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global [work] - Roger & die Cybraceros

D 2000
Friday
7.7.2000
23:00

global [work] - Roger & the Cybraceros
Marcel Schwierin

Michael Moore highlights in his brilliantly humouristic documentary film the demise of the car producing town of Flint after General Motors transferred its central factory from there to Mexico. The equally comic but hopeless efforts of the town to make something valuable out of the deserted industrial centre in the sense of the modern entertainment business with a luxury hotel, a shopping mall and finally a "Car World" don't only remind us of certain similar projects in Germany, but also of the bizarre attempts to retrain the long-term unemployed to become IT geniuses.

It remains questionable, however, whether his precise description of the situation on location really deals with the complexity of global problems (as the medium of film finds it difficult anyway, to illustrate the more and more immaterial becoming economic and working processes; see also Baumgärtel 1). Thus it would certainly be worth discussing, whether the job positions aren't actually more necessary in poor Mexico than in the over-wealthy USA. The manager "Roger" who he challenges to a media duell in the way of the American pioneer times, as if he were the only responsible villain, is ultimately subject to the same market laws as the workers who are made redundant by him; whereas in the age of speculation, the real relevance of a change of location hardly seems to play a role any more, in contrast to the strong effect it has on the extremely nervous investor's mentality. "Why Cybraceros?" develops a fundamentally different view of the problematic of globalisation; not the almighty economic tycoons, who can easily be condemned like politicians, but rather the American society as a whole is held responsible by Alex Rivera. Its schizophrenic desire for cheap workers to carry out non-rationalisable dirty work and at the same time its aggressive defence of ethnic homogeneity is a phenomena, also too well-known in Germany.

1 Baumgärtel, Tilman: "You've just been erased!" in: catalogue Sub Fiction, volume 2. Werkleitz 1998

Marcel Schwierin

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