Hell yes! Starting Wednesday, Oct 7, Film Forum presents the U.S. Premiere of The Yes Men Fix The World – a very sharp comedy documentary about the exploits of those fabled agitators, The Yes Men – for a two-week engagement. Please see this movie.
The Yes Men are comedy terrorists – or freedom fighters depending on your orientation. Posing as spokesmen for Dow Chemical, they have taken responsibility for the 1984 Bhopal, India disaster where a Union Carbide plant leaked poison gas into the air that eventually killed around 22,000 with150,000 left disabled. On that appearance, they promised the Bhopalese $12 billion in reparations. Posing as Exxon, they have suggested using dead humans as a renewable fuel to a Global Warming conference in Calgary. Earlier this year, they put a smile on many a New Yorker’s face when they dropped 100,000 free editions of a righteous fantasy New York Times that led with the story: IRAQ WAR ENDS.
We have seen comedy documentary hybrids where our protagonist travels around and exposes what is wrong about a group of people or a system or even a nation – see Borat, or Religulous, or a Michael Moore picture – but the scope of the set-ups the Yes Men give us is something new and the laughs are like glimpses of freedom. The Yes Men and their crew of excellent filmmakers have achieved something special here by showing us brave men posing as corporate and government giants to put a little hope in the hands of the common man and woman, showing us the sweat that goes into their extremely deep cover, the humanity necessary to accept responsibility when that cover is blown, and then throwing a comedic façade over the whole thing that shrugs and says, “Aw, it was nothing.”
The Yes Men Fix The World opens up on Andy Bichlbaum in costume as Jude Finesterra, attempting to get into character. From the first shots, we see The Yes Men sweat. “Jude Finesterra” is about to go into the BBC studios in Paris on the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal catastrophe and tell the world that his corporation is going to set things right on behalf of their recently-purchased Union Carbide property. Mike Bonanno – the trained filmmaker in the pair – introduces himself from behind the camera. Then they tell us the “backstory.”
The Yes Men take us to their headquarters – a derelict garage where, like cartoon terrorists, they watch their vacuum-tube television from rubble seats and set-up fake websites for major corporations at their rubble desk. Like the life of any good fisherman, there is a lot of waiting. There are a few well-produced framing pieces to this documentary and headquarters is one of them. These framing devices and animated sequences are fantastic in that they offer a break from hanging with Mike and Andy as they do their work and that break makes the movie much more accessible. It doesn’t hurt that the production value is quite good. This value shows up too whenever Mike is on camera or any one of the talented camera-operators are following The Yes Men on their missions.
As the film progresses and hegemonic structures are explained to us, Mike and Andy take on new missions with the innocence of children. They find a problem, discover what can be done about that problem, pose as the people who could fix that problem, and then suggest a solution to as large an audience as possible. Eventually their solutions become more Swiftian. By the end, they are throwing pies more and more, but something about the genius of the cinematography, the facility of the editing, and the holy and hilarious seriousness with which The Yes Men tackle each project holds together.
There are flaws in this film – the shtick gets a little heavy sometimes, some of the missions feel awkwardly cobbled in – but the sum total is something very, very good.
One question that seems to come up again and again about The Yes Men, particularly when the television folks discover the egg on their face, is, “How do you think you made these people feel?” Most of the time the direct object in the question refers to the people who stood to benefit greatly from the news that later turned out to be a hoax. A beautiful thing about The Yes Men Fix The World is that the possibility that they are hurting people through their charades clearly bothers Mike and Andy. That question sticks in the craw so much that a couple times in the film, The Yes Men set out to find what they’re doing to the people they are trying to help. The results of these journeys are almost as uplifting as the daring cons.
In The Yes Men Fix The World, we get healthy doses of caper, comedy, and politics, but none of these ingredients is ever strong enough to sour the pot. The Yes Men tell us things that we want to hear, that make us believe that the world is inherently a good place, and they tell it to us in ways that capture the imagination. Watching Mike and Andy do what they do, one cannot help but have the feeling that doing what is right in this world is the thing to do, and if Mike and Andy can work as hard as they do to pretend to do what is right in the name of people who are not them … well, then perhaps we can all work a little harder to do what is right in this world, to be the change we want to see.
So, The Yes Men Fix The World? A little bit everyday. Showing at Film Forum October 7 through October 20.
