Okay, so:
Collapse! Righto.
The Film
Well-shot, music and archival footage used to great effect. The man in a dark room smoking a cigarette detailing conspiracies with his sleeves rolled up is such an incredible cliche (despite its tremendous specificity), but I rather doubt that any of it is at all staged. Ruppert really does embody the cliches.
I was pleasantly surprised at how often Smith asked exactly the follow-up I wanted him to. He lets Ruppert ramble on most of the time, which is a wise choice because his passion for this topic is most enthralling when he's allowed to build up a head of steam. But he did need the occasional course correction, ineffective as they all were. Smith really strikes a deft balance here, I think, and his little notes of skepticism make the film tolerable for those who don't agree with most of its content. It keeps the film in the realm of an actual documentary about Ruppert, rather than letting it become a commercial for his ideas.
The Ideas
First off, the stuff he gets right: I think he's dead-on with the monetary policy stuff. It seems like all conspiracy theorists, crazy or sane, have come to an agreement on this point. It's kind of amusing how, whether they're talking about 9/11 or peak oil, they all feel strongly about monetary policy.
I think his advice, apart from hoarding physical gold, is decent enough, too. It's good to buy seeds and learn how to grow your own food. I love that kind of self-sufficiency; my dad grows some food in his backyard. Best-case scenario, it becomes an extremely valuable skill. Worst-case scenario, it's a rewarding hobby. I wouldn't be building bunkers, but learning to farm? Fine advice either way. This alone makes Ruppert hard to dislike: even if he's wrong, it's unlikely what he's saying is going to ruin anyone's life other than his own. He isn't Harold Camping, in other words.
The stuff I think he gets wrong is a little more significant, but I'll keep it fairly short and focus just on the things that I thought particularly noteworthy or obvious. His worries about population growth, which I've talked about in other threads, are unfounded. At best the issue is blown wildly out of proportion and at worst it seems more likely we'll actually face the opposite problem. I think he's a little muddled about reserving banking, too: he says minimum deposit requirements create money out of thin air, but having a loan on the books isn't the same as having cash reserves. The risk is part of the calculation.
Those are fairly minor quibbles, though, that would lessen his warnings but not eradicate them. The thing that I think is more significant, and might present an actual hurdle for his theories, is nuclear power, which he dismissed rather casually. He really only listed two problems with it, and both are pretty thin. The first was that there's a lot of regulation of the industry slowing the process. This is completely true, but in the context of a discussion about the collapse of society, it's not a problem. It's kind of like saying there's a problem with a guy standing in front of a fire exit, forgetting that if there's a fire, he's going to move. If properly motivated, we can clear this sort of thing up tomorrow.
The second objection he raises isn't really an objection at all: he says it takes a lot of energy to create a nuclear power plant. I have no reason to doubt this, but it seems obvious to me that, however much it takes, it ends up producing a whole heck of a lot more. He offers no specifics on this point, and it felt too casually dismissive.
The rest, people can decide for themselves. I'd only make the observation that we live in an age of limitless information, and there is no shortage of facts. No longer is ignorance just the result of not knowing things: it is increasingly made up of knowing some things and not others. When you have a trillion dots, anything you draw on top is going to connect them.
The Man
I noticed some interesting things about Ruppert, personally, apart from the content of his claims. The first is negative: the way he responded to questions. A few others here have pointed out the amusing moment where Smith asks him about human ingenuity, he talks about something else, and Smith has to remind him what the topic was. It's presented as a funny little example of how wrapped up he gets in talking about this, and how digressive he can be. And it is. But what's more significant is that he didn't answer the question even after the reminder. He does the same thing when asked why he should be treated differently than people saying the same thing 30-40 years ago. It doesn't feel like he's
dodging the questions, really, so much as the mere act of being asked seems to confuse him. He's a dervish of monologue, and even scant dialogue seems to completely throw him off his game.
The second thing is his tendency to say "we" and "us" when it felt a lot more likely he was just talking about himself, as if he were trying to talk himself into believing he were heading up an actual movement. This dovetails with the third thing...
...his emotional moment where he talks about community. It's easy to psychoanalyze this, so easy it has to make you wonder if it's entirely fair or accurate. The obvious conclusion seems to be that the man is simply lonely, and doesn't have anyone, so thinking about society starting over and forming close-kint communities resonates with him on a deep level. It even explains the desire to turn a "me" into an "us."
And that's where we get into the foibles. Being behind on his rent, a divorce, accusations of sexual harassment. It does paint the picture of a troubled man. Logically, I acknowledge that this tells us nothing about the veracity of what he says, but personally, it does paint a picture of someone whose obsession has probably irrevocably damaged his life. Whether or not that obsession is justified, it certainly
is an obsession. And the result on a personal level gives the film's title its second meaning: it can be seen both as a warning of societal collapse, or the clinical documentation of the result of one man's mental collapse.
Either way, fascinating stuff.