Flak Magazine: Review of The Yes Men, 11.05.04

It's pretty much indisputable that 2004 has been the summer of the political documentary. You had to be living in a cave for the past six months to not have heard of Fahrenheit 9/11, and other lesser-known docs such as Control Room, The Corporation and Outfoxed have garnered attention from both arthouse audiences and mainstream media. Rounding out the summer is The Yes Men, a profile of Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum, merry pranksters-cum-anti-globalization activists.

Most people know co-directors Chris Smith and Sarah Price from 1999's American Movie, a comedic yet sympathetic portrait of a driven, working-class independent filmmaker, but Smith first attracted the Yes Men's attention with his 1995 debut American Job, which follows its protagonist through a series of menial jobs and dehumanizing tasks. When the Yes Men asked Smith to document their stunts, Smith and Price added Dan Ollman as a third co-director and went to capture the mischief.

What kind of mischief? Well, the Yes Men are impostors, and either they are very, very good impostors or the international business community is a bunch of blithering idiots. (Perhaps both.) After successfully confusing American's online masses with a parody of President Bush's campaign website in the 2000 election, the Yes Men set out to hector the international business community. Playing on the acronym of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, they launched another parody site, this time lampooning the World Trade Organization. The site was convincing enough to earn them an invite to a conference in Vienna as representatives of the WTO. Accepting the invitation and fearing their eventual arrest, they deliver a straightforward speech advocating the buying of votes. Despite the absurdity of their message, the conference attendees embrace them wholeheartedly, and one of the Yes Men is subsequently invited to "debate" fellow anti-globalization activists on CNBC Europe Market Wrap.

This sort of prank is the Yes Men's modus operandi, and the film follows Andy and Mike throughout their often elaborate preparations for a variety of performances. While a reasonable spectator would seemingly see through the superficial nature of these hoaxes, the Yes Men know how to sell themselves — they're always professionally attired and pepper their presentations with corporate-speak and elaborate PowerPoint presentations. It's unnerving how an audience of bankers, brokers and CEOs blankly stare when the Yes Men chide the North for interfering with the natural evolution of the workforce by freeing the slaves. (Their presentation is complemented with some of the most racist scenes from D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation.) Or when they advocate using a skintight, gold bodysuit with an inflatable, phallic-like control monitor from which the user can remotely manage their Third World workforce via electric shocks.

Given the outrageousness of the performances, The Yes Men is frequently hilarious and entertaining, though the film provides a troubling lack of context for most of its running time. It's almost as if the filmmakers made the assumption that the audience would bring into the film prior knowledge of the WTO, free trade policies and anti-globalization efforts; thus they avoid dragging down the film's entertainment quotient, but they also succumb to "the preaching to the choir" syndrome. What little initial context is provided comes from a cameo interview with Michael Moore and other anti-globalization activists. You also have to wonder at the effectiveness of their guerilla theater: If their audience is not in on the joke, what exactly are they exposing? The stupidity of the business community? That nobody will question the most idiotic of pronouncements if they are made with an air of authority? It is hardly an effective bit of satire when you don't really learn anything relevant about what is being made fun of.

The film overcomes this in its concluding moments when, during a CPA Conference in Sydney, the Yes Men announce the dissolution of the WTO and that a new trade organization would be reconstituted under the terms of the UN Charter for Human Rights. The comedic film turns serious as Mike and Andy assail the assembled CPAs with harrowing statistics that finally provide some evidence of the negative effects of the WTO and free-trade policies. This final presentation is intercut with interviews with Australian accountants who are pleased that the WTO has chosen to reconstitute itself as a body more concerned with people than profits (though one accountant cynically wonders whether anything will actually change under the new regime). After their presentation, the Yes Men sent out their dissolution notice to 25,000 journalists and policymakers; as a coup de grace, the notice is debated on the floor of the Canadian parliament.

— Tim Eagon (tmeagon at tds dot net)