Roger and Me
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Roger and Me, filmed by Michael Moore, is a documentary that covers the effects on Flint, Michigan, and thousands of GM employees who lost their jobs when the CEO of GM, Roger Smith, closed Flint’s plants for cheaper labor costs south of the American border. The film is a hodge-podge of bizarre images, odd happenings, and real-life strangeness. To tell his story of the effects of GM pulling out of Flint on GM employees, Moore uses a variety of already shot visuals (home movies, newsreels, TV footage, commercials) and new material he shot with a bare-bones crew. The structure and scope of the film are wide-ranging and complex, all combined to offer a scathing satire of corporate failure and callousness and, mainly, the Reagan era. Two motifs are used to weave together plot threads that include a former GM employee who now kills and skins rabbits to make a living to the CEO of GM, Smith, reading Dicken’s A Christmas Carol with all the blithe, Reaganesque sentimentality imaginable. The first motif is Moore’s attempt to get Smith to visit with the people whose lives have been displaced by his decision to pull out of Flint. The second motif concerns Moore following a former GM employee who now throws people out of their houses for failure to pay their rent or mortgage. The film is a combination of the film-as-catalyst and cinema verite discussed by Barnouw (261) “Film as catalyst was finding diverse applications. While at one extreme it cou
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Never Walk Alone.
Barnouw comments that the skillful use of cinema verite created more respect for the interview as a tool and helped evolve the essay-documentary. However, the personal view of the author breaks through the various voices we are privy to during the course of the film, even though Moore was accused of portraying the film as objective truth when he fudged some elements of the film to further drive home his anti-corporate polemic. As author Charles Warren (262) comments on the style of the filmmaker and his documentary:
It is as though the filmmaker hooked us by offering himself as bait in order to draw us into his anticorporate capitalist sermon. The factual distortions of Roger and Me, its cavalier manipulations of documentary verisimilitude in the service of political polemic, have been analyzed at great length. I still find the film winning, up to a point, and do not mind its ‘unfairness’ to the truth, as I do its abandonment of what had seemed a very promising essay-film. Yet perhaps the two are related: Moore’s decision to fade out his subjective, personal, ‘Michael,’ seems to coincide with his desire to have his version of the Flint, Michigan, story accepted as objective truth.
The press and others
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1312
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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