Roger & Me

Introduction

In the winter of 1989-1990, the remarkable box office success of Michael Moore's first film, Roger & Me, raised eyebrows across the United States. Never before had a documentary film so totally significant of corporate USA received the mixture of national advertising and serious honors that Moore's film garnered. That recognition and acclaim were well deserved. Roger & Me is a brilliant documentary depiction, and biting satiric dissection, of the social structure and political-cultural dynamics of what is now so often called "post-industrial" America.

Discussion

Michael Moore's subject is the decline of his hometown, Flint, Michigan, the birthplace and largest production center of the General Motors Corporation. From the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, Flint was rocked by corporate decisions that closed several major factories and moved other important GM product lines out of the city. Together, General Motors' plant closings and modernization programs reduced its Flint-area work force from a peak of 79,000 in the early 1970s to just 49,000 in 1989. The jobs lost were among the highest paying in the country, and they have not been replaced. So the city that Moore recalls in the opening scenes of Roger & Me as a prosperous and happy place to grow up is shown through most of the film as "the unemployment capital of America." This Flint appears on screen as a grim and scary environment with countless blocks of boarded-up homes and businesses and lots of desperate and hopeless people.

Roger & Me blames this man-made disaster on GM and especially Roger Smith, the company's chairman during the 1980s. In the film, Moore constructs a tale of his own carefully staged, futile efforts to get Roger Smith to answer questions about the plant closings in Flint. This technique is very much like what Norman Mailer developed in his "nonfiction novels" of the 1960s: Armieso f theN ight,M iamia nd theS iegeo f Chicagoa, nd Of a Fire on theM oon.M ichael Moore is in fact the main character, as well as the narrator, of his own celluloid nonfiction novel. Moore's on-screen confrontations with a variety of receptionists, desk clerks, security guards, public relations personnel, and other low-level corporate "flak-catchers"ar e among the film's most humorous scenes. But they also effectively disclose the way that corporate decision makers like Roger Smith, who have the power to make or break a community, insulate themselves from the injuries, the pain, ...