이 글의 제목은 채널4의 인기 프로그램의 타이틀입니다. [How Clean is Your House?] 두 명의 매우 개성이 강한 청소 전문가 아주머니들이 (물론 진짜 힘든 일은 전문 청소 회사 직원들이 하죠) 영국 곳곳의 아주 아주 아주 더러운 집들을 찾아다니며 청소해 주는 프로그램이에요. 청소 말고도 주 캐릭터들의 약간의 코믹 액트까지 섞어 재미를 더해줍니다. 청소에 관한 각종 정보도 나오구요. 깃털과 구슬을 달아 화려하게 모양을 낸 색색가지 고무장갑들도 등장합니다...
리얼리티 티비라는게 시청률을 의식하다보면 점점 더 강한 자극을 찾아다니게 되겠지요. 시리즈를 거듭할 수록 점점 더 더러운 집들이 등장합니다. 매주 많은 사람들은 해도 해도 너무나 지저분해서 욕지기 올라오는 집들을 보면서 어떤 만족감을 느끼는 모양입니다. 저만해도 저기다 대면 내가 사는 집은 정말 깨끗한 거로군...하고 중얼거리면서 공포 영화 볼 때 잔인한 장면이 나올 때처럼 너무 과하게 지저분한 장면은 눈을 가리면도 매주 찾아 보게 됩니다. 다 치우고 나서 깔끔하게 빛나는 집을 보고 있으면 공연스레 집 주인 대신 흡족하기도 하고요..
어제는 9년동안 딱 1번 청소를 했다는 30대 초반 독신남자의 플랫이었는데....개까지 두마리를 데리고 참 해도 너무 하게 살더군요. 등장인물 들의 반응을 보니 냄새도 지독한 것 같고, 침대엔 개 소변이 얼룩져 있고, 어디가 어딘지 때도 너무 많이 끼고 어디나 쓰레기장이고요...너무 더러워서 이사람이 내일 병에 걸려 죽는다고 해도 별로 놀랄 일도 아닐 것 같았어요.
전엔 더한 집들도 있었죠. 이런 청소는 헤라클레스 과제, 아우게이아스왕의 외양간 청소에 맞먹습니다. 어제 그 집은 5명의 팀이 장비를 갖고 달려들어 무려 8시간을 치우고 닦았다니 바닥이 보이기 시작했더군요...
이 프로그램 포맷이 어찌나 성공적이었던지 미국 어느 채널인지에서 사갔다고 합니다. 미국 버전이 곧 나올 모양이에요.
채널4의 이 프로그램 사이트에 가보면 얼마나 깨끗한 인간인지 테스트하는
퀴즈가 있거든요. 질문이나 답이 너무 뻔하긴 하지만 심심풀이로 하면 재밌어요.
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[화씨 9/11]에 대해서 글을 올리고 나서 가디언을 보는데 제 심정을 보다 잘 대변해 준 다음과 같은 기사가 실렸더군요. 이 영화가 말하고자 하는데 동의하더라도, 솔직히 말해 이 영화는 다큐멘타리로선 순 사기란 거죠. 그래서 이 영화를 보고 즐겼다면 그건 guilty pleasure라는 겁니다.
These dots don't join up
Bin Laden funding Bush? If you have any respect for accuracy, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 will be a guilty pleasure
David Leigh
Thursday July 29, 2004
The Guardian
It is generally agreed that Michael Moore's anti-Bush documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 is not one for the intellectually fastidious. This wildly club-swinging production is nonetheless politically potent, as anyone could testify who has seen its large and appreciative British cinema audiences.
Moore, whose film became the first documentary to take more than $100m, claimed this week, as he surfaced at the Democratic convention in Boston, that he was shifting US presidential votes away from the Republicans. So it is worth asking what his factual basis might be. Are any of Moore's facts right? In particular, is his biggest conspiracy theory true?
In his let's-join-up-all-the-dots way, this Emile Zola from Flint, Michigan, accuses Bush of a corrupt relationship with the Saudis. He says - or hints heavily - that Bush had business links with the Bin Laden family, which induced him to allow the lot of them to escape from the US on chartered planes in the aftermath of 9/11, and, secondly, to allow Osama himself to get away later, while Bush hastily diverted the public's attention to irrelevant Iraq.
There is only one source given for this material - a New York writer called Craig Unger who is interviewed on screen by Moore about it. Unger has written a book called House of Bush, House of Saud. Few Britons have yet had a chance to read it, because its first UK publishers, Random House, took fright at the prospect of being sued by rich Saudis. A smaller firm, Gibson Square, proved braver and Unger's book is due out this month.
Unger is not in the big league of historians. To quote his book jacket: "He has written about the two George Bushes for the New Yorker, Esquire and Vanity Fair". And his subtitle is downright false: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties. The relationship has not been a secret.
The text is solidly enough researched. It does indeed demonstrate convincingly that Bush had a business buddy called Jim Bath back in Houston, Texas, in the 1970s, who in turn acted as fixer and frontman for a pair of rich young Saudis. One of them was a brother of Osama bin Laden, and the other, years later, donated to Osama's Afghan guerrilla war against Soviet Russia.
The book does go on to show too that some Saudi money went into a struggling oil firm, Harken, in which the young Bush was involved. And it does show that the Bin Ladens and all the other rich Saudis holidaying in the US at the time of 9/11, were hustled home in an astonishingly privileged way, probably thanks to the cigar-chomping Prince Bandar, Saudi ambassador to Washington.
The book also documents two important general points. One is that the undeservedly wealthy Saudis have invested an estimated $860bn in US companies and purchased US arms worth several hundred billions of dollars.
The other key fact demonstrated is that the Saudi royals have helped preserve their close link with the US by aiding successive administrations in unsavoury plots and plans. These included arming the Nicaraguan contras, covertly arming Saddam in Iraq (in the days when it suited the US to encourage him), and using Saudi conduits to funnel money to the crazed Osama bin Laden himself (ditto).
Unlike Moore's film, the underlying Unger book is perfectly fastidious with the facts. But Unger's dots don't join up to make a conspiracy either.
For a start, they do not show that a Bin Laden directly funded Bush. For another thing, the Bin Ladens are a huge clan, and knowing a single one of them does not automatically tar you with the Osama bin Laden brush.
Most important of all, there is a fundamental misreading of the nature of the relationships at work here. Many western politicians in the 70s, 80s and 90s sought to shake down the Saudis and relieve them of their oil money, either to prop up their local economies or to line their personal pockets. Britain's own Tory cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken was a case in point, and ended up going to jail as a result.
Naturally, this required the turning of a blind eye to the alarming characteristics of Saudi society - for example, its brutality, corruption, despotism, misogyny, fanaticism, hypocrisy, dishonesty and greed. And equally naturally, it is very embarrassing for the likes of George Bush when the consequences of that sort of behaviour blow back in your face. Who would want to advertise it?
But this does not make a conspiracy. There is no real evidence in Unger's book that Bush wanted Osama bin Laden to escape, or that he invaded Iraq as a deliberate distraction.
In fact, the 9/11 commission last week blamed the defence department arch-hawk Paul Wolfowitz for the Iraq obsession, quoting the president telling Tony Blair that Iraq was not the immediate problem, whatever Wolfowitz said. And indeed, Moore's parochially-minded J'Accuse makes no mention of our own PM's equally loopy wish to march on Baghdad.
Moore's defenders say that, if not factually correct, then his film is in some way "essentially" true. Iraqi babies and US blue-collar soldiers are indeed being blown to bits for no good reason. The west's unholy relationship with Saudi Arabia and the Saudi royal family's unholy relationship in turn with its barbaric Islamists, did, in a general sense, lead to 9/11. And western politicians do seem to want to distract us from those nasty facts.
But this makes Fahrenheit 9/11, in documentary terms at least, a fraud. The film is not journalism. It is an extended piece of stand-up - a satiric riff by one deeply hostile individual. This shouldn't discourage people from going to this exhilarating movie. But it means that if you have a respect for accuracy, watching will be a guilty pleasure.
david.leigh@guardian.co.uk
