Manufacturing Consent is an immensely frustrating film. The documentary, which showcases Noam Chomsky's anarchist-socialist critique of the American media, purports to be an expose, a skewering of the deception and manipulation perpetrated on the public by the corporate-governmental establishment.
Far from providing the needed antidote of clarity and passionate honesty, however, the filmmakers(and, perhaps, Chomsky) are guilty of their own manipulation of facts and appearances, stacking the deck in their own favor and employing tricks and distractions to get away from the important issues.
First, rather than simply presenting Chomsky's biography and philosophy in a straight-forward, focused way, the film is full of ridiculous little set-pieces and interludes meant to drive home points that the highly articulate Chomsky already made perfectly clear. To illustrate the New York Times skimpy treatment of the East Timorese genocide the film gives us two actors in surgical gowns cutting up a newspaper with scalpels. We see Chomsky's face broadcast on giant banks of TV screens placed within the darkest corners of the Establishment: a mall, a football stadium. And, of course, we get the usual clips from '50s era educational films, just so we can have a laugh at those stupid people not as sophisticated as we documentary viewers.
These cinematic jokes, sneers and posturing pad the documentary out to an absurd length of three hours, despite its containing only about ninety minutes of genuine material.
Worse, the documentary takes a slavishly adoring stance toward its subject, one which Chomsky himself, to his credit, would find absurd. All critics are shown up as fools or buffoons and all clips of Chomsky with an opponent are carefully chosen so that Chomsky always bests or one-ups the other guy.
Further, the film uses innuendo rather than evidence: the key portion of Manufacturing Consent, deals with media treatment of East Timor and the inadequate nature of the news coverage is amply demonstrated. Chomsky and his supporters provide no arguments as to why this is the case, however: we are meant to assume that such media failures can only be a manifestation of social control of the masses by elites.
Finally, even after hacking through the padding and the carefully managed presentation, the portrait of Chomsky that emerges is, I think, a misleading one. He comes across as a kind of intellectual Michael Moore, a populist determined to dispel the lies of the powerful and reveal the plain, honest truth.
Nonsense. Chomsky's radicalism is the product not of commonsense decency, but of the very rigid, extremist philosophy that shapes and constrains his own thought as much, if not more, than the corporate-dominated media constrains the thought of others. Noam Chomsky is an anarchist, and he is not in rebellion against the GOP, big business or even capitalism, but against the very idea of authority, of any kind, itself.
A genuine debate with Chomsky must be one that challenges anarchism per se, and arguing about politics or the media only leads to the tedium and frustration of Chomsky and his critics talking past each other-as we see again and again throughout "Manufacturing Consent".
Far from providing the needed antidote of clarity and passionate honesty, however, the filmmakers(and, perhaps, Chomsky) are guilty of their own manipulation of facts and appearances, stacking the deck in their own favor and employing tricks and distractions to get away from the important issues.
First, rather than simply presenting Chomsky's biography and philosophy in a straight-forward, focused way, the film is full of ridiculous little set-pieces and interludes meant to drive home points that the highly articulate Chomsky already made perfectly clear. To illustrate the New York Times skimpy treatment of the East Timorese genocide the film gives us two actors in surgical gowns cutting up a newspaper with scalpels. We see Chomsky's face broadcast on giant banks of TV screens placed within the darkest corners of the Establishment: a mall, a football stadium. And, of course, we get the usual clips from '50s era educational films, just so we can have a laugh at those stupid people not as sophisticated as we documentary viewers.
These cinematic jokes, sneers and posturing pad the documentary out to an absurd length of three hours, despite its containing only about ninety minutes of genuine material.
Worse, the documentary takes a slavishly adoring stance toward its subject, one which Chomsky himself, to his credit, would find absurd. All critics are shown up as fools or buffoons and all clips of Chomsky with an opponent are carefully chosen so that Chomsky always bests or one-ups the other guy.
Further, the film uses innuendo rather than evidence: the key portion of Manufacturing Consent, deals with media treatment of East Timor and the inadequate nature of the news coverage is amply demonstrated. Chomsky and his supporters provide no arguments as to why this is the case, however: we are meant to assume that such media failures can only be a manifestation of social control of the masses by elites.
Finally, even after hacking through the padding and the carefully managed presentation, the portrait of Chomsky that emerges is, I think, a misleading one. He comes across as a kind of intellectual Michael Moore, a populist determined to dispel the lies of the powerful and reveal the plain, honest truth.
Nonsense. Chomsky's radicalism is the product not of commonsense decency, but of the very rigid, extremist philosophy that shapes and constrains his own thought as much, if not more, than the corporate-dominated media constrains the thought of others. Noam Chomsky is an anarchist, and he is not in rebellion against the GOP, big business or even capitalism, but against the very idea of authority, of any kind, itself.
A genuine debate with Chomsky must be one that challenges anarchism per se, and arguing about politics or the media only leads to the tedium and frustration of Chomsky and his critics talking past each other-as we see again and again throughout "Manufacturing Consent".