Tweaking the money masters

Famed pranksters the Yes Men bring their subversive exposés of corporate malfeasance to Concordia

It was a Yes Men stunt that got George W. Bush to state, “There ought to be limits to freedom.” The quote came in 1999, after the Yes Men had created a media frenzy over their faux Bush website, which gently contorted his philosophies, pushing him further into the loony Right.

The Yes Men—namely, Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum (pseudonyms for Igor Vamos and Jacques Servin, respectively)—have been stirring things up ever since, in a series of ingenious infiltrations of the media and corporate multinationals. Their latest film, The Yes Men Fix the World, is a strange mix of clever pranksterism and utopian wishful thinking. They dream of a world where governments and corporations actually behave themselves.

“We set about announcing what we’d like to see,” says Bonanno, on the line from his New York home. Their first stunt came about after they set up a fake website (one of their specialties) that looked just like an official one for Dow Chemicals. When the 20th anniversary of the Bhopal Union Carbide disaster approached, they were e-mailed by the BBC for an interview about the catastrophe, one that cost thousands of Indian lives. We see Bichlbaum do his best to calm his nerves before appearing on live TV to make the stunning announcement: since Dow has purchased Union Carbide, the corporation has decided to finally give millions of dollars in payments to those affected by the toxic accident and to clean up the site entirely.

Of course, Dow had made no such pledge. But the stunt put them in a tricky spot: they had to deny it, but to take any legal action against the Yes Men would only have drawn more atten­tion to the fact that Indians affected by the accident have received virtually no help. “Dow made a smart decision,” says Bonanno. “If they had pursued legal channels, it would have kept peo­ple talking about it. And the more people talk about it, the worse it is for them.”

HITLER’S BUSINESS CARD

Such is the anti-corporate agitprop crusading of the Yes Men, equal parts Swiftian satire and sublime silliness. Their latest film shows us their pre-stunt jitters (“We’re always a bit nerv­ous before we go on stage—we think they might be on to us,” says Bonanno) as well as their stunt follow-ups. They actually go to Bhopal to see firsthand the ongoing fallout from the most lethal industrial accident in history.

Bichlbaum says the stakes have been raised in the media universe. Fox News now pumps up political entities like the Tea Party, which purports to be a grassroots movement but in fact was concocted and bankrolled by billionaires. “A lot of people are spending a lot of money lying to the media. It’s called PR,” he says. “As long as we allow big corporations to say whatever they want and use the media as a platform, they’re going to do it.”

Equally strange are the Yes Men’s appearances at business conferences, where they deliver papers suggesting that slavery wasn’t such a bad thing for the economy. It’s not so much their presentations, but the fact that people in the audience seem entirely unfazed by such declarations. “They’re not usually stupid people,” says Bonanno. “They’re well educated, but take it seriously. Humans have very bizarre behavioural flaws. They need to collect the business cards, even if the card is Hitler’s.”

Bichlbaum credits much of his media sabotage instinct with his work as a gay activist in the AIDS group ACT UP in the ’90s in San Francisco. “ACT UP was quite brilliant in the way they used the media to get their message across. It had a huge impact on me.”

The Yes Men’s reach has grown. (Perhaps not surprisingly, Michael Moore is a big fan.) But both concede that as their notoriety grows, this makes it harder for them to fly under the radar for new media stunts. Thus they have developed the Yes Lab, where they coach activists on how to best infiltrate the mainstream media.

“We really do want to fix the world,” says Bichlbaum. “We hope that our stunts show audiences that they can do something too. We hope that people will get off their asses if they’re still sitting on them. And have a good belly laugh, if that’s what they need.”  ■

THE YES MEN WILL PRESENT THE YES MEN FIX THE WORLD AND STAY FOR A Q&A AFTER THE CINEMA POLITICA SCREENING AT CONCORDIA’S HALL BUILDING (1455 DE MAISONNEUVE W., ROOM H-110) ON MONDAY, DEC. 6, 7 P.M., FREE

Short URL: http://www.montrealmirror.com/wp/?p=16933