Movies into Film
Dress You Up:
The Yes Men
“Hank Hardy Unruh” shows off his “EVA” in The Yes Men (United Artists)
On the morning that I meet with Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, the irrepressible upstarts who impersonated WTO representatives from 1999 to 2003, and who continue to combine liberal activism with a highly personal kind of political theatre, they are clad in identical Mediterranean blue button-downs, cranberry corduroy pants, and matching incongruous ties. Andy and Mike swung through Seattle on September 13th to promote the near-simultaneous release of their new book and documentary film, both aptly titled The Yes Men.
Each wears a backwards nametag. At one point in our discursive chat, they turn the tags around to reveal their latest identities, the two most Republican sounding names they could dream up: Mike is calling himself Reginald Lamprey, and Andy has assumed the guise of Harmon Spellmeyer. In earlier incarnations, Andy was known as Hank Hardy Unruh, Kinnithrung Sprat, and Granwyth Hulatberi. Where do these linguistic delights come from? “They just happen,” Andy tells me, before he adds, “For a while we were coming up with the names from obscure Nazi officials.”
Both men—Mike is 36, the gray at the temples Andy admits to being “much younger than that”—appear softer in person than in photographs or in the footage on-screen. When he isn’t mugging for cameras, Mike has the malleable facial contours of a Kabuki mask; Andy’s typically buzzed hair has grown out into a downy mass of salt and pepper.
Given that the two have traveled across three continents satirizing corporate greed and performing what they refer to as “identity correction,” I’m not immune to the irony of meeting them in the “executive conference room” on the 18th floor of a downtown Seattle hotel (name withheld to protect the innocent). The Yes Men have hoodwinked hundreds of experts in carefully planned, flawlessly executed, and utterly bizarre economic speeches where references to “justice vouchers—for countries that want to commit human rights violations” and to slavery as an “involuntary imported workforce model” are par for the twisted course. The breezy, insouciant 80-minute movie (co-directed by Chris Smith, Sarah Price, and Dan Ollman) that charts their vogueing as the WTO arrives as a blast of fresh air after the overlong doom-and-gloom of The Corporation or the sheer idiocy of Super Size Me, The Hunting of the President, and a whole host of Michael Moore-inspired trash. The Yes Men, truth or fiction, may well be the best, most wryly entertaining American comedy of 2004.
Mike Bonanno, left in the mirror, and Andy Bichlbaum are The Yes Men (Photo: United Artists)
Mike and Andy burst into the conference room a few minutes late. I was their first interviewer of the day, but their performance mode was already in high gear. Taking in the gray cityscape from our balcony view, Mike bellowed, “Look at the Capitol Records building!” purposefully misidentifying the Westin Hotel’s circular clone towers.
First off, I ask them about the Republican National Convention. These are, after all, the same fellows whose mock website gwbush.com prompted George W. Bush to make the remark that has come to define his ill-gained presidency: “There ought to be limits to freedom.”
Mike: Andy got into a little row with the Secret Service people there.
Andy: A minor row.
Mike: He got sternly talked to, that was all.
Andy: We ran into Newt Gingrich and [Secretary of Energy] Spencer Abraham. We didn’t have much of a chance to do anything with them besides pose for photo ops in Republican drag and try to squish their heads from afar. I took a picture of Cheney carrying brochures for private airplanes. An odd little detail there. What’s he doing with them?
Most of what the Yes Men tell me about their RNC adventures may readily be found on their blog (www.theyesmen.org); the more interesting tales they told involve duping an assortment of Lane County Republicans. Andy and Mike had spent September 11th in Eugene, Oregon. As part of their campaigning for Bush, and as Mike phrases it, “trying to speak about the issues, clarify the issues, speak about them more honestly than even Bush himself speaks about them, saying all the things he somehow is having trouble saying,” the Yes Men have invented Smokey the Log.
Mike,
cleverly disguised as Smokey the Log (Photo: theyesmen.org)
Andy: He’s a replacement for Smokey the Bear. He’s all about clear-cutting. All about using the resources while we have them, we’d better use them up. And there we are [Andy shows me photos on his laptop] with a Republican Congressman, or an aspiring Congressman. [Jim Feldkamp, who’s running against the incumbent Democratic Rep. Peter DeFazio.]
NPT: He looks very wholesome and clean cut.
Andy: He sure is. Doesn’t like homosexuals. Loves the timber industry. Wants to clear-cut. He’s a real good guy. He sang along with the Smokey the Log song. [Sample lyric: “You can take a tip from Smokey—it’s hard to be a tree! Sitting in one place is as boring as can be. But if we chop him up…that’s how we set him free!”) They just loved it. Loggers sang along and so did any Republicans. We couldn’t get them to understand that they were being parodied. We’re constantly finding that no matter how far we push it, we’re not extreme enough. At the end of the day, we realized—wait—we’ve just been mouthing their lines. We haven’t actually said anything unusual. We hadn’t stretched the truth at all. We basically said, “Clear cut! Chop it all down! Forget about nature! What’s wilderness for? We don’t care!”
NPT: And they lapped it up?
Andy: They lapped it up. They signed our petition. Of course they did. It’s exactly what they believe.
NPT: [Reading the petition] “Whereas trees have more utility and economic value than bears, we the undersigned hereby support replacing Smokey the Bear with Smokey the Log as official mascot of the USDA Forest Service.”
After we’ve laughed some over this, I wonder about the implications of talking nonsense to people and having them just not care. How dangerous an idea, I ask, does someone have to put forth before good citizens do something besides sit there like sheep?
Andy: I dunno. Part of it is that these ideas seem dangerous to us; you watch the movie and hear us talking about things that would strike any normal person or student as dangerous, but really to these people, they’re just details within a bigger scheme, and to them the notion of the market being dominant and trumping all other concerns is so normal that anything you say makes sense within that context. Shocking workers with a prong, recycling hamburgers out of shit—whatever you want to say, that’s just gonna be a detail, and they may go, huh, that’s a little discomfiting, but they’ll accept it because the overall picture is “right.” ◊
A found object at the RNC; pundit for a day on CNBC (photos: theyesmen.org)
The Yes Men opens October 1st at the Harvard Exit.