A polemicist who draws on the techniques of investigative journalists. A director who unleashes the broadest comedy on the darkest subjects. A baseball cap–wearing Everyman, champion of minorities and the working class, who is really a rich white man -- Michael Moore is all these things, a contradictory figure who elicits many conflicting emotions, often within the same viewer.
No surprise, then, that his latest film plays out that same tug-of-war, pulling an audience in one moment and then repelling the next. Fahrenheit 9/11 is Moore's most ambitious film yet, a no-holds-barred indictment of the war on terrorism. His goal is even more ambitious: As the director told The New York Times recently, he hopes his film will help unseat President Bush in the upcoming election. To that end, Moore has employed his usual tactics, plying found footage; man-on-the-street interviews; and large heaps of innuendo, self-righteousness, and genuine outrage and concern into a blistering attack on the Bush administration.
Fahrenheit 9/11 arrives on a tidal wave of advance publicity. Disney barred its Miramax unit from distributing the film (the movie is now being distributed by Lions Gate Films, IFC Films, and Bob and Harvey Weinstein's Fellowship Adventure Group), and conservatives have taken up a campaign against the movie. Moore has responded by keeping us apprised, loudly, of the attacks on his film and rallying an army of fact-checkers and lawyers. “Any attempts to libel me will be met by force," he has declared.
All the squaring-off over the film leaves viewers in a quandary. In the coming Armageddon of this election, Moore seems to be asking, are we for good or for evil? Moore is the Old Testament God, smiting politicians with embarrassing footage of one crooning a monstrously sincere, self-penned song, and another soaking his comb in his mouth and then raking it through his hair. Moore sends down plagues and poxes of war footage, of cutesy Dragnet and Bonanza spoofs. Reeling from Moore's salvos, the brimstone smell of another four years with Bush wafting through our nostrils, is there any such thing as free will? Can we do anything but believe in our shambling, unshaven deity?
Well, yes. Even though I probably share a good portion of Moore's politics, I resent having to kowtow to such a sanctimonious bully. But it's true, Fahrenheit 9/11 is certainly Moore's best film -- his most tightly focused, disciplined, and powerful one. And although he commandeers an ice-cream truck to harass lawmakers and ask them to send their kids to Iraq, there's even less of Moore himself in the film pulling his usual tricks. This time, he largely focuses on the story at hand.
And what a story it is. Moore has retained some of his preach-to-the-converted rhetorical style, wherein he makes various insinuations with clever editing and blazes through statistics at light speed. This time, however, Moore draws on the work of people like journalist Craig Unger, author of House of Bush, House of Saud, to lay out the Bush family's Saudi connections, giving the documentary a certain heft. The opening portion of the film moves at a brisk, direct pace, in marked contrast to the sprawl of Bowling for Columbine.
But then the film begins to, well, spread out a bit, like a fat man in a big chair. And here Moore gets into trouble. Contradictions run rampant: The war on Afghanistan was a deliberate distraction, but we didn't send enough troops there; homeland-security policy tramples on our civil liberties but is then too lax; Bush is both a cowboy dummy and a master puppeteer of diversionary wars and a media-fueled culture of fear. Where there isn't a contradiction, there's a gaping hole: What, pray tell, are we to do about our very real problems? What should we do instead, in this infernal struggle against fundamentalism, in the mess of Iraq?
When Moore does turn his camera to Iraq, he reveals both his great strengths as a master of found footage and his weaknesses -- his ersatz populism and condescension towards both his subjects and his audience. He shows us searing footage from the front -- charred bodies, children with shattered limbs, the confused and aching faces of U.S. soldiers. But he prefaces these images with shots of a wedding, children flying kites in the Iraqi streets. Are we to believe that before the occupation, Iraq was a heaven on earth? That must be news to the thousands lying in Saddam's mass graves.
Nevertheless, the war images have the power of blunt-force trauma, which makes it all the more disappointing when Moore editorializes with a voice-over or with the abrupt, jarring cut that is his specialty. At times it seems as if others' suffering becomes just a convenient peg from which to hang his argument. He shows an Iraqi woman at the very extremity of rage and grief. Her uncle's house has just been bombed; it will be her fifth funeral. “I can only count on you, God,” she screams, “Where are you, God?” Moore then cuts to Britney Spears, chewing gum and saying, “We should just trust our president.” I know the point Moore's trying to make -- here some of us are, bovine, plastic, blindly following our president, while others feel abandoned by their God. But goddamnit, Michael, do you have to be so callous to show us our own lack of feeling? My notes at this point in the film accelerated into illegible profanity.
Moore attempts to subordinate a second woman's grief to yet another rhetorical point when he finds a warmly articulate woman whose son has died in Iraq. We are meant to understand the disproportionate toll the war takes on people of color, disenfranchised youngsters with no opportunities, and desperate families. He follows her as she walks through Washington, D.C., dazed, a female stand-in for his own usual wandering role in his films. She stands in front of the White House. A stranger argues with the mother, saying, “This is all staged” (a complaint many might have of Moore's films). But the mother's response, as she cries out a question that echoes and makes whole the despair of that Iraqi woman, is so real and so heartbroken that she breaks free of Moore's artifice, his attempt to make a point of her pain. Moore, for his part, stands back and lets his film become something more than what he aimed for -- an act of witness to suffering that is, for a moment, deeply human and not just polemical.
Moore would do well to remember the book from which he appropriated his title. Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 depicted the deliberate destruction of imagination and knowledge in a world where firemen set fires -- they burned books. Moore probably sees his film as an antidote to the corporate censorship of the war on terrorism and the media spin of the war's terrorism alerts. But in a way, Moore has a bit of authoritarianism in his filmmaking. He wants to tell us what to think, how to interpret his footage, what an Iraqi woman's pain means in his grand theory. He lobs firebombs: The Bush administration is a conflagration, as are the companies and the corrupt Saudis.
And yet there are moments of human grace, when we witness those women asking ancient questions. It is an act of artistic maturity that Moore allows for silence after at least one of the questions. After all, it is up to us to struggle towards the answers.
Noy Thrupkaew is a Prospect senior correspondent.
