Last month Michael Moore finished shooting
Sicko, and the film is scheduled for release in early 2007. The content of the movie is as secret as the goings-on at a papal conclave. Nonetheless, the pharmaceutical industry has already launched a preemptive PR blitz. But what is it, precisely, that makes Michael Moore a lightning rod for so much hatred and fear from the authoritarian right? After all, the gregarious guy from Flint, Michigan doesn't say anything more radical than what has been repeated on the DailyKos a thousand times before. He's probably nicer than most of us. So where do Michael Moore's superpowers come from?
Filmmaker Michael Moore is not a genius because he says interesting things but because he elicits interesting responses. The authoritarian right hates and fears him not because of what Michael Moore might reveal about them but because of what they might inadvertently reveal about themselves in his real or virtual presence. Think, for example, of the Flint, Michigan PR man in
Roger and Me who expresses absolute faith in market innovation and opines that a new lint roller factory will eventually make up for multiple GM plant closings. The pink-slipped auto workers just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Michael Moore could not possibly have made the flack utter such egregious babbitry. The PR man exposed himself simply by saying what, presumably, he thought he should be saying. Moore merely refused to turn off the camera. As another example, take his use of footage of a Tucker Carlson interview with Britney Spears in
Fahrenheit 911:
CARLSON: A lot of entertainers have come out against the war in Iraq. Have you?
SPEARS: Honestly, I think we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that, you know, and be faithful in what happens.
CARLSON: Do you trust this president?
SPEARS: Yes, I do.
Once again, Britney does it to herself. All Moore does is keep looking, and this is what so enrages the authoritarian right. The talking point gets delivered. But Moore refuses to move on, and the banality of the speaker's own rhetoric resounds in the silence of the missing cut to something else. The mask of expertise or dutiful compliance slips aside and the hollowness of the speaker is fully exposed. To authoritarians it feels like a personal attack, and the fact that they are the authors of their own misfortune makes their exposure doubly painful.
Late last month Moore finished shooting Sicko which he describes as "a comedy about 45 million people with no health care in the richest country on Earth." Scheduled for release in 2007, the content of the movie is secret. (Note: Moore will screen teasers for his two new films Sicko and The Great 04 Slacker Uprising at the Toronto International Film Festival (Sept. 7-16).) Never mind that only Moore and his lawyers know which big pharmaceutical companies will ultimately appear in Sicko. Big Pharma knows that the portly man from Flint is up to no good and has launched a preemptive PR campaign.
From time to time in my diaries I've written about the two voices in which the right addresses the world: thuggish competence and inveigling solicitude. I've nicknamed the voices Kingpin and Bobbie Sue after a pair of high school stereotypes. Kingpin is the captain of the varsity football team. He drives around in a Camaro and will tell you dispassionately why you'll never, ever measure up. Fifteen years later, if you run against him in a city council race, he'll tell you exactly why you're going to lose. Bobbie Sue is Kingpin's cheerleader girlfriend and junior partner in running the school. She goes to church. She volunteers. She'll help you be popular if you play ball. She'll get even with you if you step out of line, but she'll see it as enforcing the natural order of things. Fifteen years later, you'll find her raising money for a charity that teaches inner city youth to play golf as a "life lesson." If the Flint PR man is Kingpin, Britney is equals Bobbie Sue.
Predictably, the threat of a new Michael Moore movie about them will have Big Pharma talking to us like Kingpin and Bobbie Sue. Ken Johnson, senior V.P. for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America adopts the Kingpin voice in an interview with Advertising Age:
A review of America's health-care system should be balanced, thoughtful and well-researched to pin down what works and what needs to be improved. You won't get that from Michael Moore.
Never mind that Moore won an Oscar for directing Bowling for Columbine and has made more money on a documentry than anybody else, ever, Kingpin knows more about balanced, thoughtful, and well-researched filmmaking than that fat kid will ever know.
In a similar vein, a flack for another pharmaceutical outfit said:
We expect [Moore's film] will be one-sided and biased, just like his other documentaries.
And one more from the Chicago Tribune back in September, 2004:
"What our society really needs is a serious debate about overall health care based on facts, not just another one-sided micro-mockumentary," said Court Rosen, spokesman with the drug industry's Washington lobby, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.
Notice that Big Pharma is using the bully strategy of dictating the terms in which its critics get to discuss its conduct.
But the treatment is not complete without an appearance from Bobbie Sue with a targeted display of pity to obviate calls for systemic change. Here our friend Ken Johnson waxes merciful in a press release trying to to fend off state-mandated price controls for drugs in California:
America's pharmaceutical research companies are committed to developing real world, workable public policy solutions to help reduce the number of uninsured and help those with low incomes better afford their medicines. Unfortunately, the program announced today is not a comprehensive healthcare solution. In fact, the likely consequence of this proposal may mean poor patients will have less access to the very medicines their physician has prescribed....We are committed to working with the state to develop a comprehensive solution that lowers the ranks of the uninsured and looks at patients' total health care needs. Until such a solution is found, patients in need should turn to the Partnership for Prescription Assistance [an industry-sponsored charity program].
As the release date for
Sicko approaches look for more "we care too" rhetoric from Big Pharma. Of course, all the caring will be undertaken on voluntary terms favorable to the pharmaceutical industry. Naturally, we'll and be treated to "the personal stories of those helped." But all this will be nothing more than an inveigling attempt to change the subject from the society-wide conduct of a highly profitable industry capitalizing on human misery.
What the pharmaceutical industry fears from Michael Moore is not an expose of its conduct. The facts are already available to anyone who wants to know them. What Big Pharma most fears is exposure of the hollowness of its PR. It fears exposure of its bad faith in the public forum. In the world of money and authoritarian control, words function to elicit behavior not to state what is so. Once the rhetoric is exposed for what it is, it loses its power to control. No wonder the pharmaceutical companies are gearing up for a big public relations war. Michael Moore is looking at them...