Michael Manns The Insider - History Redefined :: Movie Film Essays

Michael Mann's The Insider - History Redefined [1] Growing up, I had always been a gullible child. If someone had told me the sky was falling, I would inevitably look up. As my naivety led me to be the butt of many jokes, I grew less and less trusting. I learned that if something looks too good to be true, then it probably is. I learned not to buy products from infomercials. I even had to sadly face the reality that the WWF wrestling matches I so faithfully watched each weekend were fake. My eyes had been forced open and made to look at the light. But when I looked back down at the world around me, my vision was blurred. I had become cynical. [2] In retrospect, this change was a somewhat positive one. I began questioning everything, taking nothing for granted. I watched movies and television shows with a look of disgust, knowing that the unlikely scenarios portrayed on the screen could never happen in real life. When the Reel American History project came my way, I knew it was the perfect playground for my inquisitive mind and distrustful nature. I thought about how I would be a detective, uncovering the real facts about what happened. Nothing would get by me! I imagined myself picking apart the film, scene by scene, and raking the filmmaker over the coals for daring to manipulate history. [3] After choosing to study The Insider, I sat down to watch it. For close to three hours I was riveted by the drama unfolding on the screen. I was completely swept up in the story. As the last scene faded away, I sat silently with my emotions: sadness for Jeffrey Wigand's losses, an utter hatred for the entire tobacco industry (at that point, synonymous with "evil" in my mind), and a deep sense of admiration for my new hero, Lowell Bergman. But then a new frame came up on the screen and interrupted my thoughts. I squinted to see what the small print said: "Subsequent to the events dramatized here, the tobacco industry in 1998 settled the lawsuits filed against it by Mississippi and 49 other states for $246 billion.