Cinema Politico: The Gems of Political Documentary

The most popular documentaries of our time generally seem to border on propaganda. Michael Moore whispers grave condemnations about anything left of socialism when discussing health care in SiCKO, and Ben Stein babbles rightist nonsense in his idiotic intelligent design diatribe Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, going as far as conflating Darwinism with Nazism.

These strident voices only serve to vindicate the views of audience members who already agree with the films’ political stances. They also belie the brilliance of lesser-known nonfiction films. However, recent years have produced well-researched, nuanced documentaries that enlighten rather than reinforce personal preconceptions.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, a 2005 documentary on the collapse of America’s most infamous corporation, is one such work. Directed by Alex Gibney, the film takes a measured, professional approach to profiling the company’s downfall, remaining both comprehensive and understandable to the layman. Most Americans have a murky understanding of what Enron did, simply grasping that whatever the company’s actions were, they were bad. The Smartest Guys in the Room does a fantastic job dispelling that clouded perspective.

Enron’s story is outraging, but it is the facts that infuriate, not Stein-or-Moore-like narrative manipulation. The film also contextualizes Enron’s rise and fall, emphasizing that the company’s crimes did not happen in a vacuum—Enron executive Kenneth Lay’s friendship with the Bush family was integral to the company’s ephemeral success, as was its involvement in the electricity crisis that crippled California in 2000 and 2001.

Another business-based documentary worth watching is Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders, a 2006 film directed and written by James Scurlock that explores America’s destructive relationship with debt. Smartest Guys in the Room may be a better-crafted film, but Maxed Out is vital viewing, outlining the exploitation by companies and lenders that fomented our current economic crisis.

It has become far too easy to assign communal culpability for our financial woes to exonerate the finance sector. University President Lee Bollinger emphasized the point at his most recent fireside chat where he sympathized with a University trustee who was excoriated during a congressional hearing on the economy by stressing that the economic crisis “is everybody’s fault.”
Maxed Out makes that position untenable. Most damning is the testimony of Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren. She discusses her interactions with banking executives who, among other unscrupulous practices, refused to stop lending easy credit to risky clients they readily admitted were destined for delinquency because they produced short-term profits. She talks about visiting Congress and asking congressmen what would happen after the U.S. debt market collapsed (i.e. now). They responded with dumbfounded silence.

The filmmakers also uncover predatory practices used on customers. In Maxed Out, one interviewee is a mentally handicapped man who was swindled into signing up for a loan. The man’s handicap was so severe that the banker had to write out the man’s signature for him to copy.

Though it does dip into melodrama, Maxed Out is an important historical document. It reminds us that this recession was neither organic nor unforeseeable. The greed and—to be fair, though to a lesser extent—the consumer gullibility to buy into that greed were conscious choices with obvious consequences.

Fog of War, from director Errol Morris, possesses the same historical relevance as Maxed Out. Fog is an extended interview with Robert MacNamara, secretary of efense under Kennedy and Johnson. MacNamara has always been reticent about discussing his involvement in Vietnam, but in the film, along with his candid discussion about the rest of his career, he is forthright about his Pentagon years. Imagine how astonishing it would be to see Donald Rumsfeld sit for a frank interview about his failings in the Iraq War. Fog of War is the Vietnam equivalent.

Morris is both a brilliant documentarian and an adept aesthetician. Rather than rest all the laurels of his once-in-a-lifetime interview, he incorporates astounding footage of everything MacNamara discusses as well as a brooding Philip Glass score. Fog is as much a beautiful work of art as it is a revelatory look at history.

These three films examine sides of America that are not enjoyable to uncover, yet they enrich our understanding of history and culture. Watching these movies may not be as validating as having a brazen documentarian parrot your personal views, but it is a far more enriching experience.

David Berke is a Columbia College first-year. Cinema Politico runs alternate Tuesdays.