The Making of the "Rust Belt" in the Minds of North Americans, 1969-1984

Roger & Me, Michael Moore's irreverent 1989 film documentary about cor- porate greed and the hollowness of the American Dream, propelled Flint, Michigan into the North American limelight. The fall of Moore's home town was a decidedly sharp one. To the upbeat music of the Beach Boys' "Wouldn't It Be Nice," Moore showed his audience what Flint had become— a town of abandoned homes, vacant lots, boarded businesses, and empty streets. Interspersed between these scenes of urban decay were newspaper headlines announcing the closure of one automotive plant after another. Moore's technique of juxtaposing contrasting images led to a devastating indictment of General Motors. The most damning example occurred at the end of the film when Moore overlaid G. M. Chairman Roger Smith's Christmas message of human fellowship with visual images of a family being evicted on Christmas eve. While a choir sang "You Better Watch Out, You Better Not Cry," the family's meagre possessions were piled onto the curb- side; even the Christmas tree was added to the pile. The film's impact owed not only to the creativity of Michael Moore, but also to the fact that North Americans were already primed to interpret, in terms of decline, the history of Flint, and other industrial cities in the Great Lakes region. Had Moore made such a negative film about a city—in what was then known as the "industrial heartland"—-at the outset of the 1969 recession, he would have been dismissed as an alarmist. By the 1980s, however, North Americans had become used to thinking pessimistically about the Great Lakes region. As the industrial heartland transmuted into the "Rust Belt" in the minds of Canadians and Americans, the fate of its cities became the ideal targets for black humour.1