“The Yes Men Fix the World” is a dichotomous film. It is both juvenile and remarkably intelligent, both a nightmare and a dream.
The documentary follows practical jokesters The Yes Men (directors Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum) as they weasel their way into corporate conferences, give false speeches and make idiots of the people and organizations they claim to represent.
Halliburton, Exxon and even subsets of the U.S. government fall prey to the pranksters.
For these corporations, and those that support them, the film is a nightmare. For those with imaginations, funny bones and a basic sense of what’s right, it’s a dream.
The film takes a firm stand against the idealization of the “free market,” a concept that can be explained with a single sentence: Put capitalism on autopilot, and everyone will prosper.
This notion has been the economic basis of American society since its inception. The problem, The Yes Men argue, is that in big business a “free market” is often an invitation to do whatever it takes to get rich, even if it means the destruction of human lives.
The film’s first act, for instance, involves the worst industrial catastrophe in history: the Bhopal disaster of 1984. A malfunction, which could have been prevented, at a Union Carbide chemical plant took the lives of more than 3,000 Indian workers immediately. Tens of thousands more in the area suffered from leaked toxic gases. The company never took full responsibility for what happened.
Mega-company Dow Chemical acquired Union Carbide in 2001 and was supposedly going to take responsibility for Bhopal, but it never happened. So it was up to The Yes Men — two goofy intellectuals with no credentials — to hold the corporations responsible for the disaster.
To gain access to the private spheres where they wreak their havoc, The Yes Men bait news organizations and conference leaders with fake Web sites that appear to be official.
In this case, they created a Dow Chemical Web site and eventually were contacted by the BBC for an on-air interview on the 20th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster.
Andy and Mike agree, but are subsequently terrified to learn that the broadcast will reach 300 million people.
Nevertheless, the show must go on.
Mike poses as a Dow Chemical representative, and proceeds to tell the BBC and its audience happily that the company is indeed going to take responsibility for Union Carbide’s failures. He said that they’ll roll out a 12-billion-dollar plan to compensate victims of the incident in Bhopal.
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Of course, it’s discovered to be a hoax, but not before Dow Chemical’s stock drops about two billion dollars. Here the film takes a nightmarish turn, revealing the terrible truth about the free market system that so many Americans boast about.
For a period of an hour or two, it was widely accepted that this huge company was going to do the right thing. It was going to spend some of its own money to help the city of Bhopal get back on its feet, to clean up their water that is still infected with the chemicals that seeped in 25 years before and to financially assist individual victims.
And in this period of only an hour or two, Dow Chemical’s stock plummeted. This fundamental, colossal good deed was punished, and harshly, by our free market system. Is it really so ideal?
This example is only the first half-hour of hoaxing in “The Yes Men Fix the World.” At times, the film sinks to juvenile humor and, at times, it seems more wrapped up in the joke than in the reason behind it.
But for all their haphazardness, The Yes Men succeed. Do they fix the world? Certainly not. But their message could bring us a step closer.
