Civil subordination In the seventies, America was struck by a wave of fury from one of the most famous and at the moment left-wing organizations called the Weather Underground, consisting of people, deeply appalled by the crimes committed by their country’s government, and desperate to attract attention to them by legal means. They tried the full range of criminal ways to fight for their ideas - staged spontaneous demonstrations, which turned hundreds of cars into useless piles of metal, and all shops within a hundred meters were left without windows, planted bombs in places where people could not be harmed, and blew up police stations or other places where the explosion could definitely cause and caused human casualties, destroyed important government documents and even arranged an escape from prison for Timothy Leary. At the same time, police officers in several states of the country could not sleep peacefully, who were furious at another well-known left-wing organization, the Black Panther Party, whose members also desperately wanted to fight injustice, in their case, in discrimination against black people, and also did not hesitate to use illegal methods aimed mainly at law enforcement officials, as a result of which at least fifteen policemen lost their lives and the number of wounded is uncountable. The seventies are long gone, but the trend of groups of disillusioned young people in the country and society who are ready to think about radical methods of communicating their ideas to the masses has remained, but the powers of the FBI to combat it have greatly expanded. How far will the security services go to prevent the emergence of another radical leftist terrorist group? And what are today’s left-wing youth willing to do to change the world and express their anger? In these questions decided to investigate the director Jamie Meltzer, who shot in 2012 the documentary “The Informant”, telling about a man who went from left-wing activist to undercover worker for the government and the favorite of right-wing politicians.
The picture voices many interesting problems and questions related to this kind of activism – that people with the same goals may have different motivations for this and accordingly do not agree on the methods of their implementation, that leaders who lead people may not understand the system they want to fight, that there are always characters who only want to attract attention to themselves or participate in some dangerous events, hiding behind good intentions. The Informant raises the topic of Hurricane Katrina, the Black Panther Party, the legitimacy of the actions of the FBI as a whole, and their specific agents, and Venezuela, and many other acute topics for modern America and the world as a whole. But skipping from one mention of the important to another, the director can not really competently acquaint the viewer with any of the problems that his characters talk about, he believes that you should figure out everything yourself, starting with whether many events and facts that were voiced by the speakers of the picture, and ending with what these left-wing radical persons and groups fought for and against, who talked a lot about what they want to stand up for their own ideals and could endlessly talk about some specific moments of their struggle, but never showed a really strong position for the viewer, never talked about the crimes that the government can better stop people from trying to stop them. And if it is impossible to detect motivation and goals, if not one voice does not sound loud enough, then how to understand which of the representatives of completely different groups and trends you should believe and who should not?
Not only the characters of the film have no concrete position, but also the director - he mixes a huge amount of contradictory information and ideas into one cauldron, and even if he has his own opinion on this matter, it is impossible to determine it, and after watching the film you can write Brandon Derby either as a hero or a villain, since there are enough grounds for both. In documentaries, lies are not only not forbidden, but also welcomed - it is against this background that it is especially valuable to listen to the truth, and when in a film about the post-war reconstruction of Iraq you first see a stuttering politician who gives a rather lengthy speech about why certain steps were taken the way they were made, and then listen to a person who clearly and clearly states his position, refuting all the words of the previous speaker, and shows remarkable knowledge in the question, it is much easier to determine which side to stand. The Informant will not provide you with such a choice, since none of the participants in the film expresses their position clearly enough to attract the viewer to their side - everyone can not clearly formulate their idea, everyone refuses to answer questions, everyone focuses on some small personal quarrels, instead of voicing their opinion about the situation as a whole, and if a person appears in the film who is ready to disown personal grievances and conduct a small analysis of the problem, then the viewer is not alone with him long enough to be able to assess the reliability of his words, and the fact that the director uses a lot of information that cannot be accurately verified only increases distrust of the film. And it turns out that he not only did not fulfill the main function of modern documentary film, which is not a biased search for truth, but also did not find a new topic, since this scandalous story has already been told in the work of Callie Duan and Katty Galoway “Better than this world”, and the personality of Brandon Derby has been considered in five films. And it turns out, as with the story of a trinity from Memphis, three friends who were convicted of the brutal murder of young children on the basis of speculation, and who even after their release continue to become heroes of films and books, while in American prisons dozens of innocent people rot, who are struggling to attract public attention, and would give anything to tell their story on the screen. So with Jamie Meltzer’s Informant, which once again tramples on the already voiced story of a dubious nature, instead of telling the viewer about something new, and this is especially criminal considering that in the current age of the Internet, the theme and character for such a film can be found after a couple of hours of searching in Google.
