Moore's Legacy of Visual Protest in Capitalism a Love Story

The Department of Film and Media Studies at UCSB does a series of colloquium throughout each academic quarter.  The topics shift from paper presentations to discussions of media texts.  This week we came together to discuss Michael Moore's latest film, Capitalism a Love Story.

For me, Moore is at his best when he discovers footage that delivers a new working class perspective on traumatic issues (9/11, Columbine) or on-going inequalities.  At his worst Moore repeats conspiracy theory rhetoric and simplifies complicated issues until they have become quite distorted.  A major weapon in his arsenal of investigative documentary is the use of humor.  In the past Moore has done a hilarious job of finding stock footage or 1950s healthy class films that sarcastically situate contemporary events within historic political incorrectness or naivete.  His style is to use these clips, or other found footage, as humorous answers to rhetorical questions that he poses through his voice over.

In this latest film he uses a YouTube "viral videos" as part of this sarcastic style.  He edits together the two parts of the "Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Video" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZzgAjjuqZM) in order to punctuate his claims that American manufacturing cities have been devastated by capitalism.   Apparently these videos originated from an Cleveland area comedy troupe.  The video which includes the lines, "Here's the place where there used to be industry ... We see the sun at least three times a year. ... Our economy's based on LeBron James. ... Buy a house for the price of a VCR" eventually inspired the a Cleveland Tourism Board (Positively Cleveland) to make their own video contest designed to corral the creativity of internet filmmakers for a positive message.

But positive messages are not the style of "viral videos."

Toward the end of Moore's film the screen fades to black and Moore's voice over announces that he is not going to "keep doing this" (making films) unless the people start standing up for themselves and their democratic rights.  We discussed this call to action in our Colloquium and decided that it could be interpreted in two ways.  One way is that Moore is calling for more citizen image capturing and investigation of corruption and injustice.  The evidence of this call to action can be seen in the amount of time that Moore's voice is aligned with amateur video within working class spaces.  By using this style Moore is not coming to working people as an ethnographer but rather as one of them.  This style of film making was most successful in the collective footage production method of "Trouble the Water."

Moore's project in many ways is about changing public perception and understanding of symbols.  This can explain why he spends so much time going after sites of power, Wal-Mart, GE, President Bush.  By telling that it is their duty to create the meaning of the signs of their own meaning perhaps people will no longer vote against their own interests.

The second way that this could be accomplished is in the replication of his humor aesthetic.  Moore's inclusion of the Cleveland "viral video" suggests that he sees a kindred spirit within the comedy troupes and amateur filmmakers that create spoof videos and "viral memes" that then resonate with the internet public and become an email phenomenon.  I am troubled by the notion that viral spoof videos are equal to public action. 

At the Colloquium we discussed Moore's applicability to our current budget issues in the UC system.  It was suggested that in order to follow Moore's example we should protest the fee hikes by creating a "viral video" that features puppies and protest.  Puppies will make the video pass from one person to the next and just maybe the protest message will accompany it. 

In many ways the success of a satirical "viral video" is similar to the success of a Michael Moore film.  They both use sarcasm as a way of destablizing the hegemonic meaning of signs.  Yet as Moore has increasingly been labeled as a partisan his ability to reach an audience that doesn't already agree with him is diminished.  Do "viral videos," because of the way in which they travel along social networks, suffer the same fate?