Sick Sick Sick

All right. This is not really about Sicko. This is about Michael Moore. I am tired of the attacks on Moore that follow all of his movies - it's the same shit: "fact-checking Michael Moore!" - which usually turns out to be a triumphant litany of nit-picks and irrelevance, and the kind of pig-ignorance that lets people think the fact that Cuba is two slots behind the United States is health care is some kind of endorsement of the American system. Shit! That's a stupid idea. We're two places ahead of CUBA! Paying an extra $6700 per person a year. Way to fucking go!

Anyway. No. I am interested in something a bit different - not so much Sicko as such, but Moore's films, what they are. Are they documentaries, say? Well - leaving aside the definitions: what are they? I think they do two things: first - they state positions. They say, this is bad - this is good. We need to fix this, change that. We should act in this way. They are, in that sense, essays, arguments - though not precisely arguments, and that's the second thing. Second - they are dramatizations of arguments and essays. This is where the trouble starts. Moore's critics act as though his films are reporting on an issue - laying out facts, laying out the case. They aren't. They dramatize the issues. They function like fiction films, with non-fiction material. Or - he organizes his true, real, non-fictional material fictionally - to illustrate his arguments, to act them out.

His act as a performer falls into this category: he isn't a reporter, he's a provocateur - he's every bit as much a comic improvisor as Sascha Baron Cohen. He creates little scenes that may or may not be "real" - but they demonstrate something about the world, make a point about the world. They are signs of the world, the way scenes in fiction signify the world. Doing this, I think, puts him a lot closer to Werner Herzog than he's usually portrayed - they both make films out of material that exists in the real world, but organized and augmented to give it meaning, to comment on it. They both treat their documentary work as a form of fiction - story-telling, a way of giving shape and meaning to the world, to guide us in understanding the world, and teach us how we might act in the world. Their documentaries are explicitly interpretative.

Sicko is a clear example of this. Moore takes an issue - health care in the USA - and examines it. He has a position on it - he is building a case for a type of action. (No reason to mince words: free, universal, [mostly] government funded health care - which, with some variations, is used in much of the world, and works like a charm. Look at wretched little Cuba, managing to build a health care record almost as good as ours! Never mind France.) He explores the issue - not so much as a documentary or argument, but as a series of illustrative stories. In fact, that is all Sicko is: it's almost all illustration, almost all story telling - almost all dramatization of the problems. It isn't quite reporting - and it isn't really an essay on health care, in the end. He avoids the facts and figures and analysis you could get from Ezra Klein (to name a frequent health care blogger), sticking instead to stories about how our system fucks us over. (He probably weakens his case a bit. Granted, you can yeahyeahyeah through a lot of numbers and arguments and studies on comparative wait times - but how do you argue with the fact that the US government spends more, per capita, on health care than, say, England - where health care is totally fucking nationalized! Sorry...)

All right. In the end, I think most of the problems people have with Moore are category errors.

No: let me change that. Most of the people bitching about Moore are plain and simply against what he is for - you know, peace, affordable health care, jobs for those simple suckers too stupid to leave Detroit, that kind of commie shit. But not all his critics are just paid hacks, taking the easy route of blowing smoke and calling him fat and rerunning their "Michael Moore lies!" clips from his last 6 films. He has real critics - the people wringing their hands and pretending he's just like Ann Coulter or the Swift Boat Veterans. He gives liberals a bad name! But I say, those critics are making category errors - mistaking his dramatization of issues for reporting on issues. The question - the point where this criticism gets its bite, I guess - is this: how much is Moore responsible for people making category errors? How much does he cheat? Specifically - by weaseling about what he is doing: presenting it as reporting and argument when he can, but taking cover behind "dramatization" or "deeper truth" or "impressionistic truth" when challenged?

Personally? I don't think he cheats as much as it might seem. He doesn't go out of his way to say what he is doing, or to theorize it (unlike Herzog, for instance, who talks about his manipulations at length) - but I don't think we viewers are actually obligated to turn stupid when we walk into a movie theory. We are allowed to think about what we see, and try to make sense of it. We are allowed to remember the last Michael Moore film we saw, or the last article we read about health care, or what our uncles and aunts in Canada say about their hospital stays (they bitch, like everyone does: but they don't have to fret about whether they can afford another prescription or whether some nephew with bad health history can get insurance when he grows up). We are allowed to think about how movies are put together, and compare Moore's films to fiction films, or op-eds or essays - we are allowed to ask what kinds of arguments he is making. And answer: he is making a moral argument - who are we? - to let these things happen, here, in our country. When it comes to healthm you might just as well live in Cuba - think about that!