Since first premiering at Berlinale in February, Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross’s The Shock Doctrine has itself absorbed a couple of major shocks. In the intervening months, the film has been recut (or, as Whitecross put it when introducing Shock in Abu Dhabi this week, “finished”) for fine tuning and to add material about the global financial crisis. Shortly before this altered version of the film premiered on UK television in September, the author of the book that inspired the film, Naomi Klein, made headlines by disassociating herself from the project. Because there was not “complete agreement between the directors and myself about the content, tone and structure of the film,” she told The Independent, she chose not to narrate the film or accept credit as its writer. The paper spun this as a falling out between the writer and the filmmakers; Klein then published a statement on her website softening the impression of conflict, saying that the she and Winterbottom “came up with a compromise: that someone other than me would narrate and that it would be clear in all materials that this was not my film but rather Michael and Mat’s adaptation of my book.” Whatever the production circumstances might have been, the adaptation lacks Klein’s gift for untangling relatively complicated webs of social, political and economic history with graceful persuasion.
Klein’s theory begin with the economic philosophy of University of Chicago professor Milton Friedman, which postulated that governments could take advantage of disasters to increase their power and decrease the freedoms of the governed, because “only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change.” The film meticulously (if too briskly) outlines how notions of Friedman and his disciples (called the Chicago School) were exported — with full knowledge and help of the US government, and the implicit support of the Nobel foundation –– to places like Chile, Russia and, um, England, resulting in disastrous dissolutions of governments, near-total hijacking of democratic freedoms, and economies fueled by fear. Moving quickly from one Chicago School application to the next, Shock really only slows down for long sequences of incredible archival footage of the urban warfare in which this socio-economic “shock therapy” inevitably results.
After the MEIFF screening on Sunday, Whitecross elaborated on the split between the directors and the author. Acknowledging that Klein had wanted to produce a work of investigative journalism, covering new ground and shooting loads of fresh material while Whitecross and Winterbottom were more interested in “translating” her analysis of recent world history by plumbing media archives, he insisted that Klein was “involved all the way to the end,” up to and including the portion of the film about the financial crisis produced after Shock’s premiere at Berlinale. The film doesn’t feel disingenuous to Klein’s ideas, but it does seem like it could make better use of her. She appears on screen in two modes: b-roll shows her scribbling notes “on the ground” at disaster zones from Baghdad to New Orleans, while documentation of Klein’s various panel appearances and lectures serve as the most concrete, precise delivery systems for her actual talking points. The entire argument really only comes into crystal clear focus fairly late in the film, via a lecture clip in which Klein appeals to the audience’s “feelings” about 9/11 and the ensuing expansion of government — something we can all understand, that swiftly and simply allies the viewer on an emotional level to the Chileans and Russians previously screwed over by the work of the Chicago School. This single moment renders most of Kieran O’Brien’s barking narration superfluous.
Throwing out the show-don’t-tell rule, Whitecross and Winterbottom show, tell, show again and then yell. While images of Thatcher supporting her “friend” Pinochet as he’s arrested for murder in Britain go miles further in suggesting her guilt than the long section of the film equating her crimes (union breaking, the sale of public-owned industries) with his (mass murder, torture, kidnapping, censorship…) The Shock Doctrine suffers from the same problem that weighed down Whitecross and Winterbottom’s The Road to Guantanamo (which remains the more elegant, focused, fascinating film): their material is so powerful that the filmmakers could essentially just thread it together and their polemical argument would state itself, but they weaken their case by beating us over the head with “evidence” that their chosen villains — particularly Friedman, Thatcher and every American Republican politician of the past 40 years, but there is also a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it bashing of the Clinton administration for supporting Yeltsin — are not just politically questionable, but unquestionably evil. If much of the footage here could beautifully speak for itself, a few frames of Donald Rumsfeld apparently smirking in front of the still-burning 9/11 Pentagon crash site just pushes the argument into the realm of cartoon.
As a work of anti-fascist propaganda, The Shock Doctrine might have felt refreshing several years ago, when audiences starved for angry media were forced to make do with Michael Moore. But at this point, how many more airless, humorless indictments of British and American political wrongdoings do we need to see from members of the villains’ own voting republics? The question that The Shock Doctrine and all similar films seem to revolve around is, “How could this happen in our democracy?” The weak answer usually offered is “Because the idiots who don’t watch films like this voted for the wrong people.” The Shock Doctrine, almost accidentally, reveals this as the false solution that it is. There’s a clip towards the end of the film of Obama’s election night acceptance speech, which he began by looking directly into the camera and saying, “Hello, Chicago.” By showing this as Barack Obama’s first public words as the President elect, the implication is that this is the guy who will finally break from the pattern set up by the Chicago School, this is the guy who finally look at real bad guys dead in the face and destroy their dominance. If only he had shown such strength in real life!
Clowns to the left, jokers to the right. Flattening popularly elected leaders into smarmy supervillians while essentially picking a hero at random, The Shock Doctrine offers evidence that liberal polemics have devolved into a cycle of caricature that’s indistinguishable in form from the media produced by the opposite side.
