these are both excellent political documentaries that manage not to depress but to encourage and fuel. or at least they did me. the yes me is about two guys (with a few sidekicks) who decide to take on the WTO. they build a website that looks just like the WTO’s, choose a url that attracts traffic directed to the WTO (it’s still up: www.gatt.org — GATT was the WTO’s original name), and proceed to respond to all invitations to conferences, summits, tv shows, etc. directed to their nemesis. the documentary follows them in a couple of such clandestine excursions into the world of high finance and international manipulation. they are remarkably low tech, mostly i suppose because money is tight, but still manage to pull off incredibly believable performances. their approach is simple: expose the WTO’s inhumane and repressive practices by exaggerating them to the point of absurdity and repugnance. the result is astounding: the economists who listen to them talk do not flinch, however much the two push the envelope. they are so inured to immorality that even the proposal of a resurrection of slavery doesn’t faze them. to get the audience to react, our guys must resort to a powerpoint presentation that shows first world’s feces reprocessed into mcdonald’s hamburgers for third world’s consumers. that the audience is a theatre-full of college students leaves us wondering whether the economists would have gobbled that up, too.
the yes men is about intelligent direct action combined with a good amount of farce. it’s really amazing what two guys with a good knowledge of computers, guts, cool, and a beatiful command of their subject can do. it’s also amazing how little they do, in fact, manage to do. oh, and one of them is the same guy who came up with the barbie liberation army, possibly one of the coolest “terrorist” organizations of the consumer era. check them out at theyesmen.org.
harlan country, USA was just rereleased by criterion and is simply a fantastic documentary, full of heart, great characters, great politics, and great music. the miners are amazing — eloquent, articulate, and wise beyond what one would expect, not of toothless folks with no education, but of the most consummate preacher. i particularly liked the women, who stood between gunfire and the guys when the guys were too afraid of gunfire to stand in front of it themselves. the mining/protest/union songs are great, and the bluegrassy voices, pure and poignant. the miners win the first strike the film covers, but the rich man is not going to look after the miner’s welfare, and the exhausting fight is never really over.
what was the documentary Kopple made about the Hormel strike? American Dream? That’s also very much worth renting.
does it also have great music? i saw on imdb that people are clamoring for a cd of Harlan County. that would just the right project. i can’t get the music outta my head.
‘American dream’ is easily my favorite documentary about a strike. ‘Harlan County’ is inspiring (and has great music) but, for my taste, it romanticizes the miners and avoids most of the hard questions that face unions. What makes ‘American Dream’ so powerful — apart from seeing families torn apart by the strike (literally, one brother crosses the line to return to work while another stays on strike) — is that Kopple began the film expecting to tell the story of a brave local that was using rank & file power to stand up, not only to Hormel, but also to a corrupt national union. But after spending months in this little town in Minnesota, she comes to see the dangers of militancy for its own sake, and the limits of continuing a strike on willpower alone. She even grudgingly concedes some value to the national union. It is not something most Oberlin students want to hear, but I have found ‘American Dream’ a far more useful teaching tool than ‘Harlan County’ because it complicates the story by moving beyond labor versus the corporation to the divisions that inevitably appear among workers.
I think I agree with everything Gio says about The Yes Men, and yet I found the film disappointing. It didn’t need to be high-tech; Mondovino was similarly low-budget, low-style filmmaking, yet it managed to produce a more coherent, more engaging movie. I wish Men had stuck to the pranks, which *are* brilliant, and let someone else put together a film around them.
As to Kopple’s films, I definitely see what Chris is saying, ‘though I think I liked both films very much. I’m struck by echoes of our conversation about John Sayles — the expert on labor and politics gets a bit annoyed by the films which lean toward a romantic view, while the rest of us struck by the dim view of labor throughout most American culture seem to have more patience for such stuff. (Maybe?)
Also, speaking of labor, Reds comes out on dvd pretty soon…
i haven’t seen American Dream yet, so i am not sure what you mean, chris, when you say that Harlan County presents a romanticized view of labor. if you mean that the workers are (more or less — there are a lot of scabs, the picket lines are not very well attended, etc.) united and motivated to win, and that they do eventually win, well, i think i’m okay with this. it often happens. many strikes (i wish i knew what the percentage is, but i believe they are the majority) are successful, and strikes are intense, life-changing events. they require a huge amount of courage, abnegation, and cooperation, so they are really inspiring for the workers themselves, and i think kopple takes away this sense the mine workers have of having reached a new level, of having stood. it is not very romantic, in fact, that their victory is a half-assed contract after which there isn’t much celebration, and that the film ends with clear indications that the miners will always be on the losing end, and that victories can always be snatched away. the mining industry is, of course, in shambles again, as we saw with the recent mining accidents in (again!) harlan county and west virginia.
but maybe we’re going back to the discussion michael and i were having a few days ago over the west wing, and i think at the end you can always show a bleaker, more “realistic” side to just about anything. there are very few things that are so completely good that one cannot find a way of showing a dark, less inspiring angle to them. i am pushing your point here, but in any case, as far as this possibility is concerned, i don’t see what’s to be gained from it. struggling to achieve change, in the real world, does require a huge amount of idealism because otherwise you don’t even get started, and i’m happy to cultivate idealism in myself rather than cynicism. by the same token, i’m glad to watch films that make me believe change, justice, and a good world are possible, and that i can do something to actualize that possibility.
Regarding the discussion between Gio and Chris, is it sophomoric to suggest that there is place for both kinds of films, those that show the fractures, complications, difficulties that pertain to any worldly situation AND those that show that nonetheless, concerted efforts sometimes do have enough coherence and direction that some positive effects can be achieved? We need both of these, don’t we?
to clarify things regarding my thoughts on the West Wing (and generally in these matters)–I don’t think I was aiming toward the cultivation of cynicism in myself at the expense of those looking for a better world, nor was I advocating some kind of crushing of idealism in the suggestion that The West Wing represented a fantasy world. In fact, I think The West Wing is far more cynical than it is utopian. There’s a fatal confusion here of complexity and “darkness” with cynicism and a lack of desire for change. I’m not sure I always want films, books and the like to be heaving with inspiration. This cheerfulness is often a covert cynicism concealing its own nastiness by pre-emptively accusing its antagonists of a lack of inspiration. TV evangelists come to mind.
however, that said, I found Harlan County USA to be very inspiring and, as Gio says, not really a romanticization of labor at all but rather a celebration of collective action and the courage it takes. I don’t think as of yet we have really gone beyond “labor versus the corporation” as Chris suggests…of course with the rise of Big Labor and its betrayal of its workers, unionization is a tarnished activity. But I think it pays not to complicate it too far into inaction or worry too much about its idealization in this state of things. one of the things that bugged me most about graduate students (oh, can we count the ways) was their assumed superiority to collective action, yet their willingness to get screwed over again and again, all in the name of reaching the purported middle class paradise of professordom sometime in the future. They screech like monkeys when the health insurance fee goes up but they’d be happy to trample all over you for the next dissertation fellowship or, please hold your breath, an interview….but I’m getting into a personal “darkness” here perhaps too much, so let’s move on. Anyway, power to the people, and one big union.
Really, I was not intending to knock Harlan County. It does one thing and American Dream does another; as Simon says, there ought to be room for both. And my preference (and it is just that) is political and pedagogical not aesthetic.
It is absolutely true that we (in the United States) have not gone beyond labor versus capital, so complicating labor issues with issues of labor strategy might seem to weaken whatever limited impulse there already is to take unions seriously. All I would say is that in my experience, labor struggles are not won by the passive support of people who were inspired by Harlan County or John Sayles, but by the struggle of dedicated labor activists, and those people need to know what they are getting into. A pretty significant number of my students have gone into the labor movement, and the biggest danger they face is rapid disillusionment when it does not turn out as they expect and unions are discovered to have most of the faults of other organizations. A clear-eyed view of why collective action is so difficult to achieve, and why those difficulties produce some occasionally unpleasant side-effects, prevents burnout (I can set my watch to when I get the first email from a student saying that they tried labor organizing and now want a recommendation to go onto grad school).
I quite take Michael’s point about grad student organizing, not least because Yale still doesn’t have a TA union, and I was involved in organizing one 20 years ago. I just don’t think romanticizing versus complicating labor struggles is the primary explanation of the limits of graduate union organizing. Self-interest, cowardice, the composition of the National Labor Relations Board, and the enormous resources and determination of large private universities begins the list. Oh, and culture. During the 1984 Yale strike of clerical and technical workers, I once stood behind a couple of undergraduates waiting to post a letter. Regarding the picket line, one said to the another: “I think if they [the workers] want to stay out on strike, that’s cool. But if I want to cross their picket line to go to the library, that’s also cool.” That was my introduction to labor politics in the US.
But this is really irrelevant to Gio’s point. Harlan County is wonderfully filmed, it captures not just a strike, but a certain kind of rural labor struggle that we don’t get to see very often, and it is genuinely inspiring. god knows we all need to be inspired. I’m just cranky. I’ve been known to set as an essay question: “The people united will never be defeated: discuss.”
And here is the funniest commentary on unions of recent years: http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/20060719_colbert_takes_on_unions/
Chris,
I didn’t mean to disregard your valid points about the difficulty of union activism–I hope I didn’t sound like it would all be rousing speeches and Pete Seeger songs…I was just reacting to what seems to be a more and more popular attitude, that unions are doomed to corruption and therefore it’s better just to confront (or submit to) the corporation on an entirely individual basis. I’m impressed to hear about your experiences at Yale—at USC the union never got past idle talk in the hallway. dealing with the universities perhaps inspires crankiness? by the way, would you give an ‘A’ to the student who simply answered your question “Yes”?
really!?? what do you teach? that’s great, and, in this light, your comment sounds very different to my ears, and your pedagogical preference of American Dream, very understandable.
you should try miami. one of the most frequent mantras to emerge from the administration’s and the student body’s mouths in connection to the janitors’ strike at UM was that it should not be “disruptive.” coming from a country with (for better or worse) a huge strike tradition, i wanted to bang my head against the wall.
like you, chris, i see a very poor collective culture here. and i agree with you, also, that “professionals” like graduate students (to use michael’s example, but there’s plenty of others) are paralyzed by an effective combination of laziness and fear. i don’t think people aren’t idealistic. i think they are scared. and there is much to be scared in a society in which your survival and welfare rely so much on your performance and productivity, unlike, say (and to mention a context i actually know something about), european social democracies, in which you are guaranteed healthcare, welfare, a roof on your head, and a pension pretty much regardless. so it is those who are truly desperate who get together and fight back here in the US, because they are the ones with absolutely nothing to lose.
michael, i do understand better now your view of cheery cinicism. i am still not sure it applies to the West Wing, which makes me want to go out and campaign (but it may be me), but i totally see what you mean.
PS i know a lot of ex-yaleis who were part of the TA protests of the mid-nineties (did you really mean 20 years ago, chris?). every single one of them seems incredible inspired by what went on there. i have Will Teach for Food sitting in my bookcase, waiting to be cracked open and read. it looks good, but also infuriating. i hesitate to read it, because i am not sure what to do afterwards… can one read a call to action and then do nothing?
It was called ‘TA Solidarity’ back in 1987 when organizing began (and I still have a t-shirt with those words on it because no labor struggle is complete without a t-shirt), and only changed to GESO in the early 1990s when the Yale organization felt strong enough to contemplate a grade strike. Graduate student organizing is always tough. Students in English, History, Cultural Studies and Political Science are really into it, and the Science students are impossible to organize, primarily because their entire funding comes from the faculty grants of their advisers so they are utterly dependent. I guess we (grad students in the above disciplines) have no problem participating in a union because we have no real expectation of getting jobs anyway, so we have little to lose but our chains.
It’s worth remembering that there was a moment roughly from 1995 (new leadership of the AFL-CIO) until 2000 (Bush, 9/11, war) when there was something of a resurgence in interest among American undergraduates in unions. The various union internship programs (Union Summer) and the anti-sweatshop movement fed lots of students into union organizing drives. It is still true that there are lots of quite well paid jobs for organizers right out of college.
And Gio, just to assure you that I can occasionally work my way out of weary cynicism and be inspired, let me tell this story. It would actually have made a great documentary if I knew how to work a camera. It is January 1988 and the strike deadline for the second contract of the clerical and technical workers union (local 34) is only hours away. Frantic last minute negotiations. Local 34 always allowed two students from the requisite “student solidarity committee” to attend negotiations (much to the chagrin of the Yale administration). As luck would have it, it just happened that this particular night, I was one of those students. Bargaining took place in little bursts throughout the night. In between bargaining sessions the workers just sat around the big conference room, some napping, other playing cards and talking. At 6.00am we hear that Yale is coming back to present its final offer. Along one side of the table are members of the union: all women, many black, bleary-eyed, not looking great. On the other side of the table are Yale’s lawyers, all men, all in beautiful suits and looking as though they spent the night at a spa. The chief Yale negotiator starts to read the final offer, and as he reads it slowly dawns on all the workers in the room that Yale has conceded on every significant issue. So as an observer I look from on side of the table to the other and realize, for the first time really, no matter how much reading I had done on unions, how unions give working people power.
So, that’s my inspirational story for the month, probably the year. Now back to movies, or actually, back to waiting eagerly for the first episode of ‘The wire’ season 4 tonight.
this is great story. thanks. everyone should spend some time hanging out with workers during a strike, because it’s such a paradigm shift — it’s just hard to imagine if you haven’t done it. and it’s especially great when the workers start trusting you. then it becomes really special. i’m so glad you had such a fantastic moment! good for you!
now to a question about documentaries: do you guys think it’s possible, in this tv-saturated times, to do a documentary such as harlan county, in which all the players are so beautifully unselfconscious in front of the camera? i wonder if those times are over.