coll. - Michael Moore and the Rhetoric of Documentary

Thomas W. Benson and Brian J. Snee

This book is a collection of original essays by scholars and critics who undertake a film-by-film critical analysis of the documentaries of Michael Moore. These close readings of the films illuminate the contributions of Moore to the art of rhetoric and to documentary, analyze the progressive political arguments of the films, and explore how Moore cultivates affect and sentiment not simply to arouse support but also to bring a radical perspective to life as thought and feeling.

Michael Moore has contributed to a renewal of documentary by responding to historical change and opportunity, as the earliest practitioners would have understood. John Grierson, a founder of the documentary idea, wrote in 1942, The materials of citizenship today are different and the perspectives wider and more difficult, but we have, as ever, the duty of exploring them and of waking the heart and will with regard to them. That duty is what documentary is about. Michael Moores own adventure in the materials of citizenship and waking the heart introduced changes that over a quarter of a century have challenged the roots of documentary.

Brian Winston has argued that Michael Moore liberates documentary from the burden Grierson laid on the documentary, while suggesting that Moores films raise additional questions about their own fundamental value as political argument:

The burden Grierson laid on the documentary was to pretend that his films were reports on the news pages, as it were, when in fact they were editorials for the established order. Moore liberates documentary from

We agree with Winston that Michael Moore is certainly making documentary films and that he can be partial, biased, unfair, and simple-minded, and yet these two observations leave much to be discovered about Moores contributions to documentary and to the political conversation. The present collection is our own exploration as scholars of rhetoric and media into the sorts of public rhetoric Michael Moore has created in a hugely successful career as a documentary filmmaker. In our account of Moores reputation and the reception of his films, we rely heavily on responses to Moore in the popular press, not because we suppose they are the best arbiters of Moores achievements in the art of documentarythat will take a long while to sort out, though film scholars in a variety of disciplines have made a good startbut because the popular press both reveals and constructs Moores persona and reputation, both of which have a bearing on the rhetoric of the films. As a rhetorical matter, Moore achieves public status as the author of his works, though it is good to keep in mind from a historical perspective that film is a collaborative art, calling on the skills of many others in preparation, production, postproduction, circulation, and publicity.

Michael Moore was born in Flint, Michigan, on April 23, 1954, to middle-class parents, a General Motors assembly line worker and an office secretary. He was raised in the Catholic Church and educated in Catholic schools. After considering the priesthood, Moore turned his attention to politics and media. According to his biography in the New York Times, Moore won a merit badge as an Eagle Scout by creating a slide show exposing environmentally unfriendly businesses in Flint, and in 1972, when 18-year-olds were granted the right to vote, he ran for a seat on the Flint school board, soon becoming one of the youngest people in the United States to win an election for public office.

After a year at the University of Michigans Flint campus, Moore dropped out of college. He eventually started an alternative newspaper, Moore sued the publication for wrongful dismissal, eventually settling out of court for a small sum that he used as seed money for a documentary about General Motors and the city of Flint.

Roger & Me (1989) changed Michael Moores life and career, and it led some journalists to claim that he had changed the face of documentary film. This is a claim that scholars of the long and distinguished history of documentary might justifiably resist, but it helps us see, from a rhetorical perspective, how rapidly Moore established an outsize public reputation. That reputation came to have a force of its own. Matt Labash of the Weekly Standard writes that pre-Roger, social-conscience documentaries (is there any other kind?) tended to be low-sugar, high-fiber affairs. Whether the subject was striking miners, Great Plains soil erosion, or copulating manatees, these pictures were more medicinal than entertaining. Roger was different, and it became to documentaries what the New Journalism had been to feature writing. Moore infused the form with subjective vitality, inserting himself into his narrative to drive it with a novelists ingenuity. What he delivered in Roger was a dark and devastatingly funny social satirea tautly edited trove of snappy narration, vivid characters, and cruel ironies. Labashs comments about the mainstream documentary are surely oversimplified, but they do reflect something of the public reputation of documentary at the time Moore upended expectations.

Moores documentary was personal, political, funny, and rude. He was on-screen as his own witness and on the sound track as interpreter of the scenes in which he did not appear. He combined biographical and historical accounts with a stirring spirit of radical nostalgia for progressivism and the Social Democratic New Deal compact.

The commercial and critical success of Roger & Me initiated Michael Moores transformation from failed magazine editor to a rich and famous documentary filmmaker. Moore has become a public figure whose name is regularly invoked in connection with politics and public policy, for his unapologetic progressive arguments and for the force of his political persona. His work is cited as a reference point in virtually any serious critical commentary on the current state of documentary, even in books and articles that are about other filmmakers. His political views have become place markers of political journalism and debate, both left and right. Conservatives disparage a position by saying that Michael Moore believes it. It may well be that the public reputation of Moore as a filmmaker obscures the work of many other worthy and influentialand perhaps betterfilmmakers, who prepared the way for him and who will continue to make contributions to documentary after he has moved on. Still, his public reputation remains a touchstone in the popular press.