I suppose it's the effect of the general malaise brought on by summer, but "Summer Movie Season" brings with it "Summer Movie Syndrome", a condition in which no one has any expectations or pre-conceptions other than the films will be big, dumb, loud, and occasionally funny. Transformers has all of those elements in spades (though I didn't particularly care for it, but review is not the aim of this post). The dumber the better, don't ask me to think too hard, just sit back and enjoy the ride. As one writer once put it, "They're not supposed to be good. Your eyes are supposed to be glazed". The problem with "Summer Movie Syndrome", though, it is has crept into the other seasons, and now seems to have been adopted as the status quo in cinema and life in America in general.
Michael Moore's Sicko is not a "summer movie", though it is at times big, dumb, loud, and occasionally funny. The common wisdom is that Moore's picture is a piece of agitprop designed to convince us to adopt "SOCIALIZED MEDICINE". That's not what it' really is, no matter how many times Sean Hannity says it. This understanding of the film is simply the result of Summer Movie Syndrome run amuck. The way I saw it, Sicko is not so much an argument for "SOCIALIZED MEDICINE" so much as it is an attempt to force the discussion of the broader issue (perhaps even meta-issue) of the state of our health care system.
It's not as simple as "free-market" vs. "statist" in Moore's film, instead he is telling us that our system does not work as well as it should/could and shows a few select examples of things that work in other places. He has said himself in the many interviews he's done on the press tour for the movie that he knows there are problems with any system, but that it should make sense to try to incorporate as many functional aspects from good systems as possible.
A local radio hostess tonight was ranting about "SOCIALIZED MEDICINE", declaring, "I don't want the same people who run the DMV doing surgery on me. I don't want bureaucrats in Washington or the state capitol deciding which doctor or hospital I can go to". I'm sure most in her listening audience lapped up this nonsense, but make no mistake, it is nonsense because it is completely sidesteps the realities of the current system. Roger Ebert astutely points out in his review of Sicko, "Of course we have heard all about "socialized medicine," which among many evils denies you freedom of choice of hospitals and doctors. Hold on: That's the free-enterprise HMO system."
As an aside, we wouldn't be in a "HEALTH CARE CRISIS" is we took better care to look after our health in the first place. Instead, over half of adults are clinically overweight or obese; people are less active, more prone to excess portions and fast food, sleep deprivation, unsafe fad diets, and even perilous over-excercise now more than ever. Rush Limbaugh opined on radio today that in 20 years it will be skinny kids ostracized and teased and made outcasts by the legions of fat children. If we were more moderate, more sensible in lifestyle choices heart disease would not be the #1 killer in America. We wouldn't have to spend so much on cholesterol and blood pressure and diabetes medication. There would be fewer strokes, heart attacks, and fewer people in a doctor's office on any given day. This, however, is not in the best interest of the medical profession, which would suffer considerable financial harm if people were, oh, I don't know....healthy.
Winding our way back to Sicko. Mark Twain wrote a short story entitled "A Fable: A Cat, A Painting, A Mirror" (or some combination of those three). In the story, a painter hangs his latest painting on a wall facing a mirror so he can admire it in the mirror, because "...this softens it, and it is twice as lovely as it was before." Well, a housecat overhears the painter musing to himself on how wonderful his painting is and goes to tell all the animals in the forest. They want to know what a painting is, so the cat goes into the painter's room, but he doesn't know where to stand to look at the painting in the mirror, so he stands directly between the painting and the mirror and sees only himself. He reports to the animals that the painting looks like a cat. They want to see for themselves, so they all go and each stands between the painting and the mirror and sees only itself (Nevermind how an elephant got in the room or why a cow would be in the forest...it's summer, just go with it).
Twain's moral to the story: "You can find in a text whatever you bring, if you will stand between it and the mirror of your imagination. You may not see your ears, but they will be there." This, I think, is at least part of the brush-back against Moore, certain viewers came in expecting to hate it and stood in front of the mirror seeing their own opinions reflected instead of what is really going on and being said. Granted he does resort to cheap cinematographic gimmickry on occasion. In the film he edits a sequence such that the viewer assumes he and a group of 9/11 rescue workers sailed from Miami to Gitmo, when in fact they flew to Cuba commercially. As the boat nears international waters off the Florida coast, he cuts to a graphic that says something to the effect of "The Department of Homeland Security doesn't want you to see how we got to Cuba." The inside joke is, neither does Moore. But rather than reading all of that, isn't it just so much easier to rant about "SOCIALIZED MEDICINE" and Moore himself, rather than confronting the actual problems.
Unfortunately, the Summer Movie Syndrome does not stay in the moviehouse. It has extended in the political theater and the media at large. Rather than actual news reportage we have an incessant barrage of stories that read, "According to the latest _____ poll, ____% of the American people think ______". This is laziness. Especially irksome are the Fred Thompson-related polls. "Incredibly a man who is not even declared in the race is leading....". No, what's incredible is that a man who is not even declared in the race is IN THE POLL. Jim Gilmore was a declared Republican candidate who dropped out of the race over the weekend, but since your name is not Romney, McCain, Giuliani, or Thompson, you're already irrelevant, you leaving the race couldn't possibly matter. Who ever heard of anything more than a 3-horse race, anyway? Who cares that Ron Paul is more popular on the internet than even Obama? We already have one "maverick" in the race. We can't have two. That would make people think too much. And come on, it's summer, Rush Hour 3 is opening soon. And if that's too far away, there's always Obama Girl vs. Giuliani Girl if you want to catch up on politics.
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