I saw it last night on its first night in Springfield MO in an almost empty theatre. Sort of like a private viewing. It will probably be dropped fast and that means it will make tons of money for my beloved Moxie our very own independent theatre in Springfield. So I am predicting it will follow in the path of Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.
I could comment endlessly on this movie and people already have. I could not sleep all last night and I am one of those people who could probably fall asleep on a roller coaster. At eight am I finally let go of this movie.
I am looking back on it with Umberto Eco eyes. If you have ever read the great semiologist's essays, let alone his extaordinary novels, you may know what's coming.
Now follow my path.
Looking at Moore's shots of the huge corporate headquarters of the powerful and wealthy HMO's my association is of Eco's essay on the Presidential Libraries as modern day pyramids. No, I think our pyramids are the huge buildings built with the blood, sweat and tears of working people paying their insurance premiums and going without god knows what to do it, to build these huge monstrosities honoring greed and death. Isn't that what the pyramids were?
Rather than the mass of physical labor to build the pyramids of old, the mass of labor required to build our modern ones is hidden. Physical labor has become abstract, an exchange in the form of paper. Every premium was the bread and butter of these corporate tombs, but the denials of life were the inflation pops required to build them.
So we have not ordered our citizens to line up at the railroad station and don't forget to bring your valuables with you! Uh-uh. Our citizens have dutifully paid their premiums thinking they would be safe when disaster struck. I had a friend who was hit by a tractor trailor and brain damaged. After two months in the hospital he couldn't find his way home anymore. He called Mutual of Omaha, that revered name piped into our living rooms since we were children, and they refused his disability payments which he had paid premiums for. I finally had to take over the phone and it took all my therapeutic language skills to get to the right person and get those payments sent to him. He could never have done it had he sat in front of that phone the rest of his life.
Back to my diary on symbolism. So we have a system that perpetuates a genocide of the weak, the sick, the legal innocents, the desperate, and the ones in complete dispair. And this genocide is hidden, it is paper killing, and it is deadly. And it creates its own monuments to corporate ingenuity and greed.
Now people are going to see Sicko and if they have been vicitmized, they are going to get it in the chops. Now they are going to know they didn't fall through a crack, it wasn't just someone's bad judgement or a mistake that they didn't get the help they needed. That their loved one died. No they are going to know it was carefully planned. A genocide of one no longer but of thousands and probably millions if we could get the numbers tallied. Worse than voting in Florida I bet.
So who will be the first, the second, the third, the nth to recognize that their catastrophe was purposefully planned, their life ruined by loss of love, their despair knowing no end, who will decide they have something in common with Iraqi insurgents warring against the US government who enables our homegrown horror.