June 28, 2010: Capitalism: A Love Story
The latest from documentary filmmaker Michael Moore is another look at the current state of American society, but this one is not quite as timely has his other films from the past decade or so. Capitalism: A Love Story looks at the American Dream and the American lifestyle and how or whether the recent economic collapse puts the dream in jeopardy.
A bank robbery montage at the opening of the film sets the stage. Parallels are drawn with ancient Rome, with the facade of a powerful and well-functioning democracy, a softening of the people as entertainment becomes the main time-consumer, and a decay of society as people in other parts of the world become hungrier and more persistent and threaten to gain dominance. It seems that Moore wants to imply that America is headed in the same direction, but at the same time, as an American child of the prosperous baby boom himself, he can’t bring himself to admit that the American Dream isn’t real. His other recent films have examined the prevalence of guns, the lack of health care, and the military misguidedness in America, but these were all treated as isolated trouble spots which could be fixed by taking examples from good practices of others around the world, and developing them into a uniquely American and of course undeniably better solution. But capitalism may be more than Moore can handle, because it appears to be the root of all that is wrong with America, and he is discovering that the foundation of all that he and his country believe in is the key to what is destroying them. Where do you go from there?
The approach Moore takes is to try to symptomize the problem by blaming the corporations. He’s no stranger to blaming individual corporations, such as General Motors in his feature debut Roger & Me (1989) or the various Health Management Organizations (HMOs) in Sicko (2007). Here, though, it’s more than just the financial institutions which are to blame. He looks at airlines who pay their skilled pilots only $20K/year. There are also the big-box retailers who take out blanket “dead peasant” insurance policies against their employees so that if any employee happens to die for whatever reason, the company gets paid. The automakers continue to shut down plants and put hard-working Americans out of work as assembly jobs are shipped overseas. Privatized government functions such as juvenile detenion lead to payoffs for judges in order to keep the facilities full. Pile that on top of the mortgage foreclosures and refinancing, and things start to look pretty ugly through and through.
Capitalism: A Love Story doesn’t ultimately amount to more than a rambling essay, delving into particular flaws in the system and bringing personal interest stories as examples. To my mind, these individual cases are counterproductive, such as a regular American who is painted as having been “robbed” after refinancing his house and then not paying back the money. I’m sorry, but if you make a deal to refinance your house, part of the deal is that you pay it back. You were not robbed. Moore’s formula is getting a bit tired here, and he of course resorts to some of his usual stunts, like trying to get into GM headquarters to talk to the CEO as he didn’t quite manage two decades ago, going up to banks with armoured trucks and a big money bag to get back the money they stole from the American people, trying to make citizen’s arrests of bank executives, and putting up crime scene tape around bank buildings. This is all classic Michael Moore, but even he doesn’t quite seem to have his heart in it this time, with the stunts not making a coherent point or being something the viewer can get behind. To be fair, Moore’s notoriety gets in the way, as many corporate representatives simply hang up the phone upon hearing his name and he’s often ejected from places by security guards as soon as he is recognized, so he’s not able to delve as deeply as he would like through the proper channels, but he can’t claim that he hasn’t brought that upon himself.
Michael Moore wants America to actually live up to the dream for all citizens, but he doesn’t want to acknowledge that some effort and responsibility is required, and it’s not just a God-given right due to happenstance of place and time of birth. He refers to Franklin Roosevelt’s 1944 State of the Union address, in which he demanded a second bill of rights which would include the right to jobs and pensions. Needless to say, that didn’t happen. Americans walk a very fine and often contradictory line between wanting everything for everyone, and yet not wanting anything which even hints at socialism. I’m sorry, but it doesn’t work that way. Life can certainly be great for some of society, for a while, but that’s not the whole dream, and it also can’t last.
Michael Moore discovers the real problem.
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