The dark underbelly of the beast

digby's reaction to michael moore's film via atrios...

This is not just a rehash of what happens when the capitalist dream dies, however, but an attempt to examine why it so often does. Moore digs deep into the dark underbelly of the beast in this outing; he gives us many eye-opening examples of truly soulless profiteering and unchecked vulture capitalism at its most egregious, including a very interesting business arrangement between a privately-run juvenile detention center and a hanging judge that will leave you slack-jawed with disbelief, and an animal glibly referred to by insurance company insiders as a “dead peasant policy” that will blow your fucking mind.

The film’s trailer has misled many people into assuming that they are just going to be seeing Moore doing another series of his patented grandstanding pranks. Although you do see him running around Wall Street armed with a megaphone, yellow crime scene tape and a rented Loomis truck, demanding a refund from bailed out financial institutions on behalf of the American taxpayers and generally being a pain-in-the-ass to hapless security guards, these types of shenanigans really only take up a relative fraction of screen time. Those moments of shtick aside, I think that the film represents the most cohesive and mature film-making Moore has done to date. Interestingly, from a purely polemical standpoint, it is also one of his least partisan, which I’m sure is going to make some of his usual knee-jerk critics develop a little twitch. Not that it really matters; his haters will continue to despise him no matter what kind of film he makes, and likely condemn it as anti-American, unpatriotic and full of lies (without bothering to actually see it, of course).

Okay, so he does close the film with a lounge-y version of “The Internationale” playing over the end credits (you just know he can’t help himself). Yet despite that rather obvious provocation (and the film’s title, of course), at the end of the day I didn’t really find his message to be so much “down with capitalism” as it is “up with people”. There is a streak of genuine and heartfelt humanism that runs through all his work, and it continues to be puzzlingly overlooked by many film-goers (and most film critics). Isn’t that kind of what the founding fathers were all about? After all, I believe that little Declaration thingy reads that we all have the right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”, not “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, even at the expense of someone else’s”. Or does it?

i'd REALLY like to see this flick and wish i didn't have to wait until i return to the states, altho' this IS kabul and the pirated version may already be on the streets... guess i oughta look, huh...?

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