The Necessity of Michael Moore, Part 2:
(Part 1 was written exactly three years ago, on the opening of Fahrenheit 9/11)
Back in 1989, in New Orleans, the Rude Pundit had just gotten off a plane and, with nothing to do for a while and a car left for him, he went to a movie theater to see Michael Moore's first film, Roger and Me. His nascent rudeness was just beginning to rear itself, and the Rude Pundit was looking for ways to articulate his rudimentary political liberalism beyond snarky college paper editorials. And then he watched Moore kick the Reagan/Bush(I)-era worship of corporate capitalists in the nuts. Was it biased? You fuckin' well bet it was biased. Was it unfair to the executives of General Motors? Big time. But such blatant, real, unmitigated populist outrage was a blast of clean air in James Watt's darkened skies. "Yes," you wanted to leap up and say, "this is what I've been thinking but didn't know how to say."

All of Moore's documentaries operate on the idea that they are correctives to everything we're told on a daily basis. See, Moore doesn't need to have "balance," which we only think of now in the Fox-ian sense. His films are the balance. A truly balanced news media would have reported most of the things in Fahrenheit 9/11 prior to the war. MSNBC would be tracking down illegal gun dealers, in addition to setting up online child predators, and instead of airing constant one-hour "specials" about this or that murder. Every day, General Motors, the NRA (and its congressional lackeys), and the Bush administration spin to us with impunity. We've been fed bullshit mythos and propaganda long enough, Moore's films say, now, how about the other side of the story.

Moore explicitly tells you that aspect of his approach. He tells you what the opposing sides have been saying, and then he mocks them and shows you how they're at best ingenuous lapdogs, at worst sickening liars. And for the people who Moore really wants to see his films - that'd be people who don't regularly check their Americablog or Media Matters - he's going to say what he has to say as simply as possible. He ain't an Al Gore-type wonk. He's a storyteller, knowing that stories, whether they are his own as surrogate "Everyman," a construction that Bill O'Reilly gets to pretend to every day, or of others, form a basis for beliefs. And that's the way to get the message to the masses.

So, sure, for Sicko, the good members of the media and we oh-so-knowledgeable citizens of Blogsylvania can say that Moore "doesn't show the other side" of his health care manifesto, or that there's not enough nuance. The Rude Pundit wanted Moore to go into one of the ghettos outside Paris to see what people there think of the French health care system, comparing the treatment of our poorest (which he shows) with the treatment of their poorest (which he doesn't). And, sure, Moore could have interviewed people who are dissatisfied with the Canadian health care system, but, Christ, we have heard that before. And, yeah, we know there's lots of bad shit that goes down in Cuba, but can there not be things that are done right? Fuck, imagine how good the Cuban health care system would be if the United States government would stop being such assholes about the country.

His point with his trips abroad is that there's something fundamentally being done right there with health care that has not been discussed in the United States because we're so fucking scared of seeming worse off than other countries. Meanwhile, the truth is, as Moore shows, that we are. Every time the Rude Pundit goes to Canada, one of the things he's struck by is how relaxed people are, even the meth-addicted homeless people. And while it can't all be the free health care, imagine existing in a place where, no matter what, if you get in a car accident, you're gonna be taken care of. If you have health insurance, imagine thinking about changing careers, of trying to be an artist or going back to school, without the burden of wondering how you'll get by without that Blue Shield card. That's freedom. No, England, France, Canada, and Cuba are not utopias. But, as Moore says, why can't we look at the things they do right and see how we can do them here?

This aspect, the most important and potentially nation-transforming aspect of Sicko, is getting lost in the whole "Michael Moore went to Cuba" bullshit. But the Cuba section, at the end of the film, is Moore at his best - outrageous, funny, moving - and he does what a filmmaker ought to be doing: he gets you to see something you thought you knew in a different way. When Moore and his American patients enter Havana Hospital, there's unspoken, palpable awe at how, well, nice it is, how not fucked up. Could this have been an illusion, conjured by the Cuban government because it knew Moore was filming? Sure. Anyone got proof of that?

The first part of the film is all horror stories, mostly from people with insurance. These are frustrating, Kafkaesque, and sad, and the Rude Pundit's audience in that crowded cinema on a lovely Sunday afternoon, was over half senior citizens, many of whom audibly reacted in agreement or talked (too fuckin' loudly) about friends of theirs, or themselves, who were treated the same way. And they hissed, really, when Moore shows President Bush signing the prescription drug benefit. And they cheered when it was over. It's bracing, isn't it, to have someone articulate what you know but have been unable to say or have been cowed into not speaking out loud.

It ain't a perfect film. Moore's best work is still Bowling for Columbine. The film's repetitious: how many times do we have to be told health care is free in the other countries before we get the point? How many times do we have to see people cry? But these are the complaints of someone who's been reading and thinking about this issue for a long time. For someone who doesn't know the health care systems of other countries, it is a truly stunning prospect, this notion that you don't pay anything for your illnesses and injuries and pregnancies (other than one's taxes, which Moore does mention).

All of Moore's films question the bullshit myth of the American dream. What he's always been asking is how to make that myth a reality, acknowledging a potential in the citizenry for change, trying to show that there's other ways to exist as a people, as a democracy, as a nation. The people who truly love America are the ones who refuse to let it ossify and crumble, the ones who want to keep its old bones moving.