Capitalism, Not The Whole Story

I just saw Michael Moore’s Capitalism, A Love Story. Weird, this movie is supposed to be about money and all that evil stuff (which it is), but I don’t think I’ve seen such a Jesus-centered film since The Passion of the Christ.
It’s a very personal film, perhaps Moore’s most personal. He has his father in it, an old guy in Flint, Michigan, pointing out where the factory used to be where he worked almost all his life but now raised to the ground. Michael clearly loves and respects his Dad. It also has a short grainy film from Michael’s first communion and the revelation that at one time, as a little boy, he wanted to be a Roman Catholic priest because of the priests he saw committing their lives to the poor. But underneath it all, underneath Moore’s shambling sweet-comic persona, there is a barely concealed, simmering anger.
He’s angry because of destruction of unions, because of banking deregulation, because so many people lost their homes and land, because of Wall Street dealing in “exotic instruments” and needing a massive bail-out from taxpayers (I understand “exotic” like this: you’re running a horse in a race that you’re sure is going to lose [because it’s actually people buying houses they can’t afford] and at the same time you’re taking bets in the form of huge I.O.U’s with a small but significant upfront payment against the time when the horse will actually lose and meanwhile you’re delaying the race and every week the horse doesn’t lose you’re paying out partial winnings and everybody’s happy because people keep placing the bets and there’s an astronomical amount of fictitious money pumped into the system until finally the horse collapses in plain sight and everybody’s asking where’s my money and of course there is none, and if that makes no sense then go see the film for the ridiculously funny bits when Moore gets a finance professional and a professor to try explain “derivatives” and they both get lost in the first sentence. It’s not meant to be understood.)
Michael is angry, and he’s also frustrated because he can’t figure out why the rest of us are not just as angry as he is, why in fact we’re not in a state of open revolt. He would like us to be but we’re not.
Now poor Michael, he’s is in a terrible bind. He knows the only way he can make his point and try to rouse us to action is by entertaining us, by making us laugh. He has to be funny, clownish, non-threatening in order in the process to inform us, provoke us, get us ultimately to threaten the massively vested interests that have got us in this mess. But how can that work? He runs the risk of being just about as subversive as Mary Tyler Moore. To make his point he has to be part of an entertainment industry whose business it is precisely to keep us with glazed eyes only half-aware of what really is happening to us and just too couch-comfortable to do anything. If Eisenhower back in 1961 warned of a military-industrial complex I think more likely he’d name it today as a military-financial-entertainment complex.
So where does that leave Michael Moore the filmmaker. What can he possibly show us to make a difference? Because that’s the thing about filmmaking, it’s about showing stuff, not primarily about abstract thought or ideas. It works at the level of the visual, of visual signs and the immediate impact they have. And what Moore shows us, unmistakably, out of the crisis of communication that grips him, is Jesus. The figure of Jesus runs through Capitalism, A Love Story like Best Supporting Actor, second only to Moore himself. He turns up in the priests and bishops Moore keeps interviewing, in hilarious clips from Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth with mashup voiceover in ripe Robert Powell tones (“I’m sorry I can’t heal you, it’s a pre-existing condition"), in an image of the Crucified strung up over the big banks, and finally in the stirring Woodie Guthrie song heard while credits roll, “They laid Jesus Christ in his grave.”
This is not liberation theology, telling us that Jesus is on the side of the poor. Sure, it is that on one level, but what difference is the theological idea going to make when we can’t even connect with the notion of $700 billion (and counting) being fleeced from the nation’s collective pockets? What is much more potent, and the only hope, is the abyssal truth of Jesus, crucified at the heart of the world system and slowly but surely subverting it with the earthquake of the innocent yet forgiving victim. You see what I mean? I mean it’s not about a political change founded in distributive justice and the struggle for such justice. It’s already too late for that. We’re like lobsters in a pot, cooked alive with lies and the violence of lies. But Jesus is faithful to the truth at a level deeper than any lie, and it is that faithfulness which calls us at this moment in time. He calls us to be faithful at this radical level, as individuals, as groups, as small communities, finding ways to live justly through love and forgiveness with each other. We do so in the knowledge that the world system is terminal and cannot be salvaged without a change that goes way beyond what any politician today can imagine or propose. It can only be helped at the level of the Crucified, the one who reveals all violence while offering it all forgiveness, and that means effectively, in the actual surrender of violence by humans. (For-giveness only really happens when the perpetrator gives in reciprocally to the giving of forgiveness.)
That is what Moore as artist and filmmaker understood and showed. And I take my hat off to him. Really there has always been capitalism, plutocracy etc. But the protest against it is a biblical thought—“let there be no poor among you.” What Jesus is doing goes deeper still. He says “Blessed are the poor,” meaning the absolute change in the world order has already occurred. Those who follow Jesus live that way, in an absolutely new way. For them the transformation has already happened, no matter what Fox News or Wall St. does. And by making Jesus Best Supporting Actor in his movie Moore really said that, even though he perhaps didn’t realize it. I am glad he didn’t get ordained. I don’t think the robes would suit him. But I’m sure glad he’s a filmmaker-priest, holding up the image of Christ deep in the world’s abyss.