GET A LIFE, BIOGRAPHER !

From The Truth About Michael Moore to The Truth About Life.


It was originally called Michael Moore – A biography, but I’ve recently seen copies renamed The Making of Michael Moore. Sez about it all. However, it’s Mike’s first biography ever, and so I’ll still pay it with an in-depth review as such. But as such only.





THE TRUTH ABOUT MICHAEL MOORE

“What is it about this former Eagle Scout that gets people from around the world and from all political persuasions so worked up ?”, the cover anxiously asks as an opening question. Oh, but the book was written “without an agenda to prove Moore right or wrong” and author Emily Schultz just wants to “sort the man from the myth with in-depth interviews and research”. Oh, good. For a minute I had pictured Michael Moore as a guy that riles up people from around the world and from all political persuasions. Now I know that I’m going to be graced with an objective and moderate outlook that will enable me to learn The Truth About Michael Moore. I’m fully reassured.

Sure enough, I’ve always had this dream of me and Mike sprawled on deckchairs on some faraway beach, sipping exotic cocktails as he would unfurl for me the story of his life as it came. I would understand everything and nod gently, mentally finishing his sentences as he would begin them. He would stop and take this long, cool, friendly look at me, and say with that charming, tongue-in-cheek smile of his : “You’re the only one who can do the job properly, you know”. And I would simply reply : “I know”. And we would both sip from our glasses with a renowned feeling of peace. However, visceral jealousy is unfortunately optional to perceive the sad mediocrity of this hypocritical, center left but not too much, release.

Actually, and to be fair, it’s not as bad as that. The book is well researched. You learn things. Schultz explores important and little known aspects of Mike’s life : the Flint Voice epic, the Mother Jones episode, the Flint workers’ historical background. Of course you may ask yourself what she would have done had Ben Hamper not written Rivethead – but let’s not start with left-handed compliments.

The controversies are also scrupulously chronicled and their cumulated accounts shed a light on the formation and the manufacturing of the anti-Moore subculture. Only if you do the analytical work yourself though, since these stories are there for no other reason than marveling at Moore’s ability to rile up everyone without an agenda to prove Moore right or wrong, and therefore insipidly juxtaposed with the occasional glimpses of sympathy equally shared between Mike and his adversaries - but let’s NOT start with left-handed compliments, I said.

And finally, there are a few scattered intelligent and personal insights and remarks. Very few. Here’s one (about Roger and Me), showing a shrewd understanding of Mike’s cinematic approach of the collaborator character (p 72) : “With Smith missing from much of the movie – seen only from a distance or in news clips – his double becomes Deputy Fred Ross. The kindhearted evictor, with his just-doing-my-job casualness (…) appears after every failed attempt of Moore’s to contact the CEO. At the film’s devastating climax, Smith and Ross are intercut.”

Good. I’ve paid my dues to moderation and objectivity. Now for the rest. ;)


THE TRUTH ABOUT EMILY SCHULTZ

Even by the logic of Schultz’s agenda – oops, sorry, I meant lack of agenda -, some essential controversies are missing (the school years and his paradoxical relation to teachers and authority, the continuing story of the Nader-Moore feud, the love-hate relationship with the Democrats) or hardly tackled (F9/11 in particular !). But the most unnerving is her refusal to make any space for the artistic dimension and the subsequent absence of any analysis, any concept, any chapter devoted to the evaluation of Michael Moore as an artist. Hello, Emily !… Mike is a filmmaker !…

But Emily has decided that Mike saw himself as basically a journalist, in spite of his repeated claims that he was first of all a filmmaker who felt he had to do the media’s job since the media didn’t. And this is emblematic of the consistent suspicion that is the trademark of her total lack of agenda. Mike doesn’t tell the truth. SHE’s going to tell the truth about Mike.

Her introduction opens on an episode of Mike’s life she seems to regard as highly typical of the character, as she’s going to obsess over it throughout the book : how he cleverly used the media in 1985, at a time when he was unknown, to lay a piece of agit-prop action on Reagan as he prepared to lay a memorial wreath in a German cemetery that contained the graves of Nazi SS soldiers. Her conclusion will tag him as Citizen Moore, in reference to Citizen Kane who went on to confiscate truth through the power of his populist success. In between, a classic and unexcitingly told success story. Moore is but a media whore keen on self-promotion. Such is The Truth About Michael Moore that you get when you just sort the man from the myth without an agenda to prove him right or wrong.

Well, Emily, you know – gonna break it to you as a fellow researcher and writer : when little happens between an introduction and a conclusion, other than an obsessive interpretation of every joke, every statement, every staging as a deliberate will to feed an artificially made up image of “the everyday rebel” (when you could, I don’t know, admire his fidelity and truthfulness to his roots for example) – when you do little more than that, I’m afraid that you’ll only discover what you already “knew” right from the start. And that this “knowledge” barely exceeds David Hardy’s depiction of Mike as a pathological and narcissistic phoney in Michael Moore Is A Big Fat Stupid White Man.

And – still as a fellow mature observer as keen as yourself on justice and objectivity – let me consequently break, in turn, The Truth About Emily Schultz’s Lack Of Agenda : your aim, dear Emily, is to offer the anti-Moore stance the moderate discourse and therefore the credibility that it lacked until now.


THE TRUTH ABOUT LIFE

Was it an aim ? Or just the logical outcome of your lack of focus, vision, depth and ambition ?

For the few good moments that I have liked, I’ll give you the benefit of doubt. Perhaps it’s not Machiavellianism but just impotence. At any rate, you sure wrote down, if not the truth about Michael Moore, at least The Truth About The Times, and I’m sure that your work has been up to all of your publisher’s expectations.

But, Emily – and this will be my last advice – if you don’t believe that Mike is the “common man” he says he is (and I share this view, just not the suspicion attached to it), be logical. Don’t treat him like a common man. Don’t be a common woman when writing about him. A life is more than a linear, tedious, unimaginative resume. Lives have opinions. Mike’s more than anyone else’s. The life of an artist is more than the events that pave its progression. And being a biographer doesn’t boil down to spoil +200 pages to prove that tautology that no artist is literal. Yes, sure, Mike is partly a self-written character since he made his biography a part of his art and his self a part of his casts. To make it a crime, or at least something hidden and therefore shameful, only stems from the dominant and ignorant right-wing puritanical crap. Witnessing the life of an artist doesn’t consist in “sorting the man from the myth”, as if a myth was a lie, as if the myth could be separated from the man. It consists in just the opposite – sorting the myth from the man. It demands from the biographer some basic answers about the reasons why his subject deserves a biography, if you prefer.

You write (p 168) : “It’s this duality of cynicism and ethics that defines the character of Michael Moore”. That’s your thesis, without a doubt. Okay, so where is your definition of cynicism ? Where do you present his ethics ? Where do you confront, discuss them – in themselves and in view of your subject and of the society and the times ? Where is your personal slant about Michael Moore anything else than the ditty you hum while typing ?

And how the fuck can you write a biography of Michael Moore without uttering the words “personal responsibility” ONCE ?