Michael Moore's 9/11. -- by James S Robbins

The preview really got my attention. The New York Times called the
documentary "entertaining, moving and historically significant."
Details dubbed it "an instant and incendiary classic," and
Entertainment Weekly called it "epic storytelling...one of the most
revelatory...portraits ever made." Thoughtful words for an important
moment in film. But Metallica: Some Kind of Monster won't be released
until July 9, and, anyway, I was in the theater to see Fahrenheit
9/11.

 
 
 
Satire in wartime is an ancient art — Aristophanes made a career of
it. One can appreciate the humor in a well-made caricature regardless
of one's view of the issues it makes light of. But listening to the
banter amongst the Left-wing crowd in the theater, I concluded that
this was not simply lampoonery. Moore accurately reflects the beliefs
that most Democratic voters hold as true: President Bush was not
elected legally; the United States is run by a wealthy white oligarchy
(of which Democrats are somehow not a part, but sometimes facilitate);
the military is comprised of an underclass that is sent to die in wars
to keep the ruling oligarchy in power and make its members even
wealthier; and invading Iraq was the idee fixe of the Bush
administration from day one, for which the war on terrorism simply
provided a convenient pretext.

As a film, Fahrenheit is uneven. A few parts are visually entertaining
(e.g., the Bonanza parody) and some are very moving. But other
segments wander to no particular point (such as a night patrol in
Iraq, dimly filmed and inconclusive) or are simply confusing (are
there really insufficient numbers of state troopers in Oregon, and if
so, isn't that their problem?). Mostly I was interested in how Moore
employed the various elements of his shtick, which he has been
developing at least since he emerged on the scene with Roger & Me in
1989. All the tricks were in evidence:

Exploit the ignorant: Talk to people who are inexperienced with media,
and encourage them to say things that they probably should not. It is
especially effective when giving a straight interview to people whose
views are preposterous. The Daily Show does this regularly, and it is
very funny, but hardly profound. Moore shows, among others, a woman in
Saginaw, Michigan, who explains why her town could be a target for
terrorism, and a clip of a hapless entrepreneur hawking an "escape
chute" for emergency evacuation from tall buildings. These people were
used to illustrate the irrational fears the oligarchs had conjured in
order to prepare the hoipolloi for the case to invade Iraq.
Congressman Jim McDermott called the fear campaign a "skillful and
ugly" manipulation of the American public, underscoring the sense of
paranoia that pervades the film.

Stage ambushes: Track down famous people and pose difficult questions
while filming them, hopefully catching them in an embarrassing moment.
Moore presents congressmen with the idea that their children should be
sent to fight in Iraq, his reasoning being that if the lives of the
progeny of the oligarchy were placed in danger we would only fight
wars that were really necessary. Unfortunately for Moore, he is too
well known and instantly recognizable for the ambush to work very
well, and most of the shots show his intended victims avoiding him.
Perhaps he should work through proxies.

Capitalize on the nonsequitur: The most noted example of this
technique, and one being used to promote the film, features President
Bush on a golf outing. He states to reporters, "I call upon all
nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers.
Thank you. Now watch this drive." This scene got big laughs. Moore
makes it appear as though the president convened the reporters in
order to make a major policy statement, and then get back to his golf
game. However, this was a routine press availability in which the
president gave a standard answer to a stock question. Had he shown the
entire Q&A it would hardly have been as interesting, but it would
definitely have been more truthful. Moore also delights in running
out-takes, pre-interview preparation shots, and other images that
editors do not usually find newsworthy. People sometimes do strange or
potentially embarrassing things before the cameras come on. For
example it is not particularly edifying to see Deputy Secretary of
Defense Wolfowitz coping with a bad hair experience, but apparently
Moore found it significant.

Juxtapose: Juxtaposition is a very important aspect of Moore's
technique, but he is not very subtle. For example, he shows a clip
from al Jazeera of an Iraqi woman wailing about her house being
destroyed by American bombs, then cuts to a soldier talking about how
they are there to make life better for the Iraqi people. The low point
in the film is a series of street scenes of happy Iraqi children
interspersed with shots of the attack being readied. The implicit —
perhaps explicit — message is that life under Saddam was just fine.
(Moore doesn't much discuss Saddam, or why Bush was out to get him,
except to imply it was because Saddam had tried to kill Bush 41.) We
shortly see images of Iraqi children killed or horribly wounded, an
echo of the "baby-killer" rhetoric of the Vietnam era.

Mess with the soundtrack: This is another form of juxtaposition, and
the least clever aspect of Moore's act, the kind of technique anybody
could employ. Just take a serious situation and put frivolous music
behind it, or illustrate a popular song with images of your victim
that place him in a bad light. Moore sometimes showed a little
imagination, such as showing tape of President Bush landing on the USS
Abraham Lincoln while playing the theme from The Greatest American
Hero ("Believe It or Not"). However, frequently his selections were of
the "cheesy sounding circus music in the background" variety, what one
might call French humor, which is probably what caught the attention
of the folks at Cannes.

Milk the pathos: Moore appeals to emotion throughout the film, for
example showing wounded servicemen, most of whom bore their situations
stoically. A 9/11 victim's family member discussed at length how her
life had been devastated, though she seemed to be one of the
professional victims attending the 9/11 Commission hearings. Moore
could have engaged in some clever juxtapositioning here by flashing up
the average payment from the victim funds ($2.1 million), especially
compared to the minuscule benefits paid to families of troops killed
in the war. The most poignant story was Lila Lipscomb's, whose son
Sgt. Michael F. Pedersen was killed April 2, 2003, in a Blackhawk
helicopter crash. Moore presents Lipscomb as a proud service mother, a
self-described conservative Democrat who ran the flag up every day and
despised the antiwar crowd. After her son is killed, Moore documents
her descent into despair. She is currently getting involved in the
peace movement she used to oppose.

There was one scene where I felt Moore had reached high art. He
portrayed the 9/11 attacks using sounds and a blank screen. He passed
up using the most compelling visuals of recent decades, appealing
instead to the viewer's imagination and memory, with an auditory
prompt. It was disorienting and frightening, and in my opinion the
best moment of the movie qua movie. Nevertheless, it was soon over,
and then it was back to the shtick.

Moore is the perfect person to engage in this kind of manufactured
public embarrassment, largely because you cannot imagine him being
embarrassed about anything. Not because he doesn't have reason to be,
but because he is completely unselfconscious. Faulty reasoning, slim
evidence, outright foolish statements, nothing slows him down. The
film has a number of factual errors, and the 9/11 Commission, which he
portrays sympathetically, has since undercut some of the pillars of
his major arguments. Moore passed up a great opportunity for irony
with respect to one Commission finding: The movie dwells at length on
the issue of the Saudi flights out of the U.S. after the attacks, and
Moore shows a clip of Senator Byron Dorgan asking who was responsible.
Later when showing Richard Clarke making his argument that the
president had ordered him to find Iraq responsible for 9/11, Moore
could have scrolled text across the bottom of the screen saying, "Hey
Senator! This is the guy!" But that might have disrupted the
conspiratorial story line with unnecessary salient facts.

The Democratic leadership embraced Moore at the premier at the Uptown
Theater in Washington, and the heavily liberal audience applauded the
film vigorously. It was a great moment of candor. Moore has the guts
to say the things they think but will not utter. If the film
encourages them to speak up, all the better. I cannot see Middle
America finding much intellectual appeal in the film's underlying
feeling of ill will and dread. It is at base very hateful.
Conservatives should not protest this film; that only gives it more
notoriety and makes its multimillionaire "everyman" director even
wealthier. I would sooner acknowledge Moore as the intellectual leader
of the Left, and this film his (and their) emblematic masterwork. This
is the best they have to offer.