Movies / TV
The "Fahrenheit 9/11" Review
By R. E. Pierson
Jul 7, 2004, 12:28

Michael Moore taught me something new and enlightening about movies.

Really. He did.

He taught me that a movie at the cinema can convey a sense of urgency. Not escapism. Not abstract moral lessons. Not a new point of view about a subject. But real urgency: the sense that the events on the screen are happening right now and that something must be done about it.

At any given movie we see in a theater, there's a considerable amount of distance between the spectator and what's on the screen, and we can convince ourselves that it's only a movie. There's a feeling of safety we normally get from being in the seats, looking at the screen, and nine times out of ten what we're looking at is fiction anyway. Most movies cultivate this feeling of safety, and are marketed as an escape from the real world. Even documentaries usually don't cover current events (as in "The Fog of War"), or don't cover subjects that we're familiar with and exposed to every day, so we can still separate ourselves from them. Michael Moore's �Fahrenheit 9/11� does everything it can to take away that distance. It does all it can to say, �This concerns you and you are not safe from what is happening on the screen.� There is a palpable kind of alarming effect in this film that sets you on edge and demands that you pay attention.

I can�t recall a single film that relies so much on time and place as "Fahrenheit 9/11.� There is something immediate and unnerving about sitting in a movie theater and seeing such a damning portrayal of events that concern people who are still in office, and events I just saw on the news 6-12 months ago. This is not "just a movie;" it's a cinematic call to arms more instant and more direct than anything I've ever seen in a theater. . Even documentaries usually concern events that have already passed by, or people and events we're not exposed to on any regular basis; even highly political documentaries like "The Fog of War" or the infamous "General Amin Dada" allow for some distance between the audience and what is being shown on the screen. The events we see in these movies, as horrible as they are, somehow cannot touch us anymore and we're in a safe place from which we can study them. This is the exact opposite of "Fahrenheit 9/11.� It doesn't behave like a documentary, or like a fiction film. Its rhetoric is too fiery, its subject matter is too close to home, its goals are too audacious and immediate. If anything, "Fahrenheit 9/11" behaves most like the direct political cinema of the 60s and 70s. It belongs more with Jean-Luc Godard's anti-bourgeois works, and Melvin Van Peebles's "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song": stark, unwavering political calls to action that would tell you their agenda in no uncertain terms and would go to any number of extreme lengths to make their point. They spoke powerfully about issues that were still on people�s lips. Movies haven't been this commandingly political in decades (certainly not in my lifetime). And although "Fahrenheit 9/11" doesn't always work (it's too clunky and uneven to sustain the effect it wants for 122 minutes), when it does work it's like a wake-up call to remind us of what movies are capable of doing.

As with Godard's "Weekend" and Van Peebles's "Sweetback," building a narrative or building an argument is not the point of this movie at all. The point is to jolt you with as many moments of impact as possible. Moore tries to make an impact in every way he can think of, with a number of weapons at his disposal: snide voiceover narration, use of old news footage to make his targets look ridiculous (John Ashcroft singing a song provides an especially juicy moment), interviews with Congressmen (all of whom are Democrats), personal testimonies, pop culture parodies, and some particularly disturbing footage of dead bodies: we see Iraqi women who have been napalmed, we see charred corpses of American soldiers, and we see a lot of other things.

There is a train of thought and a narrative that Moore sort of follows, attempting to show how we got from 9/11 to the war in Iraq, but he goes off on so many tangents that it is hard to follow, and difficult to put the pieces together into a cohesive whole. I myself had to see it twice, take extensive notes while I was watching, and look at my notes afterwards to see that the film had a logic to it. It goes something like:

�Bush won the 2000 election fraudulently and his term was going poorly until 9/11/2001. Bush purposely bungled proper 9/11 investigations for fear that the Bush family's connections with Saudi Arabia (and particularly the bin Laden family) would be made public. He had little interest in capturing Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda, and instead looked for an excuse to invade Iraq. His administration did this by creating a culture of fear in America of terrorist attacks, making us believe that anyone at all could be a threat, so that they could argue Saddam Hussein was a threat. The war and its aftermath needlessly took the lives of many civilians and American soldiers alike. And while conglomerates like Halliburton stand to benefit enormously from the Iraqi occupation, the underprivileged are often economically strong-armed into joining the military for a decent source of income, fighting and dying in a war that only benefits the rich and had no business being waged.�

This is a fairly simple story, and could probably be told effectively in about eighty minutes. But within this structure, Moore throws over two hours' worth of information at you, and he doesn't help you out much with the attempt to keep all the pieces straight in your head. He dwells so long on so many pieces, like Bush's censored coast guard papers, and spends so little time connecting those pieces, that I often found myself lost. Suddenly we're at the Saudi embassy, talking about the ambassador's security detail and how Saudis own seven percent of America. I found myself hopelessly trying to retrace my steps: "Okay, we're talking about Saudi money now because Bush Sr. has some connection with Saudi money men, and this is important somehow because of W. and James Bath, and...wait, what does James Bath have to do with this?" A few too many times, he segues from point to point with, "Was it _____? Or was it something else?" And suddenly you're in another segment making a different point, and you're left going, "Wait a minute, how did we get here again?" The purpose is to overwhelm you with information and leave you with a singular sensation of alarm that the Bush administration is in power. Again, this is not really a strategy that a proper documentary takes, and the film's power of persuasion lies more in the individual clips and segments than in the overall arc of the film. It relies a cluster of great moments rather than great build and pacing (and truth be told, much of this movie has terrible pacing).

The pointed moments in "Fahrenheit 9/11" are fairly hit-or-miss in their effectiveness, but the film abounds with so many of them that there are more than enough great ones to pick up the slack for the weak ones. For a time, the weak moments do keep coming and threaten to de-rail the whole film: The segments on the Peace Fresno group the Oregon state troopers, and the airport security breast milk incident particularly. They all serve the film of how post-9/11homeland security is really a joke, but they have all the depth and resonance of a "Daily Show" story, only less funny. They leave you wondering where exactly Moore is supposed to be going with all this, and why he's dwelling so much on these seemingly pointless anecdotes. Most of the evidence for the Bush family's connection with Saudi Arabia is also presented the same way, with the same "Where is this going and why should I care?" effect.

But even through the weak points, he's sprinkled in enough moments of genius that, when they hit their mark, are both frightening and darkly comic. There is the sound byte of Bush speaking about Osama bin Laden and saying casually and apathetically, "I don't know where he is, and I don't think much about it." The frankness in the way he says it elicits a very uncomfortable laugh. There is the man on a segment of the "Today" show, who has invented a parachute for jumping out of tall buildings (in case you should be inside a tall building and it's attacked by terrorists), and whose demonstration girl cannot even get the parachute on properly. The expression on her face is priceless, and the pathetic comic quality of the clip within Moore's larger context gives it a quiet underlying tension. These moments let us laugh at what is happening, while still making us take the situation seriously and not letting us forget what is at stake in the film.

This is the most effective and most appropriate tone for the movie, playing "Dr. Strangelove" with news clips, but they're scattered too sparsely through the longer segments for the film to have any cohesive impact for the first hour or so. Often it feels like Moore is trying too hard to be our next great satirist, his excessive use of narration and music gets the tone all wrong, and the film becomes too clever for its own good. The important thing is to get the laugh WITH the sense of impending danger, not get the laugh at the EXPENSE of that sense of impending danger. Too many times Moore goes for the cheap laugh, at the expense of a larger meaningful effect. The montage of various government officials shaking hands with Saudis set to "Shiny Happy People" just doesn't work, it goes on too long, and it makes no further point that Moore didn't already make five minutes ago.

Most of the first half is dominated by his narration as well. He usually guides us from segment to segment with it, and many times guides us through each individual segment with it. This hinders the movie not only because the narration isn't very well-written, but because it keeps the tone too light. The long pseudo-train of thought Bush has, laid over the footage of reading "My Pet Goat" after the WTC bombing is not funny and is a perfect example of Moore unnecessarily spoon-feeding his audience. Between his nasal voice, his innumerable rhetorical questions and his bad comic timing, you wish for him to just shut the hell up and find a way to let his material speak for itself. The best parts are when he makes his points by showing the right clip in the right place, and editing it together in a specific way. This is what he does to show the WTC attack, putting sounds and images together, and it's done in a very moving and tasteful way.

Once the film gets to the war in Iraq and its aftermath, the material does start to find its own way and speak for itself. The tone changes, Moore�s voiceover becomes more sparse, and there are fewer jokes. We get barraged with the administration�s �We know he has WMD�s� rhetoric, with images of Iraqi civilians killed by the invasion, with images and stories of American soldiers killed and wounded in the invasion and occupation. The stark and frightening moments start coming one after another, and the sum of these moments leaves you with the feeling that the American people have been bamboozled by the administration. It�s no coincidence that this is the best part of the film, and the part that hits home the most. This is mostly where Moore lets the images, the intercutting and the stories speak for themselves, and the stakes are considerably higher. He introduces Lila Lipscomb here, who provides an emotional anchor for the film as Moore�s ideal American, and why the Bush administration is so dangerous.

Mrs. Lipscomb is from Flint, Michigan, Moore�s own hometown and a place he comes back to in film after film. For him, this place seems to simultaneously represent everything he loves about America, and everything he believes is wrong with it: he has a genuine affection for the people there, and a strong hatred for the circumstances they are left in. The area is pathetically impoverished, with an unemployment rate of (according to Mrs. Lipscomb) over seventeen percent. In this area, the military is one of the only ways out of poverty, as a way to earn a proper income. We see recruiters for the Marines go to the poorest sections of town trying to talk young people into enlisting with every means possible: as a way into the music industry, as a way to start a career in professional basketball, etc. According to Moore, these are the people, by and large, who end up fighting on the other side of the world, and these are the people who pay when the administration chooses to fight an unnecessary war. The story of Mrs. Lipscomb and her son, who was killed in an assault in Baghdad, is spread out among several segments, taking its time to build and resonate in an oddly brilliant example of pacing. We first see her explaining how the military is �an excellent option for people in Flint,� for pragmatic reasons. We see her putting an American flag up on her lawn every morning, because she has two children in the military. We hear her story, in very intense detail, of the night she found out her son was killed in action.

In one of the most affecting scenes of the film, we see her read the last letter her son ever sent from Iraq. The letter expresses his disgust for the situation he has been placed in, not because his life is in danger, but because he does not know why he is there. There is a startling dimension of drama in reading this young man's words of anger powerlessness about being placed in an environment that would eventually kill him, and the tragedy is not that he died, but that he died in vain. It is summed up succinctly in his father�s words, spoken directly to the camera: ��And for what? That�s the sickening part. For what?�

The film is ultimately less about Bush�s own specific policy decisions than it is about the have�s and the have-not�s. Contrasting the loss of this middle-class family, Moore goes to a corporate conference that shows us exactly how Bush can get away with continuing to put his soldiers at risk: corporations stand to make a lot of money from the overthrow, and these are the people who give Bush the campaign money to remain in power. The have�s reap all the benefits and make none of the sacrifices. The scene of Moore harassing Congressmen to get their children to enlist makes absolutely no sense in itself (and has rightly received a lot of negative attention), but it does literalize his point about who is making the real sacrifices in the war. Moore himself makes an comment on the sacrifices of these young people and the responsibility we have to them, which is well-written and quite touching.

Although the film is very scattered segment-to-segment, the end wraps everything up nicely, with just the right tone of comic anger. The film chillingly parallels the events we�ve just seen with a quote from George Orwell that finally brings all the information into scope, and doesn�t let us forget who is still in charge, what power they wield, and what Moore implies must be done about it.

Moore�s overarching point is not to convince Bush supporters that he is really incompetent or evil: it�s too riddled with sensationalism and straw men. The point of the film is to speak to those who believe Bush to be incompetent or evil but are apathetic about the fact, and urge them to act. One of Moore�s criticisms of the Bush administration is using scare tactics to get its agenda passed. As an interviewed Congressman says, fear works, and you can get the people to do what you want by creating an environment of constant threat. Shockingly (or not), this is exactly the strategy of �Fahrenheit 9/11�: to scare the viewer on a very basic level by barraging him with pieces of information that he can�t quite fit together, and leave him with the vague but undeniable feeling that he is being threatened. Moore does this not by highlighting rational arguments, but with violent imagery, parody, and tons of other cinematic tools that have been used since the days of Soviet montage to emotionally convince you, by your psychological reactions to images and sounds. It�s cinema as a rhetorical device, not a tool for debate. You�re not convinced by a clear line of reasoning that Moore follows, or by his amazing powers of superior intellect. You�re moved because you see Donald Rumsfeld talking about �the care that goes into� bombing Iraqi military targets, juxtaposed with a hysterical Iraqi civilian whose house has just been bombed, and whose family has had five funerals this week because of the attacks. How ethical is it? I have no idea, as I have no idea how much of the information in this film is true and how much he has stretched or made up for the sake of impact. Is it propaganda? Absolutely. But it works in providing a much-needed shot in the arm to remind us of what the cinema is capable of doing. It is capable of speaking directly to the people, in the present tense, and confronting them in a very vivid way with current issues that must be dealt with.

Footnote: Apparently this film (and the publicity around it) has inspired, among other things, a right-winger named Michael Wilson to make a film called �Michael Moore Hates America.� I personally think this is a great thing, I'll see it as soon as I get the chance, and I hope it turns out to be as passionate and well-done as the movie that inspired it.

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