FIRST PERSON FEST REVIEW: The Yes Men

POSTED: Monday, November 9, 2009, 5:15 PM

Filed Under: Arts | Events | Movies | Movie Review First Person Fest

theyesmen.org

The Yes Men Fix the World opens with its protagonists frolicking in green, sun-dappled waters, dressed head to toe in business suits. Before the end of the documentary, they've manufactured candles ostensibly made from human remains, distributed a version of The New York Times with entirely good news and roamed lonely landscapes dressed in 'Survivo-balls,' inflatable, 'disaster-proof' suits they marketed to a frighteningly receptive audience of Halliburton product scouts.

In their more, erm, legitimate lives, the Yes Men, Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum, are professors of media arts and design, respectively. The Yes Men Fix the World, which was screened at Painted Bride on Nov. 5 as part of the First Person Festival, documents how they apply those disciplines and their Monty-Pythonesque spirit to a special brand of political activism they call 'identity correction.' Briefly, this entails impersonating corporate figures to perform acts that are remarkably socially responsible, environmentally conscious or simply absurd, to get at larger truths about the corporation.

theyesmen.org

But The Yes Men Fix the World also shows the more private, authentic aspects of their work. We see Bichlbaum on the morning of his visit to the BBC studios in Paris, about to pose as a Dow Chemical spokesman in front of 300 million viewers, curled up in the sheets of his hotel bed and groaning with anxiety. His BBC performance goes smoothly, and he temporarily convinces the world that Dow has decided to compensate the victims of the Bhopal disaster in India, in which poisonous gas leaked out of a factory and killed thousands. Bichlbaum performs so well, in fact, that reports start coming in of how crowds of Indians celebrated the broadcast with tears of joy ' then bitterly angry tears when they found out it was a hoax.

Bonanno and Bichlbaum are suddenly stricken by guilt. 'Had we really hurt the people we'd been trying to help?' asks Bonanno in a voiceover. They go to a Bhopal to find out ' and what do you know, the locals in Bhopal welcome them gladly. Turns out they were bitterly disappointed, but when Bichlbaum sheepishly asks, 'Was it worth it?' an old man assents vigorously: 'Totally worth it!' For longtime fans of the Yes Men, many of the exploits covered in the documentary may already be dearly familiar. But these glimpses at their real identities are delightful, and give a fuller sense of who, in fact, the Yes Men really are.

Bichlbaum opened up even more in a question-and-answer round after the screening. He winced when describing some of the pair's failed stunts, including an effort to parody the Bush presidential campaign in multiple skits: 'We got a grant for it, too,' he recalled wistfully. He spoke bluntly about his fears for the future of journalism, declaring himself 'worried about a future in which news is only told by bloggers.' But of the lawsuit recently filed against the Yes Men by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whose identity they recently corrected, Bichlbaum was buoyant. The case would attract the Chamber a lot of bad publicity, he said, and besides, 'We're raring for a fight.'

There are probably more direct ways to actually fix the world than impersonating corporate figures, as Bichlbaum himself said during the post-screening Q&A. But before being dismissed as distracting jokers, the Yes Men should be credited for focusing global attention on some grievously neglected injustices.
Plus, who else will insert images of sodomy behind a filmed interview with a free-market pundit who requests that he be shown against a backdrop of 'free men freely pursuing their desires'?

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