Manufacturing Dissent

I broke one of my rules tonight. When I started this blog a couple of weeks ago, I said I wouldn't finish watching films I hated. Well, tonight I did. I almost turned it off after a half hour, when I figured that I had the measure of the film and didn't need to see more. But somehow I felt I had to keep watching. I guess I wanted to see how the clips I'd seen when it first came out fit into the film as a whole.

The film was Manufacturing Dissent, an all-out, full-throttle attack on Michael Moore by the Toronto-based husband-and-wife team of Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine.

It's easy to dislike Michael Moore. He twists the truth, he takes cheap shots, he manipulates his subjects, he manipulates his audience... and all these things have made him millions of dollars. Damn that Michael Moore - he lies and he cheats, and he doesn't just get away with it, he wins Oscars for it! Let's face it, if anyone in the documentary business deserves a critical analysis, it's him. So when Manufacturing Dissent came out last year, a lot of people wanted to like it. By the time it had its Canadian premiere at Hot Docs, it had more buzz than a barbershop full of army recruits.

I missed the screening, of course, but then I started hearing from filmmakers who saw it, and the reports weren't good. A few days later, Debbie Melnyk appeared on a panel about personal filmmaking, claiming that it was entirely an accident that the spine of her film turned out to be her chasing Michael Moore around and being repeatedly turned down for an interview, à la Roger and Me. She had never wanted to put herself in the film, she said, but felt she had no choice. Nobody asked her how that could be true when the couple's previous film, Citizen Black, had exactly the same gimmick - Debbie Melnyk being turned down for an interview by Conrad Black.

So, anyway, given all the controversy, I felt that I should watch the film, and I recorded it when it aired on Bravo last week.

Well, now I can say I watched it. Here are the top three things I hated about it:

1) The main problem is not that the film is a polemic (I like a good polemic as much as the next guy), it's that it's a one-note song, with no subtlety, no analysis, and not even an attempt to take Moore's arguments seriously or to consider him as a cultural phenomenon. It's a laundry list of bad things he's done and lies he's told. OK, I got the point after a half hour. Why watch any more? It's my own damn fault that I didn't turn it off at that point.

2) The film is full of shooting-fish-in-a-barrel non-sequiturs. Two young women in Michigan who've never heard of Moore come across as airheads in a streeter that goes on for about 30 seconds too long: is the joke on Moore or on them? A group of college feminists are shown doing some kind of goofy pro-choice cheerleader routine at a protest - how is this related to the film? A young Republican woman says she hasn't seen Farenheit 9/11 because she's too "sensitive." Michael Moore may be the big fish in Melnyk and Caine's barrel, but their shotgun blast hits a lot of minnows too. It all reminds me of, hmmm... what's his name again? That portly documentary guy who always wears a baseball cap.

3) It is appallingly badly shot and lit. One African-American fellow is interviewed with the sun behind him so that his eyes are completely in shadow. The rest of the (many) interviews have no style, no consistency, terrible eyelines, awful backgrounds (you can see one guy's back in a reflection behind him). Amateur hour.

One quote stood out, from a fellow commenting on the right-wing film industry that's sprung up in response to Moore: "The industry is laughably bad. So I don't think that those films mean crap."

I'd put Manufacturing Dissent in that category, too.