The Televised Revolution of Michael Moore

by Kathy Newman

One of the audience members, an undergraduate woman with a shaved head and a tie-dyed skirt, challenged Moore's use of television as a political medium. Moore replied that most Americans watch television---a lot of it---and that he could not think of a better way to reach the masses. This made me happy. Because I love television. And I love left-politics.

So when I found out that Moore was coming back to television on BRAVO, I called TCI and subscribed to digital cable for the first time. Moore's new series, The Awful Truth, premiered April 11th with a backdrop mimicking soviet art and Moore's declaration that he would provide a "People's Democratic Republic of Television." This reference is part self-parody; Moore is the only entertainer in the country who can make people laugh while saying things that would have him exiled for communism in the 1950s.

The truth is, it is hard to be funny and revolutionary. No one likes a wise-guy with a bull-horn. And satire, a form of humor in which "irony, derision, or wit in any form is used to expose folly or wickedness," though often used for left-leaning political purposes, can be delicate business. Humor, if it is used to expose the travails of the down-trodden, must be careful not to make the afflicted the butt of the joke.

Moore had some tendencies in this direction in his early satire. In his 1990 documentary Roger and Me, a mock-heroic quest for an interview with the CEO of General Motors, Roger Smith, Moore seemed to ridicule the out-of-work people of Flint, Michigan, nearly as much as he did the GM executives, the rich residents of Flint, and the Minnesota candidate for Miss America. Female residents of Flint, like the woman who performed "color analysis" in her home, or the woman who raised, killed, and skinned rabbits for food were as memorable as the portly, freckled, beady-eyed visage of Roger Smith.

TV Nation was an improvement, politically, over Roger and Me, as Moore began to experiment with television as an analog to collective action. With TV Nation Moore began to use his television gags to achieve political goals, rather than simply to make people laugh. In one episode he assisted an African-American man in Washington, D.C. who had been wrongfully arrested by the police over 20 times. TV Nation made up t-shirts, billboards, and television commercials to explain that he was "not wanted." Moore made this single case into a crusade---with meaning that transcended a single individual's situation.

Moore continues this tradition in The Awful Truth. In this series Moore successfully uses irony, derision and wit to expose of the folly and wickedness of corporate America. Moreover, under the Moore microscope, corporate America looks hapless, hostile, and humorless.

In the premiere episode of The Awful Truth, after a hilarious episode in which Moore takes actors dressed as pilgrims to D.C. to find the real sinners on Capital Hill, Moore brings a diabetes sufferer named Chris Donahue to the corporate headquarters of his HMO, Humana. Donahue needs a pancreas transplant, Humana refuses to pay, and Donahue's doctor says he could die "any day." When Humana executives refuse to meet with Moore and his crew, Moore and Donahue tell Humana they will be hosting a mock-funeral for Donahue outside Humana headquarters.

The funeral arrangements include an invitation with a skeleton that says, "I'm having a funeral and you're invited," a hearse, an empty coffin, and bag-pipes. Moore promises Humana functionaries that their company will be featured on The Awful Truth every week until they agree to pay. One week after Donahue's mock-funeral Humana agrees to pay for the transplant, and changes its company policy so that all pancreas transplants for diabetics would be covered in the future.

At the end of the first episode Donahue holds his four-year-old daughter in front of Moore's live studio audience in Chicago. The crowd gives him a standing ovation. He starts to cry. I do, too. After all these years of making me laugh, Michael Moore has finally made me cry.

It was worth the wait.