Let me put it this way: during the Bush era, the notion of conscience (and in extenso guilt) was replaced by dogma masquerading as faux-morality. It's a typical strategy adopted by manipulators or should we say, social engineers.
If the cinema is anything to go by, Conscience (yes, with a big C) is making a come-back. How do I know? I've just seen two films at the Berlinale (Berlin International Film Festival) that shine a light on the way ahead. They tell us things that maybe have been lurking at the back of our minds or maybe just absent or worse still, forgotten as we hurtle uncontrolled, deregulated, maxed-out credit-wise, into consumer society.
FOOD INC. by Robert Kenner is making its US debut soon. It is a film that consolidates many of the arguments and exposes we have seen in the press - about lax standards in the Bush FDA (lobbyists for the food industry were appointed as heads of FDA and other standards institutions); about misplaced government policies that have led to the Corn-is-King notion of agriculture (it can do everything from clean your house to feed the cow that provides your hamburger); and the deleterious effects of fast food. Traveling the length and breadth of the country, Kenner - aided by advisers Michael Pollan (a Berkeley based writer) and Eric Schlosser (author of "Fast Food Nation")- looks into how large conglomerates have applied manufacturing industry practices to the production of food. That is, factories (because that is how our food is now produced, not by farms) employ workers to do just one thing all the time - that worker does not need much training, can be easily replaced and therefore can be paid the lowest of wages. In the course of 50 years or so, the number of slaughterhouses/companies in the US has shrunk from many thousands to just a few thousand. The slaughterhouse has become one of the most dangerous places to work in the US and not only to the workers - as we have seen over the years, outbreaks of sometimes deadly e-coli have come from everyday foods like ground beef and peanut butter. For those of you who may wonder about e=coli, much of it comes from faeces so your burger may not taste like you-know-what but if you have a stomach ache afterwards you have eaten you-know-what (you want fries with that?)
Kenner's film puts all of this in clear and concise terms. It does not set out to demonize conglomerates nor to appoint accusing fingers. Rather it sets out to try and introduce a balance and perspective to a food production and consumption culture that has led to high rates of obesity and Type 2 diabetes - we are on track to having an almost one-third child population in the US inflicted with Type 2 diabetes.
There's a story in Kenner's film of a lower-middle class family. The mother explains that they are on the go just trying to make a living from 6 am. to 10 pm. It's cheaper and easier to buy burgers for themselves and their two girls, than cook at home after a hard day's work. The father has diabetes and the parents know that feeding their two girls in this way could bring on the disease, yet they keep doing it. The reason: when they visit a supermarket, a pound of broccoli costs more than burgers.This does not reflect economic reality. It reflects agricultural lobbyists devastating effects on government policy. It costs more of course to produce a pound of ground beef than a pound of broccoli but government agricultural subsidies keep the beef production low while healthier broccoli is left to market survival. This does not take into account of course the ballooning costs of health care as more and more people require treatment for obesity and diabetes.
While Kenner's film is issue-oriented and important as a step in understanding our "intimate relationship" with food (as he puts it), it is by no means a singular work. We've seen in recent years a sub-genre of films dealing in what can only be described as one of the most direct interfaces between audience and film - the dangers of the stomach. Films like SUPERSIZE ME (surely a pioneering film of sorts, in the same league of self-abuse as Werner Herzog eating his shoe as filmed by El Cerrito's most famous filmmaker Les Blank), Richard Linklater's FAST FOOD NATION and Ruth Ozeki's book MY YEAR OF MEATS have brought these issues to the fore.
Kenner's film is a good illustration of de-regulation gone destructive in one important sector of our society. Michael Winterbottom's new film THE SHOCK DOCTRINE takes a broader and just as conscience-stricken approach.
Winterbottom's documentary (or rather, essay-film) is based on Naomi Klein's trenchant and long overdue critique of Milton Friedman's terrifying theories of free markets. Klein, who is one of the foremost anti-globalization writers and activists today traces the doctrine of shock therapy to experiments carried out in Canada in the 1950s that led to the torture techniques that are still used by the CIA and others today. Sleep deprivation, electric shock and isolation are essential ingredients to re-creating the compliant human being. The idea is to wipe clean the memory of the subject and to replace it with messages that the controller wants to instill. In this case it is the instillation of "free market" practices into governments and the population.
Winterbottom goes through the terrorist economics of the Chicago Boys and Friedman's denial of any real complicity in any of its consequences. It's his god-given position you feel, that lies behind his delusion that just about no government is good government, and that prices should be allowed to find their own level. (Winterbottom notes importantly that in the 1950s he and his school were regarded as crackpots.) His dirty little secret of course is that prices never find their own level, they are fixed - by corporations and governments trying to work out their competitive strengths and weaknesses in a world ruled by global politics, good or bad. Indeed the engine that implemented Friedman's concept of free market economics was the war-profiteering machine (as we all know, Eisenhower warned against the rise of the industrial-military complex). You need tanks, bombs and planes to force your population into accepting lower wages, higher costs of essential commodities, and the enrichment of the rich elites at the expense of the poor.
Winterbottom articulates all of this wonderfully well. He reminds us also of a history that many of us who lived through it have never forgotten but only seen fade away like the thousands and thousands who suffered the consequences of the Chicago Boys. And he also reminds us of more recent history that we may have forgotten. To encapsulate it broadly - Chicago Boys economics is the underlying thread of the Pinochet Terror of the 1970s (for that is what it truly was), the Argentinian disappearances of the 1980s, the Thatcher-Milk-Snatcher repression of the unions and creation of the Greed Class, the divisive Reagan Years that replicated the Thatcher loathing of organized labor and an almost religious intensity for free markets, the chaos of the post-Soviet Union Yeltsin years, right up to the Winter Meltdown of capitalism at the end of 2008. From Friedman's meetings with Pinochet right up to his 90th birthday party at the Bush White House attended among others, by Donald Rumsfeld, a Friedman acolyte, it's Friedman's free market economics that paradoxically inspire the most controlling, insidious, paranoid governments. We reflect back now on why Friedman was awarded the Nobel Prize in the mid-1980s, an act that are a grave insult to the victims of this insidious doctrine (Winterbottom's clip of this in his film speaks volumes).
In an apochryphal story, THE SHOCK DOCTRINE relates that on September 10, 2001, Rumsfeld main preoccupation as he announced proudly was a war on the Pentagon bureaucracy. Shouldn't he have been concerned with other, more pressing matters?
Winterbottom's film gives us the throughline of a well-informed historian who can connect the dots of the big picture. Its one weakness - in terms of really anchoring the film in a memorable reality - is a lack of depth about Friedman's motivation. We come away from the film knowing what he thought, how his thoughts were implemented at great cost to all of us, and who did this. But we don't really know why or how he arrived at this complete embrace of de-regulation. He was not deluded but he was the ultimate ivory tower academic, a man so out of touch with reality that his economics became a fantasy (or rather fatal nightmares to countless thouands and untold misery on millions). A man of power without responsibility - the most dangerous animal in a democracy. It was as if his thoughts were given flesh by Thatcher and Reagan. It is a strange phenomenon that we still do not quite understand.
Nevertheless, THE SHOCK DOCTRINE remains a powerful film and one that should be shown in as many venues as possible - from high schools to the White House screening room. It is a film that demonstrates why economics is not taught from the earliest years of high school. If it were, the current reality would be too scary to contemplate and the next generation would actually improve the system. If only that were possible.
Let's end by saying: Michael Winterbottom is not only the ablest chronicler and cinematic thinker of his generation but also remains the best filmmaker in Britain today. He has inherited the noble mantle of Ken Loach. He is the Conscience of his times. It is an honorable tradition and a proud one.
Berlin, February, 2009
