SURVEYING THE BODY of director Michael Moore's work, one is quickly overwhelmed by its scope. There was the 1989 documentary Roger & Me--an indictment of corporate greed, downsizing, and cavalier disregard for the working man. Then there was the mid-'90s television series TV Nation--an indictment of corporate greed, downsizing, and cavalier disregard for the working man. Throwing a change-up in 1996, Moore wrote Downsize This!--an indictment of downsizing, corporate greed, etc. And now in theaters is his new documentary, The Big One--an indictment of . . . well, Moore likes to keep fans guessing.

But to take this man's measure from his eclectic output would still be to miss his true dimensions. For Moore is so much more than the goalkeeper of the proletariat, the bra-snapper of corporate America, the auteur who repeats himself more often than a Tourette's patient singing "Bennie and the Jets." Moore, we are told, is "the great satirist of the 1990s" and "the last firecracker on the Fourth of July" (Newsday). He is "an essential aid to democracy" (Knight Ridder). He is a "working-class hero" (Chicago Tribune). He is a man who defies overstatement, as the Minneapolis Star Tribune proved when it called him "as dangerous as Mike Wallace--but a whole lot funnier." Pushing 300 pounds, Moore is actually as dangerous as two Mike Wallaces.

But that's not all. He's been compared to Mark Twain by the New York Times, to Voltaire by Newsday, to Mother Teresa by . . . himself. And it is precisely that

It was not always so. In 1989, Moore, a virgin film-maker and the former editor of an alternative newspaper in Flint, Michigan, delivered his critically acclaimed documentary Roger & Me. The film chronicled his two-year quest to confront Roger Smith, then chairman of General Motors, whose supposedly callous decision to close several GM plants had helped decimate Moore's hometown. Not only did Roger become the highest-grossing non-musical documentary in history, it almost singlehandedly resuscitated an ailing genre.

Pre-Roger, social-conscience documentaries (is there any other kind?) tended to be low-sugar, high-fiber affairs. Whether the subject was striking miners, Great Plains soil erosion, or copulating manatees, these pictures were more medicinal than entertaining. Roger was different, and it became to documentaries what the New Journalism had been to feature writing. Moore infused the form with subjective vitality, inserting himself into his narrative to drive it with a novelist's ingenuity. What he delivered in Roger was a dark and devastatingly funny social satire--a tautly edited trove of snappy narration, vivid characters, and cruel ironies.

Moore intercut his primary story (stalking the elusive Smith from yacht club to stockholder meeting to Grosse Pointe neighborhood) with inspired asides: the Flint gentry at a Gatsby lawn party where unemployed locals posed as human statues; sienna-haired golf-course biddies decrying lazy welfare dependents; animatronic autoworkers in a civic-renewal display singing praises to the robots destined to replace them; and the unemployed Rhonda the Bunny Lady selling rabbits for pets or clubbing them in her front yard to sell as meat.