The Price of Knowledge: Hysterical Discourse in Anti-Michael Moore Documentaries

Abstract

Hysterical characters can seldom render a full story, they tell an aspect, a part, whatever suits their needs of the moment, engaging in what might be called unintentional lying. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, The Anatomy of Prejudices This essay examines several documentary films, all of which share the same intertextual goal: to critique and ultimately rebut the progressive political ideas found in films directed by Michael Moore. The complete cycle of politically conservative documentaries include Michael & Me (Elder 2004), FahrenHype 9/11 (Peterson 2004), Celsius 41.11 (Knoblock 2004), Michael Moore Hates America (Wilson 2004), and Manufacturing Dissent (Caine & Melnyk 2007). The films display several common traits: personal attacks against Moore; the calling into question of his ideology, motives, and seriousness as a filmmaker; interviews with predominately Republican government officials and conservative media pundits; and a tendency to use Moore's documentary strategies against him. The anti-Moore films also misconstrue, mischaracterize, and seemingly misunderstand Moore's respective critiques of corporate capitalism (Roger & Me), gun culture (Bowling for Columbine), and the administration of George W Bush (Fahrenheit 9/11). The failure of the conservative films to address coherently their selected subject matter is not a byproduct of ideological bias, I argue. Instead, the false spectacle of intertextual debate, as it appears in these reactionary films, demonstrates a constitutive feature of their political discourse. That is to say, the films deploy the formal appearance of political debate for a contradictory end: to deny outright an encounter with political difference and thereby to refuse any serious consideration of the issues, ideas, or arguments expressed by a political opponent. In psychoanalysis, there is a clinical term used to describe a person whose speech employs excess, spectacle, or contradiction for the purpose of avoiding direct dialogue: hysteria. Although the term hysterical has appeared in the press with relative frequency in recent years to describe the Tea Party movement as well as the histrionic displays of such conservative media figures as Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, no serious attempt has been made to link conservative political rhetoric to hysterical discourse. This is precisely my intent: to explain how contemporary conservative ideology, at least as it appears in a small selection of films, manifests in a form analogous to that of hysteria. For Jacques Lacan, hysterical discourse identifies a form of speech, a social bond, constituted by a peculiar understanding of the relationship between knowledge and desire, specifically, a desire not to know, an enjoyment located in a safe haven of ignorance. Lacan's theory of hysterical discourse, I argue, not only illuminates a certain rhetorical and aesthetic tendency operative throughout the anti-Moore films; it may also offer a productive framework for broader considerations of contemporary right-wing media and political representation. Typified by talk-radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Fox News commentators like Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly, conservative political media is most often assailed by critics for its overt biases, for the propagation of a moralistic ideology undeterred by facts, logic, counterarguments, or prevailing science. In the seemingly insular world of conservative media, or what Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella term the echo chamber, political arguments derive their veracity not from evidence but from repetition (75). An analysis of conservative media through the lens of hysterical discourse, as I offer here, reveals a different set of concerns. In hysterical discourse, the fundamental bias demonstrated by the hysteric is the disavowal of enjoyment, specifically, the enjoyment derived from leveling attacks on an authority figure. In the process, hysterical discourse simulates dialogue or debate but in a manner that maintains a fundamental barrier against any significant exchange between self and (an antagonistic) other. …