Who Knew It'd be This Easy?

The Yes Men Show Audiences The Power of

By Laura Kwerel

The Yes Men are not who you think they are. Their movie, in theaters now, is a frightening look at the power of men in suits in which the Yes Men - Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum - become stand-in WTO officials, and the world believes them.

Sporting fake gold watches, cheap three-piece suits, and really big briefcases, the Yes Men duped PhDs all over Europe. They had fancy PowerPoint presentations, and important-sounding names like Dr. Andreas Bichlbauer and Hank Hardy Unruh. They shook everybody's hands like politicians. But if their academy-educated audiences had paid a little more attention, they would've realized that the two men lecturing them about textiles weren't European professors from the World Trade Organization—they were Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum, two slick dudes from the good ole U.S. of A.

In The Yes Men, we follow Mike and Andy as they convince unsuspecting lecture halls they're from an organization they detest, stating what they figured the WTO would say—well, meant to say. Believing the WTO says one thing and does another, Mike and Andy were just going to say their true intentions for them, taking the WTO's own arguments to their logical extreme. They find that as long as they wore nice suits and stood behind a podium, they couldn't stretch the conclusions far enough—the audience always reacted with polite applause.

Mike and Andy had been pulling pranks for years, but no one really took notice until they created a fake website bearing the former name of the WTO's own site, gatt.org. The graphics and logos were exact replicas of the originals, but the content was just a cleverly worded mockery. Because most people didn't bother to read it, many of them mistook the site for the real thing—including an organizer of a conference in Austria, who wanted the WTO to show up and discuss trade issues. Mike and Andy were more than happy to oblige.

One thrift-store suit and a snappy PowerPoint presentation later, Andy was "Dr. Andreas Bichlbauer," an expert on international trade law. Bichlbauer offered some interesting suggestions, including the creation of vote-auction.org, a forum where votes could be sold to the highest bidder. Even though it completely undermined the basic principals of democracy, no one rejected it; indeed, one of the other panelists told him it was a great idea.

The producers at CNBC couldn't have been reading gatt.org that closely either, because they contacted the site to invite a WTO representative to speak on "Marketwrap Europe." This time Andy was "Granwyth Hulatberi," and he was responding to allegations by WTO protestors. He declared the protesters were "focused too much on reality" and that they needed to stop leaning on "facts and figures." He ended by noting that "all the powerful people in the world happen[ed] to coincide" with the WTO's ideas. Still, no one batted an eyelash.

The next stunt distorted—or rather, clarified—the WTO's logic to such an extreme it was grotesque. How the lecture was received with loud applause defies explanation; Let's just say it involved a golden, three-foot phallus.

The Yes Men is not as patiently filmed, or beautifully realized, as American Movie (the previous documentary by the same directors). But it's for a good reason. Yes Men's haphazard, threadbare cinematography resembles Mike and Andy's breathless trajectory across the continents as they try to attend conferences on time. They always seem to be late, and have made a dozen tiny mistakes by the time they get there. But no amount of planning ahead can prepare them for show time. When Mike and Andy have to get on stage as WTO spokesmen, all the real work is done in the moment, on the fly; The hand-held camera perfectly captures this tension.

In the end, the year's most humorous documentary is also its most disturbing. There's nothing funny about the willingness of educated people to blindly follow whatever tripe a corporation like the WTO tells them. It seems this film is as much about human psychology (think the Milgram study) as it is about corporate immorality. In one of the Yes Men's last performances, they suggest that the WTO be dismantled and remade, to "ensure that it will have human, rather than business interests as its bottom line." The crowd bought that one, too.

Q & A
On September 3rd, I had the unusual opportunity to talk to the Yes Men themselves. I found Mike and Andy to be two of the most charming, funny people I have ever met. Our discussion was less a formal interview than a lively conversation—frequently spiked with their infectious laughter.

YES MEN: THE INTERVIEW


How did you settle on the name "the Yes Men"?
MIKE: It just came naturally, because we were trying to figure out what we were actually doing, and it turned out that we were sort of agreeing with people. We were trying to find people with the most repugnant criminal ideas that we could find, and then agree with them until they kind of revealed their worst ideas. It was sort a circus of agreement-so that's why we called ourselves the Yes Men-we were out there saying "yes".

How do you think these big corporations like the WTO are able to naturalize these ideas and not only make them seem unremarkable, but inevitable?
ANDY: I mean that is an amazing process, and it seems like it's a process of education, It's been going on for around 200 years, since the economist kind of borrowed these Darwinian models to show that greed was good, basically that greed could somehow benefit the poor and the disenfranchised, that in fact the whole system required greed, in order to benefit them. And it's this absurd foundation, but somehow, over the last 200 years, it's been built into our education, and we all grow up believing it in America, at least if you've had a traditional public education. You learn this idea that free trade is going to benefit people, and that allowing the people at the top of the pyramid to freely operate is going to help that. And so I think it's a long process that's based in education and a philosophy-it's kind of like faith, it's a religion
MIKE: And it's not a coincidence that it benefits the richest people in the world, the most powerful people in the world, and who's in control of education-it's the most powerful people and that's what creates it. Gosh, that's almost word for word what I said on CNBC!

Do you think your demonstrations reveal as much about corporate immorality as they do about human psychology-people's willingness to listen to authority, whether or not what they're saying is right?
ANDY: Both, I think. Part of it is just a human thing, where they're in this room..that says they're with the WTO, they respect the WTO immensly, and so they're willing to listen to it. But that in itself is really scary--that the WTO has that kind of authority--and it shows that those people are not really paying attention, and we expect that they are. We give a certain amount of trust to experts..and we think that they're paying attention and going to notice, they're somehow authorized to control, watch what's going on more than we are. There's also the fact that it's not actually unusual-all the horrible things that we were saying were sort of details in a bigger picture that was ok.

You're just pushing their own logic to their natural conclusions
ANDY: Yea, but they didn't notice, because the basic logic is there.

But what's scary is I think that they were paying attention-well sort of-they weren't spacing out, and they could recall what you said, and they could summarize it in a way that edited out the strange parts.
MIKE: They especially did a lot of that in Salzburg. There was this law firm, and we thought 'well nobody could have heard what he was saying, because surely they would have objected to making the siesta illegal, in the interest of efficiency, or selling votes to the highest bidder.' But when we later engaged in an e-mail exchange with them, it turned out that they had these photographic memories. Some of them remembered line for line what Andy had said, and they spent years in law school learning that, probably--how to take notes or just remember very well. And then it became especially weird. It was like, what was going on? They really were listening, they really did hear it? But one guy said, 'Well, sure he talked about voting, but nothing that-
ANDY: It was in the context of making markets more efficient. Which is true. That's so accurate. 'Sure he talked about voting.' And normally people would say, 'Yea, he talked about voting, he talked about how corporations buy votes.' But all he could hear was 'Yea, he talked about voting, it was about making markets more efficient.' And that kind of sums it up. He was hearing one thing-'Markets more efficient, markets more efficient, greed is good,' and everyone else is hearing like, 'Blah.' You know, it's education, too much education

It seems people are anesthetized by their PhD's: they're recalling it, but the way they recall it-something's missing, this human element. So what is the difference between the corporate mindset and the real student mindset? Why are students less receptive to your ideas?
MIKE: They haven't been indoctrinated into the system in quite so dramatic a way, but they're also in an environment where they're encouraged to question. In that case [with the Yale students], Richard Robbins, their professor has written a bunch of books that really look at the core issues of corporate globalization, and try to understand it as a kind of cultural phenomenon; so I think they were already, some of them, engaged in questioning that, questioning the ideas we were there to speak about-so that helped, as well. But it's mostly that they didn't have years of training in that area, and that helped.
ANDY: It's funny-free market theory-it's almost like when someone insists endlessly on something it may mean that actually the opposite is true? With free market theory, it insists absolutely; it's dominate metaphor is nature, and that the free market and greed is natural. And that's right, it's natural, but it's actually so unnatural--that way of thinking-that anybody normal, like students who haven't been indoctrinated, perceives it as completely unnatural, and only people who've been through 20 years of schooling can see it as natural.

How are you guys able to maintain your composure while you're up there? When you know you're about to go up there-how do you not lose it?
MIKE: It's easy because they all agree with you. They all think you are who you say you are, and you know who you say you are, but they don't. And when you're an actor, when you're on a stage, you know you aren't who you are, and they also know, so you have to convince both of you, and first you work really hard to convince yourself, and then them. You can get up there not believing who you are, and they believe it so strongly, that by the end you're just acting this role automatically. It's much easier than acting

And ultimately, there's really nothing funny about what you're basically talking about..it's pretty far from humorous
ANDY: It's pretty nasty; I mean, it's fun to be really mean and nasty and say horrible things, its really fun to do that, but you know it's not funny
MIKE: It's fun to be really mean and nasty and say horrible things.
ANDY: It is. But it's not funny.
MIKE: The difference is it's not fun to do them.
ANDY: Well, it is fun to do them….the Republicans must be having a rush.
MIKE: Yea, but fun? Do you call that fun?
ANDY: You're right, you're right.
MIKE: It's something much more demented, it has something to do with power and greed and excitement.

What do you do when you're not being Yes Men? Or can you even separate that from who you are?
MIKE: Yea, that's a good question. It's difficult these days; it's kind of all our time. But normally I have a job, I work, I do plays every once in a while. I'm in a band. We play on Wednesday nights, at Artie's, at the open mike. Our band changes every week-we don't have the same members, and we never do a song twice. We meet 10 minutes before.

Do you think the average person thinks that the world is just too big for them to change?
ANDY: It seems like most people have that feeling.
MIKE: There's a lot of 'Well what can I do?' So we're sort of saying, well, you can do whatever you can do-we don't have any special talent for this really, it's just something we started doing-
ANDY: Something we stumbled into-
MIKE: …And it turns out what we do what we're doing pretty well, but it's kind of like-
ANDY: Not fantastically well-
MIKE: But we're getting better at it. I mean you see in the movie we make all kinds of really stupid mistakes, and we just kept doing that, but you kind of just keep working your way through; and we just hope that people do whatever they can, because things have gotten pretty dire lately.
ANDY: There's so many different ways to do things. Going to law school, and figuring out exactly how the laws work, it's so useful and exciting, I think. There are so many different ways. In any position, there are lots of things to do. It's just figuring it out, not being bound by a conception that you have to take a particular route to get there.


You don't know what you're doing, so you just pretend-
ANDY: That's the way people learn language as babies apparently; I had a friend who had a baby once. It seems like the baby is just kind of imitating, it's just faking it, acting like people when they talk, and eventually it kind of gets it. It's clearly what these experts are doing. Nobody really gets it, it's all just faking-'Of course, greed is good.' And eventually, they talk it fluently and forget that they ever didn't know it-didn't think that way.

It's like a language-I understand what they [WTO spokespeople] are saying but it's got all this filler in it, it's this whole new vocabulary. When you boil it down, they're really not saying anything…it's really scary how it's got this absence of meaning-it's dead, except it has all these words in it. And that's what you were able to replicate
ANDY: Right.
MIKE: It's recasting these sinister ideas into this arcane language.

How do you feel about the Yes Men turning into a brand?
ANDY: It's appalling. There seems to be no avoiding it, but it's appalling.
MIKE: Yea, it's awful. We're embarrassed by it. But at the same time, it seems necessary in some ways. We want people to see this stuff, and we really want to tell this story to as many people as possible, but we don't know of any way to do it besides collaborating like this.
ANDY: No, no there's other ways. There's sending out press releases and getting stories in the mainstream press, and we've done that before.
MIKE: But we could never tell people an hour-long story.
ANDY: That's right; we could never sit them down for an hour and a half and get them to listen to what we want to tell them.