meeting the letter but perhaps not the spirit of the eligibility rules. That may well change; I’m not sure, for instance, that Marshall Curry’s “Street Fight,” an Oscar-nominated 2005 film about an infamously dirty Newark, N.J., mayoral election, would meet the new requirements. But that’s an issue in a much broader debate, and the Academy has clearly decided that it wants to honor theatrical films, not TV films. After all, as Michael Moore observes, the television industry gives out its own awards, and if they don’t quite carry the cachet of an Oscar, so be it.

Some voices on the Internet, including respected indie-film blogger Anthony Kaufman, have suggested that letting all Academy members — actors, costume designers, cinematographers and so on — vote for the best documentary will push the awards in an ever more tepid and mainstream direction. Neither Powers nor Schnack sees it in those terms. “It’s called the Academy Awards,” says Powers. “Academy members should get to vote.”

“Look, we love the Oscars because it’s a big, glitzy ceremony with a big gold statue,” says Schnack. “It’s part of Hollywood history and part of documentary film history. Over the years, the winners [in the documentary category] have included Walt Disney and Jacques Cousteau and the Department of the Navy. It’s a crazy, big award, and if we want to be part of it our movies should be judged as movies, by the same standards that apply to narrative films.”

: More Andrew O'Hehir

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Sunday, Mar 6, 2011 10:07 PM UTC

Michael Moore: “America is not broke”

The documentary filmmaker was in Wisconsin yesterday, slamming Republicans for cutting union benefits

By Peter Finocchiaro

Topics:Michael Moore, War Room, Wisconsin

Michael Moore has a message for Wisconsinites:

Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe — so that you’ll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had — America is not broke.

The claim came at the beginning of a speech delivered by the documentary filmmaker and liberal firebrand at the Wisconsin State Captiol yesterday. Over the course of 30 minutes, Moore railed against Republicans, who he accused of misleading the American public when they claim that government can’t afford to spend money on expenditures like pensions and union wages. You can watch the entire speech below.

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Wednesday, Dec 23, 2009 1:08 AM UTC

Directors of the decade: No. 6: Michael Moore

Whether you love him or want to punch him in the mouth, he is rallying the troops in the rhetorical civil war

By Matt Zoller Seitz

Michael Moore (at right) and former President George W. Bush in a still from "Farenheit 911"

Topics:Directors of the Decade, Film Salon, Best of the Decade, Michael Moore, Movies

Michael Moore is the only documentary filmmaker besides Ken Burns the average American has heard of, and he’s more of an active presence in American life than Burns, because even when he’s not making or promoting a new film, he’s on TV and the Internet beating the drum for a cause or tormenting the foes of all he deems good and decent. He is a media-age phenomenon as well as a filmmaker, his presence on the pop culture radar screen a life-as-mass-media-performance-art-project in the vein of previous practitioners, some important, others merely shameless: Andy Warhol, Muhammad Ali, Madonna, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Tiny Tim.

And whether you think Moore is a brave soul fighting the power or a self-aggrandizing blowhard who’s mainly selling himself, it’s clear he has a knack for insinuating himself into the head space of all sorts of people — those who have no opinion on him, those who are glad he’s alive, and those who fantasize about pouring a vat of beef stew over his head and tossing him into a pit full of wolverines. I suspect Moore’s highly subjective, emotion-driven filmmaking and his career-long interweaving of self-promotion and self-expression (which started back in 1989 with his anti-General Motors jeremiad “Roger & Me”) will one day be seen as epitomizing aspects of life in this grim, weird decade, just as Hunter S. Thompson’s song-of-myself political writing helped future generations understand the ’70s.

When artists construct such a compelling public face, the art and the artist fuse, even loop back on themselves so that it’s tough to tell where one begins and the other ends. It’s a conundrum the modern artist can’t escape, and maybe shouldn’t; when an artist resists becoming the story, the media and the public tend to decide there isn’t one. Moore knows vastly fewer people would talk about his movies, or even bother to see them, if he weren’t out there on talk shows and in front of his own documentary lens raising hell, cracking wise, taunting the powerful, comforting the powerless and otherwise carrying on like the bastard spawn of Will Rogers and Amy Goodman.

In any event, Moore the director has been politically and artistically (and on the Internet, technologically) vital — not to mention adept at identifying subjects of mass dread and getting films about them into the marketplace right around the time said dread achieves critical mass. In the last 10 years, Moore has addressed the self-perpetuating cycle of fear and violence in America (“Bowling for Columbine“), the Bush administration’s conduct of the war on terror (“Fahrenheit 9/11”) and the arguments in favor of state-run, or at least state-assisted, healthcare (“Sicko”).

Moore’s latest, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” might be the key Moore film, its title serving as an umbrella that shades every other subject he’s tackled. The answer to every “Why?” in a Moore film can be answered, “Because of money.” Its arguments are too fuzzy and its thesis too broad to achieve the level of popular relevance to which Moore has become accustomed; Americans prefer ideas they can hold in their hands. But whatever “Capitalism’s” reception, the fact remains that nobody else is making political films on such basic and important subjects and getting them so widely distributed and discussed.

None of Moore’s films this decade were as prominent as “Fahrenheit 9/11,” because none had a main character as charismatic and polarizing as President George W. Bush. It was the first feature that Moore tried to stay out of, to the extent that Moore can stay out of anything, and I wouldn’t be surprised if his decision was motivated both by a desire to foreground the message rather than the messenger and an entertainer’s understanding that you can’t steal the spotlight from a child, a pet — or W. himself. (Add to that the fact that Moore, who positions himself as the good guy in his own mythic narratives, hadn’t had a truly intimidating adversary since GM boss Roger Smith.)

The prospect of making the president lose reelection, or at least lose sleep, formalized the (often contrived) underdog mantle that Moore has always wrapped around himself like a cape. And it encouraged Moore to spotlight his insult comic’s vicious wit, setting one of the movie’s expository passages about the president’s youth to Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine” and letting Bush’s paralysis in that classroom on the morning of 9/11 play out at length. One rarely sees a documentary whose whole purpose is to tear down another person, and that dubious distinction made “Fahrenheit 9/11″ electrifying — if only to liberals who felt helpless in the face of the president’s political, military and media machines and prayed that somebody somewhere would stand up, say something, do something.

Bush’s brazenness post-Iraq seemed to crank up Moore’s urgency and grandiosity. Around the time “Fahrenheit 9/11″ came out, Moore declared that his goal was nothing less than the electoral defeat — or re-defeat, as the bumper stickers said — of the president (whether the film ultimately hurt or helped the president is an important, but unanswerable question). To achieve that end, Moore paints Bush’s definitive negative caricature, presenting him as a hateful fraud, an ignorant brat playing with mass-murdering toys, a fake macho man whose cornball swagger was purchased with daddy’s money and America’s military might, and a bumpkin prince of darkness whose descent upon the Capitol following the electoral shenanigans of 2000 was a metaphysical as well as political catastrophe. And the film’s opening credits are one of the decade’s most powerful sequences: Bush and his Cabinet being made up for TV appearances while mournful, minor-key acoustic guitar plays in the background is a devastating marriage of image and sound, one that conjures sadness, rage and fear. The sequence is a liberal’s dirge. Democracy is dead, and here are its murderers putting on their war paint and getting ready to finish off the rest of us. (Facing down the president ennobled Moore’s asshole tendencies. His adversary was so powerful and so smug about his power that Moore couldn’t go too far in attacking him – at least not as he did in “Bowling for Columbine,” in which he trespassed on the property of the elderly, unprepared and clearly baffled NRA spokesman Charlton Heston and answered his gentlemanly incredulity with snotty contempt.)

“Fahrenheit 9/11″ was arguably the documentary of the decade, a work that tried to change history as well as describe it and, if not a classic of logical argument, then surely a masterpiece of outrage, propaganda as formally skillful as it was emotionally opportunistic. (Moore’s use of war veterans and their loved ones was the liberal flip side of W. treating uniformed soldiers as TV props to burnish his warrior bona fides.) And it was everywhere in 2004 — in theaters, on TV, on the Web. Even if you hated Moore’s guts and wouldn’t see the movie if your life depended on it, you still ended up reading about it, hearing the film’s merits argued and its errors and distortions catalogued. Moore shows the world what American liberal anger looks like — a furious but ephemeral force that rarely stays roused for long, liberals being notoriously inclined to bitch rather than act unless it’s a presidential election year. Elsewhere this decade he prided himself not just on participating in the national argument, but also on setting its terms. His films supplied liberals with talking points on gun violence, 9/11, the war on terror, healthcare and financial chicanery. His Web site, public speeches and coordinated e-mail campaigns endorse or oppose presidential decisions, political candidates and propose new laws. (Moore’s “Letter From Mike” feature is written, quite effectively, in the jes’ folks style of his movie narration. “It’s not your job to do what the generals tell you to do,” Moore writes, in an “open letter” to President Barack Obama urging him not to add more troops in Afghanistan, adding, “With our economic collapse still in full swing and our precious young men and women being sacrificed on the altar of arrogance and greed, the breakdown of this great civilization we call America will head, full throttle, into oblivion if you become the ‘war president.’” For better or worse, Moore is one of a few filmmakers who could publish such a letter and rest assured that a president (or his people) might even read it.

He’s the enemy the right deserves and probably craves. He is his own self-caricature, and craftier and more gifted than detractors care to admit. He’s a standard-bearer in the rhetorical civil war that Mailer, in 1963′s “The Presidential Papers,” foretold as inevitable fallout from the end of the Cold War — “the war which has meaning, that great and mortal debate between rebel and conservative where each would argue the other is an agent of the Devil.”

: More Matt Zoller Seitz

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Monday, Nov 30, 2009 9:50 PM UTC

Moore a sign of things to come for Obama?

A prominent liberal breaks, in a big way, with the president over his Afghanistan policy

By Alex Koppelman

Michael Moore speaks at a news conference in Washington

Filmmaker Michael Moore speaks at a news conference "to challenge President Obama and the Democrats to stand strong on healthcare reform that includes a public option", in Washington September 29, 2009. REUTERS/Molly Riley (UNITED STATES ENTERTAINMENT POLITICS HEALTH) (Credit: Reuters)

Topics:Michael Moore, War Room, Afghanistan, Barack Obama

On Tuesday night, President Obama is set to announce that he’s sending additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan — about 30,000 of them. Indeed, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday that the president has already given the order, though for now Gibbs wouldn’t say what the actual order was.

Michael Moore, however, wants to stop him. In an open letter published on his Web site Monday, Moore decried Obama’s decision, saying he’ll now be known as “the new war president.” The director wrote:

Do you really want to be the new “war president”? If you go to West Point tomorrow night (Tuesday, 8pm) and announce that you are increasing, rather than withdrawing, the troops in Afghanistan, you are the new war president. Pure and simple. And with that you will do the worst possible thing you could do — destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in you. With just one speech tomorrow night you will turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics. You will teach them what they’ve always heard is true — that all politicians are alike. I simply can’t believe you’re about to do what they say you are going to do. Please say it isn’t so.

It is not your job to do what the generals tell you to do. We are a civilian-run government. WE tell the Joint Chiefs what to do, not the other way around. That’s the way General Washington insisted it must be. That’s what President Truman told General MacArthur when MacArthur wanted to invade China. “You’re fired!,” said Truman, and that was that. And you should have fired Gen. McChrystal when he went to the press to preempt you, telling the press what YOU had to do. Let me be blunt: We love our kids in the armed services, but we f*#&in’ hate these generals, from Westmoreland in Vietnam to, yes, even Colin Powell for lying to the UN with his made-up drawings of WMD (he has since sought redemption).

Here’s the thing, though: Obama wasn’t exactly hiding his position on Afghanistan during the presidential campaign. The war there was often thought of as the “good war” on the left, at least in comparison to the one the Bush administration started when it invaded Iraq. And that meant refocusing resources on Afghanistan.

Still, while it’s pretty clear that Moore’s open letter won’t change Obama’s mind, and that Obama is likely to win a fight with Moore right now, it also appears that the floodgates are opening. With former President George W. Bush out of office, liberals are coming forward to oppose escalation in Afghanistan, and Moore won’t be the last prominent figure from the left to slam Obama over it.

: Alex Koppelman is a staff writer for Salon. More Alex Koppelman

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Wednesday, Sep 23, 2009 10:23 AM UTC

Michael Moore and the evils of free enterprise

In "Capitalism: A Love Story," the filmmaker takes to the bullhorn to decry corporate greed -- and promote himself

By Stephanie Zacharek

Michael Moore

Topics:Michael Moore, Capitalism: A Love Story, U.S. Economy, Movies

Michael Moore’s ostensible subject has always been his fury at the injustices wrought against hardworking American citizens. And it’s possible that, in his early days as a filmmaker, that was his true motivation. But 20 years after “Roger & Me,” “Capitalism: A Love Story” proves that Michael Moore’s greatest subject is himself. This is a love story, all right, but it has less to do with the flaws of capitalism than it does with Moore’s unwavering fondness for the sound of his own voice, and for what he perceives as his own vast cleverness.

As with all Michael Moore’s films, that’s not to say he doesn’t have a point, buried in there somewhere amid all the Silly Putty-stretched facts and cartoony music. It’s possible to agree with Moore in theory and still find his tactics sloppy and ineffective (though his zombie-like followers don’t like to allow for the existence of any potential gray areas, maybe because gray areas tend to demand actual thought). In the 2007 “Sicko,” he highlighted some very real, and very dangerous, problems with the U.S. healthcare system. In the 2004 “Fahrenheit 9/11,” he asserted that our then-president was bad for America, and that the Iraq war was wrong. If you’re reading this right now, it’s 99 percent likely that you agree, as I do, with Moore’s basic take on those subjects.

The problem with Moore’s approach is that he reveals these injustices as if he’s just discovered them himself. Similarly, “Capitalism: A Love Story” will be revelatory and helpful to those Rip Van Winkles who slept through the fall of 2008 and the early part of 2009, who didn’t realize that hardworking American people are being pushed out of their homes in record numbers as a direct result of corporate greed. It’s not Moore’s core beliefs that are grating: It’s his consistently wide-eyed approach, his presupposition that you need to adopt an aura of innocence in order to be outraged. In Michael Moore’s world, to be enlightened and outraged makes you one of the elite — better to be an underinformed Everyman, so he can spoon-feed the facts to you and therefore reinforce his own reason for existing.

Moore’s aim here is to prove that capitalism, at least as big business currently defines it, is bad. It wasn’t always thus: Moore includes footage from his own family’s home movies, showing a smiling young Mike enjoying the pleasures of life in Flint, Mich., circa the 1950s. (Moore’s father, who appears in the film, was a longtime G.M. employee.) Moore explains in voice-over that his family wasn’t rich by any means, but they were definitely comfortable: The house in which he grew up had been fully paid for by the time he was in kindergarten; his parents could buy a new car every three years. This is Moore’s way of explaining — and he’s not wrong — that many working people could take part in the capitalism of the ’50s, but capitalism as it’s practiced today is another story.

In his usual hopscotching fashion, Moore goes on to explore numerous instances of corporate greed and its effects on working people: He interviews several young pilots, working for regional airlines, who are trained and entrusted to operate aircraft and yet who barely make enough money to get by. (One of them explains that he had to go on food stamps.) He interviews Peter Zalewski, a scarily slick type who works for a Florida real-estate concern called, in a stroke of brazen forthrightness, “Condo Vultures,” which specializes in matching foreclosed properties with buyers, who resell them for a profit. He decries last fall’s banking-industry bailout, and bemoans the way the recipients squandered the money they received instead of using it to either save endangered jobs or create new ones.

But Moore doesn’t shed any new light on this kind of greed, and his attempts to grab his audience are so strained that they detract from his essential argument. His tactics here include conducting on-camera interviews with families who have just been pushed out of their homes. For understandable reasons, these people are often brought to tears as they vent their outrage and sadness, their sense of loss. In case we’re not getting the point, Moore puts gloppy, sentimental string music on the soundtrack, as if he believes viewers can’t be trusted to grasp the basic horror of the situation on their own. At another point, he marches up to AIG headquarters on Wall Street (it appears to be on a Sunday morning, when no one’s around — Wall Street is bustling on any weekday), declaring to the security guards that he’s there to make a citizen’s arrest of the CEO. The security guards rebuff Moore firmly but politely, as if he were a crazy but harmless old auntie — they’d serve Moore’s purposes better if they were angry or bullying.

Moore does hit a number of crucial points, making note, for example, of the large number of former Goldman Sachs executives who figure prominently in both the current and previous administrations. But he can’t let 10 minutes pass without injecting himself into the conversation: Moore can’t mention the sad collapse of Detroit without taking credit for foreseeing these kinds of problems in “Roger & Me,” as if he’d offered some kind of viable advice that simply hadn’t been taken. He tells us how, when he was a lad, his dream was to enter the priesthood, because he so admired the work of Catholic priests who became involved in the fight for civil rights. This is his way of reminding us how noble his goals are — that all he ever really wanted to do was fight for the little people.

But his respect for the priesthood does make sense in terms of his misguided sense of pageantry. In “Capitalism: A Love Story,” he can’t resist showing himself outside the hallowed halls of Citibank (and Chase, and AIG), trying to gain access and, of course, being refused. Those scenes have become tired staples of every Moore film, a recycled vaudeville act that’s supposed to be funny, surprising or outrageous each time we see it. Scenes like that are necessary to reinforce Moore’s status as an outsider, and his loyal fans, it seems, never get tired of seeing them. At this point, Moore appears to be making movies specifically for those fans — he’s no longer even pretending to try to win over the general populace. With “Capitalism: A Love Story,” he’s preaching to people who have already been converted, 20 times over. As for the others, no matter how loudly he shouts through his bullhorn, he’s not going to get their attention.