WORLDVIEW

Milos Stehlik's Commentaries

Shut Up and Sing

(Transcript)
Originally broadcast December 18, 2006

	Milos Stehlik

Listen to Milos Stehlik's Commentary

I only saw Shut Up and Sing, the Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck documentary about the Dixie Chicks, a few days ago.

It is a politically irresponsible film, all the more upsetting because it pretends to be politically hip.

The Dixie Chicks, their musical talents notwithstanding, are what they are: three girls who climbed their way up the country music charts. Their 15 minutes of political fame happened at a concert in London when Natalie, the self-described bigmouth, said, “Just so that you know, we are ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.”

Considering what countless millions of others have thought about President Bush, as a political statement viewed today, this is pretty lame. But in the hot dizziness of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the comment was picked up and fanned into a firestorm by the British tabloid press. The Dixie Chicks’ statement became an early litmus test of patriotism in the wake of the Iraq invasion. Country music stations, largely owned by huge conglomerates, banned the Dixie Chicks from the airwaves, creating a downslide to their career. Rednecks stirred up by right-wing radio hosts drove their gas guzzling mini-trucks across piles of Dixie Chicks CDs. President Bush, seen in an archival clip in Shut Up and Sing, applauded the Dixie Chicks for their right to free speech provided, he smirked, they are willing to pay the consequences to their careers.

This is not an uninteresting subject for a movie. Shut Up and Sing follows the Dixie Chicks as they struggle to manage the public relations fallout. They eventually reinvent their style, move closer to rock, and meekly reclaim their right to their shame at being from the state of Texas, the same state as the President.

To do this film well would require a filmmaker with a sense of rigor, history and distance, someone capable of analysis. We might learn something about the nature of corporate censorship, about how freedom of speech and the media business interface in the democratic spheres of a consumerist society. Barbara Kopple, the celebrated documentary maker of Harlan County U.S.A. and her co-director and co-producer, Cecilia Peck, are not those filmmakers.

Obviously, Shut Up and Sing was a film sanctioned by the Dixie Chicks. Kopple and Peck were given behind-the-scenes access to recording sessions, the dressing rooms, and homes of the Dixie Chicks. There are lots of shots of the Dixie Chicks’ children, husbands. We see them and their shrewd British manager try to reconstruct their career after they’ve been booted off the air and the sales of their CDs plummet. Shut Up and Sing is a mix mash of celebrity pornography and political-lite correctness.

Treated, as we are, to long shots of the Dixie Chicks lounging around in their Juicy Couture, vamping for the cameras, it is hard to know what they think, or what, if anything, they stand for. When we see them slobbering and apologizing for having felt shame at sharing George Bush’s statehood on feel-good daytime TV shows like “The View,” Kopple and Peck NEVER follow this up with questions.

In Shut Up and Sing, the dance between the filmmakers and the singers is onanistic—it is one, two-hour star _______(BLEEP). You fill in the blank.

Later in the film, the Dixie Chicks pose almost-naked on the cover of Entertainment Weekly under the headline “The Dixie Chicks Come Clean” with contradictory slogans like “Saddam’s Angels,” ”Proud Americans” and “Traitors” written on their body parts. But Kopple and Peck never investigate the intent. Was it an attempt at free speech or marketing?

The public prostitution as the Dixie Chicks grovel publicly to apologize for their comment is hard to watch. Harder still, is trying to understand what it is that Kopple and Peck want to make of it. Who is exploiting whom? What is the context?

The irony was that a country which theoretically embarked on a trillion-dollar mission to bring democracy to Iraq was spooked by an off-the-cuff, rather dim-witted, slightly amusing comment from a country-and-western singer. Corporate interests sprang into action and pulled the girls’ band off the radio. Shut Up and Sing pays only token attention to this. A scene shows Lewis Dickey, Jr., the CEO of Cumulus Broadcasting, which banned the Dixie Chicks on all their 50 stations, as he testifies before Congress. Dickey hypocritically rationalizes the ban as a “business decision” taken in response to a groundswell of protest from the public.

This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview.

“Worldview” film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia.

Click here to read more transcripts.