‘Roger’ and Reality : Why is ‘Roger & Me’ getting knocked so vehemently for using age-old documentary techniques?

Michael Moore’s “Roger & Me” is at the center of the hottest debate in the movie world. Is it a “real” documentary or just an amazing simulation? The film has attained “more-than-a-movie” status, which in this case means an awful lot of people aren’t sure just exactly what to make of it.

Included in the confusion is the documentary committee of the Motion Picture Academy, which will reveal Wednesday whether “Roger & Me” has been nominated into Oscarland. If you recall, last year’s “more-than-a-movie” docuthingamajig, Errol Morris’ “The Thin Blue Line,” with its dreamy re-enactments and its Philip Glass score, was passed over by the committee--and the film only ended up saving a guy’s life. It may turn out that “Roger & Me” will save the city of Flint, Mich., but, for now, it appears to exist primarily as a launching pad for Moore’s burgeoning media career.

Unfortunately, the debate being raged over the film has very little to do with its subject--the effect of auto-plant closings in Flint instigated by General Motors Chairman Roger Smith--and everything to do with Moore’s character and motives resulting from revelations about the film’s jumbled, misleading chronology. Every day seems to bring forth fresh revelations. What’s next? Will the Roger Smith of the movie turn out to be some two-bit actor? Will Michael Moore turn out to be the real Roger Smith?

I’m basically pro-”Roger & Me.” It’s a black-comic jape on Reagan-era heartlessness, and maybe the only movie ever made that could appeal equally to Mark Twain and Diane Arbus. But certainly, Moore has a lot to answer for, both as film maker and media personality. The patchwork sequencing of events in “Roger & Me”--the way events occurring prior to February, 1987, appear to have taken place afterward--represents at the very least a breach of journalistic etiquette. As a self-created persona, Moore has positioned himself, both on and off camera, as the auteur of this particular media drama, and he’s also taken it upon himself to be the Ralph Nader of the ‘90s, and maybe the Will Rogers of the ‘90s too.

But his standard working-class uniform of baseball cap and down jacket, his just-scraping-by demeanor and his talk of financing his $200,000 movie by setting up bingo games and selling his house, don’t jibe with the man who, according to the Detroit Free Press, received a $250,000 advance in the summer of 1988 from Doubleday and Co. to write a book about two families living in Flint. You’d never know from this movie that Moore’s dismissal as editor of Mother Jones in 1986 after a brief five-month stint was, in the minds of many--but not his--a direct result not of political head-butting but, rather, of managerial incompetence.

There’s lots more where this came from, but I don’t think ad hominem attacks on Moore necessarily make a convincing case against his movie. Except in this sense: The film is steeped in Moore’s “sensibility,” which is often a lot closer to David Letterman at his most snide than to Will Rogers. Entertaining and purposefully enraging as it is, “Roger & Me” doesn’t show off its issues, or its people, with any real complexity. It’s as if Moore thought too much brainwork would spoil the show. (The posture isn’t helpful, it’s condescending.) Like many a gifted political cartoonist, which is essentially what he is, Moore is interested in people as caricatures to prove his point--in this case, that capitalism, at least as practiced by GM, is without a social conscience.

Still, Moore is not the first film maker to promote a populist self-image; he’s not the first to hog all the glory. If one judges documentaries by the personae, public or otherwise, of their creators, what is one to make of, say, Marcel Ophuls (“The Sorrow and the Pity”), Claude Lanzmann (“Shoah”) or the late Emile D’Antonio (“Millhouse”), all film makers with notoriously “difficult” and self-aggrandizing personalities? For that matter, should we lower our opinion of “Guernica” because Picasso was a bad man?

A more productive debate should address the question of what we mean when we call a movie a documentary. Does Moore’s movie cross the line?

Apparently, almost nobody is very satisfied with the notion that documentaries are undefinable. I think they are though, and, I think the form’s very undefinition is its glory. The great film historian and documentarian Kevin Brownlow has written, “The gulf between the so-called pure documentary, which records only actuality, and the reconstructed documentary, which is branded a fake, is not as broad as we have been led to suppose. There are precious few documentaries that have not resorted to some kind of restaging . . . the bizarre truth is that the most effective films of fact have been subject to almost as much manipulation as fact films.”

Sure, documentaries are supposed to depict “real” events with real people, but what does that mean exactly? The very inclusion of the documentary film maker into the “real” event changes the nature of the event. Every camera angle, every cut, implies a choice, a position taken by the film maker. Objectivity no more exists in the documentary than it does in the fiction film. (And fiction films, let’s not forget, draw on documentary techniques all the time.) In any event, it’s the documentaries that most aspire to lordly objectivity--those dreary “educational” films about the basic food groups, or some such--that have given documentaries a bad name. The greatest documentaries have always been the ones that expressed the directors’ minds and vision.

Moore is self-serving when he talks about “Roger & Me” being an undocumentary-like “fun” movie, and he’s just plain wrong when he burbles on in Capote-like fashion about how he’s created a new art form, the “docucomedy.” (For starters, check out Ross McElwee’s “Sherman’s March.”) But the implication of his argument is valid: A documentary that is boring is not a good movie. Boringness should not be a signifier of quality, though in the high-art movie world, it often is taken to be.

Are Moore’s offenses in “Roger & Me” hanging offenses? I don’t think so. Yes, he’s flimflammed the audience into accepting his chronology of events. But the central point is this: Moore does not misrepresent the basic situation in Flint. He does not mischaracterize the city, state or federal response to Flint’s plight. He does not distort GM’s callousness. His re-ordering of events is an attempt to structure the film in a way that mimics traditional fictional narrative, and it could be argued that the re-ordering, though misguided, is at least an effort to make the movie and its “message” accessible to the widest possible audience. There aren’t all that many movies that rummage around inside the debris of Reaganomics, or that point up the brutal class divisions in American society. Why is “Roger & Me” getting knocked so vehemently--and from the watchdog left as much as from the right--for the same techniques that documentarians have been employing since the birth of movies?

Is it because the film has a political edge, and gets a satiric kick out of sharpening that edge?

In the last few years, a number of apolitical documentaries have “transgressed” at least as much as “Roger & Me.” The most blatant example occurred several years back with “Pumping Iron II,” George Butler’s highly acclaimed female body builder movie. Butler ostensibly followed several contestants through their paces in preparation for the Caesar’s Cup World Championship. What the film didn’t tell you was that the Cup was mounted specifically for the film, with some of the prize money kicked in by the film’s backers. Butler shot sequences with the women working out for the Cup six months after the competition. He coached them on their “roles” and scripted many of their scenes. There was no public outcry.

If this example isn’t elevated enough for you, how about the work of America’s greatest documentarian, Robert Flaherty? Flaherty once wrote, “Sometimes you have to lie. One often has to distort a thing to catch its true spirit.” And that’s exactly what Flaherty did in some of the greatest documentaries ever made. In “Nanook of the North,” Flaherty paid the Eskimos to perform re-enacted rituals for the camera. He staged hunts and insisted the Eskimos employ harpoons, though harpoons had long since been replaced by rifles. In “Man of Aran,” Flaherty sent the island’s inhabitants on a shark hunt years after such a practice had ended. In both films, “real” footage was fitted into a prearranged narrative that expressed Flaherty’s romantic vision of life.

In the modern age, documentaries have largely become the province of television. The financing is more readily available; the opportunities for topicality are greater; so is the potential viewing audience. “Roger & Me” is one of the rare theatrical successes in the documentary field, and it comes out at a time when “infotainment” and “reality” TV are increasingly what passes for serious documentary news reporting. A lifetime diet of hype has supposedly made us super-wise to the trumpery of media manipulation. We’re supposed to know what “reality” is.

Nevertheless, this emphasis on “reality” is essentially another media con--a preemptive strike on our own wayward disbelief. We like to think we’re too sharp to buy the obviously slick and staged, but the favored new “rough” look of reality is more difficult to dismiss--whether it be presidential campaign spots or the simulation of events on the nightly news or the tell-all talkfests like “Geraldo” whose babble is the obbligato to our tawdry times.

This is the climate in which “Roger & Me” has opened, and probably it’s a healthy sign that so many questions have been raised about its veracity. Better too many than too few. Michael Moore may palm himself off as a bumpkin who never set an f-stop before embarking on his movie, but he’s slick enough to have co-opted the techniques of “reality” TV for his own political point-making. The points are eminently worth making, though. Just because “Roger & Me” is “real” doesn’t mean it isn’t real.