The Yes Men
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Hijinks ... Mike Bonanno, left, and Andy Bichlbauer.
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THE YES MEN
Directed by Chris Smith, Dan Ollman and Sarah Price
Rated M
Dendy Newtown and Opera Quays, Palace Verona, Cremorne
Orpheum
The Yes Men are pranksters - a word we haven't heard much in public life since the '60s, when Tom Wolfe chronicled the hallucinogenic adventures of Ken Kesey and his hippie band, the Merry Pranksters, in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Kesey's pranks were ends in themselves - drug-assisted outbursts of self-expression opposed to seriousness of all stripes. But the Yes Men, whose work is wholeheartedly celebrated in this documentary, have an agenda. In their sights is the World Trade Organisation, along with anything else that stands for the forces of globalisation.
So what's new about that? Given the likes of Super Size Me, The Corporation, Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism and the films of Michael Moore, it has long since begun to look as if American documentary-making is on a mission to expose big business's every transgression.
But there is a difference here. The Yes Men don't rage, rant or spray statistics at you. They arrange elaborate hoaxes then declare themselves horrified - in a wry sort of way - at the fact that so few people realise they're being fooled. Consult their website, gatt.org, which is designed to look exactly like the World Trade Organisation's home page, and you enter a hall of mirrors. If you accept what you see there - and hundreds have after straying on to the site, thinking that it's the real thing - you will come away convinced that the WTO is preparing for its own demise so that it can remake itself in a more liberal and humane form.
Indeed, this parody home page has been so effective in spreading confusion and misapprehension that various groups around the world have invited the Yes Men's leading members, Andy Bichlbauer and Mike Bonanno, to speak at conferences in the belief that they really are from the WTO - a prankster's dream come true.
In the film, we first meet them as Andy is struggling into the suit he'll be wearing as the WTO's representative at a textile industry conference in Finland. It's actually a clown's costume. Billed as a futurist's idea of something called an "executive leisure suit", it incorporates a giant blow-up phallus fitted with a computer screen. This is supposed to enable the holidaying businessman of the future to not only keep tabs on his factory workers but stun any slackers with an electric shock.
This creation is received with polite titters by the Finnish audience, presumably as a fair example of WTO humour. The filmmakers, sadly, don't press them on the point. In fact, they don't press anybody on any point. The film contains no response from the WTO itself. Nor does it give you anything but the barest facts about Andy and Mike. I still don't know what to make of an internet encyclopedia entry which says they are actually Jacques Servin, a writer, and Igor Vamos, an assistant professor in media arts at a New York polytechnic.
The film just records their progress in an admiring way as they move from Helsinki to Salzburg to Sydney in their guise as WTO spokesmen, doing their best to upset, outrage and confound, failing at almost every turn. Salzburg lawyers remain sanguine when they suggest that democracy might get a firmer grip on developing countries if voters were permitted to sell their votes to the party of the highest bidder.
In fact, the only audience to rise to the bait is the crowd of irate New York university students who start throwing things at their tormentor when he suggests one way of feeding poor people is to serve them hamburgers which would then be recycled from their own waste and served up again and again. Even so, this display of indignation is pretty alarming since it offers eloquent proof that the hoax has worked yet again.
It's all very funny in a mordant way, but the filmmakers' stance - that of unofficial cheer squad - eventually takes the edge off it. I felt cheated, for example, on behalf of the group of Sydney accountants who become the first people in the world to be treated to the Yes Men's fake announcement that the WTO has decided to reform itself along more liberal and democratic lines.
Reasonable people, they all think it's a great idea and don't really deserve to have injury piled on insult with the revelation that they've been had.
As a finale, this episode is anti-climactic and left me feeling nostalgic for the days when "crusading documentary" was not a piece of propaganda but a work of investigation.
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