LOUD AND CLEAR AND SUBTLE

This entry is the fourth part of the section entitled "The Innovator" in my essay "Yes, He Makes Movies", devoted to Mike's contribution to film.


“Roger and Me” had a FORMULA. The film was lauded for its unique combination of acerbic editorializing and exploration of the deterioration of the Flint community in a most casual, accessible and personal manner. The former is the Moorean touch. The latter is the Quality Mainstream touch.

Mike has always been a master provocateur, adept at raising temperatures and arousing passions. Under his shambling, wilfully unglamorous persona lies a shrewd intelligence, someone with the keenest of eyes for the preposterous and the absurd, a filmmaker who knows both what he can make fun of and what makes fun of itself.

Mike is Today’s Master of Agit-Prop. And he handles it through the dialectics of emotion and restraint on the one hand, and the dialectics of comments and silences on the other.

(above : an Agit Prop poster based on the crosscut technique used by Mike in Roger and Me to point out the true nature of Roger's Christmas wishes)

Agit-prop is a contraction of "agitation and propaganda". The term originated in Bolshevist Russia, where it didn't bear any negative connotation at the time. It simply meant "dissemination of ideas". In the case of Agit-prop, the ideas to be disseminated were those of communism, including explanations of the policy of the Communist Party and the Soviet State. In other contexts, propaganda could mean dissemination of any kind of beneficial knowledge. "Agitation" meant urging people to do what Soviet leaders expected them to do at various levels. In other words, propaganda was supposed to act on the mind, while agitation acted on emotions, although both usually went together.

Now the Moorean Touch lies in the truly exceptional dignity the filmmaker shows in practicing this lost, difficult and now pejoratively connoted art. Its secret is simple – obscenely simple, to some : he treats the victims like victims, and the villains like villains.

Mike, who’s been accused of coming close to emotional pornography in occurrences such as his extended depiction of Lila Lipscomb’s pain in F9/11, or his leaving a photograph of murdered little Kayla at Heston’s home, finds in fact in such scenes the perfect dialectics between emotion and restraint, which generates in turn the most powerful emotional punch and the most effective appeal to a vast and receptive audience in the American heartland we ever witnessed since Chaplin and Capra. But, rather than featuring grisly images of the World Trade Center collapsing, he lets the screen go dark, like he was closing the eyes of 3 000, relying on sound to convey the horror of the event. And this scene restores the sense of infinity attached to the loss of these innocent victims, and brings back the sense of obscenity where it belongs – to the mainstream media.

As acknowledged by CNN Reviewer Paul Clinton :

“The heart-wrenching grief of Lila Lipscomb is a taste of exactly what the USA needs now: a head-on, popular confrontation with the Bush war machine. It's great if much of Fahrenheit 9/11 makes people uncomfortable. Better still that it makes the warmongers burn with shame at the senseless loss of life they have caused. And it'll be the very best if it helps fire the US people to throw out the warmongers and build movements for lasting social change.”

http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2004/591/591p13.htm

Yes, this coming from a CNN reviewer. Now so much for the voyeurism.

On the other hand, the villains receive the perfect parallel treatment, through the dialectics of comments and silences. In F9/11, Mike doesn’t rub political salt into the continuous incompetence of the Bush administration, or its behavior. He doesn’t need to say anything when the AG starts singing Let the Eagle Soar. He doesn’t need to comment on Bush‘s “I call you my base” fund raising dinner. He lets the “talkies” do the work – and the effect is infuriating.

As for the traitors – the PR people dispatched when Mike charges, cameras rolling, into their polished corporate lobbies – their (self-)treatment is even harsher. Unable to laugh at his engaging brattiness, these hapless flacks must politely push him toward the door while defending corporate downsizing in an era of record profits. The look on their faces—a fascinating blend of fear, frustration and "I hear what you're saying, bro"—expresses the potency of the big-picture questions Mike asks in Roger and Me and The Big One.

Did you ever feel sorry for the PR people you pestered during the
filming of The Big One?

Look—they're workers too. The CEO won't come down and talk to me, so they've got to deal with me. So, I do feel bad for them on one level. On another level, they're the good Germans. And I gotta tell you something: Most of them are former journalists who saw they could make three times the money in PR. And every day, they sit in those cozy little offices and get softball questions from the mainstream press. For one lousy day out of their lives, some overweight guy in a ball cap comes into the lobby and asks a simple question: How do you defend the position that the company just made a record profit and laid off ten thousand people? They know it's indefensible; they're not stupid.

http://industrycentral.net/director_interviews/MM02.HTM

And above all that, but not, NEVER beyond good and evil, Mike never forgets decisive subtlety for his undertones in overall style. Discreet Monna Lisa smiles at the Winks of Fortune. Hints at the Cosmic Joke behind it all. This he calls his “10 percenters” :

I put these little films in the movies, I call them the 10- percenters. I know that only 10-percent of the audience will get it, but they're going to love me for it, because they're going to be part of the 10-percent who will get the joke. I know that less then 10-percent will read the French title of the film poster (Heston sits in front of the French poster for A Touch of Evil during his interview with Moore.) Thee French call [the movie] "A Thirst for Evil." A thirst for evil… and he asked to sit in front of it! We're just going, 'WOW!' Not everyone gets it when the women in the bank (where you can get a free gun if you open an account) says while I'm trying to remember how to spell, 'Caucasian,' and she says, 'I don't think that's the part they're going to be worried about.' That line just speaks volumes! Two white people sitting down, 'Ah. Don't worry about that part, you're a white guy!' (laughs)

http://www.themovieinsider.com/celebrities/cid/116/

Now if the 10-percent were ever to turn into 90-percent, none of my pro-Moore pieces would be necessary, Dumb-ya’s would never get elected ever again, and the world would go rounder.

But it isn’t done….