My wife and I caught Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry at IFC the other night, and we enjoyed it. I would not call it a great documentary – it lacks a certain depth, cohesiveness and beauty that the very best documentaries have – but it was a decently-done and fairly interesting portrait of the Chinese dissident artist, and his struggle in his homeland against state oppression.

I came away from this movie with a new appreciation of the possibilities of Twitter, and new concerns as well. My experience with Twitter thus far leaves me with the impression that it is little more than a dedicated conduit for everyone’s verbal diarrhea; most of what is said on Twitter really does not need to be said, ever, and that includes all the “comedy” on Twitter. Weiwei uses it differently, as a subversive, real-time artistic tool, a way of uniting people in an emerging way of thought. In his art he is obsessed with communication, and it shows in his tweeting. It’s maybe the closest thing I’ve seen to the grandiose notion that Twitter will eventually evolve into some kind of a meta-intelligence.

I found myself thinking about his blog, the one that the Chinese government shut down, wishing that he was still blogging so I could read it – he posted 1-2 articles a day when the blog was active, and spoke of how blogging enabled normal people to shape public thought, previously dominated entirely by the media (commercial or state.) Now by necessity he is limited to Twitter, but I find I have no desire to follow his Twitter feed. Am I meeting the limits of my generation? Twitter reaches more people faster, but are real-time sound bites a legitimate evolution from traditional forms of communication and discourse. Can reasoned, sustained thought survive Twitter? And can the world actually be changed though it? I think Weiwei thinks so, and his recent dissident work (and this documentary) invite internal debate within all of us. It is this, rather than the particulars of latter-day communist oppression, that I found fascinating.

But Twitter looks impressive in this documentary in part because the situation Weiwei faces is pretty one-dimensional. If the Chinese government was smart, they would get on Twitter and drown him out, not with their stupid crap, but with perversions of his stuff. False statements, false events, false personas, false information, false allies, false critics. They would corrupt the channel of discourse, just as is done in the United States mass media, so that it becomes impossible, or simply too onerous, for average people to recognize the signal from the noise. But the Chinese government is not smart, and there is a really good reason for this. In an open society like ours, you have to work much harder to control the thoughts of the population; that is why the propaganda we Americans are subjected to is so sophisticated that most people in our society wouldn’t even know what you were talking about if you brought up the subject. As far as Americans are concerned, we are not as a people subjected to propaganda – “propaganda” is something communists (and maybe Nazis) do. But communist propaganda is really primitive and feeble, largely because communist leadership has the available option of maintaining control by simply making people they don’t like disappear, or shutting them up with straightforward brutality. They pretty much shut Weiwei down using these techniques, but this will only galvanize people even more behind his ideas, just as Weiwei in part rode the imprisonment of concurrent dissidents to his position of popular influence.

Think about the earthquake tragedy that Weiwei takes up as a cause célèbre. The communists are really slow-moving targets for Weiwei, because they simply deny the tragedy, enabling Weiwei to galvanize public thought pretty easily. In a similar situation in America, he would never get away with that, because it would not be denied. Instead, certain parts of the truth would be hung out to manipulate the initial perception of the event in the general population, thus creating a much murkier situation to combat. Weiwei’s obsession with outing the truth would quickly be made to look like the bizarre, OCD proclivities of an internet whack-job, and the deep sleep of most Americans would be completely undisturbed.

I actually think that a documentary like South of the Border is much more important for Americans to see than Never Sorry. Americans need to look forward not backward, and they need to worry more about their own roll in the world. In fact, I worry that documentaries like this simply keep American intellectuals (the target audience for this film)  mentally stuck in the 1950’s. In our society, “communism” is a straw man concept, wielded to keep people ignorant and distracted, and I feel the documentary’s   manipulativeness just reinforces this. Communism does not have a monopoly on unfairness, brutality, unaccountability or lack of humanity in this world –  in the U.S. we just do it with more style and more pizzazz.

I’m not belittling how fucking awful it is over there. (On leaving the theater, my wife says to me “One good thing about that documentary is I now feel perfectly fine about never going to China.”) Weiwei’s aspirations for China are laudable and important, of course. But watching a film largely aimed at how stupid and wicked communists still are just seemed a little quaint to me. I think this was in large part because Weiwei (and the documentary) really didn’t have very much to say beyond this – for example, what does he think China should become, post-communism? From my perspective, Weiwei’s struggle, as important as it is, is way behind the historical curve.

But don’t take my word for it. See Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry and make up your own mind. It is definitely worth seeing.

(One last note: Weiwei’s cats are fabulous! Even if you couldn’t give a crap about China or his politics, you could see the film just for the cats and come away happy.)