Roger & Me (1989)Director: Michael Moore
Starring: Michael Moore and the people of Flint, Michigan.
We're into the final stretch of Introduction to Cinema for the semester and we are finishing with a two week unit on documentary. These days you can't really talk about documentary without talking about Michael Moore, so the film for this week is his debut film Roger & Me.
Flint, Michigan, is a town built on the back of the automotive industry. It is the birthplace and home of General Motors, one of Americas most powerful companies. However, when GM chairman Roger Smith endorses the closure of factories in Flint in favour of opening cheaper factories in Mexico, the one-crop economy of Flint collapses leaving the town in disarray. Watching the town he loves fall to pieces, Flint local Michael Moore sets out on a mission to arrange a meeting Roger Smith and invite him to accompany him on a tour of Flint, so he can see first-hand the consequences of GM's decision.
When Roger & Me came out in 1989 it was going absolutely gangbusters at the US box office and looked like a shoe-in for the Best Documentary Oscar. However the December issue of Film Comment published an interview with Moore by Harlan Jacobson in which he accused Moore of altering the chronology of the events in the film and tinkering with some of the numbers. Essentially, he accused Moore of advantageously misrepresenting the truth. These accusations damaged the film's reputation and ultimately Moore did not even receive an Oscar nomination.
Now the accusations of changing chronology centred mainly around two events. The first was a visit to Flint by Ronald Reagen where he took ten retrenched autoworkers out to lunch and encouraged them to look for work in Texas. This visit occurred in the early 1980s after the first round of factory closings when Reagen was a presidential candidate whereas Moore creates the impression that the visit occurred in the late 1980s, at which time Reagen was President. The other event was the city of Flint's misguided effort to try and transform Flint into a tourist destination by opening an Auto themed fun park, a luxury hotel and an elaborate shopping mall (featuring the city's only escalator). Again, this misguided use of taxpayer funds took place after an earlier round of factor closures rather than those in 1987 to which Moore refers at the beginning of the film. The argument can be made that the chronology of the events does not ultimately alter the fact that those events did occur and that they were symptomatic of the issue that Moore was exploring. What I find more interesting about the accusations is that it says a lot about what people's expectations of a documentary were then, and how Michael Moore subverted them.
People watched documentaries and expected objective truth. They expected the unbiased facts and when they discovered that what they were getting was a treatment of actuality rather than actuality itself they felt betrayed. We live in a much more cynical time now where we don't even expect objectivity from our newspapers or TV bulletins. We are conditioned to ask "Who owns this newspaper?", "What are the agendas here?" Whereas obviously in the late 1980s people were much more willing to trust their media.
In Moore's defence he never even suggests he is seeking to provide an objective account. That is not what Michael Moore does. Moore's films are highly subjective polemics in which the viewer gets Michael Moore's take on a particular issue. And in the case of Roger & Me he doesn't hide that. The film is, after all, called Roger & Me, not "Roger Smith and the GM factory closures in Flint". Moore plants himself in the title and thereby establishes himself as being just as central to the film as Smith. The film doesn't start with generic archival footage of factories with cars going along assembly lines. Rather it starts with video from Moore's first birthday party and his memories of growing up in a town which was in the shadow of GM. While they didn't expect that openly biased approach to documentary then, we have come to expect it now, especially from Michael Moore.
Whether or not you like Moore's polemical style, there is no denying that he is arguably the most influential film documentarist of all time, especially in terms of the popular documentary. No one gets bums on seats in cinemas for a documentary. You just have to look at a list of the highest grossing documentaries of all time:
1) Fahrenheit 9/11 - US$119.2million
2) March of the Penguins - US$77.4million
3) Earth - US$32million
4) Sicko - US$24.5million
5) An Inconvenient Truth - US$24.1million
6) Bowling for Columbine - US$21.5million
7) Oceans - US$18.7million
8) Madonna: Truth or Dare - US$15million
9) Capitalism: A Love Story - US$14.4million
10) Religulous - US$13million
17) Roger & Me - US$6.7million
The man has four of the top ten most financially successful documentaries of all time, including the number one by a fair margin. All five of his films have made it into the top twenty. The fact that Roger & Me, which was released well before Michael Moore had any sort of international profile, managed to take as much as it did is amazing.
One thing I found really interesting about watching Roger & Me is you are watching Michael Moore establishing the Michael Moore character we are all so familiar with now. Moore always sets himself up as the everyman, a kind of people's champion. Since he making Bowling for Columbine, and especially Fahrenheit 9/11, though Moore's profile has gone through the roof and he has become much more of a person of influence. His average Joe act is now very much that, an act. Whereas in Roger & Me we can watch Roger Smith ignore Michael Moore like he would anyone average punter, because in the late 1980s Moore was a nobody, today Moore is much more of a force to be reckoned with so the people he chooses to target have to be much more careful about how they approach him.
Roger & Me is an incredibly watchable film. It has all the things we come to expect from Moore, a serious issue approached in a personal way with smatterings of comedy. But what I think puts it up there with Bowling for Columbine as his best work is that there is something a bit more authentic about Moore in this film. He has not yet become too big for his boots.
We're into the final stretch of Introduction to Cinema for the semester and we are finishing with a two week unit on documentary. These days you can't really talk about documentary without talking about Michael Moore, so the film for this week is his debut film Roger & Me.
Flint, Michigan, is a town built on the back of the automotive industry. It is the birthplace and home of General Motors, one of Americas most powerful companies. However, when GM chairman Roger Smith endorses the closure of factories in Flint in favour of opening cheaper factories in Mexico, the one-crop economy of Flint collapses leaving the town in disarray. Watching the town he loves fall to pieces, Flint local Michael Moore sets out on a mission to arrange a meeting Roger Smith and invite him to accompany him on a tour of Flint, so he can see first-hand the consequences of GM's decision.
When Roger & Me came out in 1989 it was going absolutely gangbusters at the US box office and looked like a shoe-in for the Best Documentary Oscar. However the December issue of Film Comment published an interview with Moore by Harlan Jacobson in which he accused Moore of altering the chronology of the events in the film and tinkering with some of the numbers. Essentially, he accused Moore of advantageously misrepresenting the truth. These accusations damaged the film's reputation and ultimately Moore did not even receive an Oscar nomination.
Now the accusations of changing chronology centred mainly around two events. The first was a visit to Flint by Ronald Reagen where he took ten retrenched autoworkers out to lunch and encouraged them to look for work in Texas. This visit occurred in the early 1980s after the first round of factory closings when Reagen was a presidential candidate whereas Moore creates the impression that the visit occurred in the late 1980s, at which time Reagen was President. The other event was the city of Flint's misguided effort to try and transform Flint into a tourist destination by opening an Auto themed fun park, a luxury hotel and an elaborate shopping mall (featuring the city's only escalator). Again, this misguided use of taxpayer funds took place after an earlier round of factor closures rather than those in 1987 to which Moore refers at the beginning of the film. The argument can be made that the chronology of the events does not ultimately alter the fact that those events did occur and that they were symptomatic of the issue that Moore was exploring. What I find more interesting about the accusations is that it says a lot about what people's expectations of a documentary were then, and how Michael Moore subverted them.
People watched documentaries and expected objective truth. They expected the unbiased facts and when they discovered that what they were getting was a treatment of actuality rather than actuality itself they felt betrayed. We live in a much more cynical time now where we don't even expect objectivity from our newspapers or TV bulletins. We are conditioned to ask "Who owns this newspaper?", "What are the agendas here?" Whereas obviously in the late 1980s people were much more willing to trust their media.
In Moore's defence he never even suggests he is seeking to provide an objective account. That is not what Michael Moore does. Moore's films are highly subjective polemics in which the viewer gets Michael Moore's take on a particular issue. And in the case of Roger & Me he doesn't hide that. The film is, after all, called Roger & Me, not "Roger Smith and the GM factory closures in Flint". Moore plants himself in the title and thereby establishes himself as being just as central to the film as Smith. The film doesn't start with generic archival footage of factories with cars going along assembly lines. Rather it starts with video from Moore's first birthday party and his memories of growing up in a town which was in the shadow of GM. While they didn't expect that openly biased approach to documentary then, we have come to expect it now, especially from Michael Moore.
Whether or not you like Moore's polemical style, there is no denying that he is arguably the most influential film documentarist of all time, especially in terms of the popular documentary. No one gets bums on seats in cinemas for a documentary. You just have to look at a list of the highest grossing documentaries of all time:
1) Fahrenheit 9/11 - US$119.2million
2) March of the Penguins - US$77.4million
3) Earth - US$32million
4) Sicko - US$24.5million
5) An Inconvenient Truth - US$24.1million
6) Bowling for Columbine - US$21.5million
7) Oceans - US$18.7million
8) Madonna: Truth or Dare - US$15million
9) Capitalism: A Love Story - US$14.4million
10) Religulous - US$13million
17) Roger & Me - US$6.7million
The man has four of the top ten most financially successful documentaries of all time, including the number one by a fair margin. All five of his films have made it into the top twenty. The fact that Roger & Me, which was released well before Michael Moore had any sort of international profile, managed to take as much as it did is amazing.
One thing I found really interesting about watching Roger & Me is you are watching Michael Moore establishing the Michael Moore character we are all so familiar with now. Moore always sets himself up as the everyman, a kind of people's champion. Since he making Bowling for Columbine, and especially Fahrenheit 9/11, though Moore's profile has gone through the roof and he has become much more of a person of influence. His average Joe act is now very much that, an act. Whereas in Roger & Me we can watch Roger Smith ignore Michael Moore like he would anyone average punter, because in the late 1980s Moore was a nobody, today Moore is much more of a force to be reckoned with so the people he chooses to target have to be much more careful about how they approach him.
Roger & Me is an incredibly watchable film. It has all the things we come to expect from Moore, a serious issue approached in a personal way with smatterings of comedy. But what I think puts it up there with Bowling for Columbine as his best work is that there is something a bit more authentic about Moore in this film. He has not yet become too big for his boots.
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