Just when you thought we’d reached the saturation point with TV veriti, along comes a bumbling Brit to breathe new life into the well-worn “cultural travelogue” genre. Louis Theroux, son of author Paul Theroux and host of the hilarious new Bravo series “Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends,” delves into a different American subculture every week on a quest to understand people’s idiosyncratic passions. Whether he’s dealing with televangelists or porn stars or drag-car racers, the genuine respect Theroux shows his subjects has a very humanizing effect, and it’s ultimately what makes the series so winning.
Theroux, 29, came to television by way of “TV Nation,” the predecessor to Michael Moore’s “The Awful Truth.” (Fans of that show may recall how Theroux distinguished himself
with a brilliant segment in which he waged “psychological warfare” on the media circus surrounding the O.J. Simpson murder trial.)
But Theroux’s distinct charm — and, indeed, the success of his show — depends largely on his lacking any clear agenda, political or otherwise. “Weird Weekends” is more
about Theroux’s earnest explorations than it is any kind of satirical exposi — though he’s not above using provocation for the sake of good footage. (In one segment, a pissed-off pro wrestler worked him over until he threw up.) He walks the line between being brave (sleeping in an underground mountain shelter with an armed survivalist) and brazen (asking a wannabe porn actor to show him his penis), but he never forgets his well-bred manners — in a show about born-again Christians, Theroux accompanies his “date” to a religious revival, and shows up in a suit and tie.
There’s a touching moment at the end of the show about anti-government survivalists in Idaho where Louis bids farewell to his host and advises him “not to do anything
silly.” “Seriously, Mike,” he intones,
“I’d hate to hear that something terrible happened to you because of something silly.” He reprises the sentiment in the closing voice-over, and just when you think he’s taken it to the point of mockery, comic relief kicks in and the following readout appears on-screen: “Since the taping of this episode, Mike hasn’t done anything silly.” Ultimately, Theroux makes more fun of himself than anyone.
“One of the weird things about doing the series is that I’m making the program,
but the program’s also about me, to a degree,” Theroux explained during our interview. “So I’m both scientist and laboratory animal.”
The Oxford-educated Theroux cut his teeth at the Spy school of satire, working briefly at the magazine as a writer and editor in 1992. “It was fun, but it was difficult, because it was definitely after the glory years.
I think we felt a bit like ancient Britons in the ruins of the Roman baths, you know, looking around at these monuments to a lost civilization and peeing in them, crapping in the Forum.”
You worked with Michael Moore, who is a pretty controversial character, especially among
American lefties. So it’s interesting that he seems to have found an audience in Britain. What’s the appeal for British audiences?
For me what it comes down to is, Do you find his shows funny or not? Do you enjoy watching the shows or not? And if you think that there’s something bogus about the political analysis, then that’s because you’re not enjoying the show. But I
personally do enjoy his shows. I like Tom Green. I can’t justify it; I don’t think [Green's] really doing a huge amount for the environment, but you’re either laughing or you’re not.
Michael’s a polemicist, and a satirist, so he’s going after corporate targets. It’s not really what
I would do. But I applaud him for doing it. I don’t consider the people I cover to be targets, just subjects.
So how do you pick your subjects?
I haven’t totally pinned this down, but they tend to be worlds which I find to be, on the face of
it, self-contradictory. Americans have this unusual degree of commitment to things that just don’t
square — they seem based on a misunderstanding of objective reality. That isn’t true for all of the
shows, but I think that’s probably true for the best ones — the male porn stars, the born-again evangelists.
There’s a refreshingly unscripted feel to the shows. How much of it is mapped out ahead of time?
The first time I meet people, it’s always taped. We have, obviously, a director and producer who have contacted people and pre-interviewed them to see what they’re like. But I meet people for the first time on camera. I had a lot of war stories from working on “TV Nation,” a lot of behind-the-scenes anecdotes, and I always felt like that was the sort of thing that should be going on air. So that’s one of the primary impulses behind “Weird Weekends,” that there be no “behind-the-scenes.”
It seems your subjects tend to be working- or middle-class. Is that by coincidence, or are you
making some commentary about class in America?
It’s less about class; it’s about people on the cultural margins — who almost by definition are not upper-class. Because people on the cultural margins don’t have power. You could say Ted
Turner is marginal in the sense that he’s kind of eccentric, but he’s not really marginal in the broader cultural sense.
I think the reality of it is, the show is about the relationships that form between me and people
who are alien to me and my way of thinking. And for that friendship to develop, I think we sort of rely on quite a lot of goodwill from the people
I talk to. And it may just be that upper-class people have better things to do than hang out with
TV crews and British people. I mean, most of the people we do stories on are pretty excited or flattered to have us there. And so a lot of the goodwill and bonhomie that comes out of the programs, I think, flows from that.
Would a show exploring English subcultures be as interesting?
It would be a lot harder to do. For one thing, I think maybe Americans like British people a
bit more than British people like Americans. It sounds harsh to say it, but there’s a huge
Anglophilia over here, because America’s got nothing to fear from Britain, really. America’s
the most powerful nation on earth and so it has this luxury of being able to not feel threatened
by other countries. Whereas Britain, this former empire, is now reduced to inferior second-class
status in the world. So British people console themselves with the idea that maybe they’re a
bit more cultured and sophisticated.
There’s a long tradition of programs in Britain that cater to that sense of cultural superiority.
And I think some of the people in Britain who watch “Weird Weekends” get a sense of “Oh, those Americans, they’re so vulgar and tacky and weird and stupid.” I happen to think there’s more to the shows than that.
You do walk a tightrope between taking a satirical approach with your subjects and seeming
genuinely engaged by them — and occasionally it seems as if you’re about to fall off.
This has been a weird journey for me, because I’m not someone blessed with a tremendous amount
of self-knowledge. And I think the first couple of stories I did, I was definitely being faux-naive. I was, what we call in England, taking the piss out of people. I did a story on some neo-Nazis in
Montana, and they were talking about the “race war” and different planets the different races were
going to go to. And I’d say, “Well, what’s the black people’s planet going to be like? What sort of facilities will it have?” And I just strung them along for a long time in this way, asking in ludicrous detail about their theology.
After that show, I tried to rein it in. But I’m actually aware now that, when I look at it, I’m
capable of being insincere without really realizing it. Which is troubling. Sometimes I think the other
people are being faux-naive also, and it’s just part of the theme — people know that I’m doing it, so it’s OK. And other times I’m just being sincere. Sometimes the funniest stuff with people is stuff
where I just don’t get it, and I’m just being normal. You know, if you look at the shows, I’m usually laughing quite a lot. It’s really about me
being amused by people and them being aware of me being amused, and I suppose both of us being aware
of a culture clash. It’s not supposed to be satirical. It really is supposed to be about my authentic reaction to people.
There was one particularly tense moment during the show on male porn stars, when you ask a straight porn star if he enjoys being “gay for pay” — if he actually enjoys the gay sex he’s having on-screen — and it really seems like he might clock you.
A lot of people say that.
It was pretty unsettling to watch.
At that moment I didn’t feel like he was about to hit me, quite honestly. And maybe he was — a lot of people have asked me about it — and I just wasn’t aware of it. But we actually had quite a good rapport going. If you analyze what is happening in the moment, I got slightly irritated with him because he was bragging about how much money he’d made. And I said, “Yeah, but you are
going down on guys, right?” He’d told me he was straight. You know, if you’re gay, that’s
absolutely fine, but if you’re straight, that seems to me going against your nature, contradictory.
Because my take on him was that actually he was gay, but that he had kind of a homophobic streak and didn’t want to admit to being gay. And so when he said, “Yes, unfortunately,” I thought, that’s unnecessary — why say “unfortunately,” like
that? When he said “unfortunately,” I felt like he was saying, “You and I both know that we don’t like gay people,” and he was trying to bond with me over the fact that gays are gross or whatever. So that’s basically why I said, “Come on, you enjoyed it,” and that was the bit where he flinched.
There’s a certain mundane reality revealed beneath a lot of the more extreme behavior you
stumble onto, so that by the end of each show, you really feel like you understand how, for instance, a roller-skating, Holocaust-denying survivalist came to be the way he is.
Yeah, it’s really true. To me, one of the weirdest things about meeting weird people is how normal they are. I just thought of an analogy this morning: It’s kind of like if you saw a naked person wearing a little leather cap — that little bit of clothing makes them seem even more naked.
There was a time when the political left could pretty much rely on alternative weeklies to toe the liberal line. That time has passed. While activism certainly isn’t dead — it’s hotter than ever, according to some reports — the fiery idealism that once fueled acts of political derring-do have been dampened by chillier, postmodern perspectives. Once-alternative weeklies are being sucked up like Slurpee ice by faceless parent companies with bottom lines and conservative advertisers to consider. Hoisting sacred cows onto the flaming pyre of our smug self-awareness is en vogue (as is wanton use of clichid metaphors, or so I’ve been told). Over are the days when Karen Finley and artists who pissed, figuratively and literally, upon our holy icons were made into holy icons, when Mumia Abu Jamal was presumed innocent, a saintlike martyr for the activist set.
Of course, some true blue weekly newspapers — and many zines — continue to print anti-corporate, anti-Republican, anti-establishment articles and screeds. For the rest, however, steak’s on!
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New York Press, Oct. 7-13
“Karen Finley Shows Her Ass Again” by John Strausbaugh
Perhaps I enjoy John Strausbaugh’s seething assessment of NEA martyr Karen Finley and her latest book because the only Finley performance I saw was the most senseless, self-indulgent piece of theatrics I’ve seen ever. (Finley, if you’re reading, I want my $14 back!) Regardless of why, I found myself nodding enthusiastically to his assessment of Finley’s rise to stardom (thanks a lot, Jesse Helms), hypocrisy (she’s as judgmental as Helms and his ilk ever were), predictable politics and overall childishness (most of us exited the anal phase during the “terrible 2s”). These days, the paper’s mean-spirited conservative bent makes it the true alternative.
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Washington City Paper, Oct. 1-7
“What Goes On” by Mark Jenkins
In his weekly music column, Mark Jenkins addresses Michael Moore’s recent claim in Forbes that “rap is the dominant music of the decade.” Jenkins counters this statement with charts and statistics that show rap’s poor performance among the other musical genres. He attributes Moore’s statement to passi “white-liberal sentimentality,” and wraps up his piece with this potshot: “A radio station that programmed the full gamut of ’90s pop would certainly play hip-hop, but only about 10 percent of the time. If that reality’s too complicated for Moore to grasp, he can always go back to his full-time gig of imagining that most U.S. blue-collar workers toil on Rust Belt assembly lines.” Daaaamn!
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Village Voice, Oct. 6-12
“Rudy’s Brooklyn Rampage” by Wayne Barrett
The Village Voice has published no fewer than eight stories on the latest Rudy Giuliani dust-up, which involves the mayor threatening the Brooklyn Museum with punitive measures over its controversial show, “Sensation.” The Voice goes after the mayor, of course, but doesn’t stop there.
The painting: “The Virgin is, however, not Ofili’s best painting. It begins an uneven phase of his work in which he abandons his decorative, all-over wild style for specific images. The most impressive thing about The Holy Virgin Mary is that it seems to have survived the current onslaught of hatred, adrenaline, and misinterpretation.”
The art world: “The art world has sabotaged itself throughout the culture wars, and it’s happened again in the controversy whipped up around ‘Sensation’ at the Brooklyn Museum of Art … This has been a problem from Day One — the consistent reluctance within the art world itself to defend targeted artists.”
Democrats: “Response by Democratic political leaders has been swift, though hardly a roaring show of support for contemporary art.”
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Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages, Oct. 6-12
“Life of the Party” by Katy Reckdahl
In this sweeping, historical profile, Katy Reckdahl talks to the remnants of the once formidable Minnesota Communist Party: a handful of sassy, political grannies with amazing lives behind them.
Ben Is Dead, The Final Issue No. 30
Ben Is Dead, the popular Los Angeles pop-culture zine, is dead after a respectable 10-year run and a book. (Its Web site has been dead since, like, 1997.) The focus of this issue is celebrity; fortunately it does not contain a bunch of moronic sniffling about how this is the last issue and thanks to all who’ve made it happen and damn if we weren’t something special. It does include a funny essay by a guy who competed on “The Dating Game” dressed as a superhero (he didn’t get the girl), a chuckle-inducing compendium of dumb things people have said to celebrities (“Fuck man, you look like Billy Zane” to Billy Zane), as well as lots of indie rock ‘n’ roll stuff, which is great if you go for that sort of thing.
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Broward/Palm Beach New Times, Sept. 30-Oct. 6
“One Nation, Divisible Under God” by Bob Norman
Bob Norman looks at a recent legal challenge to the “under God” clause in the Pledge of Allegiance. What’s interesting about this piece is not so much the suit to have the offending religious words removed, but the history of the pledge, which Norman provides to give perspective to the argument.
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Salt Lake City Weekly, Sept. 30-Oct. 6
“It’s Oyster Time in Montana” by Mountain Times staff
A report from the 17th Annual Testicle Festival: “Taste like chicken? No. Rod and his staff of 60 serve chicken on the same plate so there is no mistake. They taste like bull testicles. Sliced, breaded, fried. Tasty. Period.”
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Phoenix New Times, Oct. 7-13
“Murphy’s Law” by Edward Lebow
The Murphy school district, in an unsavory part of Phoenix, has lost 31 kids to violence, mostly gun-related, in the past seven years. None of these deaths made front-page news. Reporter Edward Lebow takes a hard and challenging look at how the mostly Hispanic school district has coped with its losses and builds community programs that will, hopefully, prevent future crimes.
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Dallas Observer, Oct. 7-13
“In the Line of Fire” by Carlton Stowers
While we’re on the subject of school killings, when 47-year-old Larry Gene Ashbrook started killing people attending a youth rally at the Wedgewood Baptist Church last month, one of the teens present stood up and confronted the killer, telling him to be saved. Ashbrook ended his massacre, sat down and shot himself. Is 19-year-old Jeremiah Neitz a hero who risked his own life to prevent further bloodshed, as Stowers clearly wants us to believe? Or is this yet another wishful attempt to create sense out of this spate of mindless killings?
“Etch-a-Sketch” by Melissa Hung
Scarification as fashion statement and mental panacea! What will the kiddies think of next?
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The Smoking Gun
“Gary Coleman Comes Up $hort”
It seems unfair to kick Gary Coleman when he’s down. But the gruesome spectacle of Coleman’s recent bankruptcy scandal, as presented on the site in court documents, is too good to resist.
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And now, three tales of smugglers!
Ecstacy-smuggling Orthodox Jews!
Cuban cigar-smuggling businessmen from the Bay Area!
Cuban-smuggling Cubans!
Actor-screenwriter Myles Berkowitz was struggling to succeed in Hollywood while simultaneously navigating the treacherous dating waters of Los Angeles. Frustrated by his lack of progress in both areas, Berkowitz raised $60,000 and exposed his life to the camera. He videotaped himself on 20 dates with women he met through traditional and not-so-traditional methods, hoping the result would coalesce into an entertaining film.
To his surprise, Berkowitz fell in love with a woman he met during the filming, and “20 Dates” captures many of the nuances and entanglements of the courtship on camera. But he still dated other women to fulfill his contractual obligations, and the film shows the impact of this romantic juggling act on his life. He also wound up with an unexpected antagonist in financier and co-producer Elie Samaha, whose prodding for name actresses and T&A shots became so hostile that Berkowitz taped their conversations, fearing for his life.
Berkowitz spent a year in the editing room whittling down 120 hours of footage to 88 minutes. Together with his editors, he crafted a “documentary” that faithfully adheres to the structure and conventions of romantic comedy. “20 Dates” won the audience award at the 1998 Slamdance Film Festival, and was picked up for distribution by Fox Searchlight within a week. It will be released in New York and Los Angeles on Feb. 26.
Salon spoke to Berkowitz from his home in Los Angeles about his unique and trying filming process.
Do you consider this a documentary?
There are several reasons why it’s not. I don’t believe a true documentarian would go into a situation to provoke a response. When I try to sneak past the guards at a studio, whereas that is real, is that a true documentary? I was provoking the situation by showing up there. That’s what Michael Moore did in “Roger and Me.” I just feel that a true documentary places a camera down and records real life. My going with a camera and trying to get on a studio lot, or into a fancy restaurant, or even on a date, was a lot more provocative than what true documentaries do.
Before filming, did you do a draft or mock script, or any sequencing that you hoped the script would eventually follow?
Yes. I had written a treatment that had me going out on 20 dates, and assumed some things would happen — for instance, a date where I’ll like her and she won’t like me. Then I was going to conduct sit-down interviews with people about single life and dating that would somehow relate to the experiences I had on dates in the movie.
I also hoped to have more than one date with a woman that I could blow up into a relationship on screen. I thought it probably wasn’t going to work out in the end, so I intended to make a mean, vicious comedy about dating. I could never have planned meeting the woman of my dreams and falling in love while this was filming. So the project kind of got away from me. The mean, vicious comedy about dating became a sweet romantic comedy.
How did the film’s structure eventually develop?
From any particular date, we had three or four hours of footage. We had to take snippets of each date that would represent the overall dating experience, and also see whether or not the 20 dates as a whole represented a universal dating journey.
Charlie Chaplin used to make movies that way. He would show up on the set with a basic idea for the story in his head, film some scenes, then close down production for a couple of weeks. He would think more about the story and how he could write it, and he and his writing partner would work out the scenes. Because film was so cheap, and because he was Chaplin, he could do it.
Do you think you’ll ever want to work like this again?
No, absolutely not. It was a nightmare. I’m flat-out broke and I’m exhausted. It was very hard work.
How different was the final product from what you had envisioned?
The only reason the film worked in the end was because of several things that I did not anticipate — because of the villain, Elie, and because of Elisabeth [his fiancie]. I lucked into this movie to a large degree.
The relationship with Elisabeth immediately made the movie more accessible. Now, it’s not just a story of a guy going out on dates, but about going from being single to hooking up with the girl I’m eventually going to marry. That’s a transition a lot of us make, but we captured it on film.
What was your relationship with Elie really like?
Going in, I only had one or two meetings with him, but when he saw footage of me on dates, that’s when he started going nuts and getting angry. Those were the conversations I taped, because he thought I was trying to steal his money, that it was a practical joke or something.
He does actually threaten you with violence in the film.
He would constantly say, “You’re in big trouble, brother.” There were also more specific threats of body parts being sent to my mother in the mail. At the very beginning when he said something like that, I called my agent, who said, “Ah, that’s just the way he talks.”
So you taped your conversations with him because you were freaked out?
I was a little freaked out. I was getting messages on my home machine. The other side of him, which isn’t apparent in the movie, is that he saw the whole project through, despite all his yelling and screaming. I’ve been in this town a long time, and no one had ever given me a break, or money to make a movie. He did.
Did you wrestle with how to handle the camera’s influence on the dates?
There would come a time when even though we both knew the cameras were there, we forgot about them, because the emotion of being on a date was stronger than the uncomfortable feeling of being in front of a camera. The first half hour, maybe, we were on our best behavior, but ultimately, you want the other person to like you.
Were you self-conscious throughout the filming about how you were going to come across?
You’re seeing a movie made by a guy who was very desperate [laughs]. I was at wit’s end. I was really going to give up trying to make movies and pursuing my dream. Like what Bob Dylan said — “When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.”
I initially thought we would focus on the women, get snapshots of 20 single women, and then have some commentary from other people about single life and dating. When I showed what we had to people, they wanted to know more about me, what I was thinking and where I was in my life. After all, I was asking them to follow me on my journey.
This was a nightmare, because I always swore I would never be one of those first-time filmmakers who makes a movie about himself, and here I was doing that. The other obnoxious thing is that these guys always get these beautiful women who would never go out with them in real life, and here I’ve got Elisabeth. No one’s gonna believe this.
Was there any one moment in the film that crystallized your dating life?
Right after the bungee jump. This was a girl I was very attracted to and thought I might have a shot at. She seemed kind of interested in me, I made her laugh, she made me laugh, we had a good time. I thought we would go bungee jumping, the blood would be flowing. Then, of course, when we jumped, both of us climbed back onto the bridge having gone through the worst experience of our lives, the adrenaline totally gone. I realized that I would go into dates with all these plans and ideas and strategies and it never seemed to work out the way I thought.
A moment that crystallized the movie experience for me, how it was kind of like living in “The Truman Show,” was the scene on the beach with Elisabeth. We’re talking about something very personal, about her family getting divorced and my dad dying and all that, and out of the corner of my eye I see a woman coming toward us. On one hand I’m having this very personal quiet discussion with Elisabeth, and I really do care what she’s saying. On the other hand, I’m thinking that if this woman walks into my area, this is gonna be comedy gold. So I was constantly going through this process, saying, “Am I real? Am I doing it for the camera? Is this person real?” It was a very confusing thing.
When are you and Elizabeth getting married?
October. And there will be no photographers at the wedding.
fall fell on us like a cartoon safe in New York yesterday, and the air just socked in that Christmas/Thanksgivingy aura of rosemary-tinged bittersweetness and reminders of family bathos and ex-loves. Memories of the recently dead are flitting about in swatches like sudden hits of laundry steam and pine. The bright cold has that crispy heartache quality to it, where you can’t believe how lucky you are to be walking in the hard morning sunlight on your own two strong legs, tensed against the new wind, and you also can’t believe how sadly and violently impermanent every damn thing is. Yesterday, summer ’97 snuck out the window forever, without even saying goodbye.
There are three things I can’t stop thinking about, this sudden fall: supermodel Shalom Harlow, Nike and the closing of Woolworth’s.
Shalom Harlow lives in my neighborhood, with her equally inhumanly pretty boyfriend, and the problem with them is they appear to be having an absolutely wonderful life. She is one of the best-paid people in the world. God knows who he is, but they undoubtedly met at some gala fashion show in some old garden palace in Firenze, where she was draped in the quattrocento courtyard against a twilit fig tree with morning glories twisted into her bangs, wearing nothing but a sheer organza tube slip and a $75,000 tangle of rare orange pearls, drinking a Dom Bellini out of a Tang dynasty finger bowl. He was probably looking for the ivory-tipped dart he had rashly shot out of an original Zulu blowgun that was only borrowed and supposed to be a prop, and he found it sticking suggestively in the trunk crotch about an inch and a half over her sleek, minky ocean of brunet curls, and huge blue eyes met huger blue eyes and they spoke in some kind of inaudible, spiritual free-prose and recognized that physical perfection and love and wealth had all instantaneously achieved some obscene, whirling celestial synthesis between them, and that they were the Original Man and Original Woman restored to power in Eden here in the late 20th century.
They are always clutching each other and giggling and kissing deeply but politely in the supermarket and whispering important little secrets to each other, dressed down exactly alike in their sealed, hermetic, beatific world, and everyone else who comes within 20 feet of them looks somehow like criminally obese shrub trolls, wretched from cosmic justice’s foiling of their own selfish and foul-minded plans.
There goes the .0000000009 percent, I say, when I see Shalom and her Man.
All the looks, all the cash and all the fun, apparently. Glad somebody’s having everything all at once. I just wish the rest of it all were more evenly distributed, like everything else in America and the world.
The other day, I went shopping on one of the final days of Woolworth’s, the senile five-and-dime where you could once find anything from lawnmower cozies to oil lamps shaped like golden owls to Barbie windmills and top it all off with a 99-cent chili dog and an Orange Julius. By the time I got there, the shelves were a savaged carcass with all of the packaging entrails gored and exposed. Nobody was bothering to re-stack or re-wrap anything. The store was an old, obsolete creature that had already died; its custodians would never again bother to clip on its mock necktie or help its arthritic hands open a can of Vienna sausages or mix up its home permanent kit again.
Woolworth’s was long past those modest vanities, and now the carrion shoppers were performing their entropic role. When I was standing in line with a pair of stockings and a couple of picture frames, I saw who the Woolworth’s family was — all the jittery, blotchy, innocent elderly people on terrifically constricted budgets, buying up the last new washcloths they’d ever use, young black women buying armloads of normally prohibitively priced baby accessories and hard young professional $16,000-a-year temp chicks with their plastic baskets filled with discounted cosmetics — probably the same frustrated young women who ball-pointed the goatee and round glasses on the cosmetic display-photo of Shalom Harlow, staring winsomely out at Woolworth’s shoppers through her glossy cardboard window from an empyrean galaxy far, far away. The poor neighborhood old folks would undoubtedly really miss their Woolworths, where they could always buy their Kleenex pocket-packs and Suave hand lotion and treat themselves to a nice grilled American-cheese sandwich and Carnation ice-milk for 10 percent off every Thursday.
While Woolworth’s closed, two brand new Dolce & Gabbanas opened in New York this week, with 10-foot photo-murals of Shalom or her physiological equivalent in the windows, sporting $2,000 plastic raincoats and $130 stocking caps.
When I was flying back to the United States recently from Jakarta, I was listening to an obnoxious young woman, apparently an ad executive, talking to a couple of older guys who were apparently also ad executives. Like me, she was on her way back from visiting super-impoverished Indonesia. “So I had this pair of shoes,” she was saying in the hyper-animated, entitled-to-your-rapt-attention way that spoiled little girls who get older always have, “and let me tell you, they smelled so bad, I decided to leave them behind! So I’m taking these shoes out of my bag near this village and these people started running up to me and saying, ‘Nike American! Nike American!’ and offering me trades! So I was like, sure, I’ll take that sarong, I’ll take that wall-clock, I’ll take that and that!” She began laughing and the two older men started laughing with her. “This woman finally tried my shoes on,” she continued, “and I kid you not, she started to walk to work in them and she was crying. Tears — I’m not kidding you — were rolling down her face.”
“Nike American!” said one of the men. “Why, I’d cry too, who wouldn’t?” I decided he wanted to get into her pants.
“Yep! The real McCoy!” said the woman.
The whole exchange turned me so emotionally sideways, I wanted to beat both of them into the tarmac with Tiger Woods’ 9-iron. I really hate it when the overprivileged act like they are the only three-dimensional entities in the world and everyone else is an amusing finger puppet. According to Michael Moore’s great lefty diatribe “Downsize This,” 36 percent of all retail Nikes are made in Indonesia by young women who work 50 hours a week for a starting rate of $2 a day, a wage they can’t live on. It would take most Indonesian villagers about two months to earn a pair of Nikes, and that’s if they didn’t spend any money eating or living. The $250 million that Nike spent on advertising in 1994 has successfully brainwashed all world ghettos, even the very people that Nike itself is keeping below the poverty line: Nikes are the magic shoes, the real McCoy, they can make you jump so high you can catch a glimpse of that world on luminous billboards and the international power-glow of MTV. Show your love for Michael Jordan, own a true piece of the hero, share the diamond-studded frame with the face of God.
Local unions must be established to safeguard the fair distribution of worldly pleasure. Shalom Harlow is the CEO of all human desire. If you want to picket, I know where she and her boyfriend hang out.
what does Michael Moore have in common with Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern? The answer — I mean the other answer, the one that doesn’t include the words blubber or bigmouth — is Judith Regan. The feisty celebritor’s HarperCollins imprint, Regan Books, recently announced a six-figure deal with Moore for a January 1998 follow-up to the director-cum-author’s bestselling “Downsize This!” Meanwhile, Moore is trying to arrange overseas financing for a third incarnation of his satirical newsmagazine, “TV Nation.”
For most people on the left, Moore is welcome news. Some of us, however, have had enough.
Eight years ago we forgave Moore when he distorted facts in “Roger & Me,” his documentary about General Motors and Flint, Mich. After all, it was in the service of a larger Truth, and as progressives (or liberals, as we called ourselves then) we wanted to support a distinctive populist voice. Most importantly, “Roger & Me” was a clever and very funny film.
Three years later came “Pets or Meat,” a shoddy rehash of “Roger & Me.” We let it slide because it was good just to have Moore back. When he followed up with “Canadian Bacon,” we politely pretended that embarrassing flop was an irrelevant aberration. By 1994 we were kvelling over “TV Nation,” which a typical critic hailed as “the best TV show in the past 30 years.” Demonstrably not a fact, but in the service of a larger truth: that a wildly uneven left-wing TV show was better than no left-wing TV show at all.
“TV Nation” was canceled (twice), but Moore returned last year with a book, “Downsize This!” and, well, you know the pattern. It was mediocre at best, but progressives championed it and propelled it onto the bestseller lists.
Stop the bandwagon, I want to get off.
FIVE REASONS THE LEFT CAN DO WITHOUT MICHAEL MOORE
1. ROGER AND ME, ME, ME, ME, ME!
The first warning was when “Pets or Meat” turned out to be about what a great film “Roger & Me” was. Then came “TV Nation,” with its frequent segments about what a great show “TV Nation” was.
Late last year, Moore wrote four “Media Matters” columns for the Nation, in which he showed clearly which media matter to him. The first installment mentioned “Downsize This!” in the opening paragraph, then discussed both “Roger & Me” and “Canadian Bacon.” The second installment was all about “TV Nation.” The third again mentioned “Downsize This!” in the first paragraph and discussed at length the promotional tour for that book. The final column oddly had nothing to do with the media — except for the mention of “Downsize This!” in the first paragraph.
Currently, Moore is editing a new documentary about … the promotional tour for “Downsize This!” “The first concert film of a book tour,” he calls it, as if the world’s been waiting for such a thing. The tentative title for Moore’s new Regan Book? You guessed it: “TV Nation: Uncensored.”
2. KARL WAS NOT THE FUNNIEST MARX BROTHER
Michael Moore is phenomenally good at one thing: getting people to make idiots of themselves on camera. That can be uproarious, but it’s not inherently so. It can also be self-defeating if overused, as viewers catch on that maybe the suit on the other end of the microphone each week isn’t really so dense, he just comes off that way because that’s what Michael Moore does to people.
When Moore actually cracks jokes, as he does in “Downsize This!” it becomes clear that his knack for comedy is shockingly third-rate. In this book (published five years after 1991) Michael Moore slaps his thigh over such laff riots as Barney the dinosaur, John Tesh and “the guy responsible for the little silver tape you can’t get off the CD box.”
Hey Mike, for your next book: airline peanuts, and how hard they are to open. It’ll kill.
3. BLACK HELICOPTERS OVER FLINT
Did you see “Canadian Bacon”? Me neither. But anyone who has will tell you this anti-war “comedy” deserved to fail as badly as it did. Moore does not buy that. He thinks the studio, PolyGram, intentionally buried the film. As he wrote in the Nation: “They tested the film in front of an all-white audience near, of all places, Simi Valley, California (site of the infamous Rodney King verdict and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library). Guess what? THE AUDIENCE HATED IT!”
That’s right — Reagan did it.
Why would PolyGram sink its own movie? Because it’s “owned by Philips of the Netherlands, makers of weapons.”
In another Nation column, Moore accused Borders of canceling his signings after he supported a Borders employee named Miriam Fried who had tried to unionize her store. Well, maybe. But wasn’t his “NOTE TO BORDERS EXECUTIVES” a little excessive? “If, after this column is published, you retaliate by removing my book from your shelves, or hiding it in the ‘humor’ section or underreporting its sales to the New York Times list, I will come at you with everything I’ve got.”
Relax. I’m sure no one would ever classify “Downsize This!” as humor.
4. FRIEND OF THE WORKING MAN
It was Miriam Fried who said, “The ultimate measure of a company’s social responsibility is the way it treats its employees.” It was a “TV Nation” producer who said, “If you had … a reunion of people for whom working for Michael was the least pleasant professional experience of their lives, it might be necessary to rent a large stadium.”
From articles in New York magazine and the New York Observer, and from my own conversations with Moore’s former employees, I have learned that Moore’s office is not, as he insists in his book, “a nonstop rock-’n'-roll party for the proletariat.”
“TV Nation” writers say he tried to dissuade them from joining the Writer’s Guild (though he spends a chapter of his book on his efforts to unionize his researchers). Once they did join, writers relied on the Guild repeatedly to secure them payments, credits and residuals Moore was trying to screw them out of.
On another Moore project, one senior staffer regularly responded to Moore’s abuse by presenting the boss with a big box of doughnuts. He assured co-workers he was not trying to placate Moore. Rather, he figured Mike’s intemperate scarfing would hasten the fat man’s death.
Moore’s response is that his critics resent the success of an uneducated man from Flint because “they went to Yale, they went to Harvard.” In fact, no one on “TV Nation” attended an Ivy League school, but Moore is probably going for a larger truth.
5. POP GOES THE POPULIST
Read an interview with Moore and sooner or later you get to the part where he says, “I’m the same person I was before ‘Roger & Me.’ I still only own three pairs of blue jeans and one Detroit Tigers cap.” It is vital to Moore’s sense of self (not to mention his career) that he remain a Guy from Flint.
He hasn’t been that guy for quite some time. Even when he says “I never made more than $15,000 a year” before “Roger & Me,” he’s not counting the $58,000 settlement he got from Mother Jones after they fired him. (The magazine says Moore was incompetent. Moore says the publishers conspired against him. You make the call.)
The thing is, no one would even think to begrudge him his success if he wasn’t such a snob about being “working class.”
Like when he says, “Average working stiffs were willing to … pay seven bucks to see my movie. So if they’re going to give me their money what am I going to with it? Get a big boat? I don’t think so.” Instead he got a $1.27 million apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. You didn’t think he still lived in Flint, did you?
Again, no one would care, except that Moore insists on telling interviewers that it’s OK because his neighborhood is “a lot like Flint. It’s poor, noisy.” Granted, it’s noisy (though I suspect it’s quieter up in Moore’s 17th-floor pad, even out on the 755-square-foot terrace), but poor? Within four blocks of his front door, Moore can buy a $3.40 cappuccino, $375 shoes or $400 sunglasses. Fortunately, the local all-you-can-eat “barbecue pig out” is only $15.95.
Moore’s address does put him in a good school district, but that doesn’t matter. He sends his daughter to private school.
What’s really sad is that Moore is dependent on being Joe Baseball Cap largely because he is bereft of any ideas beyond that. As Might magazine pointed out, the crux of Moore’s political agenda is, in his own words: “We need to let the working class know that we don’t think we’re better than them.” If Newt Gingrich said anything so patronizing, the Left would never stop ridiculing him. And how do “we” let “them” know we’re on their side? “To effect change we have to get off our high horse and start living in the real world,” Moore says. “I want you watching ‘Friends’ every single week. I want you listening to country music.” If only my mother had known watching TV was an act of revolution. She’d never have made me turn-off-the-damn-set-and-do-your-homework-already. Besides, if the popularity of “Friends” really means that show represents where ordinary Americans are at, what does that say about shows that don’t get high ratings, like, oh, “TV Nation”?
Occasionally, Moore tries to elaborate on this theme and slips up. “Rap music and country music, these are the voices … of people who are disenfranchised,” he told one college audience. “I know the music sucks, but don’t you want to put yourself through some pain to see what people are feeling?” Not that we’re better than them or anything.
