The Yes Men, a movie, follows a couple of anti-corporate activist-pranksters as they impersonate World Trade Organization spokesmen on TV and at business conferences around the world.
The story follows Andy and Mike from their beginnings with GWBush.com, and on to their tasteless parody of the WTO's website. Some visitors don’t notice the site is a fake, and send speaking invitations meant for the real WTO. Mike and Andy play along with the ruse and soon find themselves attending important functions as WTO representatives.
Delighted to speak for the organization they oppose, Andy and Mike don thrift-store suits and set out to shock their unwitting audiences with darkly comic satires on global free trade. Weirdly, the experts don’t notice the joke and seem to agree with every terrible idea the two can come up with.
Exhausted by their failed attempts to shock, Mike and Andy take a whole new approach for one final lecture.
The Yes Men is directed by Dan Olman, Sarah Price, and Chris Smith, whose previous credits include the 1999 Sundance Winner “American Movie.” It was released by United Artists. - From http://theyesmen.org/movies/theyesmen
Within the documentary they show how these two guys go around to conferences and TV interviews, pretending to be representatives of the WTO. Within these interviews/conferences, they assume the opinion of the WTO, which is pro trade liberalization and so will always defend/protect the WTO as if they really are part of it. What they however do, is take these points to quite an extreme where they propose new policies which are quite ludicrous, but in a way do very closely resemble how the WTO works/operates -- it's just more emphasized.
So in the documentary for instance, they show how they go to a conference in Finland to talk about 'The Future of Textiles'. For this conference, they created this golden tight costume, which has got an inflatable penis attached to it, with a screen on the head of the penis. In this conference where lots of educated people are sitting, they showcased the suit on how managers can overcome the obstacle of work and monitoring their workers in Third World Countries while at the same time enjoying leisure time. So here, the suit is set up with monitoring devices and sensors, where the manager can keep an eye on the slave workers in Third World Countries and send them shocks to implants in their shoulders -- all from the suit.
At the conference, the guy who is doing the presentation is wearing the costume underneath his suit, and after his 'assistant' rips his suit off and the costume is revealed, he does a presentation of the suit along with showing an animation clip with all the benefits of this amazing suit. So this is one of the funny parts, because here's apparently a guy from the WTO, which is considered to be one of the representative points of capitalism and our current economic system -- walking around in this conference in a penis suit.
One of the sad parts however, is that they've been in this game for quite a while, and previously when they did this type of gigs, they were already going a bit 'over the top' but no-one seemed to notice that they were pulling a joke. They expected people to immediately find out what they were doing and get thrown out, but instead everyone received their message very well and encouraged what they are saying. So that's pretty scary -- where simply because the WTO represents that point of 'authority' -- people will simply accept whatever they say and support it, within believing that it's the right thing to do without being critical in anyway whatsoever.
So now with this penis suit, they thought it was going to be quite clear and they were pulling off a joke, and that they were going to be thrown out -- and as I was watching the moment in suspense, I was completely flabbergasted by the level of apathy in the audience and how they were not at all questioned or thrown out.
Some of the things you see in the documentary, where they do their speeches, are really quite disturbing and completely 'off of this world' and the complete zombie-ness of the audience/participators is just....scary.
I definitely recommend watching this documentary, as it clearly shows how our so called 'educational elite' is completely clueless as to what to do with this world, and are just brainwashed zombies who will accept anything 'society' throws at them from if they perceive them as an 'authority' -- even if what they throw at them goes beyond any form of reason and is completely ridiculous. It also shows the extent of the human problem and how much work there is to be done in terms of re-educating human beings and supporting them to for the first time become being with actual common sense and integrity. Because right now, humanity's really a joke -- and a bad one at that.
Interesting Leila. May have to watch the thing.
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