Fahrenheit 9/11
dir. Michael Moore
Opens Fri June 25.
The First reaction of everyone I know to Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., is to cry. It’s as blunt a statement about death as I’ve ever seen–all those names, all that black granite–and tears come reflexively. The second reaction, one far more common than I expected, is anger, which boils over into rage, which of course becomes outrage. There’s no getting around the simple three-word question that digs its heels into any discussion of Vietnam, and the basic American distrust of our government’s foreign policy ever since: And for what?
Michael Moore asks that question a lot in Fahrenheit 9/11, a new documentary in which the left’s most famous and popular activist-artist-demagogue mounts a full-frontal assault on the legitimacy of George W. Bush’s presidency, the morality of his war in Iraq, and the ethical implications of his ties to Saudi Arabia, and–for the first time since his 1989 debut, Roger & Me–hits his target with savage accuracy. The film steps back to examine the last four years, which began with a stolen election (lest we forget), and went on to include the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the USA PATRIOT Act, the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, scandals at Enron, contracts for Halliburton, and an almost daily litany of verbal massacres from the mouths of our most prominent leaders. Fahrenheit 9/11 calls up all these travesties in a heroic effort to state the case against George W. Bush’s reelection as passionately as possible. In doing so, the film appeals equally to our hearts and minds, echoing the process of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial; the tears come early (thanks to footage of the towers) and are plentiful, but you walk away outraged. It’s the best kind of outrage, too: the kind that makes you want to run down the street imploring everyone to see this film and argue about it, even if you have to pay for their tickets. Moore gives powerful, eloquent voice to the Bush Hater class here, speaking in pictures and sound to people who all too often allow bumper stickers and T-shirts to do their sloganeering for them. And to the moral relativist set, Moore’s film offers a study in conviction. Yes, there are complexities. Yes, there are contradictions. What there isn’t is the liberal curse of seeing every side of every argument. This is a polemic, a call to action. And on that level, the film is a stunning success.
Moore’s last two films, especially the celebrated Bowling for Columbine, had a way of sneaking up on a meaningful argument, then scaring it off with cheap-shot ironies that pandered to a self-satisfied audience. And while you could hardly call Fahrenheit 9/11 free from Moore’s boilerplate tactics–he keeps cutting away, for instance, to TV news footage of celebrities like Ricky Martin and Britney Spears reacting to events for snidey laughs–it’s the first work in Moore’s career that aids the gravity of its subject matter by showing a degree of restraint. The most obvious example is that Moore himself isn’t onscreen very much, which is in itself a welcome change. He also finally seems to have recognized that his filmmaking method, which consists largely of compiling damning evidence directly from the public record–pictures we’ve seen and forgotten, brilliantly edited together to comprise a cogent argument–is strong enough to fuel the viewer’s interest without so many smart-ass interludes. After all, when the attorney general sings a song to the press corps, you hardly need to tell your viewers that they’re living in Nero’s Rome.
We are introduced to the key players with archival shots of them being made up for TV appearances (Bush smirking; Wolfowitz nauseously wetting a comb by sticking it in his mouth) that are more revealing of character than any interview. More gravely, we get fundraising speeches (Bush: “Some call you the elite. I call you my base.”), Halliburton investor videos (“We’re in Iraq because of what we know, not who we know”), and endless coverage of Bush looking and sounding (and being) out of his depth. Juxtapose this with the horrendous footage taken on the ground in Baghdad, or in Flint, MI, where a dead soldier’s mother slowly discovers what her son died for; intercut it with the scenes of the TV press selling out the truth time after time, of the Democrats selling out the resistance, of the troops selling out the Geneva Convention, and what do you wind up with? You wind up with the most compelling, concise argument yet made that our current president is a smug bastard who is obviously not interested, much less qualified, in being a leader or statesman. There are facts here you can argue with; that’s a virtue. What you can’t argue with is the film’s emotional impact. Bush must go.
The picture begins, obviously enough, in Florida, November 2000, as all the polls are declaring Gore’s victory. The reversal of the tide is credited to Fox News (staffed by a Bush cousin), the vote counting process (presided over by a Bush employee), and the Supreme Court. All this we remember all too well. What we may not recall so clearly is the scene on the floor of the Senate, when black House representative after black House representative stepped up to contest the election results, but, absent the signature of a single senator (“The Senate is missing,” they declare), were turned away–by Gore himself, banging the gavel to seal his own political obsolescence. That the film should open with a scene of such pathetic Democratic failure to fight is significant; the quality that has singled Moore out as both hero and goat to both right and left is his lust for political combat in the service of liberal ideals–at the expense of taste, and sometimes of accuracy. He is, in that sense, a propagandist, taking the fight to the opposition on their terms, and winning. Because of his motives and his audience, this propagandist is the most important filmmaker we have, and Fahrenheit 9/11 is the best film he’s ever made.
