Fahrenheit 9/11
Dir.: Michael Moore
R, 122 min.
Now playing at area theaters
The last weekend of June, millions of disgruntled Americans protested the Bush administration in a way that neither the White House nor the mass media could ignore. They did not march on Washington—that would get them dismissed as a bunch of nuts or hippies. They did not participate in a poll that could be spun one way or the other. Instead, they did something so simple, mundane and tangible it had the force of a shock wave. They bought a movie ticket. When the weekend tally was done, Fahrenheit 9/11 had grossed a record-breaking $23 million. It was the No. 1 movie in the country. It even beat White Chicks.
It is not remarkable that a movie would land on the covers of both Time and Entertainment Weekly. Spider-Man 2 made Newsweek's cover. There is no longer "entertainment news": watch CNN and FOX and the wasteland of network "newsmagazines," and there is only news entertainment, designed to advance the holdings or corporate agenda of the network or publication's owner. (NBC's flogging of the Friends finale as a Desert Storm-sized news event comes to mind.) No, the remarkable thing is that by selling the right number of tickets, Fahrenheit 9/11 set the nation's news agenda with actual news.
For all my misgivings about Michael Moore—a cuddly populist with a demagogue's hidden claws—I'm glad he knows how to play this game. NBC won't devote an hour to possible ties among the Bush family, oil cartels and Saudi Arabian nationalists who shelter terrorists. But if Michael Moore makes the most popular movie in the country, then by God put him on Dateline. Moore owns a brand called "Michael Moore," a rumpled, lovable figure who embodies the little guy who stands up to City Hall. A ticket to a Michael Moore movie is a vote against corporate corruption, imperialist arrogance and economic injustice, and because the votes are measured in dollars, they confer a legitimacy the mass media cannot ignore. There's just one catch: You have to vote for Michael Moore.
I was skeptical when Moore's 1997 doc The Big One palmed off his book tour as a public mandate. After this box-office haul, he may be right. Is Fahrenheit 9/11 worth seeing? Hell yeah, if for no other reason than to know what you're talking about when someone inevitably asks. Is it a good movie? Hard to say. Like a lot of Moore's work, his excoriating attack on President George W. Bush is a rangy, rousing mix of essay filmmaking, galvanizing populist outrage and cheap shots, as bristling with ideas and issues as it is rather messy and ill-formed as an argument. Your mileage will vary on how strongly you feel the ends justify the means.
"Was it a dream?" Moore wonders ruefully over footage of a 2000 Florida victory celebration—for Vice President Al Gore. No such luck. The movie closes its eyes, the screen goes black, and the sounds are of shrieks, explosions and a screaming across the sky—the most vivid picture imaginable of the Sept. 11 attacks, the one in our heads. From there Moore aims for nothing less than regime change, beating the Bushes for a litany of pre- and post-9/11 sins: coddling Saudi Arabia to protect the investments of Bush cronies; diverting the war on terrorism to Iraq as a smokescreen; jeopardizing, even wasting the lives of American soldiers, on campaigns founded upon a pack of lies.
Moore's strategy—or if you will, his strategery—is to couch his attack as mainstream entertainment, using snarky sound bites, pop-music montages and graffiti-like sketch comedy. When Moore's aim is true, his piefights hit like firefights. In one terrific bit, after learning senators rubber-stamped the Patriot Act without reading it, the director rounds Capitol Hill in an ice-cream truck blaring the fine print. Later, he and a Marine accost various congressmen—including Tennessee's own Rep. John Tanner, making an inauspicious screen debut—asking them to recruit their own kids. Like the director's fiercest and funniest provocations, these gags channel aggravation into activism.
Yet this nyah-nyah razzing also indulges some of Moore's shoddiest tactics. If he doesn't have a smoking gun, he'll distort innocuous images into something menacing and incriminatory, with slow motion and ooh-scary music. Take the pre-broadcast footage of Bush getting made up as he prepares to declare war. Maybe Bush looks a little frivolous for a man about to call the nation to battle, especially when he cuts his eyes back and forth like Susanna Hoffs in the "Walk Like an Egyptian" video. But evidence it ain't. If CNN had existed during the Civil War, Abe Lincoln would have looked just as stupid waiting for a satellite uplink. It's bad enough that we elect public officials on their televised comportment. Must we judge them now on their makeup tests?
When these techniques fail, Moore settles for innuendo disguised as an easy laugh. The movie's worst scene is a clip of various Bush puppet-masters shaking Saudi hands to R.E.M.'s "Shiny Happy People"—the implication being that all those towel-heads are up to no good, and the Bushies are plainly in bed with them. So, what—we're supposed to fault career diplomats for doing grip-'n'-grins with foreign dignitaries? A famous photo shows President Richard Nixon shaking hands with Elvis Presley. It doesn't prove Nixon was a Jordanaire. If you're gonna go after Bush and his cronies, get them for their sins, not because they talk funny and look silly in pictures. Not even if, like Paul Wolfowitz, they smooth their hair on camera with their own spit.
You could argue that such lapses weaken Moore's arguments. But cohesive arguments are not Moore's strength. If Moore's current-affairs free association makes his movies a kind of nonfiction analogue to Don DeLillo's majestic paranoiac tapestries, as critic Matthew Wilder noted in the Minneapolis City Pages, it also makes him a kind of drive-by polemicist, given to hit-and-run broadsides that sometimes contradict each other. After noting that intelligence agencies failed to detain and question bin Laden family members right after 9/11, the movie cuts to clips of Dragnet's Joe Friday, bulldozing suspects as Moore seems to think the FBI should have done. It gets a laugh.
Yet here's Moore a few scenes later, in one of the movie's most valuable sequences, mocking homeland-security hammerheads for hassling harmless Americans and infiltrating peace groups. Well, are the terror cops overzealous or not zealous enough? The presentation blunts what should be its main thrust: that the administration is misusing the war on terror to silence critics, not enemies. One minute Moore's sending up the Bush gang as cowboys in a Bonanza parody, riding herd on Afghanistan; the next he's arguing that we didn't send enough troops to get the job done. One minute he's goofing on small-town Virginians who fear terrorists will strike their spaghetti supper; the next he's worrying that the Oregon coast lies unprotected. The flurry of accusations only obscures the good reasons for getting Bush out of office.
But Moore finds them in the movie's devastating second half, which is given over to ill-supported U.S. soldiers overseas, harrowing combat footage too graphic (and hence unpatriotic) for America's embedded mass media, and the grief of a dead serviceman's mother, Lila Lipscomb, whose son's last letter prays the folks back home won't reelect the fool in charge. Donald Rumsfeld can crow all he wants about the "humanity" of a campaign designed to shock and awe. But dead Iraqi civilians, injured children and anguished families refute him directly—as do our own soldiers, faced with getting blown apart and sent home in flag-draped caskets for reasons they tell Moore they don't understand. As an election issue, that trumps squinty eyes and makeup tests.
Fahrenheit 9/11 may not add up to the prosecution Moore intends, but it's a downpour of often damning circumstantial evidence. And thanks to Moore's skillful deployment of his own celebrity and box-office clout, he's made sure the slumbering mass media will spend the summer investigating or refuting his charges, with the zeal they should have mustered in the first place. Among the movie's most effective sequences is a montage of supposedly objective TV anchors fawning over our war machinery. No wonder a friend says he gets his most substantial TV news now from The Daily Show. If they hadn't rolled over, if news chiefs hadn't stacked their broadcasts with puff pieces and plugs, there might not be a need for a Fahrenheit 9/11.
For that reason alone, I cast my vote for Michael Moore. Twice now. And counting
