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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Robert Greenwald's powerful new Wal-Mart film. Plus: Gay sex in the 1970s, the New York Dolls, a history of ballet, and a Kiyoshi Kurosawa ghost story.
Nov 3, 2005 | If talk radio and talk TV have largely become a province inhabited by right-wing know-nothingism (sure, there's Air America, but they're just a drop in the bucket), documentary film is now the land of lefty agitprop and muckraking. Is there some Marshall McLuhan-style proposition to discover here about the nature of these media, and the way they segment their audience? Maybe so. Red-faced guys in ties bloviating in real time makes for a "hot" medium, distilling unfocused rage and fear out of the atmosphere. The refracted shimmer of the documentary medium is much "cooler," with its quasi-naturalistic blend of talking-head interviews and archival footage, provoking a more detached, intellectual response.
I have decidedly mixed feelings about the way documentary film has become a branch of advocacy journalism -- but, hey, I don't hate it as much as the executives at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. do. Robert Greenwald's new film, "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices," has subjected the retail industry's Goliath -- already on the defensive after waves of lawsuits and bad publicity -- to new and harsh scrutiny. By my count, stories casting Wal-Mart in a dubious light (at the very least) have appeared in the New York Times five of the past seven days, most of them on either the front page or the front of the business section. While Greenwald's film didn't prompt all these stories, it's mentioned in all of them, and Wal-Mart now has a "war room" full of skilled political operatives principally devoted to countering the accusations it raises.
We didn't know about any of this alleged bad stuff, Wal-Mart insists -- and that happy little yellow Low-Pricey Man throws his gloved hands in the air and does his best impression of a frown. But as you watch Greenwald's movie that response becomes more and more incredible; what the chain's execs presumably didn't know about their global quest to drive costs, wages and prices ever downward dwarfs the already galactic scale of what George W. Bush and Dick Cheney presumably didn't know about Iraq. It's a crude analogy, but the same philosophical approach to the world is at work here, and it's no accident that Greenwald's earlier films -- which pioneered his distinctive guerrilla-marketing approach -- have tackled Fox News, the Iraq war and the 2000 presidential election.
Beyond the question of that polo shirt you bought for $3.79, for which some Indonesian teenager who gets two days off a year got paid 4 cents, it's a massive week for cultural history. We've got a documentary reminding us that for gay men, the 1970s weren't about poppers and coke and Fire Island parties and mind-blowing amounts of sex -- well, OK, yes they were -- but also about a culture and a community discovering itself, right before being hit with a veritable holocaust. We also witness the unlikely reunion of the New York Dolls from an even unlikelier perspective, and learn the impossible, delightful story of how ballet traveled from the 19th century Russian aristocracy to American popular culture. We've only got one fictional feature this time out, but it's a doozy for those so inclined, a creepy, slow-moving existential ghost story from the enigmatic Japanese master, Kiyoshi Kurosawa.
For you regular visitors to this space, no, your memory's not playing tricks. It's only been a week since my last catalog of oddities and obscurities, and starting right now Beyond the Multiplex will be appearing every Thursday. Partly that's because there are too damn many interesting movies to cover any other way, and partly it's thanks to the love and guidance of my awesome editors. But mostly it's because of you. So please -- drop a line when you can, tell me when I've endorsed yet another pretentious snore-fest or sneered at a masterpiece, point me at amazing things you've seen in overseas film festivals or your neighbor's collection of pirated DVDs, or tell me how I can make this space more friendly and useful. Just like the good folks at Wal-Mart, my goal is to work hard, embrace change and always try to do better.
"Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices": Freedom is slavery -- but we're cutting prices!
If Enron marked one extreme of turn-of-the-century capitalism, Wal-Mart, as depicted in Robert Greenwald's grimly mesmerizing film, marks another. You can't say that either company behaved irrationally: Both exist in a system that lavishly rewarded greed, falsehood and exploitation, and that never made clear where the acceptable limits lay or even whether they existed at all.
Enron was encouraged to lie because the financial markets had demonstrated, at least in the short term, that they didn't care whether reported profits were real or not. Wal-Mart's logic is even more inexorable: By virtually enslaving workers in third-world sweatshops and keeping its retail employees at home systematically overworked and underpaid, the chain could not only undersell all its competitors but also create a marketplace where low wages and low prices became mutually necessary. Nobody in the film quite puts it this way, but Wal-Mart was the Perfect Storm of the downshifting American economy. The cut-rate colossus didn't just ride the tide that sucked industrial jobs out of our towns and cities and spat out low-wage service-sector jobs in the sprawling exurbs -- it helped create it, and at the very least drastically accelerated it.
You probably know most of the information that appears in Greenwald's film by now -- a laundry list of anti-Wal-Mart indictments has been aired in the news media over the past few years -- but it remains a powerful experience to see it gathered together and supported by witness after witness. On various levels, "Wal-Mart" is a more effective and impressive film than either Greenwald's "Uncovered: The War on Iraq" or "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism." The target is more elusive, arguably more dangerous and definitely less well-understood, so Greenwald and his team have had to dig deeper and weave together many different strands of research and reporting. Knowledgeable critics of the Bush administration or Fox News are relatively easy to find. Whistle-blowers who know about the inside workings of Wal-Mart are few and far between, and this film will make you appreciate their courage and convictions.
