Movie: “Roger & Me”
Sometimes it takes me a little while to get around to watching movies — like, 10 years or more. I didn’t watch “Die Hard” until the late 1990s, for instance, firstly because I have to be in a particularly tolerant mood to stand Bruce Willis, and secondly because the first time I stumbled across it on television, I quickly realized that Alan Rickman was playing the villain, and thus his character would die at the end,* and that would be too depressing.
Thus, it was only last night that I finally watched Michael Moore’s “Roger & Me,” which came out in 1989. Overall, I enjoyed it, though I did feel bad for the people working at the country club — they were just doing their jobs, mostly seemed to have no control over club policy and probably couldn’t have afforded memberships at the very place they worked, and didn’t deserve to be hassled (though MM was very polite in his hassling, I thought). Other notable features included the hilarious 1980s hair — I have had many ill-judged haircuts in my life, but I am proud to say that I never hairsprayed until my hair was poufy and stood up like a big fluffball, increasing my apparent height by about five inches — and the poor mayor who was trying so desperately hard to find some sort of tourist attraction to keep the town alive.
My main problem? The bunny-butchering scene came as a complete shock. Objectively, its inclusion makes sense — the woman doing the butchering was selling rabbits “as pets or meat” in a desperate attempt to survive in a town with overwhelming unemployment — but I guess I wasn’t expecting them to show quite the lengths she had to go to. I felt bad for her (and for the bunny too, obviously); desperation can make you do things you ordinarily wouldn’t even consider. I hope she made it out and is now in a situation where she doesn’t have to worry about where she’ll get her next meal, or how she’ll keep the roof over her head, and, I hope, doesn’t have to sell rabbits dead or alive any more. (Not said in judgment, but in sympathy. Per Maslow’s heirarchy, it’s damned difficult to worry about philosophical abstracts such as whether it’s right for you to eat animals when you’re not even sure your basic survival needs for shelter and food and security are going to be met. Not impossible, obviously, but a lot harder. Basic survival needs tend to be rather insistently distracting.)
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*Don’t think that warrants a spoiler warning at this point.
