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Film at 9/11
by Jesse Fox Mayshark
Whatever else he is, Michael Moore is an American success story.
Here’s this awkward, gawky—and, as his critics never tire of pointing out, porky—guy from Flint, Mich., perennially unshaven, shambling and rambling in his sneakers and baseball cap and haplessly nasal Midwestern voice, a guy who (as he himself never tires of pointing out) never graduated from college, taking on the major figures of his time and place—corporate CEOs, Hollywood gun nuts, and now the very president of the entire United States of America—and somehow getting both rich and famous along the way.
I mean, what could represent fulfillment of the American dream more than some fat schlep from a burned-out Rust Belt hellhole making a mint by telling the system to, as Dick Cheney would say, go fuck itself? You couldn’t do that in Iran or North Korea, that’s for damn sure.
So, Michael Moore is a great American capitalist. Surely nobody begrudges him that. But what about the art? Because not only is Moore rich and famous (and getting richer and famouser by the moment), he’s also—according to his resume—an accomplished and acclaimed filmmaker. He’s got one Oscar under his belt (for Bowling for Columbine), and this year he collected the Palme D’Or at Cannes, the most distinguished and snooty award available in his field.
The Cannes jury insisted the award was based on the movie’s cinematic merits, not its politics, but that’s kind of like saying you like Casablanca for the lighting, not the love story. Moore’s movies are political to their core, and the movies only work if the politics work.
For that reason, there’s no point in recommending Fahrenheit 9/11 to, say, my ardently Republican Tennessee in-laws. They would get out of it what I get out of my weekly dose of National Review—a chance to review the opposition’s playbook. And since they’d have to pay Moore and the Weinstein brothers for the privilege, I don’t imagine they’ll take the opportunity.
But...all that said, and acknowledging my own bias along with Moore’s (we’re both lefty populists who supported Ralph Nader in 2000), here’s what I think of the actual movie:
First, there’s obviously never been anything like it. There is no presidential-year precedent for a widely released, wildly profitable, starkly political documentary aimed at removing the incumbent from the White House. (There has been a certain amount of noise from people distressed at the use of the word “documentary,” because, they say, the movie is not “objective.” These people would be well advised to review the history of the “documentary” genre. When they get done with that, we can move on to the ontological argument about “objectivity.”)
Second, Moore is still the same smart-ass he was all those years ago in Roger & Me, with the same mixed bag of results. Sometimes his gags work (handing out military recruitment pamphlets to befuddled members of Congress), but just as often they go flat. His insecurities as both an entertainer and a polemicist show through in his hyperactively ironic soundtrack (the theme from The Greatest American Hero playing as the only president we have lands on that Mission Accomplished aircraft carrier) and his connect-the-dots voiceovers, which sometimes overstate the obvious.
Third, smart-assery aside, this is, for anyone at all willing to face its implications, a harrowing and heartbreaking movie. In its most effective, least affected moments—a roll call of African-American members of Congress pleading for Senate support to contest the 2000 vote count; a retelling of September 11 that shows no planes and no buildings, just a long stretch of blackness and then one horrified reaction after another; bloody, burned and broken bodies of Iraqi men, women and children; amputees in a U.S. Army hospital struggling to adapt to their physical losses; a pro-military, pro-war mother in Flint trying to come to terms with her son’s combat death—it shows things that have been either forgotten or altogether absent from the mainstream American version of the last four years. There may not be anything in the movie that a well-informed citizen doesn’t know, but the film reminds us of the difference between knowing something and seeing it.
Fourth, it is, of course, an incomplete picture. Partisans on all sides will find things left out, obvious arguments or counter-arguments excised, a lack of follow-through on several central points, a certain prevailing superficiality to Moore’s everyman anguish.
But then, Fahrenheit 9/11 is not a policy paper. It’s not an essay in Foreign Affairs or the scripted platform of a blueblood presidential candidate. It’s the assorted, assembled grievances of a big, bull-headed, baseball-capped guy from Michigan who thinks a lot of people are getting a raw deal and the world could be a little more fair than it is. And it’s hard to imagine anything much more American than that.
Happy Independence Day.
July 1, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 27
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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