some thoughts on seeing SICKO
Jul. 4th, 2007 02:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
topazFirst of all, if you are already getting set to tell me that Michael Moore is a crackhead, or that his films are propaganda rather than documentary, please save yourself the trouble. Moore has said as much himself, with his "I am the balance" speech. I don't have a problem with calling his films "documentary," but I think he's best described as a "video essayist."
1. Michael Moore makes an ironic counterpoint to talk radio.
Commercial talk radio is overwhelmingly right-wing (cf. Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Jay Severin, ad nauseam). A common liberal complaint is that talk radio is dominated by right-wing voices. The answer most frequently given is that if liberals don't like it they should come up with their own damn show.
(That's actually the right answer. Yes, I know Air America sucks. The left wing's failure to come up with a consistently entertaining radio voice is a huge embarrassment to the whole of Blue America, believe me.)
The funny thing is that Michael Moore's overwhelmingly left-wing stance in film has led conservatives to complain for years about his liberal bias raging unchecked in our nation's movie theaters. Surely the right wing's solution to Michael Moore is the same as the left wing's solution to Rush Limbaugh. Why haven't they figured that out yet?
2. The most widely publicized criticisms of the movie studiously avoid addressing its main point.
This is the core claim of SiCKO: when a health care system is based on a simple profit-and-loss model — that is, ours — then the corporate goal of maximizing profit and minimizing loss will inevitably translate to denying people access to medicine, even medicine they need desperately.
The first third of the movie builds that argument with interviews of former and current HMO employees who describe a corporate culture of systematically denying medical care even to patients in critical need. The second third explores potential counterexamples: interviewing patients who have moved to Canada for medical care, American expatriates and doctors in France, and the staff of a British hospital. The final third is classic Michael Moore theater: he loads most of the people interviewed in the first two-thirds of the film onto a small boat and takes them first to Guantanamo Bay and then to Cuba in an attempt to find doctors who can help them.
Given all that, I probably shouldn't be surprised that most of the criticism of the movie amounts to "OMG can you believe it he compared us to CUBA!!" But it is hard not to notice that no one has yet found fault with Moore's assertions about the shortcomings of the U.S. managed care system. That seems to me like a deeply telling omission.
1. Michael Moore makes an ironic counterpoint to talk radio.
Commercial talk radio is overwhelmingly right-wing (cf. Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Jay Severin, ad nauseam). A common liberal complaint is that talk radio is dominated by right-wing voices. The answer most frequently given is that if liberals don't like it they should come up with their own damn show.
(That's actually the right answer. Yes, I know Air America sucks. The left wing's failure to come up with a consistently entertaining radio voice is a huge embarrassment to the whole of Blue America, believe me.)
The funny thing is that Michael Moore's overwhelmingly left-wing stance in film has led conservatives to complain for years about his liberal bias raging unchecked in our nation's movie theaters. Surely the right wing's solution to Michael Moore is the same as the left wing's solution to Rush Limbaugh. Why haven't they figured that out yet?
2. The most widely publicized criticisms of the movie studiously avoid addressing its main point.
This is the core claim of SiCKO: when a health care system is based on a simple profit-and-loss model — that is, ours — then the corporate goal of maximizing profit and minimizing loss will inevitably translate to denying people access to medicine, even medicine they need desperately.
The first third of the movie builds that argument with interviews of former and current HMO employees who describe a corporate culture of systematically denying medical care even to patients in critical need. The second third explores potential counterexamples: interviewing patients who have moved to Canada for medical care, American expatriates and doctors in France, and the staff of a British hospital. The final third is classic Michael Moore theater: he loads most of the people interviewed in the first two-thirds of the film onto a small boat and takes them first to Guantanamo Bay and then to Cuba in an attempt to find doctors who can help them.
Given all that, I probably shouldn't be surprised that most of the criticism of the movie amounts to "OMG can you believe it he compared us to CUBA!!" But it is hard not to notice that no one has yet found fault with Moore's assertions about the shortcomings of the U.S. managed care system. That seems to me like a deeply telling omission.
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Date: 2007-07-05 04:34 am (UTC)This doesn't have a bearing on the movie as far as I know, except to say that in some ways Cuba does have very good doctors.