The Yes Men Fix the World   

For more information about the Yes Men, including times/venues for film showings, click here.

Webmaster's Note: On October 19th, the Yes Men pulled another stunt, this time on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Check out Tikkun Daily's story.

 

The Yes Men Fix the World

Review by Michael Lerner

 

Sometimes it's hard to know whether to laugh or cry at some of the scenes in this engaging and insightful documentary about the antics of the Yes Men. The film, which opened in New York and San Francisco in October, is one of the most significant pieces of political theater about capitalism to be made available to a mass audience, and its greatest strength is its humor and light touch, which provide a balance to the moral outrages that the film exposes.

The Yes Men are two committed social change activists who have managed to present themselves as representatives of several major corporations and then to use that position to expose corporate crimes that have been known but not fully grasped by the public or the media. Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno are white, middle-aged men, neatly attired in corporate suits, who enter various settings and give talks to audiences who take them at their word and find nothing strange about their presentations. In one such caper, they talk to their audience about the "inevitable" loss of lives that the pursuit of profit-uber-alles requires and use a gold-sprayed skeleton as a prop to illustrate how their corporate hosts have learned to put profit as the highest good. Rather than attack this corporate ethos, they perform as though they are behind it all the way, and that allows audience members to feel safe about revealing their own commitment to putting profits above human lives.

In another scene, they get invited to represent Dow Chemical on a BBC broadcast, where they announce that Dow has agreed to spend the $12 billion it will take to rectify the pain created by Dow's subsidiary Union Carbide twenty years before in Bhopal, India, where its plant exploded, killing hundreds and maiming thousands. Dow's stocks drop precipitously in the next few hours as investors, instead of rejoicing in the news that their company has finally taken moral responsibility for the well-being of those whose lives it had wounded, react by selling their stocks for fear that their profits may temporarily decrease. And in yet another scene, the Yes Men present themselves as representatives of the federal government's Department of Housing and Urban Development and -- as the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana look on in shock -- announce that the government will now take the steps to open up housing unnecessarily closed to residents, as well as seriously rebuild New Orleans after having neglected it for years following Hurricane Katrina.

In each of these last two cases, the Yes Men reveal what a morally grounded corporation or government would do, in contrast to what is actually happening. In each case, the fraud is soon uncovered, and the Yes Men are confronted by a hostile media that questions whether these activists have caused more pain by raising hopes that are dashed within hours. Community activists in Katrina-affected areas and Bhopal respond by saying that the corporations and government have done little to rectify the damage, and that the Yes Men's prank might actually put that inaction into public consciousness after years of neglect!

The Yes Men are a grown-up version of the Yippies -- the Yes Men's self-presentation and analysis are similar but much deeper. Their film provides background for the specific corporate crimes they are exposing while positioning all this in the context of the fundamental distortion: the placing of corporate profits above the well-being of the human race. The Yippies rarely made these connections, and seemed to suggest that acts of individual "unveiling" of the outrages were sufficient. The Yes Men, on the other hand, make it clear that they see their actions only as a stimulus to and not a replacement for the development of a social movement that could transform the entire global economic and political system.

That they convey this message with humor, grace, and wisdom makes this film an invaluable tool for education. But even for those who already concede the points, the film is so funny and pleasurable that you've got to see it and bring your friends! And the Yes Men are really "tikkunistas": their film is titled To Fix the World -- quite literally what we are all about!

 

The Yes Men Interview

How did you acquire the chutzpah to go up against the corporate world? How did you get radicalized in the first place?

Mike Bonanno: My parents had the idea that we should have a healthy disrespect and mistrust of authority in order to look out for ourselves as well as others. 

Also, I grew up in the suburbs, and that was something to rebel against. Because the suburbs were so monotonous and it felt like there was nothing to do. I really loved going back to Brooklyn to visit my grandmother, because it seemed like there was a real environment there with people doing things. I think my formative years were about rebelling against the idea of a uniform consumer society and at the same time having this kind of generational teaching about what can go wrong with abuse of power.

My dad is Hungarian, and my mother is Dutch. They both came over after World War II, basically as kids. My mother tried to ride a scooter around the world and got a lot of fanfare. She has all these little newspaper clippings about it -- you know, sponsored by a scooter company and stuff. This was in the 1950s, so I think it was seen as a bit outrageous to go on a scooter to Iran and Afghanistan. So I grew up with those stories, as well. And my parents were into folk music in the early ‘60s and that sort of thing.

Andy Bichlbaum: Well, my grandfather died in Auschwitz. I only understood that when I was twelve or fifteen -- my father never wanted to talk about it. I am Jewish: I went to Hebrew school and all that and spent a year in Israel when I was nineteen. So yeah, I got aware of all that at a certain point and I'm not sure how it transmuted into activism. Somehow I started to really want to do something in college and kind of stumbled into things later in my life. Like doing this, much later in my life.

Let's see ... when did I become conscious of the problems with corporate America? I guess I would be able to trace it to ACT UP [the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power]. I was probably aware of it before then, because I was writing ... fiction that touched on the same themes. Then when I moved to San Francisco I became aware of a lot of things. [ACT UP] was really an amazing machine -- they did a lot. And it is largely due to them that we got an AIDS policy eventually. The way that a few people doing clever things could have an effect on the world was dramatically demonstrated to me by ACT UP. 

How did you meet?

Mike: I did a project where I switched the voice boxes of the talking Barbies and GI Joes and put them back on store shelves and claimed responsibility as the Barbie Liberation Organization. And Andy had done a project where he had inserted gay content into a macho video game. We had these two common friends who independently contacted us and told us that we had to talk to each other. That was when we started working together, about fifteen years ago now.

What was the video game story?

Andy: I worked at this games company. It was my longest job, like a year. I decided I would put a bunch of kissing boys in this video game because I wanted to leave the job. I was fired after 80,000 copies of this game were shipped to store shelves with these hordes of boys that would come out and start kissing. But what I didn't expect was that it turned into a worldwide media sensation, so that kind of got me interested ...

I hadn't really intended it so much as an activist thing exactly. I certainly hadn't expected it to become a media story. And when it did happen, it occurred to me ... wow, this is useful.

Then I had this idea: everyone should know about this, everyone should do this. And the funniest thing to do would be to create a kind of cultural "terrorist" organization that would be about funding all kinds of people to do this. And create this big fake umbrella organization that people would think is real, and that would convince people there is a big movement going on and all kinds of people are doing this.

So you created a website to talk that up. But how did that turn into the Yes Men?

Mike: In 1999 there was all this activity going on around the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle. There was this huge protest being planned. We wanted to go but we were in other parts of the world. Andy just threw up a fake website for the WTO that was satirical: it was meant to be funny, to be a joke. The idea was people would go to the fake website and be confused for a moment, read this cutting satire that was critical of the WTO, and realize it was fake. Some people never caught on and wrote us emails, and we responded in all kinds of crazy ways. [People who thought we were the genuine WTO] asked us to send the director general of the WTO to give the keynote at a conference. So we went. And that's it. That one is in our first movie, "The Yes Men."

You guys are great. Is there something more we can do than tell you that you are great?

Andy: That's the thing. The intention at the end of the film was to say, "get together, do something, change the world, fight, figure it out" ... and kind of throw it back on the viewer. Since finishing the film, we have started a couple of things in that vein. One is beyondtalk.net, which is a kind of a climate pledge of resistance, pledging to get arrested in the interests of climate change policy. Then there is this Challenge website (challenge.theyesmen.org) we have set up, which is a social network where people can do things like we do. We give away our secrets, basically, and we encourage people to get together and to try things.

Have you thought about putting something at the end of the movie saying, "here is how to connect with us," or "we want to hear from you"?

Andy: Well, in a way, we don't want to hear from "you"; we want "you" to go off and do your own thing. There are millions of ways to do things, and we are just one way. We're not a hub. There is this giant movement going on, and you have to find your own way of supporting it. That's the message we are trying to give: "Two guys in cheap suits aren't gonna be able to do it; it will be done by millions of people."