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Monday, Dec 28, 2015 5:29 PM UTC
Michael Moore on why America “needs a little time in the timeout room,” and whether Hillary will start a war to prove “a woman can pull the trigger”
Salon exclusive: Michael Moore talks Trump and terrorism, Sanders and socialism, Hillary and war
Topics: Movies, Our Picks: Movies, Documentaries, Documentary, documentary films, Michael Moore, interview, celebrity interviews, where to invade next, Socialism, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, 2016 Democratic primary, 2016 election, 2016 Republican primary, 2016 Presidential Campaign, 2016 campaign, Entertainment News, Politics News
Michael Moore has entered a period of reckoning, a period of thinking about his legacy. This can be deadly for artists or it can kick them into a higher gear; there’s no general rule about this. (If William Butler Yeats had died young the way Keats and Shelley did, he’d barely be remembered today.) I’m not going to pretend to review Moore’s new movie, “Where to Invade Next,” which is more like a manifesto or a plea than a conventional documentary. It has abundant flaws, some of which are simply questions of timing. Moore could not have known that his film heaping praise on European social democracy would come out as Europe faces multiple overlapping crises: a million or so migrants from the Middle East this year alone, the rise of the neo-fascist right, persistent economic stagnation.
Despite those flaws, or maybe because of them, I also found “Where to Invade Next” intensely moving. Moore visits the remnants of the Berlin Wall with an old friend, as evidence that things we believe will never change inevitably do. He visits the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, a country 99 percent of Americans could not find on a map with 20 guesses, where he finds American undergraduates receiving an entirely reasonable education with zero tuition. (Maybe it’s not Yale, but it’s not Podunk Community College either. And I repeat: It’s free.) He visits Portugal, where no one is ever arrested for drug possession, because it’s no longer illegal — and where not only crime has declined, but drug abuse as well. He visits an Italian couple who have barely middle-class jobs by American standards, and who eat lunch at home together every day and spend five weeks at the beach every summer (paid vacation, of course).
As Moore says in the film, his ventures into Finland’s legendary educational system (no homework!) and Norway’s prisons, where convicted murderers bake bread, go on nature hikes and record hip-hop albums, are about picking the flowers and ignoring the weeds. If his portrait is overly simplistic in many respects — in every single country he visits, some aspect of the social safety net is under vigorous attack from neoliberal reformers — its broad strokes remain vivid and valid. As I discussed with Moore, even Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim National Front, does not advocate major cuts to healthcare or retirement benefits. (Although she would surely like to restrict who gets them.) Britain’s governing Conservative Party has eaten away at the National Health Service in some ways, but would never be so foolish as to propose abolishing it.
In other words, even Europe in crisis — facing a million new residents many Europeans don’t trust and don’t want, and the trauma of two terrorist attacks in Paris inside a year — represents a level of collective commitment to equality and a decent living standard that America has never had. We came the closest, perhaps, under John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon — yeah, I said Nixon! Stay tuned for more on that. But the relatively mild Keynesian interventionism of that period has been under sustained ideological attack ever since, to the point where most Americans simply accept the dogma that the private sector always does things more efficiently and there’s no point trying to battle the tide of economic reality. More to the point, politicians accept that dogma or refuse to resist it; see the turgid tale of Obamacare, which represents a big improvement over the previous situation in roughly the same way as the moment when the horror-movie maniac stops beating you with a claw hammer.
Whatever you make of Moore’s movies or his screen persona as the bumbling American naïf trying to reconquer Europe’s best ideas — many of them borrowed from the American progressive movement in the first instance — he has never been the kind of leftist who distrusts pleasure. He would willingly have spent our entire interview talking about “Star Wars” (he’s a fan, although he hadn’t seen the new movie yet) and about his other populist campaign: to save the movie theater and redeem the moviegoing experience.
Moore runs two successful theaters in northern Michigan along with the Traverse City Film Festival every summer, and wants the Directors Guild of America to issue a “Good Housekeeping seal of approval” to theater proprietors who actually project films with the correct lenses and the correct aspect ratio, who keep the room dark, control smartphone use and set the sound system to appropriate levels. His theaters charge $2 for popcorn and $2 for soda (he calls it “pop,” of course). Anyone caught texting during the movie is banned, Moore claims, for life.
“We’re the only artists who, when we finish our art, we put it in a DHL bag and that’s the end of it,” Moore says. He gestures out the window at an art gallery visible across the street from our Manhattan conference room. “The guy whose paintings are hanging over there right now — he picked out the frames, he lit the show, he put them in the order he wanted. Every burned-out, stoned rock band shows up at the club for the 4 p.m. soundcheck. Every artist does this but us, and it’s the most bizarre thing. Because our art takes years to make sometimes. Years to make these films! And then we just let them loose in the Paramus 6!”
OK, Michael, here you are having made this film about all the wonderful things in European social democracy, and all we hear in the news from Europe for the past year, and especially this summer and this fall, are incredibly terrible things.
Sure. But still, in spite of everything that has happened in the last few months, French schoolchildren are going to get a filet of cod in dill sauce for lunch. Nobody in Germany or Slovenia or Finland is going to write a check to the bank for their student loan, because there is no student loan. All the things I point out in the film, despite the economic troubles they have and the terrorism stuff, are still true. They are committed to living their lives differently, and they do their best to hang on to the social order that they wanted to create for themselves. They’re to be admired for doing that. It isn’t always pretty and it isn’t always easy, but they’re committed to doing it.
And they haven’t just been doing it for a couple of years. The things I show in the film are not new ideas. They’re decades old. The drug thing in Portugal has been true for 15 years. Fifteen years of not locking people up for possessing or using drugs. My point is, they’ve tried these things, they’ve done their trial and error. They’ve made mistakes and fixed them, and now they’re at a point where this stuff works pretty damn well, about as well as anything run by humans can run. We don’t have to make the mistakes they’ve made. They made them for us! We can learn a lot from what they have accomplished.
There’s a crucial difference that Americans almost always miss when they compare Donald Trump to someone like Marine Le Pen in France. While I would agree that she is ominous and dangerous, she does not propose cutting pensions for seniors or funding for education. She might try to argue that to save those things France has to keep the Muslims out, but that’s a different question.
Right. Or the Tories in Britain — no one would run on a platform of destroying the NHS. No, no, no, no, no. There’s a consensus across the political spectrum that these things are important for our well-being. Conservatives in those countries like these programs not because they have such good hearts, but because it’s best for them. They’ll live in a safer society. It maintains social order. If there is national healthcare, people don’t come to work sick and make everyone else sick. People have paid vacations and they come back happy and feeling good and ready to work. It’s not just bleeding-heart liberal stuff. They see benefits to themselves, benefits to capitalism and profitability.
I bring this up constantly, but the one president in American history who actually proposed national healthcare for everyone was Richard Nixon. He wasn’t doing that out of the goodness of his heart, since he …
Since he didn’t have one, yeah. Even Trump, in the first Republican debate, tried in his clunky way to explain single-payer health insurance, which he supported. [Trump voice] “Now I gotta deal with 50 state insurance commissioners and all their rules. If we just had one commissioner and one set of rules.” Which for him is a totally valid point. It made sense. In these other countries, people don’t attack these basic things because they know the country runs better with them.
People say to me, “Well, how come you didn’t point that they’ve got 10 percent unemployment?” For the same reason that it would be stupid if somebody from Denmark made a documentary about the genius of this invention [holding up his iPhone] — this is American genius right here, OK? — and then got criticized back in Denmark by somebody saying, “Why did you make a film about Silicon Valley when there have been 321 mass shootings in the U.S. this year?” What does one thing have to do with the other?
We have a lot of problems and we also have some great things. They have some great things and they have a lot of problems. This film wants to show the great things. It’s not about the problems. I also think it’s a little gauche for Americans to point out to anybody in the world what their problems are at this point. [Laughter.] I think we need a little time in the timeout room, you know what I’m saying? A little chill-down from running around the world: “You need democracy! Now you need democracy!”
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