Documentary-maker Michael Moore in his latest film Where to invade next ©Gemma Purkiss, Dogwoof
Read more by Sameer Rahim: Secret Cinema goes Cold War
Michael Moore, for me, will forever be associated with the treatment he got in Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s Team America: World Police. For anyone who doesn’t recall the scene, “socialist weasel” Moore hates America—and himself—so much that he blows himself up at the Team’s headquarters. Cruel perhaps, but like that film’s wicked satire on the war on terror, it has enough truth to make it funny.
It’s not that Moore hasn’t taken on noble causes: Roger and Me (1989), his first film, told the story of men laid off by General Motors in his home state Michigan. Bowling for Columbine (2002) was an intermittently powerful attack on gun control in America. His series TV Nation, broadcast on the BBC in the 1990s, was a more entertaining version of The Cook Report.
If you agreed with Moore, you could just about swallow the sentimentality and selective way with facts. Then came his take on the war on terror, Fahrenheit 9/11—slicker but on less solid ground, and then his risible take on the US healthcare system Sicko. (In that film the NHS is a perfect system, unsullied by waiting lists or care scandals.) As US political culture has become more like entertainment—Fox News is the prime example—Moore has followed that lead from the left and morphed into a straight political campaigner. The veneer of the neutral documentary has faded completely.
Moore is bit like Bono. He feels like his heart is in the right place, so why bother with showing the working out? In his new film, Where to Invade Next, which comes out here in June, the film opens by saying that America has lost every war since the Second World War. We know this because a long list of them cascades down the screen: Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, the Gulf War… But hang on. The US-led Coalition won the first Gulf war. And come to think of it, where’s the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, which stopped a genocide and eventually brought down Slobodan Milosevic? But if it doesn’t fit the narrative, then it doesn’t get included.
The schtick is that Moore “invades” various countries—mainly European—to steal their best ideas. So in Italy it’s paid holiday, in France haute cuisine school lunches, in Slovenia free university and Portugal drug decriminalisation, you get the idea. But he does not put these achievements into even a perfunctory cost-balance analysis—how much does it cost Slovenia to offer free education to domestic and foreign citizens? What is the academic standard? Moore justifies this by saying his job is to “pick the flowers, not the weeds.”
America figures in this telling as a raddled dystopia, where every cop is a racist thug and the president glories in destruction. That day may well be too close for comfort (see Donald Trump), but we’re not there yet. It’s telling that in the voiceovers of US leaders he juxtaposes with police brutality, Moore uses George W Bush’s voice more than he does Barack Obama’s—the usually measured rhetoric of the current president presumably being just another of those inconvenient weeds.
But if Americans are more likely to feel insulted than won over by Moore, then Europeans should also feel patronised. There’s a weird stereotyping in the qualities he picks out. In Italy, he speaks to a handsome, relaxed couple who get eight weeks paid holiday and 13 months salary. Those Italians eh, wouldn’t we love to laze around like them! In France, the school cafeteria serves multiple kinds of smelly cheese. In Portugal, those crazy Mediterraneans, they love smoking pot. In Germany, the doctor can prescribe a visit to a spa—cue pictures of healthy, naked Germans dipping in the pool. Like Moore’s hymn to the NHS in Sicko , the praise rings hollow not because we don’t think these are goods things—in the main they are all excellent—but because we know that they are not an unmixed blessing. The idea that spending state money on one thing means either higher taxes or less spending on something else, is something Moore does not acknowledge. And as anyone who uses them will attest, state services can be inefficient and bureaucratic. To pretend otherwise is to indulge in the easy promises of the dodgy politician or snake-oil salesman.
The best sequence in the film is when Moore has to confront contradiction. Germany may be easy with the spa prescriptions, but its darker history cannot be ignored. He rightly praises the way the country has come to terms with its past sins, pointing at the monuments to deported Jews that have been placed all over the country. (An immigrant schoolboy who has recently acquired German citizenship thoughtfully tells us that when he took on the benefits of living in the country, he also took on the burden of its history.) What might it look like, says Moore, if America came to terms with its original sins—the treatment of Native Americans and of slavery— in a similar way?
It’s an important point, well made—but is sadly buried in what is otherwise a film that preaches to the already converted. I have heard it argued the left needs figures like Michael Moore, who make simple, broad-brush arguments in a populist way. Sure he might be glib, the argument goes, but he’s playing the right at their own game. But this misses the point. Moore, it seems to me, is uninterested in speaking to the people he should be reaching—the working-class people in America voting for Trump. So it not only fails on an intellectual level, it fails on a populist one as well. Less of Moore, please.
