About two years ago, my parents and I went on a trip to Europe. After two nights on the town in Paris, France, circumstances found us in the quiet little town of Bois (pronounced just like it’s spelled as long as you’re speaking through a mouthful of yogurt). With a few hours to kill before the restaurant’s opened, I flipped on the TV and found this.

Manufacturing Consent is an almost three hour long documentary profile of one man. Despite this, in an unusual twist of fate, that man and his ideas are actually worth the time and attention given to them.

The Man is Noam Chomsky. His ideas are many, varied and soon to be explained. Filmmakers Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick followed the academic around for almost four years, taping talk after talk in a variety of countries. They also managed to dig up hours of archival interviews from as far back as the 1960s. All of which is cut-n’-pasted into a one hundred sixty-seven minute primer for anyone two lazy to pick up one of the man’s many (many) books.

For those who don’t know (I know you’re out there) Professor Chomsky is one of the most respected linguists in the country. When my mother went back to get her Masters in English, who’s book do you think she poured over with a highlighter? Mr. Chomsky’s taught at MIT, written a shelf-full of books and appeared on numerous TV shows…in other countries. But thanks to his anarcho-leftists politics and his scalding criticisms of American foreign policy, he remains largely unknown to the general public.

The ironic thing is, Manufacturing Consent is really about domestic policy. Over the course of things, Chomsky lays out one of the cornerstones of his worldview— that the vast majority of Americans are in fact toiling under a system of institutionalized propaganda. Through the media (which are, after all, just corporations owned by the same small community of super-rich that fund, manage, and dictate our political system) the elite of this country are, in effect, brainwashing the rest of us into going along with whatever foreign or domestic policy happens to suit their interests.

We’re not talking Manchurian Candidate here. Chomsky isn’t a nut. Or, at least, he doesn’t come across as one in his interviews or lectures. Instead, he looks (and sounds) quite reasonable with his buttoned-down professor look and his intelligent-but-reasonable teacher’s voice. And unlike many an career academic, Chomsky never talks down to his audiences and shows a complete willingness to say the same things over and over again.

At the same time, Chomsky showcases an almost pathological aversion to the views he considers immoral or unjustifiable. Often, these views also happen to be the accepted party line of both the United States and the major media networks. As a linguist, Chomsky often catches many a pundit on the meaning of their language. He also has the annoying habit of asking about the myriad things the mainstream press often overlooks. Why is this story being ignored? Why is this option not being explored? Why are important questions being dismissed? And in who’s interest?

This kind of act does not make one popular and maybe you’ll hate Manufacturing Consent. The real point of this whole show is you have to make up your own damn mind. So, like The Matrix the only way to do that is to see it yourself.

More importantly, you should. Politics aside, this movie is a well-crafted piece of documentary, yards more entertaining than a whole season of A&E Biographies. Instead of fuzzy photos, chello music, and droning narration, Achbar and Wintonick take the novel approach of actually letting the subject speak for himself.

Now, even this could get boring after two and a half hours. What really clinches it for me is the fact that the filmmakers recognize this and inject a liberal amount of eye candy to compensate. These take the form of period footage, newspaper clippings, interviews with contradictory pundits and (best of all) visual aids.

In practical terms, this creates an experience akin to attending a Noam Chomsky lecture after ingesting a mild hallucinogen. Thanks to what was no doubt painstaking editing (by director Wintonick) the entire piece keeps its focus, and packs quite a punch no matter your leanings.

Whether you agree with his theories, you gotta admit that this picture presents a dramatic (and, more importantly, thematic) picture of an individual. This is almost a text book case of documentary done right and it disserves a place in the sun, for this if nothing else.

So? What more can I say? Buy it. I did, and it’s done me no wrong. In point of fact, it started a paradigm shift that grips me to this day. But that’s just me. Manufacturing Consent might not do this to you. That’s what makes me hold back that last half-G. But if you’re the slightest bit interested in any of the above, you should pick up a copy for yourself. These days, intellectual self-defense is perhaps the only weapon we have left to us. Best to have a primer.