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Art Objects: The Works of Michael Moore
and Peter Watkins
M A R K P O I N D E X T E R
IN HER PLAYFULLY NAMED BOOK OF ESSAYS A RT OBJECTS (IN WHICH
the second word is a verb, rather than a noun), Jeanette Winter-
son stresses the role of art as a means of seeing beyond the mun-
dane. The hallmark of both Michael Moore and Peter Watkins as
filmmakers is that they challenge conventional frames through which
contemporary issues are seen (or perhaps ignored). The works of both
Moore and Watkins would fall into the realm of art envisioned by
Winterson as explicated in such passages as the following:
It is necessary to have a story, an alibi that gets us through theday, but what happens when the story becomes a scripture? Whenwe can no longer recognize anything outside our own reality? Wehave to be careful not to live in a state of constant self-censorship,where whatever conflicts with our world-view is dismissed ordiluted until it ceases to be a bother. (59 – 60)
Michael Moore and Peter Watkins both attempt to break down
conventional social and political assumptions in their works and both
rise above mere exhortation in opposition to or in support of specific
policy. Their scope is broader than harangue or polemic, even though
their work is politically charged. They produce dissident art.
Although his film The War Game (1965) won the Academy Award
for Best Documentary in 1967, Peter Watkins has never had a block-
buster film in hundreds of theaters in major release, as Moore has had
with Bowling for Columbine (2003), Fahrenhype 9/11 (2004), and Sicko
(2007), or a film that has brought him the personal notoriety or
received the sustained popular attention of Roger & Me (1989).
The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 44, No. 6, 2011© 2011, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
1268
After attracting a good deal of attention with his first feature
length film, Culloden (1964), a work for the BBC that applied con-
temporary news coverage techniques to a re-enactment of the last
major internal battle fought on British soil (in 1746), Watkins made
a documentary (also for the BBC) on nuclear war. The British net-
work got more than it had probably expected and in the end more
than it was willing to put on the air when Watkins turned over The
War Game, a forty-eight-minute production that consists mainly of a
graphic enactment of what the likely consequences of a nuclear bomb
dropped on Britain would be. He employed nonprofessionals as actors
who dealt with such troublesome issues as, not only the physical
aftermath of a bomb, but the police killing those who could not
possibly survive, the loss of hope and the breakdown of social order.
With this dramatization were mixed facts and comments from
experts on the survivability or nonsurvivability of nuclear attack.
Although the BBC publicly emphasized at the time that it was the
upsetting nature of the depiction that caused it to withhold the work
from broadcast, it was suspected — and in retrospect now appears con-
firmed — that the British government quietly intervened to keep the
work from television screens in fear that it would prompt public reac-
tion against Britain’s nuclear arms policies, which were very close to
those of the United States during the Cold War. In a compromise,
the film was eventually shown in theaters in Britain, but not on tele-
vision until the 1980s, despite the Academy Award that the work
received in 1967 (Cook; Murphy).
Watkins continued to develop the techniques used in Culloden and
The War Game, specifically the use of nonprofessionals to portray
ordinary people in stressful times in his only American film, Punish-
ment Park (1971). It is based on the fictional premise that both the
War in Vietnam and domestic opposition to it have escalated dramat-
ically and that President Richard Nixon has used executive powers to
declare a state of national emergency that allows for special courts of
citizens (perhaps somewhat reminiscent of draft boards) to sit in
judgment on people engaging in civil disobedience to oppose the
war. In one series of such pseudotrials in California, those convicted
are offered the choice of lengthy prison terms or volunteering to
participate in police and military exercises at a desert site called
Punishment Park. Most of the film consists of cross-cutting between
the trials of young dissidents, some violent, some not, who seem to
Art Objects: Works of Moore and Watkins 1269
represent a wide spectrum of philosophies and issues that drew
together protestors against the War in Vietnam, social injustice, and
racism in the United States in the early 1970s. Individuals with
views and background similar to the characters they portrayed were
chosen for the roles of protestors. The same was true for the citizens
who staffed the tribunals and the police and military. There were
general outlines of what the actors were to do and say, and there was
a plot that resulted in convictions of the dissidents and prolonged
confrontation as they struggled to make it across rough terrain to
their goal while pursued by police and military units. Much of the
actual dialogue and, in some cases, even the interaction involving the
killing of protestors, was extemporized by the nonprofessional actors
(Adams). The film became not only a political and social statement,
but also a psychodrama for those in it. While the sympathies of the
filmmaker and the film appear to be with the protestors, the antago-
nists, ranging from the citizen members of the tribunals to the police
and soldiers, are not mere caricatures. Most of them most of the time
seem more misguided than inherently malevolent and some of the
reaction of the “establishment” engaged in repressing the protestors
appears to be at least partly provoked. Some of the incarcerated prot-
estors when they are in Punishment Park, assuming that they are
likely to be killed rather than given a fair chance to make it through
this sort of obstacle course, decide to strike first and kill one of their
opponents, adding to the developing antagonism and paranoia of the
police and military pursuing them.
Watkins has made quite clear in the years since Punishment Park
that his goal is to make films that differ in many ways from what he
has come to call the Mass Audiovisual Media or MAVM. Watkins
appears to want his films to be a collaboration in which the actors
identify with their roles and provide a dynamic internal voice or
voices that combine with the director’s own creative vision to result
in a film that does not present a unitary vision, but preserves some of
the ambiguities and subtleties that Watkins seems to believe get lost
in more conventional approaches to the creation of mass media con-
tent. Watkins derisively refers to most of what ends up passing
through mass media channels as “the monoform” (Adams; Bowie;
Cook; Murphy; Watkins). As depicted in a Canadian film celebrating
his resistance to conventional approaches to media production called
The Universal Clock (2001), directed by Geoff Bowie, Watkins’s chief
1270 Mark Poindexter
objection to mainstream video and film production seems to be the
high degree of control utilized to achieve a predetermined objective
— to provoke a specific outcome in the audience, generally by assault-
ing it with the typical tools of production, including fast cutting,
dramatic music, and a unitary vision designed to achieve a
predetermined effect.
Watkins’s own progressive political perspective is definitely of the
Left, but differs from classical Marxism in his antiauthoritarian
stance, as well as his insistence that the bourgeoisie need to be
engaged and converted rather than merely seen as intransigent
(Grant). Despite his political orientation that would seem to call for
major structural reform in post-industrial capitalist societies like the
United States, Great Britain, and France, and certainly opposition to
wars like those in Vietnam and Iraq, Watkins has had far from kind
words for fellow cineastes who may share his political perspective in
some ways, such as Michael Moore or Mark Achbar, whom he sees as
adopting the tactics of the enemy and ultimately enfeebling the
potential of the mass media to bring about positive change.
One of Watkins’s most ambitious works since Punishment Park,
and probably his other work that most resembles it, is La Commune
(Paris, 1871), which was released in 2000. La Commune suffered
somewhat the same fate as The War Game more than thirty year ear-
lier when one of its investors, the Franco-German television network
Arte, chose to show it in the middle of the night (Universal Clock).
While some critics may find the film to be an artistic achievement
and to push Watkins’s notion of community involvement and of
engagement of ideas to new levels, the audience for which this may
occur may be quite limited, at least in the United States, compared
to Punishment Park. Some of the reasons for this may be technical and
have to do with the steps he takes beyond what he did in the earlier
films. In La Commune, Watkins has his characters not only extempo-
rize, but he shoots them out of character, talking about their personal
lives and relating themselves to the character they play, especially
relating current social and political issues to both current context and
what the nonprofessional actors have learned about the events of
1871. Sam Adams writes of the film:
The most interesting interpretations . . . come from the partici-pants themselves . . . In the most thrilling sequences, clustered
Art Objects: Works of Moore and Watkins 1271
near the beginning of the second half, actors slip imperceptibly,almost unconsciously from past to present and back: Abandonedartisans ask after their errant master, then muse how nowadays, it’shard to even know who you work for. It may sound frightfullyself-conscious, but there are moments when Watkins’s “livinghistory” threatens to leap from the screen.
For some, watching La Commune can be a powerful experience but
for others, it appears not to be. When the film was shown at the
Toronto International Film Festival in 2001 it was sold out. People
almost fought physically to get into the screening, attracted by pro-
motion and perhaps the novelty of seeing a film that ran nearly six
hours (a total of five hours, forty-five minutes for the version in
Toronto). Following what might be described as highly assertive
behavior of those standing in the rush lines trying to get seats, the
festival staff acquiesced and allowed a sizeable overflow audience to
come in and stand in the back of the theater or sit in the aisles to see
the film. Within an hour or so enough people had left so that it was
fairly easy to claim a seat. By the intermission near the middle of the
film, the audience had declined more and by the end of the film,
nearly six hours after it had begun, at least half of the initial audience
appeared to have left. An observation from Winterson’s Art Objects
may help frame a possible explanation for the film’s loss of much of
its audience at the Toronto screening:
Communication between you and me relies on assumptions, associa-tions, commonalities and a kind of agreed shorthand which no-onecould precisely define, but which everyone would admit exists. (79)
It may be helpful to assume a sort of calculus that sets the effort
taken to understand a work of art, in this case a film, against the degree
to which the work appears to have potential to connect with the
assumptions, associations, and commonalities of the audience in such a
way as to offer insight or provide some sort of emotional engagement
for the audience. Especially, if the objective of the artist is to defamil-
iarize something in order to offer a new perspective, it may be difficult
or impossible to achieve this if there is too little that is familiar for the
spectators to begin with. The commercial mass media industry has long
been criticized for its unwillingness to take risks in what will engage
audiences and how such engagement can be achieved. Witness the long
1272 Mark Poindexter
history of criticism that includes such comments as H. L. Mencken’s
“No one in this world, so far as I know . . . has ever lost money by
underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain peo-
ple” (Quote/Counterquote). But to accept the assumption that an audi-
ence’s level of engagement affects its willingness to work at
understanding is not the same thing as stereotyping the public as a boo-
bus americanus, again to use Mencken’s terms (Columbia Encyclopedia). It
is merely recognizing that certain emotional and semiotic threads must
exist between what is on the screen, in the case of a film or television
program, and what is in maps of the world in the heads of the audi-
ence, to evoke Lippmann’s explanation (3 – 20) of how people live in a
pseudo-environment that determines their actions (including whether
or not they continue to pay attention to a film or go to see it to begin
with, for that matter). To take up the same idea in a slightly different
context, the multifaceted Tony Schwartz (who was responsible for the
famous Daisy commercial for the Johnson Campaign in 1964) asserted
that, when setting out to influence an audience, it was first necessary
to engage that audience, not so much by conveying new information,
as by evoking pictures, sounds, or ideas the audience already has. In his
book The Responsive Chord , Schwartz called this phenomenon resonance.
This is not a revolutionary idea, as Aristotle defined rhetoric as
“observing in any given case the available means of persuasion”
( Aristotle’s Rhetoric ). To use the more contemporary psychological
terms, the schemata, frames, templates, and/or paradigms of the
intended audience must be taken into consideration. If one accepts
James Carey’s definition of communication as “a symbolic process
whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired and transformed”
(23), it is easy to see any of these outcomes — including those that
result in frames and paradigms being changed — starting with the real-
ity that already exists within the listener or viewer of a film or other
media content. The best explanation of the different effects of Wat-
kins’s La Commune may simply be that, especially for an audience with
little or no prior knowledge of the 1871 Commune or of contemporary
life in France, the gap between what is already familiar and what is
presented on the screen simply becomes too great. Add to this the need
to deal with subtitles in a film where ideas conveyed through speech
are at least as important as what is seen and that the contemporary
issues — while not totally different from Canadian or US concerns — are
in a French context, the film may simply ask too much in too many
Art Objects: Works of Moore and Watkins 1273
different dimensions to engage a sizeable percentage of North Ameri-
cans for as long as the film lasts. For some La Commune works and for
some, it does not. This is not to imply that it simply needs better mar-
keting to maximize its penetration of its niche. It may have something
important to say to many and that alone (for reasons that extend
beyond marketing) may well justify it having been made.
The most conspicuous difference between Moore and Watkins is
that while Watkins has distanced himself from what he calls the Mass
Audiovisual Media, Moore has adeptly managed to insert himself into it . In
addition to critical acclaim, Moore’s works have: (i) reached millions of
people; (ii) made money, in some cases a lot of money (Fahrenhype 9/11
cost six million dollars to make and in its first month grossed over one
hundred million dollars in the United States alone); (iii) established a
high enough profile that opponents have launched counter offensives
with at least other films directly attacking Moore, among them Fahen-
hype 9/11 (2004), Celsius 41.11: The Temperature at Which the Brain…
Begins to Die (2004), Michael Moore Hates America (2004), and Michael
& Me (2005). Printed works also attack Moore, among them Michael
Moore is a Big Fat Stupid White Man (Hardy and Clarke).
Although, as of this writing, Moore and Watkins have never had a
direct confrontation, Watkins has specifically mentioned Moore’s work.
In a message to the Gijon Film Festival in November, 2004 in the wake
of the critical box office success of Fahrenhype 9/11, Watkins writes:
The films of Michael Moore, Mark Achbar (“The Corporation”)and others, indicate a heightened use of the Monoform to manipu-late audiences for “progressive” ends. The process used by thesefilmmakers entails an endless barrage of ultra-rapid and aggres-sively edited soundbites and dislocated interviews, the narrativetricks of Hollywood including background music to heightentension, commentary employing the rhetoric and conclusions of the tabloid press, clips from old feature films to reinforce points(or titillate the audience), etc. etc. The plaudits for this divisiveprocess — and consequent placing of Michael Moore onto an iconicpedestal — indicate yet again a marked lack of critical debate aboutwhat is really happening here.
In the same message, Watkins later states:
How can we separate the media methods used by the establish-ment from those now being used by the so-called “left”?
1274 Mark Poindexter
Both “camps” blatantly use the Monoform, which is designed toprevent reflection or questioning, and to maintain a hierarchicalrelationship to the audience — and both thereby show completedisdain for the public.
In his letter to the Gijon Film Festival, Watkins expresses the
belief that since the 1960s when “TV was a medium full of possibili-
ties” that “we slid into a world of extreme audiovisual manipulation,
coupled with an increasing standardization of TV and filmic form,
and a repression within the media to maintain this conformity.” (He
goes on to express the fear that the public has been manipulated to
accept “increasingly centralized control from reactionary political and
corporate forces on the national and multinational level” and that
there is an encouragement of “ever greater levels of consumerism, all
with dire consequences for the planet.”)
While such documentary filmmakers as Michael Moore and Mark
Achbar might agree with the immediately proceeding statements by
Watkins, there is a clear parting of the ways between Watkins and the
documentary filmmakers in today’s limelight when it comes to the use
of the media themselves. Watkins finds the more overtly reactionary
social and political environment to be coupled with and “grievously
compounded by a second (and largely invisible) layer of manipulation
— that which comes about through the manipulation of time, space,
rhythm and structure in the language forms used by the MAVM [mass
audiovisual media].” He goes on to complain that “since the education
systems have also become tools of the marketplace preventing critical
media analysis, and encouraging students to unquestioningly accept
the consumer popular culture, the silence has become deafening.”
Watkins finds the structure of the media to be profoundly anti-
democratic and calls for attention to the process of media production
and to the relationship between media and audiences.
While it is difficult to believe that Michael Moore applauds the
hierarchical media system, the oligarchy of ownership or the rationale
upon which decisions to fund and distribute projects are made, Moore
makes quite clear that he is willing to play by some rules of the sys-
tem in order to be seen and heard. While he has not directly replied
to Watkins, one can find statements Moore has made about his rela-
tionship to major media organizations in such places as his interview
in The Corporation, in which he states he is trying to use the system
Art Objects: Works of Moore and Watkins 1275
against itself. Moore views capitalism’s concern with profit as a weak-
ness that can be exploited by making critical and progressive media
content that opposes the very system that funds and distributes it. In
an interview with Joe Lockhart distributed with the DVD of Bowling
for Columbine, Moore portrays the interests that fund and distribute
his films as having no love for the content of his work, but still will-
ing to do anything that will make them money, perhaps because they
believe that the work will not have any significant impact anyway
(which, he says, he is betting against). Likewise, Moore goes to great
lengths in the introductions of two of his books ( Stupid White Men
and Dude, Where’s My Country?) to point out the obstacles he has had
with publishers not wishing to distribute his work, which he claims
to have overcome with a combination of pressure (in one case from
librarians objecting to the temporary refusal to distribute Stupid
White Men immediately after 11 September 2002) and greed (because
of the profitability of his work). In the interview with Lockhart,
Moore also pointedly states that he is not making movies for the
“church of the Left,” but is attempting to have some impact on a
much larger population.
Perhaps a major difference between Moore and Watkins is that
Watkins takes a much different view of public space. Having spent
decades attempting to open up cinema as a public arena at both the
production and exhibition stages, it is understandable that Watkins
reacts as he does to what seems to be the tacit assumption of Moore
(and perhaps others who have been less successful) that there is no
way the ideals of Watkins could be realized within the present sys-
tem. The audience does have limited frames of reference and media
content has become primarily a consumer commodity (with notions
of citizenship and community receding as those of consumer and
market dominate). Entertainment has become the dominant use of
mass media. In a hegemonic environment that militates against civic
engagement and in favor of reactionary political solutions, one should
not be surprised that the kinds of works Watkins would like to see
face a double barrier — first a barrier of resistance for ideological rea-
sons by those who fund and distribute media content and secondly a
barrier posed by the limited ability or unwillingness of the popula-
tion to engage in critical study of the social and political environ-
ment. If to surmount these barriers, the rhetor must use familiar
idioms and work within the limitations of the intended public’s
1276 Mark Poindexter
frames of reference in order to resonate, then Watkins seems to
believe the battle is lost a priori. He certainly does not seem to agree
that corporate interests can truly be hoisted on their own profit-dri-
ven petard by appealing to the desire for ratings or box office success
and profits, as Moore has argued.
If one sides with Moore in this debate, one might be tempted to
reject Watkins’s work as esoteric, quixotic or self-indulgent. On the
other hand, if one agrees with Watkins, one is led to reject Moore as
having become too much like those he claims to oppose and to be
concerned that his work contributes to the demise of democratic com-
munication by creating dissident messages that are delivered through
the existing structure and commercially developed idioms of address
in mediated popular culture. It is possible, however, to avoid this
dichotomy and to see both Watkins and Moore as serving comple-
mentary purposes. To do this, one must adopt somewhat the position
Watkins himself does in his films and allow for some fine distinctions
and at least the possibility of finding something of value even in the
works of those with whom one disagrees or whose political position
one opposes. It also lies in an understanding of how Moore’s work
resonates with the popular culture and media habits of his audiences
in a way that does not repair or maintain ideological hegemony (to
borrow terms from James Carey’s definition of communication), but
which rather, through emphasis, through the intertwining of the
familiar and of the new, carries Moore’s audience on a journey that is
both familiar and enlightening and, to apply Schwartz’s concept of
resonance, is able to stimulate progressive elements of popular culture
that are already part of the schemas, cognitive maps and conceptual
paradigms of his audience. As Schwartz puts it:
A listener or viewer brings far more information to the communi-cation event than a communicator can put into his program, com-mercial, or message. The communicator’s problem, then, is not toget stimuli across, or even to package the stimuli so they can beunderstood or absorbed. Rather, he must deeply understand thekinds of information and experiences stored in his audience, thepatterning of this information, and the interactive resonanceprocess whereby stimuli evoke this stored information. (25)
Moore seems to apply the kind of approach described by
Schwartz to subvert or challenge reactionary politics. Moore does
Art Objects: Works of Moore and Watkins 1277
not concede the territory on those cognitive maps so rapidly as
Watkins would.
Let us examine briefly what are probably Moore’s three best-known
works prior to 2007: Roger & Me, Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenhype
9/11. Perhaps individually, but even more so collectively, they show
just how much of a hybrid form Moore’s work is. All three of these
films mix genres freely. If one looks at previous works, where does one
place these films? While documentaries, they lack the traditional
pretense of objectivity of the television works of Edward R. Murrow or
even of the more engaged Hearts and Minds (1974). Yet they are in
some respect documentaries. They are satirical, yet they are not mere
parody or burlesque. They engage in political advocacy, but are not lin-
ear intellectual arguments like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. They are
in the broad muckraking tradition that includes such expose s as The
Washington Post’s celebrated coverage of the Watergate scandal, yet
they are also in the tradition of another kind of muckraking: the politi-
cal cartoons of Thomas Nast. Moore’s targets are presented at times in
conventional news clips, in interviews (as is common in more conven-
tional documentaries), and at others times as Nastian caricatures (albeit
through the editing of film rather than with pen and ink). There is a
storyline maintained (some might say imposed) in Moore’s films that
gives coherence and sustains attention (somewhat as in fiction), pulling
Moore also into the muckraking line of Harriet Beecher Stowe or
Upton Sinclair or, especially, in the case of Bowling for Columbine, of
Sinclair Lewis. Comedy, satire, the expose , a little sensationalism,
attention-holding pacing, political advocacy: all of these elements
come together in Michael Moore’s films in ways that are not unlike
what was present in Joseph Pulitzer’s newspapers of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century, which combined entertainment, political
advocacy, information, and education about public issues (Stephens,
Leonard). One of Moore’s creative leaps has been in bringing this fusion
to the cinematic screen which, if one applies the same principles to
cinema as she advocates for literature, would seem likely to please
Jeannette Winterson. In Art Objects, she writes: “Ours has been a
century of change, and if literature is to have any meaning beyond the
museum, it must keep developing” (39). Later in the same work, she
advocates a breakdown of the barriers “between poetry and prose” and
calls for “a form that answers twenty-first century needs” (191).
Perhaps Moore’s work does in cinema what she calls for in literature.
1278 Mark Poindexter
Roger & Me begins with a nostalgic return to the 1950s of
Michael Moore’s childhood in Flint, Michigan. Speaking in the first
person, Moore shows family movies with himself in them. Both the
images and the voiceover are typical of the TV form of address
(folksy, seeking to establish contact and rapport with the audience
through commonalities). Next there is a montage evoking (especially
for anyone Moore’s age or older) bits and pieces of a US popular
culture of the 1950s and 1960s that was capitalist, corporate but
also somehow at least slightly communitarian. Some might call it
the “we’re in this together” mentality of World War II, carried over
to the corporate capitalism of teamwork (a word used in one of the
clips Moore features at this point) within a community where state,
civil society, and business easily intermingle and cooperate in some
great cause. Moore reminds his audience of post Depression opti-
mism and presumed upward mobility. He tells us that his whole
family worked at the auto factory. The tone remains chatty,
chummy and informal. Cynics would call it perhaps the false
Gemeinschaft typical of TV. But it is a familiar idiom. Moore then
slips into a more personal montage about his early adulthood and
how he wanted to leave Flint (and did for awhile), but then there is
his return to Flint and the layoffs at the auto plant. The device used
to move along the story is eventually Moore’s attempts to find
General Motors CEO Roger Smith and get him to come to Flint to
see the effects of plant closings on the city. There are many shots of
dilapidated houses. There is a news clip about the rat population
exceeding the human population. We see people evicted from their
homes. Within these montages are strains of music, sarcastic voice-
overs, and humorous seasoning of various types. But Moore isn’t
selling soap. He is using familiar form and commonalities to
reframe issues. A close examination of what to some at first viewing
might seem like a loose pastiche of serious and amusing sequences
reveals a highly coherent intermix of a very small number of themes
or discourses.
The first of these themes or discourses could be called “discontinu-
ity” and deals with the inconsistency between Flint’s situation in the
1980s and what came before, including the emotion-laden efforts of
GM in the 1950s and 1960s to emphasize a notion of “we’re in this
together,” a communitarian approach to automobile production and
an emphasis on its close relationship to its community. Then when
Art Objects: Works of Moore and Watkins 1279
the layoffs come and plants are closed, a completely different para-
digm is suddenly evoked by GM about the need to remain profitable
and General Motors not owing anything to the city of Flint, no mat-
ter how many people it may need to lay off (almost the exact words
of a General Motors public relations representative who himself ends
up losing his job in the cutbacks of the 1980s). The warm, fuzzy
notion of the avuncular corporation is now replaced by the idea of the
corporation’s primary obligation to maximize profits. It is not just
the new way in which GM and its relationship to its employees and
Flint is framed, but the utter discontinuity with what existed previ-
ously, that becomes jarring. The discontinuity is there even before
Moore introduces his metaphor of pets or meat when he visits a
woman who sells rabbits for pets or for food. The comparison,
whether the audience may immediately seize upon it or not, is to
GM and its Flint employees: first the employees were pets and, when
no longer needed, they became meat. When a pet becomes food there
is the same discontinuity. A rabbit cannot be thought of (at least not
easily) as both food and a pet at the same time. It takes a shift of
schema to go from one to the other. A similar type of discontinuity
occurs in the speech of Roger Smith at a corporate Christmas gather-
ing, bizarre even without Moore’s framing of it, when Smith refers to
Charles Dickens and praises the pursuit of nonmonetary values in a
film where the exact opposite of those values appears to drive GM.
Moore juxtaposes the speech and the GM Christmas event with scenes
of misery in Flint, including yet another eviction just before
Christmas.
Two themes related to what is here labeled discontinuity are: (i)
the recurrent contrast of the rich and poor — the better off of Flint
partying in the jail that will house the criminal population that is
growing along with unemployment, for example, and (ii) the general
approach to Flint’s problems by various segments of the community
that seem to be forms of denial/avoidance/displacement characterized
by unrealistic and ineffective responses to the economic crisis in the
city. These two themes sometimes intermingle. We see parties where
the elite have the less fortunate hired as human statues. Then, within
this Dickensian contrast, emerges a subtheme. The elite, or those we
are invited to take for elite, are not so much malevolent as indiffer-
ent, themselves out of touch. Sophomoric discourse on the industrial
revolution as an art form and Flint as its genesis gushes forth from a
1280 Mark Poindexter
partygoer, presumably a member of the elite. This man is not so
much portrayed as evil, one might observe, as absurd: he has nothing
to say that can shed any light on Flint’s problems. He simply doesn’t
know what he is talking about. We see here not Adolf Hitler, Fu
Manchu, or Simon Legree, but George Babbitt.
If the haves are indifferent, ill-informed and arrogant (whose ratio-
nalization and understanding of the problem seem to have a depth
equivalent to the purported response of Marie Antoinette to eat cake
if bread is lacking), the have-nots are not often shown as much more
insightful. As their misery is presented, largely through evictions,
what we rarely see is an attempt to define or deal with the problem
at a social or political level. The unemployed, while they may evoke
sympathy, do not seem to be on the verge of any collective action or
even much understanding of the causes of their misery. The broad
category of denial/avoidance/displacement and resulting unrealistic
response includes such segments of the film as Ronald Reagan’s visit
to give the city a pep talk and tell people if they cannot find work
there to leave; the building of Auto World, which was a failure and
closed shortly after opening, and attempts to make Flint a tourist
destination in the midst of economic crisis. These attempts and oth-
ers (including bringing an evangelist to the city to cheer people up,
offering discounts to stage shows for unemployed workers, burning
Money magazine because it referred to Flint as a bad place to live in
the wake of the economic disaster, and expecting the manufacture of
lint rollers somehow to rescue the city) are ridiculed. The exposure
here is not so much of individual facts but of a mindset that some-
how seems to avoid defining the problem. Moore is not telling his
viewers anything really new, but seems to be trying to get them to
acknowledge in perhaps new ways what they already know. In this
respect parts of the film are like an intervention for an alcoholic or
drug addict in which friends and family try to chip away at the
defenses that redefine and deflect attention away from the real
problem.
Finally, there is the theme latched onto in the title and
promotional posters and ads for the film: Michael Moore, dressed as a
working class Everyman, pursuing GM CEO Roger Smith with a
kind of false naivete . He is the fool who will show the truth. A seg-
ment that can be used as a key to decoding much of the film comes
when Moore tries to visit a plant on its last day in operation and the
Art Objects: Works of Moore and Watkins 1281
“spokesperson” for GM at the plant tells him she will not speak to
him because he does not represent anybody. This uncommunicative
“spokesperson” then oddly evokes a notion of family to prevent him
from entering the plant and talking with workers about to lose their
jobs (as if there is something exceedingly private about this). Moore
then is dismissed as a private concern while in the same confrontation
the closing is framed as a private event. This is the spokesperson’s
apparent strategy for avoiding public discourse. Of course, it backfires
because here it comes across as so disingenuous that it has the oppo-
site effect. Then the spokesperson has him forcibly removed because
he is on private property. (Since Moore and the camera have become
established by this point as somewhat of a surrogate for the audience,
their removal then seems to level the “spokesperson’s” reaction at the
audience). What Moore does over and over again in Roger & Me is to
show the mechanics of how GM’s insulation is achieved, and then he
denies it that insulation. He is able to frame layoffs and plant closing
and unemployment as the result of public and corporate policy deci-
sions rather than as somehow natural. What at some level the popular
culture may take for granted (that corporations are limited in their
accountability for the consequences of their actions), Moore holds up
to challenge, not by a linear intellectual argument, but by the crea-
tion of incidents in which there is conflict and through perhaps cin-
ema’s best argumentative tool, juxtaposition. In this way, although
the film associates ideas and images in a manner that more closely
resembles commercials than a traditional documentary, the goal
clearly seems to be to resonate with the viewer’s existing doubts
about the system and to reframe Flint’s crisis in ways that call for
critical thought on the part of the audience. Moore stimulates
thought about what his audience may already be aware of, but invites
a counter hegemonic framing of that knowledge.
In Bowling for Columbine, Moore continues the folksy style, the
chatty voiceover and the lively montages that throw together diverse
material to take the audience once again on an ironic, satiric and yet at
times quite serious romp through issues related to violence, guns and
American society. This film is less neatly tied together than Roger &
Me and does not answer all of the questions it raises, but, once again,
it attempts to make connections that call hegemonic frames into ques-
tion. While using everything from the Columbine shootings to
National Rifle Association (NRA) rallies to an interview with the
1282 Mark Poindexter
brother of Terry Nichols to getting a free gun at a bank as an incentive
to open an account there, Moore attempts to engage and entertain the
audience. The film differs slightly from Roger & Me, however, in that a
lot of what is in this film ends up not really being directly related to
Moore’s central concern (which is perhaps why some critics liked it
less than Roger & Me). Some of its content may serve the same purpose
as the comics or lurid tales of urban crime in the heyday of the penny
press, devices to attract and sustain the attention of an audience that
might not read or, in this case, watch, because of intrinsic interest in
the main topic. (One might call this a form of “bait and switch” in
that what is used to attract attention initially may not be what Moore
eventually wants the audience to think about. Their attention having
been attracted, however, they will be given the analysis that is the
main point of the film nevertheless.) In the end , Bowling for Columbine
frames the United States not just vaguely as violent (as some of those
interviewed in the film try to do) but (a) as violent as the result of irra-
tional fears — including fears that embody racism — that are kept alive
and intensified by specific interests that benefit from them; (b) as
ignoring and failing to relate to issues of violence such causes as the
lack of a social welfare system that other countries with much lower
murder rates have; (c) as violent within a larger context that includes a
war mentality and willingness to use massive force against people and
countries outside of its own borders.
In Fahrenhype 9/11, Moore continues his blend of humor and politi-
cal commentary, developing to a greater degree the effective mix of
entertainment and more traditional journalistic expose and analysis he
offers in Bowling for Columbine. One could argue that showing John
Ashcroft singing his own composition “Let the Eagle Soar” and Paul
Wolfowitz slicking back his hair with his own saliva are gratuitous
segments that really should have no bearing on how one receives the
political positions with which they are associated. But that would miss
part of their function. While the use of such unflattering clips does
put Bush associates in a bad light and perhaps sets the stage for more
direct challenges to Administration policy, critics who see them as
unfair ad hominem jabs, as well as some who cheer them, may be
missing the point that these segments are also intrinsically funny.
They are not there just to make these men look bad; they are also there to
get a laugh. Much of Fahrenhype 9/11 can be viewed (even perhaps some
of the segments in which Moore seems to be building a rather flimsy
Art Objects: Works of Moore and Watkins 1283
conspiracy theory about rather specific goals Bush and associates may
have had related to the building of a natural gas pipeline in Afghan-
istan) as simply devices to engage attention. The main message of
Fahrenhype 9/11 is simpler to state than that of Roger & Me and Bowling
for Columbine. Moore ultimately zeroes in on one core cluster of ideas:
that the Bush Administration hijacked the national outrage over the
attacks of 11 September 2001 into pursuing a war against Iraq that
was part of an existing agenda; lied or at best had a cavalier concern for
the truth about the military capabilities of Saddam Hussein, and has
embroiled the nation in a quagmire in Iraq that is sacrificing its
soldiers and the Iraqi population to policy goals that have little or
nothing to do with the values in which most Americans believe and
for which they may actually think their nation is fighting. This is a
rather specific message, although it is contained in a very large and
entertaining envelope. The film itself may not be cohesive in a logical
sense. However, it is constructed not just to state its message, but also
to deliver it as effectively as possible to a large, general audience.
When one takes into account the funding and distribution of their
work and the reception of it by the intended public, it is clear that
Watkins and Moore take quite different approaches. While Watkins
aspires to work within a public space that is healthy for a democracy
to have and his works do clearly exhibit enormous potential to
engage audiences and to embody real public participation, as well as
to help redefine the relationship between media and the public, their
potential to do any of this is severely limited. With funding for pub-
lic service broadcasting challenged worldwide and with commercial
models and definitions of markets seemingly in ascendancy, a prere-
quisite for creating the environment in which Watkins or his succes-
sors can successfully build new and more democratic models for mass
media is a major change in the political and commercial climate. It is
difficult to see how Watkins or those who are similarly marginalized
could help bring this about. Moore may not go so far as to adopt
“any means necessary” but he does seem quite focused on using many
of the means available in the current environment in ways that reach
large audiences with alternatives to currently dominant paradigms for
social policy issues, including corporate public obligations, health
care, foreign policy, racism, and the traditionally taboo subject of
socioeconomic class. He does so in a business environment that is cer-
tainly not friendly to his own ideological perspective, while attracting
1284 Mark Poindexter
large audiences from a population that is decreasingly informed and
increasingly unlikely to seek even basic current events knowledge.
In his recent work Tuned Out , David T. Z. Mindich calls attention
to what he considers a crisis in US democracy. Echoing conclusions
drawn earlier by Postman, Entman and others, Mindich documents a
continued “decline in news consumption” over the past forty years that
“has produced two generations of young adults who, for the most part,
have barely an outline of what they need to make an informed decision
in the voting booth” (ix). Mindich provides a statistical portrait of a
population under forty in the United States that not only prefers, but
greatly prefers entertainment to news and public affairs, and that has
disengaged from the political and community sphere to such an extent
that fewer and fewer even feel the need to justify their lack of knowl-
edge of current events, applying the same standard to news and public
affairs programs they would to entertainment. “Forty million people
watched American Idol’s conclusion, but only 37 million watched the
second debate between Bush and Gore in the 2000 election campaign,”
Mindich points out (2). Disturbing as that comparison is, there are
other statistics that paint an even grimmer picture:
It would be less troubling if the 80 percent of young people whodo not read newspapers every day watched TV news or logged onto news Web sites. Most don’t. The average viewer of prime-timeentertainment is 42 years old . . . roughly the median age of thepopulation as a whole. At CNN, which recently changed its for-mat to attract younger viewers, the average age ranges from 59 to64. At the broadcast networks, the median viewer age for theevening news has been climbing steadily — from the low 50s in1991 to 60 today. (3)
In a society like Mindich describes, where knowledge of public
events and issues is quite limited, it is difficult to engage in serious
discourse through mass media that can be understood by, much less
engage, large audiences. Most of us have probably seen TV comedians’s
jokes bomb on audiences that failed to catch references to major events
or topics covered extensively in the news. To use Winterson’s words
those “assumptions, associations, commonalities” that a filmmaker
like Moore or Watkins could take for granted as widely shared in the
United States are probably quite few in the political arena, but are
abundant in other areas related to personal lives and commercially
Art Objects: Works of Moore and Watkins 1285
disseminated popular culture. Moore seems to understand this and
attempts to resonate with existing schemata and/or paradigms to
engage his audiences and to challenge the way received knowledge is
framed. Watkins may find this to be a compromise that only perpetu-
ates the reactionary political trends Moore claims to oppose. Without
challenges like those made by Moore, however, the prospects of
Watkins or his artistic progeny gaining the opportunity to develop
and distribute alternate forms would seem quite slim. Far from
perpetuating the monoform and centralized ideological control
Watkins so deplores, Moore’s strategy may have the potential to help estab-
lish the conditions under which Watkins and those who share his philosophy
could prosper or provide a more hospitable climate in which they could create
and their works could be distributed . If Moore’s type of documentary
becomes no more than another commodity and does not have conse-
quences beyond simply finding another market segment to entertain
without major impact on the political climate or exercise of power,
then indeed the techniques Moore uses may, as Watkins fears, in the
long run merely help imbed the monoform more deeply in American
media culture. But it seems to me excessively pessimistic to assume
that to be the only possible outcome.
Works Cited
Adams, Sam. “History in the Making.” Philadelphia City Paper . 11 –
17 Dec. 2003. Web. 22 Sept. 2011.
Aristotle. Artistotle’s Rhetoric . Trans. W. Rhys Roberts. Book I, Ch. 2.N.d. Web. 21 Sept. 2011.
Carey, James. Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society.New York: Routledge, 1992. Print.
Celsius 41.11: The Temperature at Which the Brain…Begins to Die. Dir.Kevin Knobloch. USA, 2004. Film.
Columbia Encyclopedia (online entry for Mencken, H.L.). N.d. Web.22 Sept. 2011.
Cook, John R. “The Last Battle: Peter Watkins on DVD.” Film Inter-national 1:1 (1 January 2003): 54 – 56. Print.
The Corporation. Dirs. Jennifer Abbott and Mark Achbar. Canada,2003. Film.
Entman, Robert. Democracy Without Citizens. New York: Oxford UP,1989. Print.
Fahrenhype 9/11. Dir. Alan Peterson. USA, 2004. Film.
1286 Mark Poindexter
Grant, Jacques. “Interview with Peter Watkins.” Cine ma 73.182(1973): 108 – 12. Print.
Hardy, David T., and Jason Clark. Michael Moore Is a Big Fat Stupid White Man. New York: Regan Books, 2004. Print.
Hearts and Minds. Dir. Peter Davis. USA, 1974. Film.
Leonard, Thomas C. Power of the Press: The Birth of American Political Reporting . New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Print.
Lippmann, Walter. Public Opinion. New York: Free Press Paperbacks,1997. Print.
Lockhart, Joe. Interview With Michael Moore. Bowling for Columbine: Special Edition. DVD.
Michael & Me. Dir. Larry Elder. USA, 2005. Film.
Michael Moore Hates America. Dir. Michael Wilson. USA, 2004. Film.
Mindich, David T.Z. Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don’t Follow the News. New York: Oxford UP, 2005. Print.
Moore, Michael. Dude, Where’s My Country? New York: WarnerBooks, 2003. Print.
——. Stupid White Men… and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation. New York: Regan Books, 2004. Print.
Paine, Thomas. Common Sense. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1997. Print.
Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Ageof Show Business. New York: Viking, 1985. Print.
Quote/Counterquote. 7 Apr. 2011. Web. 22 Sept. 2011. <http://www.quotecounterquote.com/2011/04/5-things-you-wont-go-broke.html>.
Schwartz, Tony. The Responsive Chord . New York: Anchor Books,1974. Print.
Stephens, Mitchell. A History of News. New York: Penguin Books,1989. Print.
The Universal Clock. Dir. Geoff Bowie. Canada, 2001. Film.
Watkins, Peter. “Greetings From Peter Watkins to Gijon.” Nov. 2004.Web. 27 Dec. 2004.
Winterson, Jeanette. Art Objects. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.Print.
Michael Moore Filmography
Roger & Me (1989)
Pets or Meat: The Return to Flint (1992)
Canadian Bacon (1995)
The Big One (1997)
Art Objects: Works of Moore and Watkins 1287
And Justice for All (1998)
Bowling for Columbine (2002)
Fahrenhype 9/11 (2004)
Sicko (2007)
Peter Watkins Filmography
The Web (1956)
The Field of Red (1958)
The Diary of an Unknown Soldier (1959)
The Forgotten Faces (1961)
Culloden(1964)
The War Game (1965)
Privilege (1967)
The Gladiators 1969)
Punishment Park (1971)
Edvard Munch (1974)
The Trap (1975)
The Seventies People (1975)
Evening Land (1977)
The Journey (1987)
The Freethinker (1994)
Commune (Paris, 1871), La (2000)
Mark Poindexter (PhD, University of Minnesota) is professor of Broadcastand Cinematic Arts at Central Michigan University, where he teachescourses in mass communication history, theory, and criticism.
1288 Mark Poindexter
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