Last night I caught an early show of a new documentary film with the Yes Men.
Who are the Yes Men? Well, they are kind of like the Blue Men, only they don’t work for a corporation; they pretend to represent corporations, government agencies, and other powerful institutions that the Yes Men don’t like.
Unlike Michael Moore who plays a buffoonish bad boy giving the bigwigs a hard time, the Yes Men become the bigwigs. The two of them in this film give everyone they come in contact with an Alice in Wonderland tour of what the world could be if it weren’t so out of whack. They take dry financial concepts such as “hazard” (a bad thing that could happen) and “risk” (the likelihood that the bad thing could happen) and show us through their own experiences what these concepts really mean to us as human beings.
While there are hundreds of Yes Men walking the world, the film shows just Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno. Wild and wacky while devising their plans to turn reality topsy turvy, they seem to be able to pass as utterly straight when they step out to play their parts on the world’s stage. Then they become completely believable CEOs, government bureaucrats, and corporate scientists who announce some kind of “new world order.”
Within minutes their speeches begin to pull everyone in the drab conference rooms where society is shaped out of their normal bored weekday doldrums and into the excitement of an altered reality. What is this new reality? The Yes men tell you what they hope it is as you watch their film. But another way to view where they’re headed is to go back to the 1980s when Mary Daly, lesbian-feminist Catholic scholar and professor at Boston College, wrote a famous, or some would say “infamous,” book, called Gynecology.
Daly’s focus in her book was on the oppression of women around the world throughout “history”. Tackling taboo topics such as foot-binding in ancient China, genital mutilation in Africa, and the brutality of the Western medical establishment, one of Daly’s main points was “patriarchy’s” reversal of what was previously done in matriarchal societies.
The most striking image I recall from some 30 years ago when the book came out was Daly’s provocative argument that the early Roman Catholic Church replaced the earthly triple goddess of ancient matriarchies, i.e.. the “crone, mother and daughter” with its own heavenly triple god of the “father, son and holy spirit.”
According to Daly, the early Church retained the Virgin Mary as a symbol of the pre-patriarchic mother goddess. The priests replaced the daughter goddess with the symbol a dead son-god hanging on a dead tree. And, said Daly, the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church eschewed their own sexual nature and donned skirts in order to assume power over their male and female followers alike.
The Yes Men, on the contrary, seem hell-bent on reversing reality back to the core of matriarchal values In particular, they reclaim reverence for life instead of death, and they do this by donning professional men’s business suits. Enter their fantasy world and you become dizzy seeing life as it could be rather than it is.
This shift is most explicit in their prank of passing out a fake issue of the New York Times on the streets of Manhattan. On the big screen we get to watch the faces of many of the 1,000 New Yorkers who read, not “the news fit to print,” but the “news you’d hoped to hear” from a date six months into their future.
I don’t know about your view of New Yorkers, but my experience is they don’t go around downtown Manhattan looking shocked, smiling, and then hopeful and happy very often, and especially not while reading their daily newspapers.
The audacity of The Yes Men had me alternately gripping the edge of my seat in expectations of their getting caught and hauled off to prison, or laughing out loud with the rest of the audience at their antics.
What most amazed me about The Yes Men is how the hidden “glasses cam” one wears while the other plays the speaker, pans their audiences and brings out something rarely visible to the human eye. I was reminded of an episode from the old TV science fiction series, “Flash Gordon.” In this episode Flash and his men were exploring a cave on Mars. As they pass through the cave, creepy figures of clay humanoid beings emerge from the cave walls and begin following them.
It’s fascinating to watch their audiences as the Yes Men stretch what Mary Daly called the “necrophiliac” (death-loving) values of patriarchal societies way past the boundaries of “good taste.” While some members look shocked or even sickened by what they hear, others beam with joy at the whatever new “final solution” that the Yes Men propose for their fields of work.
With the Yes Men’s glasses cam, you don’t need to slice a V in anyone’s neck to see who the reptiles are who would wipe out all of humanity while not caring a whit. Their faces are right on the screen, glowing with glee.
To me these were the most shocking and startling moments of the film. They’re the moments when you can clearly distinguish the hidden psychopaths, or as they are now called, sociopaths, who walk among us and live and work beside those of us who have consciences and care.
On the other hand, some of the most heartening moments of this film are watching a group of developers cheer the idea of poor people regaining their homes in New Orleans. This would cost the developers money they’d lose from not building upscale condo and shopping projects, but they clapped in approval anyway.
Another moment came after seeing the smiles on the faces of those in India who said two hours of “false hope” from a prank by The Yes Men was worth the pain of the let-down when “reality” returned and they found their dreams of restitution were still a fantasy.
Watch this movie and you’ll both laugh, feel pain, and see the world in a brand new way, unless of course, you’re one of the “Visitors” without a human conscience… Even then, you’d probably enjoy it too, just in a very different way from the rest of us.
Copyright © 2009 Nancy K. Humphreys