It takes some nerve, not to mention diabolical intelligence and financial resources, to pull off the elaborate pranks devised by Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno (who are in real life Jack Servin and Igor Vamos), the antiglobalization activists and satirical performance artists known as the Yes Men.
Whether their high jinks accomplish much beyond momentarily embarrassing the corporations and government agencies they misrepresent at business conferences and public forums is an open question. But it is great fun to watch them do their dirty work. In their second film, “The Yes Men Fix the World,” they pose as representatives of Dow Chemical, Halliburton, Exxon and the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. The most outrageous of the modest proposals offered by these impostors might have made Jonathan Swift smile.
“What we do is pass ourselves off as representatives of big corporations we don’t like,” Mr. Bonanno cheerfully explains at the beginning of the film. “We make fake Web sites, then wait for people to accidentally invite us to conferences.”
The Yes Men have no doubts about the righteousness of their cause. At the top of their enemies list stand Milton Friedman, “the guru of greed” (their words) and champion of free-market economies, who died three years ago, and his followers.
In the movie’s first and greatest prank, they set up a fake Dow Chemical Web site and waited for a response. A week before the 20th anniversary of the 1984 Bhopal disaster at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in India, the BBC mistook their site for the real thing and invited a corporate representative to give a live interview. Posing as the fictional Jude Finisterra, Mr. Bichlbaum declared on television that Dow, which had bought Union Carbide in 2001, was taking complete responsibility for the deadly gas leak and would set up a $12 billion fund to compensate the victims and clean up the site.
Dow stock plummeted, until the hoax was revealed. But the company never acted on the Yes Men’s suggestions, and television commentators denounced the stunt as a cruel joke for giving the victims of the disaster false hope. But when the Yes Men are shown visiting Bhopal after the interview, the people they talk to express an amused gratitude for the news media attention.
In the silliest and most Swiftian stunt, the Yes Men impersonated Exxon spokesmen at an energy conference in Calgary, Alberta, and passed out candles made of Vivoleum, a foul-smelling new biofuel supposedly made of flesh from people who had recently died. In a filmed testimonial, the stand-up comedian Reggie Watts plays an Exxon janitor dying of cancer who donated his body to produce the test version of the fuel. The hoax was spotted, and the Yes Men ejected.
The funniest prank, played at a gathering of insurers, has them pretending to be Halliburton representatives demonstrating the Survivaball, an inflatable pod six feet in diameter and engineered to be an all-purpose protection from catastrophic climate change. The wearer, once outfitted, resembles a giant doughnut equipped with buglike feelers, waddling along in baby steps. How anyone could take such an invention seriously is almost beyond comprehension. But at the end of the demonstration, insurance representatives line up to accept the Yes Men’s fake business cards.
In New Orleans Mr. Bichlbaum, posing as Rene Oswin, a bogus spokesman for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, announces to a group of contractors that instead of tearing down public housing that had been relatively unscathed by Hurricane Katrina, HUD would rebuild and reopen it for the return of displaced residents. The agency was not amused, and once again the Yes Men were denounced for spreading false hope.
In the movie’s final stunt the Yes Men printed and passed out thousands of copies of a facsimile of The New York Times, dated July 4, 2009, and stamped with the motto “All the news we hope to print,” with the headline “Iraq War Ends.” It concludes the movie on a wistful, utopian note.
If the Yes Men’s antics have a lot in common with the stunts of Sacha Baron Cohen and Michael Moore, they are executed more in the spirit of dry amusement than as showboating, gotcha moments. For as entertaining as they are, the Yes Men are not stars; after the movie ends, it is hard to remember what they look like.
Their failure to shame companies like Dow Chemical into doing what the Yes Men believe to be the right thing brings up the question of why they bother. I imagine they would argue that they are sowing the seeds of a populist revolt somewhere down the line. If they can do it, why not us?
THE YES MEN FIX THE WORLD
Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.
Written and directed by Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno; edited by April Merl; music by Neel Murgai and Noisola; produced by Mr. Bichlbaum, Mr. Bonanno, Doro Bachrach, Ruth Charny and Laura Nix; released by Shadow Distribution. At Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of Avenue of the Americas, South Village. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. This film is not rated.
