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LIFE
IMITATES ART
Chris LaVigne
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"Weird Al" Yankovic vs The Corporation
Don't feel lonely out there in left field. Everyone's a leftie these days.
by Chris LaVigne
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| Don't worry, he's on our side |
Canadian documentary The Corporation is on a roll. Having won major awards at the Vancouver, Toronto, and Calgary film festivals as well as a special jury award at Amsterdam, the movie has just put another feather in its cap by winning the documentary audience award at the Sundance Film Festival. Sold-out screenings and standing ovations attest to its popularity here in Vancouver as it enjoys an extended run at the Ridge, Tinseltown, and now the Park theatres.
Like Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine, The Corporation is another activist documentary that must be surprising the movie gods by drawing such huge audiences. The success of these movies is something like your high-school's Dungeons and Dragons champion becoming class president. Certain things are just not supposed to be popular.
Another one of those things is definitely "Weird Al" Yankovic. Known for his spoofs of hit songs--like changing Cyndi Lauper's big hit into "Girls Just Wanna Have Lunch"--Yankovic also produced one film, 1989's classic (in my mind, anyway) UHF. But this is no digression just to plug one of my favourite flicks. I'm out to prove a point here. The Corporation 's success should come as no surprise when the popularity of its subject matter can be seen frequently in the subtext of numerous mainstream films, UHF being just one example. Lefties are always playing the hard luck underdog card, when really, there's a massive current of popular support for left-wing ideas.
UHF tells the story of George (Yankovic), who begins the film being fired from a low-wage job at Big Edna's Burger World. "You know what the problem is?" George whines, "Nobody here appreciates a guy with a good imagination." To which his co-worker responds, "At least not the people at the lumberyard, the miniature golf course, or Floyd's fish market or any of the other places you've worked in the last month."
George's salvation comes when his uncle gives him Channel 62, a tiny UHF television station teetering on the brink of financial ruin. Here, George finds an outlet for his imagination, producing programs like "Conan the Librarian" and the game show "Wheel of Fish." Combined with the improbable hit kids show featuring Channel 62's janitor (a younger, even zanier Michael Richards), these ridiculous ideas turn the station into the highest rated channel in town. This success angers George's network affiliate competitor, RJ Fletcher of Channel 8 (played to villainous perfection by Kevin McCarthy and his hyperbolic facial expressions), who tries to buy the station in order to destroy it. George saves the day by selling shares in Channel 62 to the community, earning enough money to buy it from his uncle before the evil Fletcher can.
Always wearing a suit and scowling from behind his executive desk, Fletcher is a businessman, through and through. The movie portrays him as a despicable human being who reams out his son for buying the wrong kind of pencils and fires employees with little reason, laughing about their misery afterwards. With these undesirable attributes, the Fletcher character reveals a lot about our society's popular perception of the business community. Even in a generic, formula movie like UHF we see the kind of tension between people and big business that documentaries like The Corporation present in the real world.
Yankovic and co-writer Jay Levey didn't just pull a character like this out of thin air. Ruthless and soulless, Fletcher is a stereotypical, almost archetypal, business tycoon common to works of pop culture. And he works as a comedic character precisely because he so closely matches the popular conception of the heartless, selfish capitalist that is so embedded in people's minds. In order for the character to work, he must tap into some broad consensus that the public shares about the nature of corporate CEOs.
UHF, then, might be deeper than one would expect. We could try to explain the film as a PhD candidate might to see what else is going on beneath its seemingly superficial comedic surface. The following paragraph is a rough overview of an essay that could be written entitled: "Twinkie-Wiener Sandwiches: Subversion of Capitalist Cultural Norms in 'Weird Al' Yankovic's UHF."
"Much like Travis Bickle in Scorsese's Taxi Driver, UHF presents George as a rebellious protagonist frustrated by his inability to assimilate himself into the hegemonic paradigm of the American social structure, which is marked by a hidden but dominant class structure and a leadership elite devoid of any principles but self-preservation. Through satirical commercials such as that for the fictional Spatula City ("We sell spatulas . . . and nothing else), the emptiness and superficiality of modern American society is depicted as an endless and ultimately unfulfilling cycle of vacant consumerism. However, facing the profit-driven inhumanity of RJ Fletcher's "corporate broadcasting giant" Channel 8, the community in UHF chooses instead to support the free-thinking and good-hearted George and his "hotbed of subversive activity," Channel 62. His sale of shares to his community confirms ideals of participatory democracy and equal-opportunity capitalism, counter to the philosophy of Nietzschean neoliberal individualism represented by Fletcher."
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| This is your job |
Perhaps the beauty of UHF is that it doesn't need fancy words like these to make its point. At the end of the film, Fletcher delivers a diatribe against the community, letting us know exactly what he represents. "You think I care about the pea-brained yokels of this town," Fletcher spews, "I can't stand those sniveling maggots! They make me want to puke. But there is one good thing about broadcasting to a town full of mindless sheep: I always know I've got them exactly where I want them." This speech is secretly taped and broadcast by a Channel 62 employee, allowing the community to see what this prestigious businessman really thinks of them. Symbolising the town's reaction is one little old lady who unexpectedly hammers Fletcher with a punishing knee to the groin.
In a similar way as Fletcher's speech, movies like The Corporation let us see what big business thinks about the people of the world. Once educated, it then becomes our duty to provide the corresponding knee to the groin, so to speak. In order to do this, we have to stop thinking of ourselves as the downtrodden minority that the RJ Fletchers of the world want us to think we are. With sold out theatres, books topping bestseller lists, and countless opinion polls proving the popularity of anti-corporate sentiments, we have to start acting like the powerful and popular majority that our culture proves we are.
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