Roger and Me
Rosenberg, Bernard
Roger and Me, a radical documentary — mmaarrkkeetteedd as a comedy —about the devastation of auto workers in Flint, Michigan, has, to everyone's amazement, become a sleeper. At this moment it's...
...Dressed mostly in proletarian attire that would by itself bar him from the personal contact that he seeks, Michael tirelessly tracks Roger...
...And if, as some have complained, the chronology is not strictly in order, most of us are quite willing to accept Moore's statement concerning Flint: "Everything that took place in the 1980s was a single blow...
...But Chairman Smith on the dais still has a live mike and doesn't know it...
...266 • DISSENT...
...Not the best of lives, but not the worst either...
...The last item that comes to us as the credits roll is a line to the effect that Roger and Me cannot be seen in Flint...
...worker, Moore is also a left-wing journalist previously associated with Mother Jones and the Michigan Voice...
...Self-defeating greed and insensitivity to the impact it has on others are not the besetting sins of Owen Bieber, who probably feels himself as much a victim as any member of his union...
...The point is well taken So are most of the other points: that G.M...
...However, the vignette does its job...
...Does he have an appointment...
...Bieber has reason to be miffed over his organization's getting such short shrift...
...For the reason that Flint no longer has any movie theaters...
...I could be wrong, but if Moore did take cheap shots at helpless people, ridiculing them without causing us to jeopardize our natural sympathy for the underdog, I was completely deceived...
...was making good profits and gave its top executive, Roger Smith, a $2 million raise during the time it shut up shop in Flint...
...She and others like her are the sole supports of families that at present can still pay the rent and keep the house...
...It is unemployment...
...Their acts are acts of pathos...
...undertook to distribute and market this unique product of Dog Eat Dog Films, the brainchild of Michael Moore...
...Moore steps into the elevator, pushes a button for the fourteenth floor— and is intercepted by a guard...
...Briefly, as Chinoy saw it, young men became factory operatives not because any of them liked spending a lot of time in dirty, noisy work sites but because, with care, they could save enough money to start a business of their own...
...And they pinned their hopes on the next generation...
...And he mutters about these hapless souls that it is just like them to be up all night and to sleep all day...
...Fast food requires fast work...
...Indeed, the pursuit of Smith by Moore and his camera crew provides the axis on which this film turns...
...Moore allots only a few seconds to Owen Bieber, a generally worthy successor to the matchless Reuther cohort of UAW leaders...
...So we overhear him expressing his delight: that pest still hasn't nailed him...
...No, but he'd like to make one with Mr...
...And these veterans of time-and-motion speed-up are too slow...
...At this moment it's making pretty big bucks...
...It's this kind of experience that makes the G.M...
...Smith's secretary...
...For these slowpokes the alternative to productive employment is not other less remunerative "service" employment...
...What the city does have is a "state of the art" spanking new jailhouse...
...Men and women threshing about in a vain effort not to fall out the socioeconomic system do not supply material for comedy...
...So what if it pays only minimum wages...
...It simply switched operations from the Rust Belt in this country to Mexico, where several new plants came into being...
...Among the bureaucrats we glimpse one woman, standing for more than a few of her gender, working only because her husband is not...
...To see Mr...
...South of the Rio Grande, after all, laborers are paid seventy cents an hour, as Moore puts it in a point that very few viewers or reviewers seem to have missed...
...Michael asks about family evictions in Flint...
...Street crime has soared...
...Instead, the impulse of New York audiences is to applaud...
...The quest took two and a half years...
...In time the entrepreneurial dream faded...
...That the cycle persisted from generation to generation did not entirely dampen their hopes...
...chairman and his toadies look bad...
...This is a tendentious work...
...What does this inappropriately dressed, possibly raffish character want SPRING • 1990 • 265 Movies on that floor...
...But, if you're looking for a barrel of laughs, you'd better take your own supply of laughing gas along with you...
...The corporation did not reduce output...
...He's made to look serious but not wholly sympathetic...
...Academics and bureaucrats will consign them to the underclass...
...It culminates in a brief encounter and an exchange—just a few sound bites—at the very end...
...Out of that immersion for a year or so came an exemplary monograph...
...Documentaries, let alone radical documentaries, are for art houses—if any are left...
...And when Smith finally gets trapped at a company Christmas party shortly after reading one of Dickens's more sentimental passages, a quick confrontation does take place...
...Go ask...
...Moore's central conceit, as I've indicated, is the chase...
...To make an appointment for an interview or to extend an invitation, as if to say, "Come see the havoc in a one-industry town when that industry disappears...
...It was here that the giant enterprise got started, here that some fabled sit-down strikes of the 1930s took place, here that our best union, the UAW, had emerged...
...At least his job is secure—and that he had himself been an auto worker for whom life in the factory was hateful, "like being in a prison," only adds to the piquancy of his nasty patter...
...All this is too breathlessly related by Moore in his capacity as narrator...
...There is no exaggerating the importance of that house or the consumer goods that go with it...
...It is obvious to them that they are homeless...
...Somehow none of this tickles my risibles...
...Despite such suspect enthusiasm, Warner Bros...
...Now and then these people are his friends and: "They're lucky to get me...
...The garrulous sheriff's deputy is featured, except for Moore, in more footage than any other character...
...He conveys his own anger rather than that of the bewildered and suddenly jobless work force, his perception, apparently shared by large liberal audiences, of the struggle between capital and labor, but just labor, not organized labor...
...Smith...
...At least they have someone to talk to...
...has nothing to do with that...
...Help me count the human cost...
...They and I do find much of what comes to us from the affluent in Flint to be contemptible...
...We watch them being fired...
...When one side is grievously wronged and the other is unconcerned or worse, how can the hands be even...
...In the heyday of postwar auto production, Eli Chinoy worked as an participant observer in one of Flint's factories...
...Rebuffed everywhere by sometimes scary, occasionally rough or oleaginous intermediaries, his energy, fueled by deadpan monomania, never flags...
...What about evenhandedness...
...How heavy that blow was and is we see in shots of general dilapidation, boarded-up stores, and oh, those evictions, mostly of blacks, like sights out of the thirties...
...Not that anyone laughs...
...The workers grew older...
...factories, along with local suppliers, began to close for good...
...Five minutes of time, if only to explain that the union does cushion layoffs (a word G.M...
...Even earlier there had been trouble enough in Flint, but at about the time of Reagan's first inauguration, G.M...
...Moore turned from print to screen in a hardtodefine genre for the direct depiction of what happened in his home town and to its inhabitants when G.M., Flint's principal employer, flew the coop...
...They settled for rented homes, for cars and appliances...
...Go see the flick...
...Even without upward mobility the status quo was tolerable...
...It is meant to send a message...
...The film noir that we behold requires more background than its writer-director star (or anyone else) could provide...
...Just as he is about to speak, his mike is turned off...
...Now that's a great virtue, but only when there is much to be said for both sides...
...Acting like a stockholder, Moore disguises himself as a substantial citizen, dressed in suit and tie...
...Roger and Me was initially shown at the New York Film Festival, where it received critical and professional huzzahs...
...Roger, from on high, sputters: G.M...
...But not, definitely not, laughable...
...The guard is a woman who panics...
...Plenty of money has been found to contain it...
...Why not...
...How to make a living...
...Nor those of anybody I have observed, nor of anybody with whom I have discussed the film...
...But the ingrates say nothing...
...He pursues his quarry to the Grosse Point Yacht Club, the Detroit Athletic Club, the General Motors Building in what was once Motor City...
...Moore insists on a mock exchange of cards and the gentlemen suggest that he write a letter...
...Why not...
...Then came homelessness and downward mobility...
...Well, the men aren't up to it...
...A group of ex–auto workers, realizing perhaps that they live in the postindustrial age and in a so-called service economy, find employment at a fast-food joint...
...Unsure of being able to handle this burly interloper, she summons help in the form of three buttoneddown middle-management types...
...adamantly refuses to use), might have been allowed by Moore...
...What does he want...
...A Flint man, son of a G.M...
...Before long there were thirty thousand unemployed auto workers in Flint...
...Nevertheless this grim, if sardonically presented, picture is a strong attack on certain corporate practices, specifically those of General Motors, a colossus whose inept managers have done their share to decimate the American economy...
...In this scene there is artfully edited black humor...
Vol. 37 • April 1990 • No. 2
