Goodness gracious, two months and counting since the last Retinal Damage post... let's see if we can't be a little more on the ball in the next few weeks!
It's actually been a pretty slow summer for me, movie-wise. To celebrate the 4th of July, Lori and I went to see
Sicko. It's probably Moore's best documentary -- even though he's as prominently featured as in any of his other docs, he's developed a knack for not being the center of attention. He's managed to return to the Everyman persona that made
Roger and Me so fresh. In fact, Moore's trek through an English hospital in hopes of finding the cashier is reminiscent of his attempts to find Roger Smith: He at least gives the illusion that he's the Average American befuddled that how he thought the world worked isn't turning out to be true.
Of course, Moore's detractors say his films are all illusion, nothing but a tissue of doctored news articles, biased interviews and emotional grandstanding masking the director's hatred for America. Such arguments are usually motivated by their propounders' own ideological concerns and/or a dismal misunderstanding of the documentary format. Moore is biased and given to emotional grandstanding but neither is necessarily a bad quality. For that matter, all documentaries are based on illusion, the notion that something "real" has been directly represented without any interference from the filmmaker.
But one of the more interesting thing about
Sicko is how Moore makes the illusion obvious. Much has been made about Dr. Sanjay Gupta's report about the various "flaws" in
Sicko.
Moore's summary of Gupta's claims and his own retorts are here. By and large, each gentlemen dances around the other's claims; each rightly points out that the other somewhat cherrypicks data to support his claims. But the critique that Gupta makes that sticks is one that I noticed when I saw the film: Moore takes 9/11 rescue workers to Cuba for free medical treatment and presents the island as a bastion of happy citizens and socialized medicine. But earlier in the film, Moore included a graphic that demonstrated that Cuba's health care system ranks two spots lower than does that of the United States, according to the World Health Organization.
Moore responded to Gupta's claim by in effect admitting the flaw then denying it was a flaw. "[
Sicko] clearly shows the WHO list, with the United States at number #37, and Cuba at #39. Right up on the screen in big five-foot letters.... The movie isn't hiding from this fact. Just the opposite...." This is dodging the larger point: Moore presents Cuba's medical system as superior to America's, yet his own data demonstrates that it probably isn't. (The obviously well worn hospital rooms and equipment further indicate that Cuba's system may not be as strong as Moore claims it to be.)
Moore probably is more interested in the irony in his Cuban jaunt, that 90 miles to the nation's south is an island nation that our government demonizes but that is willing to take better care of our national heroes than our own government has been. But the sequence also shows, if you ask me, the sloppy genius of Moore's documentary style, and why, to an extent, Moore's documentaries are criticism-proof. Moore's documentaries all appeal to a leftist or populist common sense. If Cuba, which ranks lower than the US in the WHO scale, gives better health care to our heroes than we do, well that proves that how screwed up our system is. Several critics likened
Bowling for Columbine to cinematic buckshot, but the concept could be applied to any Moore documentary. Any argument or fact or apparent fact or emotion is thrown out in hopes that at least one of them will resonate and prove whatever point Moore hopes to make. Moore is less interested in doing the right thing for the right reason than he is in doing whatever thing seems right to him. He's more interested in results than in a coherent method.
And that's why he's probably the nation's best documentarian. He isn't interested in the form of documentary that can make Errol Morris's films too cold or academic for mainstream audiences, and he isn't at all interested in maintaining the facade of objectivity that marks direct cinema filmmakers like Drew and the Maysles brothers. He's an American Jean Rouche, taking a cinema of confrontation and blending it with the narcissism that we Americans do so well. Perhaps the most fitting irony, then, of
Sicko is its concluding complaint about American narcissism, about ending the "me" culture to establish a "we" culture. Without that "me" culture, would we have Michael Moore?
