Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Yes Men

Yeah man, the Yes Men are funny. I was a little thrown off at first, I would never claim to be an expert on the happenings of the WTO, but I definitely got the picture, or at least the commentary made by the Yes Men, by the end of the film.

I think its important that there are people out there combating corporate monsters such as the WTO. If it weren’t for like-minded individuals making this king of stand, these big money organizations would spiral even more out of control.

It’s pretty clever that these guys can infiltrate this corrupt system of bureaucratic nonsense by simply acting the part of business men with perverse moral/ethical grounding: they fit right in.
Watching it as a documentary, and in essence being in on the gag, is really an eye-opening experience. You have to ask questions like: Where was security to escort this man (in a gold leisure suit with a phallus) out of this conference? Why didn’t people from a television network catch onto a false representative of the WTO before allowing him to be on air?

It really is a statement of the amount of absurdities corporate interests can get away with.

I took a little pride in the fact that the college students saw past the smooth talk and that they weren’t actually sold on the idea of literally selling shit to third world McDonald patrons. If there was a single agreeable individual in that audience, may he/she burn in hell (in my opinion).
I would have like to have seen how that presentation would have gone at the scheduled conference it was intended for, with a more money-washed audience, but it didn‘t work out that way. Hopefully, for humanity’s sake, the reaction would have remained the same, but we’ll never know.

In the last gag, the Yes Men declared that they, the assumed WTO, were disbanding and reassembling as an organization geared towards the betterment of mankind and not big business. It was pretty cool to see all the positive reactions from the press members present at this conference. It was as if some of the people giving reactions to the camera were slapped by the idea that the World Trade Organization would truly be concerned with the interests of the people. It just goes to show you how accepting a lot of us have become towards these organization’s, such as the WTO, roles as merciless and unbeatable villains. It kind of makes me want to stand up and boycott a local McDonald’s or something, but honestly I’d probably just order a number ten once discouraged.

Film is definitely a strong vessel of awareness and opinion. The Yes Men was a great example of film as action in that it promoted joining or supporting their cause at the end of the movie.

No comments: