By Armond White
Friday, February 12, 2016
Billed as “A New Comedy,” Michael Moore’s Where to Invade Next is ungenerous and
condescending. Those unfunny characteristics typify propaganda just as they
also describe the sorry state of contemporary political humor, which has
declined in this millennium, and Moore is largely to blame. Since his first
distorted documentary, Roger and Me,
in 1989, he’s used stridency, partisanship, and snark to despoil an art form
and demean political discourse.
Moore’s jovial pretense is immediately divisive. He
starts with a satirical proposition about American foreign policy: “On January
2, I was quietly summoned to the Pentagon to meet with the Joint Chiefs of
Staff. Each branch was represented: the Army, the Air Force, the Marines.
‘Michael,’ they said, ‘we don’t know what the fuck we’re doing.’” His casual
anti-military jibe introduces the film’s premise: Moore, the bumptious
American, visits global sites of bloodless social revolution: Finland, Norway,
Iceland, Italy, France, Slovenia, Tunisia, Portugal. He seeks counterpoints to
what the United States has repeatedly done wrong. Where to Invade Next is millionaire Moore’s goofball imitation of
President Obama’s 2009 European trunk show, which has been described as an
apology tour.
No matter that Moore’s anti-Americanism turns into
sentimental patriotism at the film’s other end — both positions are shallow,
and neither is credible. Moore’s only distinction as a maker of documentaries
(mockumentaries, really — mocking the idea of journalistic fairness and
thorough reporting) is that he doesn’t care to be convincing. Like his
imperious TV progeny Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Stephen Colbert, and John Oliver,
Moore preaches to the choir. Contrasting European and North African social
programs and protests with feckless American styles of protest is no more
illuminating than a TV-studio applause sign.
Moore’s button-pushing is a sign that the polarization of
American politics and media that started with the 2000 presidential election
has set in so deeply — bolstered by such events as 9/11, Bush’s 2004
reelection, and Hurricane Katrina — that it goes unquestioned and has become
the new New Journalism. Such chucklehead political satire operates by a
different sort of “logic”; argument and proof are less important than
self-righteousness and a sense of snide superiority.
Media mogul Roger Ebert’s dangerously derelict praise of
Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 (“This film
has a point of view, and that’s okay”) was as much an oversimplification of a
documentary’s purpose as the thoughtless attitude that ad hominem derision is also okay because Moore’s ultimate goal is
to mock ideas and people.
Despite his humble front, Moore’s arrogance doesn’t stop.
At his most offensively patronizing, he interviews a father whose child was
killed in the 2011 massacre of Norwegian schoolchildren. Moore heartlessly
goads the forgiving parent. He turns the screws on the audience so that our
wincing is relieved only by the father’s grace. In a specious gun-control
diatribe, part of Moore’s strategy is to mislabel the Norway atrocity as
“terrorism.” Moore ignores the truly remarkable mystery of the grieving
father’s human nature and what it says about Scandinavian pacifism.
As scattershot as Spike Lee in Chi-Raq, Moore then idealizes how other countries build spa-like
prisons, and he uses scenes of brutal American prisons and vicious guards as
counterpoint. There’s no investigation into the what, how, and when of European
crime. This lackadaisical, dishonest storytelling satisfies Moore’s polarized
studio audience, who only want him to cheerlead their distaste for the
problematic United States. Moore’s romanticizing of Europe goes unchallenged by
facts or even statistics. (There’s a clip from a promotional film of Finnish
prison guards singing “We Are the World.”) He never asks how these Utopias were
achieved, but he’s in slack-jawed awe at the different social systems — like a
naïve college student: “Gee, Ma, they
don’t have to wash their hands or say grace before dinner!”
In Portugal, Moore films a trinity of cops who
pontificate on how “human dignity is the most important thing in life,” and
another Portuguese official boasts that the country has resolved both its
African-immigrant and drug-addiction crises. Apparently, Moore hasn’t seen last
year’s astonishing Horse Money,
Portuguese director Pedro Costa’s film about the miseries of Lisbon’s
impoverished, drug-addicted black immigrants.
Where to Invade
Next offers no information because Moore is uninterested in modern Europe’s
difficulties as depicted in the best European art films, like Rade Jude’s Aferim!, which traces Romania’s dystopia
to its historic, Buñuelian roots, a philosophical view of a kind. Rather than
empathize with those suffering from the vexing social conditions of class,
crime, and unrest in America, he hits all the leftist high points, from Occupy
to Ferguson to Free College for All. For a summation, Moore asks one European
woman to lecture America on its lack of charity. And to patronize politically
correct feminism, Moore features a montage of cherry-cheeked Caucasian women
posing outdoors to somehow illustrate the notion that women make better rulers
than men. Rich and comfortable enough to devote his “comedy” to shaming the
United States, Moore deliberately misrepresents — and misunderstands — how the
melting pot boils.
Moore’s apology tour is a trip through liberalism’s Cloud
Cuckoo Land. He’s a purblind tourist who avoids looking at the personal and
sociological issues that result in crime and make court and penal systems
necessary across the globe. Essentially, Moore has no interest in examining
human nature. Portrayals of our common humanity, citizenship, and morality are
what’s missing from today’s me-against-you political satire. Moore and the
Maher–Stewart–Colbert gang are only interested in assigning blame to their
American opponents. Thus, contemporary political satire has become both
self-flattering and hate-filled. Such polarization defies the idea that we all
share a polity. Moore uses satire dishonestly, hoping to achieve small-minded
ideological power.
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