Inside the Soap Box

Michael Moore gets out of his La-Z-Boy to find The Awful Truth.

A A A Comments By Robert Wilonsky Thursday, May 25 2000

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Each segment is brutally funny--if, that is, you can manage to eke out a laugh in between pangs of shame. The Awful Truth offers satire at its most pointed and prescient: It’s the guilt-free guilt trip, humiliation as humor. And some of it comes from a most personal place: Moore was vehement about doing a gun-control segment after a 6-year-old Michigan girl, Kayla Rolland, was gunned down by a classmate last March. Moore has a relative whose daughter attended the same school as Kayla (she was across the hall when the shooting occurred). But, more to the point, Kayla was killed on her way to computer class--and Moore and his wife had bought the computers for the school.

"If you knew me personally, I’m not out to just fuck with people," Moore says. "I’m really a very..." He pauses, then chuckles. "I know this is gonna sound like, 'Oh, right, fuck you,’ but I’m serious. If you knew me, I’m actually quite introverted. We have a party tonight for the show, and I don’t wanna go. My wife says, 'Why don’t we ever go out dancing?’ Oh, God, no. I just wanna stay home in the La-Z-Boy. I wasn’t cut out to do this. Remember, this whole thing started when I was 35 years old. Roger & Me happened when I just couldn’t take it anymore, and nobody else was doing anything about it. My town was dying, and I finally said, 'Fuck it. I don’t care if I don’t know how to make a film, I’m just gonna make one.’ That’s just what runs me, I guess. I dunno."

"I don't consider myself an activist," says Michael Moore. "I consider myself to be a citizen of a democracy."

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