Screen Shot from Michael Moore's film 'Where to Invade Next.' (photo: Dog Eat Dog Films)
'Where
to Invade Next' Is the Most Subversive Movie Michael Moore Has Ever Made
By Jon Schwarz, The
Intercept
11 February 16
I can't
claim this is a neutral review of Where to Invade Next,
Michael Moore’s latest movie. Beyond the fact that I worked for
Moore for six years, including on his previous documentary Capitalism:
A Love Story, I may literally owe my life to the
high-quality, zero-deductible health insurance he provides employees.
What
I’ve lost in objectivity, I’ve gained in knowledge of Moore’s career.
I even know his darkest, most closely guarded secret: the original name of the
1970s alternative newspaper
he started in Flint, Michigan. So I can say this
for sure: Where to Invade Next is the most profoundly
subversive thing he’s ever done. It’s so sneaky that you may not even
notice exactly what it’s subverting.
On its
surface, Where to Invade Next seems to be
a cheerful travelogue as Moore enjoys an extended
vacation, “invading” a passel of European countries plus Tunisia to
steal their best ideas and bring them back home to America. For instance,
French public schools have chefs who serve students
hour-long, multi-course lunches on china, featuring
dishes like scallops in curry sauce. I haven’t laughed harder at any
movie this year than when the French 8-year-olds stare in perplexed
horror at photos of American school lunches.
It’s
all so upbeat in such an un-Michael Moore way that
he considered calling it Mike’s Happy Movie. Certainly
it’s the only time I’ve walked out of one of his documentaries and said,
“Wow, everything is fantastic!” But what made me feel this way
is the secret message hidden in Where to Invade Next — and if
you see it, you’ll feel that way too.
Moore’s
biggest foe ever
To
understand what I’m talking about, look at the trajectory of Moore’s major
films, and how he consistently became more ambitious. With every
movie he’s raised the stakes, each time aiming at a
bigger institution and its claims that it knows best and is
totally serious and in control and definitely nobody
should laugh at it. Here’s the progression:
- Roger & Me in
1989 was an attack on General Motors when it was the
largest corporation on earth, and suggested that
GM’s decision to brutalize its workers, customers, and
hometown might not be the greatest long-term strategy. (You’ve
probably noticed this turned out to be true.)
- Bowling for Columbine’s target in
2002 was even larger than GM: It wasn’t just about
America’s constant gun massacres, but our omnipresent culture
of fear that makes us hostile to any possible solutions.
- Fahrenheit 9/11 in
2004 aimed higher again: It was about the reality that the president
of the United States might be
illegitimate, definitely had no idea what he was doing, and
everyone was terrified to point any of this out.
- In
2007 Sicko critiqued something even more important than
the presidency: healthcare, America’s biggest, cruelest industry.
- Finally,
in 2009, Moore reached what seemed like the logical summit of
his career with Capitalism: A Love Story, pointing
out that our entire economic system seems to be broken.
So
where could anyone go from there? Once you’ve done capitalism, it’s hard
to imagine there’s any larger nemesis. But as Where to Invade
Next demonstrates, there is.
America’s
real ideology
About
halfway through Where to Invade Next, Moore
visits an island prison in Norway that houses inmates who’ve
committed violent crimes but are being rewarded for good behavior. It
looks less like Oz and more like a frugal resort, with
prisoners in regular clothes doing wheelies on bikes, fishing, and
sunbathing.
In the
prison’s kitchen, Moore talks to Trond, a convicted murderer with a
huge tattoo on his face. Looking past him, Moore says: “Uh, I can’t help
but notice that behind you are a whole bunch of very sharp knives.” And in fact
there are a dozen of them, including a gigantic cleaver.
There
also appear to be zero guards. Trond explains how many guards are at
the prison on weekends: four. That’s for a prison population of 115. Plus, he
says, the guards generally all stay in another building, leaving the
prisoners to supervise themselves.
For
most Americans, including me, this looks completely insane. But the
prison warden, sitting at a park bench with birds chirping in the
background, explains: “I don’t understand why you think this is a strange
idea. … The main idea is just to take away their freedom. That’s the only
punishment we are giving them. We are trying to help them back to society.”
The
Norwegian philosophy is to create a normal environment with
as few external controls as possible so that when prisoners get out, they
know how to control themselves. It works so well that Norway has one of the
world’s lowest murder rates, and its recidivism rate is about 20 percent, two
to three times lower than in the U.S. (Moore also visits a standard
Norwegian maximum security prison that’s less spa-like but totally
free of the brutality and spiritual darkness of U.S. prisons.)
Moore’s
visit to Portugal is also about its prison system, or rather its lack of one
comparable to the U.S., thanks to its total decriminalization of drugs in 2001.
Dr. Nuno Capaz, the Portuguese minister of health, classifies
himself as a drug user:
“Mostly alcohol, internet, a lot of coffee, some
sugar.” When Moore points out that drug abuse may bring a lot of sadness
to someone’s marriage, Capaz responds, “So? So does Facebook. Are we going
to illegalize it?” The results in Portugal have been just as
counterintuitive for Americans as Norway’s results, with drug use actually
falling now that you can’t get arrested for it.
By the
end of Where to Invade Next — after seeing working-class
Italians with two months paid vacation, Finnish schools with no
homework and the world’s best test scores, Slovenians going to college for
free, and women seizing unprecedented power in Tunisia and
Iceland — you may realize that the entire movie is about how other
countries have dismantled the prisons in which Americans live:
prison-like schools and workplaces, debtor’s prisons in order to
pay for college, prisons of social roles for women, and the
mental prison of refusing to face our own history.
You’ll
also perceive clearly why we’ve built these prisons. It’s because the core
ideology of the United States isn’t capitalism, or American exceptionalism, but
something even deeper: People are bad. People are so bad that
they have to be constantly controlled and threatened with punishment, and if
they get a moment of freedom they’ll go crazy and ruin everything.
The
secret message of Where to Invade Next is that America’s
had it wrong all along about human beings. You and I aren’t bad. All the
people around us aren’t bad. It’s okay to get high, or get sick,
or for teenagers to spend every waking moment trying to
figure out how to bonk each other. If regular people get control over
their own lives, they’ll use it wisely rather than burning the country down in
a festival of mindless debauchery.
Where
to Invade Next is all the more powerful because it doesn’t tell you this,
it simply shows you. It’s not speculation about how human nature will be
transformed after the revolution so we’ll all be happy to share our
ration of grass soup with The People. It’s all happening right now, with
imperfect human beings just like us.
The
movie ends with Moore visiting the remnants of the Berlin Wall, and
remembering how he’d been there in 1989 and joined with all the German
chiseling away at it. When he was growing up during the Cold War, he says,
the one certain thing was that “This wall would never come down. Built to
stand forever. Impenetrable.” But less than 30 years later it
was gone. What America’s President of Documentaries is saying now
is: Tear down these walls. We will be much better off without them.
C 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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