ROGER & ME
The story of how Michael Moore, a journalist from Flint with no prior filmmaking experience, financed his first feature is an American success story with an inspirational value all its own. Moore sold his house and furnishings, organized local bingo games, invested his settlement from a wrongful-discharge lawsuit against Mother Jones (where he briefly served as editor), and collected hundreds of small investments from Michigan residents to raise his $160,000 budget. After the film became a popular hit and prizewinner at several film festivals last fall, it was picked up by Warners for $3 million and is already well on its way to becoming an independent sleeper. Remarkably accomplished for a first film–streamlined, agreeably fast-paced, deftly organized, full of laughs and surprises–it seems to prove that an outsider to the film industry can still make it into the big time.
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Regarding the first layer, Harlan Jacobson, the former editor of Film Comment, recently pointed out in that magazine that Moore’s implied (if unstated) chronology of events is somewhat at variance with the historical record. A visit by Ronald Reagan to Flint to cheer up unemployed workers, for instance, took place in 1980–before Reagan was president, and six years before Roger Smith closed the plants. Similarly, Flint’s Hyatt Regency and Auto World theme park (two attempts by town fathers to pump life into the town’s economy) opened in 1982 and 1984, respectively, long before the massive layoffs in ’86 and ’87. Although none of this fancy footwork necessarily invalidates any of Moore’s major points (which are made more directly and without any of the same chronological ambiguity in an article he wrote for the June 6, 1987, issue of the Nation headlined “General Motors Pulls Out: In Flint, Tough Times Last”), Jacobson takes the peculiar position that it’s cause for extreme moral outrage, even going so far as to compare Moore’s minor distortions to President Johnson’s lying about the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
I’m not excluding myself from the audience. Roger & Me made me laugh uproariously both times I saw it; it also made me sick–not only about what it had to say, but also about how it was saying it, and how I and many others in the audience were enjoying it. On some level, we were being invited to laugh at our own defeat as human beings, our incapacity to affect Roger Smith’s conscience any more than Michael Moore could. And of course Moore’s odyssey with a film crew, undertaken to track down Smith, like much else in the film, smacks of a setup and self-fulfilling prophecies. I suspect that he wants us to laugh at his own impotence and our own as a way of goading us into action; but if that’s the case, he doesn’t even begin to show us what form that action could take.
Consider, for starters, the relationship of Roger & Me to two of the most popular pictures of last year, both of them characteristically and resolutely apolitical: Batman and Crimes and Misdemeanors. Part of the charge we get from Moore’s documentary stems from the perception that it is practically alone in offering a critical view of what’s been happening in this country. But in other respects, the degree to which Roger & Me shares feelings and attitudes of hits like Batman and Crimes and Misdemeanors–including a sort of uplifting pop nihilism–is grimly significant.
One thing that makes me feel unusually conflicted about Roger & Me is that just as I think there are certain wrong reasons for liking it, I also think there are certain wrong reasons for disliking it. The mistrust and sheer hatred many of my colleagues feel for films that take strong and unambiguous political stands make it all too easy for them to seize on Moore’s shortcomings–his snobbishness and his cavalier handling of chronology–as excuses for dismissing his movie completely. Over the past couple of years, the widespread critical dismissals of Walker, Parents, and Fat Man and Little Boy, among other pictures–as well as the avoidance by critics of documentaries like Coverup: Behind the Iran Contra Affair–has tended to follow a similar pattern. The point isn’t whether or not these films are flawed–how many movies nowadays aren’t?–but whether they’re being dismissed out of hand so that the critics won’t have to deal with their contents.
