In the film, the Yes Men criticize the media through culture jamming playing pranks on the media and large corporations. Their goal is to raise awareness of the societal issues, specifically the exploitation of others by large companies. They do this by presenting extremes with the hope that this will shock people into realizing the issue at hand. They create fake websites, conduct interviews, and attend conferences pretending to be representative of big corporations that they don’t like. They are very critical of big business’ greed and lack of ethics. In response to the disaster at Bhopal, they created Gilda, the golden skeleton, for their presentation on the “acceptable risk calculator.” At this conference they discussed the price of human life stating that the loss of human life is acceptable if you can make money in the process.
Then at an Exxon Oil conference they presented a renewable biofuel made from the victims of climate change. They wanted to reveal the consequences of the actions of these profit-driven companies. They used these human flesh candles to bring businessmen face-to-face with the issues raised by their questionable business practices in a very shocking way.
During an interview at BBC news they announced that DOW was accepting responsibility for the Bhopal disaster and that they were going to liquidate Union Carbide and use that money to compensate the victims. They wanted to raise awareness for the situation by presenting as scenario that is the exact opposite of what DOW Chemical is doing. DOW is willing to spend money cleaning up their name through advertisements but won’t spend any to clean up the chemical mess in Bhopal. This use of culture jamming raises awareness for current issues grabbing the attention of their audience by shocking them with blatant images of an exaggerated reality.
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