Capitalism: A hate story
Beware, the bespectacled hat man cometh!! And he brings with him his accoutrement and entourage of cameramen/women to lay bare the festering wound in the dream-nation of USA that spread like gangrene to other parts of this dollar-dependent world. Yes, it’s Michael Moore again, with his giant strides nulled by his almost child-like voice –over. The object of his ire this time is that ideology on which, at least—to quote Churchill— the ‘English-speaking peoples’ of this world (and many non-English too) avowedly depended on: Capitalism.
In Capitalism: A Love Story, Mr. Moore uses the same narrative technique that has been his hallmark right from ‘Bowling in Columbine’ to ‘Fahrenheit 9/11.’ Mr. Moore has often been accused of being a left-winger with a rabble-rousing quotient of a far-right fanatic. Though his documentaries are never ever subtle (heck, his documentaries are anticipated and accorded the status that a ‘Batman Returns’ garners in the mad rush of summer block-busters!), Mr. Moore has always managed to somehow prick the collective conscience of entire communities more with his uncompromising stance and unwavering belief in the ‘people’s power’ than with his factual analysis. The imagery in his documentaries are so strong and forceful that they just wallow up the audience without giving them much time to mathematically process the ‘facts’ being referenced on-screen.
‘Capitalism’ in Mr. Moore’s movie comes across as something that perhaps would be equivalent to ‘inter and intra-religious harmony’ in a bin Laden movie. There are no grey areas in the documentary. It is plain black or/and white. All the white-collared, obscenely-paid executives of the erst-while mammoth companies of Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac, AIG, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, etc., are the ones that shamelessly suck the blood of the hard-working, tax-paying, working-class citizen who is completely on the other side of the spectrum but always trusting thanks to having the carrot of ‘you can be one of us’ dangling in front of him/her all the time. From presenting rarely-seen archival footage of workers revolting in a General Motors plant in 1936 to Sheriffs approaching in a cavalcade of cars to evict a house-hold to grossly under-paid pilots that cause air-crash due to financial stress to workers’ strike in a Chicago door and window manufacturing company that were denied their pay since the bank decided to ‘black-list’ the company after the bank received bail-out money from the tax money that belonged to the same workers, Mr. Moore almost leaves nothing to the imagination. He caters to all the basic emotions of laughter, tears, anger, wistfulness, and disgust viscerally by what has been his leit-motif in his entire body of work: juxtapositions. He juxtaposes Jesus of Nazareth to demonstrate the uselessness of the American health-insurance system; uses one of the scenes from Mr. Reagan’s movies to show Mr. Regans’s ways of suppressing feminism; shows Mr. Bush Jr. frolicking and dancing in gay abandon just months before the world plunged into an economic melt-down; juxtaposes the decadence of the Roman society to the present-day conspiracies and under-hand dealings in the Congress and Wall-Street; and many, many more. However cynical one might be, it is difficult not to be taken-in by these clever techniques used to hit home the points the documentary wishes to make.
Ultimately, one should understand that the movie is a mechanism to be aware of how corporates twists capitalism, or, for that matter, any ideology to suit one’s needs. No ideology has ever been fool-proof because of the inherent rider that comes along with it: follow it unquestioningly. Mr. Moore unequivocally castigates capitalism and one gets a feeling that he seems confident that over-throwing capitalism will cure the ills created by the hunger for excessive wealth and ever-expanding greed. However, as history has shown, none of the ideologies have helped mankind achieve anything even close to Utopia. Hence, just yanking capitalism out of the system cannot be the solution. Whatever the society, whatever the ideology, greed of the human always finds its way home. What can be achieved, however, with checks and balances, is the reduction in lee-ways and a negation of supposed ‘profits’ that greed brings with it.
Mr. Moore’s documentary is a very important piece of work that should be seen by all. It should be seen as an example of how and why humans with good intelligence and reasoning go haywire succumbing to the instinct of greed. It should not be dissected for cinematic grammar. Mr. Moore and his documentary are just like teachers that only serve as vehicles of learning to the student. The material is already there, and will always be there. It is upto the teacher to make it entertaining and he/she has the liberty to teach in a way that rises up to the final intention of seeing ‘change’ in the audience/student. The teacher’s first step is to make the students interested in the subject such that they voluntarily jump to experience the nuances of the subject under study. And Mr. Moore is definitely a very, very, entertaining teacher.
Go for it, absorb it, enjoy it, but think seriously – and on your own.
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
He has tendency of talking in black or white. Though I like his movies, I’m not big fan of his stuff. Gonna watch it tomorrow.
That is something similar to what Priyadarshan showed in Kanjivaram. No ideology can exist in the purest form. But yes, history has certainly shown that communism has to be kept out. Moore’s 9/11 was a heroic piece of work. In India, you get your face blackened if you mistakenly call a city by its previous name. Or if you attempt to make a documentary of Bofors scandal, you have had it. There have always been achievers who have used religion, emotions, etc to herd people and there always will be. There will always be people who use the system to achieve their goals, and the rest who will keep dreaming about changing the system.