Yes, I’ve sat down and watched the first part of Mikey Moore’s Trilogy, and first off I must say how much I enjoyed the home movie of his childhood. He says that Flint’s gone to the dogs (more accurately, the rats) but all I can say is there must have been a helluva lot less to eat when Mickey was a young 'un. Positively svelte he looked in his shorts. And there was I thinking that his “working class” folks wouldn’t have been able to afford a cine camera. How wrong I was! How remiss of me to forget the one great lesson of his canon, that America has gotten poorer and poorer since he was a babe, while he has gotten richer.
Where to begin with my review (I even went back and fast forwarded through the DVD again to jot down some of the stand-out scenes and dialogue)? Well, we have the usual mix of grainy urban black/redneck underbelly (the type who spray paint 'Assholes Drive Imports’ on bridges) and toff-bashing - this time a polo game, the Annual Flint Great Gatsby Garden Party, the Golden Girls playing a mean game of golf, and the exclusive Detroit Athletics Club with a receptionist who bugs the hell out of me because he’s a dead ringer for someone else, and I can’t think who. We get Botoxed celebrities well past their sell-by date (Pat Boone wearing that jumper he always wears - Ooh, how I had the hots for Debbie when she sang at the Oscars in 1978 - she could light my light any time and some bloke - permatanned like Pat - who told the most hideous jokes and compered a TV game show). We get a rather scary looking woman who skins rabbits alive and wants to become a vet, and even Miss Michigan steps off her float to show off her teeth and practise answering stupid questions from fat white men. (And it works, as she is crowned Miss America 1988 just two weeks later.) And of course your avaricious two-faced televangelist who the dastardly Mayor of Flint pays 20 grand to tell a packed hockey stadium (must have been during the lockout as there wasn’t a puck in sight) that ‘you can turn your hurt into a halo’. Personally, I’d want to turn it into something a little more practical if I had been retrenched, but there you go. Your average cross-section of folk in middle America, I guess, none of whom seem bothered in the least by having a large fellow who is rather slow on the uptake (even the rabbit woman, who’s clearly not a graduate of U.M., looks bemused when he asks her if the sign on her yard ‘Rabbits – pets or meat’ means that she sells rabbits as pets) barge into their life with a camera crew.
Mick contrasts in his customary nuanced manner the beliefs of the toffs in fancy dress negotiating human statues on their manicured lawn (‘the unemployed should get up in the morning and do something’ - pretty solid advice when you think about it) and the Golden Golfing Girls (‘a lot of them are lazy’) with the attitoods of the punks on skid row, that skid row from which Michael managed to escape because he had a camera and a donation from Ed Asner. While Moore mocks the successful, he doesn’t need to mock the bums. They do his job for him, as he trails behind them with his mike. Thus we have the fellow who looks as if he was Christopher Walker’s stunt double on The Deer Hunter showing off his knowledge of the names and order of the days of the week together with his plasma-donation needle wounds, Deputy Fred (who looks like he failed the audition for The Stylistics down the road in Deetroit) who left the GM plant (that’s General Motors for any furriners) to evict people from their homes because it he had got into a rut on the assembly line after 15 years, Tom Kay, GM lobbyist, who after years of defending GM boss Roger Smith (or is it Brown?) - ‘the corporation does what it has to do to remain competitive in the economic climate’ blah blah - is rewarded for his loyalty by being ‘laid off’, as Mickey triumphantly tells us in his best subtitled know-it-all manner as the credits are rolling. (Yes, he intercuts the credits with ‘latest news’ type snippets of hot-press information, all telling us that the major players have either been ‘laid off’, or have contracted AIDS, or have died an agonising death being forced to watch Mick’s home movies on endless loops.) This is Moore at his Sophoclean best.
And so this modern morality tale draws to an end after 90 minutes of unrelenting film. But I have left the best till last. For reasons best known to the great man himself, we are treated to a scene where Amway meets Color Me Beautiful. Janet, previously ‘the founder and host of Flint’s feminist radio show’ (sadly we didn’t get to hear a clip of her in dungarees expounding on penile patriarchal hegemony or doing the Vagina Monologues), has discovered the kabbalah of color and has found a willing audience in a group of comely 30-something denizens of Flint, who occupy the previously unexplored middle-ground between the rednecks and the toffs. ‘If you have a dream, and you go after your dream, you can do it’, she says, and you don’t really know if she’s memorised the script or is making interdiscursive allusions to Martin Luther King and Abba. Whatever, her audience is rapt in attention, even the black woman, who Janet has told is a ‘winter’, along with all the other blacks, Jews and Italians. (No, I’m not - you can’t make this stuff up. You should know - it’s your country.) You’ve probably run ahead of me and guessed that you can also be a spring, a summer or an autumn, and you’d be absolutely right. Unfortunately, Janet must have been chanelling the wrong guru, because the poor girl has been misdiagnosed as an autumn when she is actually a spring. Still, she has plenty of the can-do spirit advocated by the Golden Golfing Girls, the Mayor, the televangelist, Pat Boone, the game show host, Roger, and Miss America, and any harm done is nothing that a swift change of clothing can’t fix. As the man on 20k a sermon puts it, ‘Tough times don’t last, but tough people do’. And how Moore lasts. After watching his movie, I think I know why. He may have made a Manhattan transfer, but there’s no danger that the master documentarian is ever going to forget his Flinty roots.
