Skip to main content

The Yes Men Fix The World

The outrageous antics of the Yes Men in HBO's The Yes Men Fix The World can leave the viewer in splits except when they pause to consider the message these two anti-corporate pranksters are trying to get across. There is nothing remotely funny about that. From doing right by the Bhopal tragedy victims, to getting the poorest Katrina victims back to their housing projects all the way to imagining a day where every news story is about having wrong set to right. Their methods are brazen, provocative not to mention incredibly creative. Even as you root for these guys wishing they can actually catalyze change, you are completely shocked at how easy it is for them to pull off their pranks.

When free marketeers run amok and greed gets to a point where otherwise rational people are no longer able to parse truth from farce, reality from pantomime the world becomes a dangerously unpredictable place to live in. In such a world, The Onion can become the most credible source of news, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart can become the most astute political commentators of the day - the Yes Men can get away with their over the top creations like Gildas, SurvivaBalls and more.

It is hard to decide what is sadder - that Dow Chemicals spends several millions in an ad campaign to damage control Jude Finisterra (Andy Bichlbaum) going on air "representing" them to say that the right will be done by the Bhopal victims even if twenty years too late or business leaders taking the absurd SurvivaBalls business seriously enough to inquire for how much one might sell, who the potential customers might be for the product.

The Yes Men, all their efforts notwithstanding, do not manage to fix the world. But they do rattle a lot of chains as they go about their business, give ordinary folks like us who don't believe they have the wherewithal to fix or change anything in their world a potent shot of hope. This has to be one of the most enjoyable films I have watched in a while.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques