A Yearning For The Hearth

In a documentary called Manufacturing Dissent (readers will note the reference to Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent) Canadian filmmakers Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine turn Michael Moore’s methods on himself and yield some interesting results. It turns out Michael reacts to these filmmakers in much the same way that the people he goes after react to him. What’s more interesting is some of the things that they discover about the claims that Michael Moore has made in his films, and the ways in which he’s manipulated situations to suit his ends.

Here are some of the more surprising finds:

• In Bowling for Columbine there’s an iconic scene where Michael Moore goes into a bank, opens an account and comes out with a rifle. A surprising sales incentive for a bank! It turns out that Mr. Moore manipulated that situation heavily - they didn’t have guns in the bank, they brought one in for him and at his insistence. The normal practice was for the guns to be distributed by dealers who could run the background checks and manage the waiting period. Apparently it took over a month to arrange his getting it directly at the bank.
• Also in Bowling for Columbine, there’s a troubling scene where Moore confronts an ageing and partially senile Charleton Heston. That speaks for itself. But in the film Moore insinuates that three weeks after a brutal murder of a little girl in Flint Heston came to the city and held a gun rally to try and offset any growing anti-gun sentiment which might arise due to the killing. Apparently this did not take place. Heston was in Flint, but only for a long preplanned Republican party event, three months after the little girl’s death - which makes it far less tasteless than what Moore had implied.
• Several of the more embarrassing Bushisms in Fahrenheit 9/11 were taken badly out of context and show Bush as even more tactless than he admittedly is. The famous scene where Bush addresses an audience as “the Have’s and the Have-more’s” and then refers to them as his “base,” actually took place at a dinner with Roman Catholic clerics and academics (not often the ‘have-more’ set) and was part of a larger self-deprecating speech intended to ironic and funny.

And then there’s the real shocker…

• In his breakout documentary Roger & Me, Moore chronicles his attempt, as a lowly Michigan-born filmmaker, to get the head of General Motors Roger Smith to talk to him and survey the damage that GM’s policies were inflicting upon once-prosperous central Michigan. In the end Michael is completely stonewalled and never gets to speak to Roger Smith. Or, at least that’s how it’s portrayed. This documentary appears to show that, in fact, Michael Moore did meet with Roger Smith. Twice, as a matter of fact. Evidently, it made for a more effective film for Michael to lose that battle.

Manufacturing Dissent is not a great documentary. It lacks the pizzazz of Moore’s own films, but is guilty of some of their same faults. It turns into a character assault on Moore which is not so different from the one Moore launched on Bush. Nevertheless, if the claims of this film are accurate, and they certainly seem credible, then Michael Moore’s own credibility is very much in doubt.