gnimbley reviews Fahrenheit 9/11

[gnimbley]

I was going to put this up on my blog, but it is having some kind of coding problem, so I am putting it here, okay? It's in three parts, so I'll make three posts. It's kind of long.

Fear and Loathing in Washington D.C. - Part One

In which gnimbley the gnome dissects, digests, and deconstructs "Fahrenheit 9/11" and discovers that, while it is a lousy documentary, it is pretty good political propaganda.

"The Soviets had Sergei Eisenstein; the Nazis had Leni Riefenstahl. We have Michael Moore."

Before

I wasn't going to see this film. I had heard enough about the film and Michael Moore (I had never seen one of his films before) to have already judged it as a left wing, biased attack on George W. Bush.  Okay, so what? The left wing has a tendency to get caught up in objectives and trample all over things like truth, logic, and the sanity of their arguments. I didn't need to see one more socialist diatribe. After all, wasn't the reality bad enough?

Then I read some passionate words some non-critics had posted on a computer forum I frequent and I thought, maybe I should check this thing out. At least so I could argue intelligently about it.

I approached the film with trepidation. Michael Moore is known for using logical fallacies and making spurious inferences. I expected a film flawed beyond redemption with rhetorical excess and invalid arguments supported by unverifiable, ambiguous "facts."

His defenders often make the statement: "at least he makes you think." But this is merely a political argument, not a defense of his tactics. If the right wing made such arguments, the left would not say, "well, at least it made me think;" they would pounce on its flaws to argue his entire premise is wrong.

This is, of course, what the right is currently doing. They call the film a pack of lies.

Someone told me the film is meant to be polarizing, but my response is, what good is that? Those is favor of Moore's premise vehemently agree with him; those opposed vehemently do not. That's polarization. So what? They would be doing the same if the film didn't exist at all. They just wouldn't be doing it about the film.

It seems to me that the objective of a political argument, is not to persuade the left or the right, but to sway those who are undecided. They are the people who might benefit by seeing this film, those who wonder if the US is doing the right thing in Iraq. They are the people who could be persuaded to vote Bush in or out of office.

And if the political debate centers over a flawed film that is - at least in part - demonstrably false, then wouldn't the discrediting of the film do more harm than good to the cause Moore is expounding? Couldn't this film be a political boomerang?

It was that in mind that I walked into a suburban cinemaplex located on Ronald Reagan Boulevard in central Indiana - Bush country if there is any - at 1:30 PM on Wednesday, June 30, 2004, to see "Fahrenheit 9/11."

I stood in line with a lot of older patrons, well, older than my 53 years, who were going to see Spiderman or King Arthur or something. I figured that I 'd be the only one in the theatre. Wouldn't you if you were going to see an anti-Republican film on Ronald Reagan Boulevard?

The ticket boy told me that my film was in the second theatre on the left. I walked down the corridor to the second theatre on the left. The sign above the door was blank. No film name at all.

The sign above the theatre across the corridor - the second theatre on the right - said "Fahrenheit 9/11." Hmm. Was the sign wrong or was the ticket boy wrong or was he just making a political statement?

I decided to trust the sign and entered the theatre on the right. After all, "Fahrenheit 9/11" was only in one theatre in the cinemaplex. Spiderman was on seven screens and King Arthur on three.

The theatre was one of those small cinemaplex shells that only hold 100 people or so. I was surprised to find there were already over thirty people there, about half older than me.

Well, there are older leftists. A lot of them were made in the sixties, something I graduated from. But thirty people at the matinee in Reagan country on Wednesday afternoon to see a piece of polarizing political propaganda? Maybe I was in the wrong theatre.

I sat down near the front, pulled out my notebook and waited for the film to start. We were in the middle of something called "The Twenty," an extended advertising opportunity showing lengthy trailers for movies and TV shows, as well as countless TV commercials. I watched something about a new Christmas movie starring Tim Allen, a NBC show about medical horrors, and some other junk.

I was a bit amused by the first TV commercial. It was a recruiting pitch for the US Army.

Maybe I was in the wrong theatre.

I figured I would stay until the movie started. If it was the wrong one I would just leave and go across the hall. Or maybe fate decreed that I should see Spiderman 2 or something else instead. I decided just to sit still and see what happened.

Numerous commercials went by. Starburst. Coca Cola. Right Guard. Low Carb Coca Cola. (Low carb coke? Isn't this ad a little out of hand? I saw an ad the other day for low carb One A Day vitamins. And my 24 grams a serving bran cereal has started putting "low net carbs" on its box, too. Ain't symbolic magic fun?)

Then we got to the previews. Phantom of the Opera. Danny Deckchair. (Might be funny.) Kinsey. (Might be atrocious.) Bourne Supremacy. (Might blow a bunch of stuff up.) Open Water. (Might just scare the hell out of me.)

Then the lights went down.

[gnimbley]

Fear and Loathing in Washington D.C. - Part Two


During

It opened on a surreal note. Michael Moore had a dream. A dream that Al Gore lost the election. It seemed unreal to him. Instead of Saint Gore we got a bumbling, pickup driving, vacation taking good ol' Texas boy for President.

Well, I was in the right theatre.

He ran through a rehash of sour politics; a rant about the 2004 election. Congresspersons, all black, took to the Senate floor to challenge the election result. Al Gore had to act the bad guy and put them all down for procedural irregularities. (That was just weird.)

Protesters at the Inaugural (which, despite Moore's disingenuous argument to the contrary, was not the first time a President rode during the Inaugural when there were protesters.)

George W. Bush sleeping on fine French linens. (Probably every President has done the same; why was it necessary to tell us this?)

And so on and so forth. The opening was fun, but it was just partisan bitching.  

Then came the opening credits, a menagerie of shots of the current occupants of the Bush White House. All at their most unflattering.  The last shot, where Bush is frozen waiting for TV cameras to roll and suddenly looks out the corner of his eye, drew the first hearty laugh from the audience.

If nothing else, I thought, this might be fun.

I think Moore did a brilliant job with his next sequence: the World Trade Center. There was no picture. Just sound.

The pictures have become etched into our souls. We don't need to see them on the screen to see them in our hearts. (There is one sequence, the second plane disappearing into a plane shaped hole in the tower, that played over and over again in my head. Those nights I couldn't sleep.)

He followed that with pictures of horrified people on the street, looking up, into a gentle falling snow storm of ash. We never see the Towers. But we know they are there. He doesn't hit us over the head with it; he knows he doesn't need to.

He follows this with the video of George W. Bush at a grade school in Florida during a photo op, sitting with little kids. Someone whispers in his ear.

Moore says the man said, "America is under attack." I imagine the man probably said "A plane has just struck the World Trade Center." Maybe it was the second plane. I don't know.

Regardless, Bush just sits there.

For seven minutes. He just sits there.

To me, this was a devastating sequence. Bush has since protested that he wanted to project calmness. But to whom? A bunch of eight year olds?

The guy who spoke in his ear only said a few words. So it isn't like Bush knew a lot. Why wasn't he asking for more information. Why didn't he excuse himself and spend a minute on the phone.

Moore doesn't show us any pictures of Bush talking to anyone. Did Moore leave those out? Or was Bush, as Moore charges, simply out of his depth?

Moore suggests a lot of things Bush could have been thinking, most of them having to do with Moore's conspiracy theories. I imagined that Bush was hoping Dick Cheney was in charge. Maybe that was unfair of me.

Seven minutes.

Well, maybe not so unfair.

Moore then launches into a long winded account about the connection between the Bush family and a whole nest of Saudis, including members of the bin Lauden family. You can follow all that if you want. I just let it all wash over me. This is an area where the media and right have criticized the film, because everything is conjecture, no real proof.

Of course it is conjecture, Moore would complain that all the facts are kept so hush-hush that nobody knows what is really going on.  It pretty standard conspiracy stuff.

You can believe it if you want. Or not. Doesn't really matter to my way of thinking. Everybody is so connected at the top, we can draw lines between just about everybody. Six degrees of separation. Although, in these cases, it's more like one degree.

That was the slow part of the film. Conspiracies are hard to prove and it gets tedious drawing all the spider webs that link the conspirators together. Eventually you give up trying to follow all the unproved allegations and temporarily accept the premise just so you can move on. There were a lot of "facts" thrown out, some which I was highly skeptical of, and a lot of connections that could easily be innocently explained, but Moore is on a mission, so I gave him some slack.

Then he talked about the war in Afganistan. He put Richard Clarke on camera to say Bush went in too slow with too few men and let the Taliban and bin Laden get away. Then he pulled out pictures of a Taliban official getting a tour of the US government and said, "guess why?" Again, nothing you can prove. It is all part of the same conspiracy.

But that led Moore to talk about fear in America, and how it is being used as a tool. A tool to keep people in line. A tool to keep people from questioning government policy. A tool to take away essential civil liberties and replace them with a blanket of "security."

We saw aging hippies out in California get investigated by undercover police officers assigned to terrorism. A mother had to demonstrate for airport security that her baby's bottle was filled with breast milk by drinking half of it.  The FBI descended on a man because he made some political statements to the weight lifters at his gym.

All excesses justified/excused by the war on terrorism.  

Moore points out that "fear does work." Fear keeps the ruling class in power. Fear keeps the people from challenging their leaders. Fear makes people shut their mouths because they are afraid who is listening. Fear keeps you in line.

The Soviets used it for decades.

Moore also argues at one point, believe it or not,  that we should be spending more on the war of terrorism. He points to a stretch of coastline in Oregon where only one part time cop keeps the terrorists from invading the homeland.

I can't see bin Laden squeezing out into a rubber raft from some submarine in the middle of the night to terrorist the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Maybe that's just me.

But the real point Moore is making is that the war on terror is not about terror. hey aren't really serious about fighting terror. It's just the excuse.

It's really all about oil.

Thus we get to the war on Iraq.

This is the brilliant part of the film. Moore goes for the gut. He belly punches you. You think you can resist political propaganda, but when it's good, you can't.

He starts off with a happy and carefree Iraq, full of smiling faces enjoying life. He lies it on a little too thick here. He tells us the sovereign nation of Iraq "never attacked the US, never threatened to attack the US, and never murdered an American citizen." I imagine he meant Iraq didn't crash planes into the World Trade Center. Hard for me to imagine Saddam didn't catch and kill at least one CIA operative over the years. But this is political propaganda. Exaggeration and bombast are to be expected.

Then he takes us to the war. But this is not the sanitized, uplifting, Nightly News version. This is a little girl with her face blown off.

And soldiers talking about the "rush" of combat, going into battle with their mp3 payers blaring out "Roof on Fire." Blowing up building. And people.

He contrasts it with Rumsfeld (I think) talking about "the care that goes into [the war effort], the humanity that goes into it."

An Iraqi woman standing next to a bombed building crying, "Where are you God?"

Britney Spears saying she trusts this President.

Back and forth, from absurdity to ugly reality; the juxtaposition of fantasy and mangled lives.

We go through the excuses for the war: weapons of mass destruction, links to terrorists, Saddam "hates freedom." Moore knocks down each straw dummy in turn. No fact, at least nothing we can vet.  But we are arguing on emotion now. On the "truth," not the facts.

Then the "war" is over, but the need for troops keeps rising. So Moore takes us to Flint, Michigan (his home town) to look for them. We listen to young black men talk about the possibility of being in a war. We walk through a shopping mall (not the one on the rich side of town, of course) with two marine recruiters as they spin their Yankee peddler magic on aimless boys.

We meet a woman whose son is in the army. She tells us half of Flint is under employed or not working. The military is a real option here.

But the young men don't want to go if there is a risk of dying. Moore asks, would you? (And there is a nice little sequence later when he asks Congressmen if they would be willing to sign up their own children to go to Iraq.)

Moore bashes Bush for immorality, for plutocracy, for greed, and for heartlessness.

But the best moments in the film aren't Moore's. They belong to the woman from Flint whose son is in Iraq. Her son is killed when his Blackhawk goes down.

Moore steps away from the camera and lets the woman's raw grief drench the audience. She recalls her emotions when the army first called, how she fell to the floor and crawled to a desk, clung to it, screaming, "Why is it my son?"

She reads his last letter which came after she learned he was dead. I could hear sobbing in the theatre.

"I want him to be alive. But I can't make him alive. Your flesh just aches."

Brilliant. Devastating. Brutal.

Moore takes us to a conference where corporations are learning how to make billions off the "reconstruction" of Iraq. Then to the streets of Washington, D. C. where the lady from Flint walks by the White House. And Moore tries to recruit Congressmen's children.

Moore wraps it up by pointing out the poorest people of our country are the ones who have answered the call to die for our country. "And all they ask is that we never send them in harm's way unless it is absolutely necessary." I imagine you know Moore's answer to that.

And finally Moore reads a little of George Orwell. From 1984.

George Orwell once wrote, that it's if not a matter "if the war is not real, or if it is. Victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won, but it is meant to be continuous." ... "A hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance, this new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or east Asia but to keep the very structure of society in tact."

The audience of 30 some persons, sitting in a theatre on Ronald Reagan Boulevard in central Indiana on a Wednesday afternoon, applauded, and then went home.

[gnimbley]

Fear and Loathing in Washington D.C. - Part Three


after

I started this whole essay by saying that "Fahrenheit 9/11" was a lousy documentary. And it is.

Documentaries are fact based. There needs to be carefully construction of the arguments.  Your facts need to stand up against carefully scrutiny. The audience needs to have faith in the integrity and honesty of the film makers.

Quite frankly, Moore fails the faith test. Too much of what we presents as fact is merely insinuation.

Oh, a lot of times he is careful to present things as his own opinion and just lets the audience make the leap to "fact." But he makes a lot of connections and implications that are not fully supported by the evidence he presents.

Skeptics will have a hard time believing a lot of what he presents. (There are plenty of debunkers on the internet, so if you are interested in where Moore "fudges" I refer you to them.)

But that doesn't make any difference. Because this isn't a documentary.

It's political propaganda.

Now those are not dirty words. Political propaganda has a long and proud tradition in the arts, including literature and film. You see it all the time on the TV, they're called campaign ads.

Some of the most celebrated film makers in history made political propaganda. One of the most honored, and historically important, American films, Birth of a Nation, is thinly disguised propaganda for the Ku Klux Klan. Sergei Eisenstein's Marxist film, Battleship Potemkim, is studied by film students to learn about montage editing. Cinema that seeks to persuade, rather than inform or entertain, can be powerful stuff.

But comedic documentaries sell a lot more tickets than political propaganda. No one expects to pay to see political propaganda. You expect it to be shoved down your throat.

So why would you go to the theatre and pay good money to see something as contemptible as political propaganda?

Because it is brilliant? And funny?

The point of political propaganda is the truthfulness of the arguments it makes, and how those arguments resonate with your experience; not whether or not all its facts are in line. You watch propaganda to gain ideas you can use, not facts to support those ideas.

If you want facts, you are going to have to find them in your own life, not someone else's. Ultimately, you have to apply the ideas to your own life, to your own experience.

Not everyone is going to agree with Michael Moore about everything. But there are some ideas in this film you need to consider.

Why are we in Iraq if every fact given for going there was been demonstrated to be inaccurate?

Why are the ones who least benefit from this society the ones who have to die to maintain your lifestyle?

Is it really necessary to secure your freedoms by giving the government the power to enter your home without a search warrant? A power given to the government in a bill passed only a few days after September 11th, which most of Congress have never read?

And is the war against terror something that can be won, or a war that will go on forever?

Fahrenheit 9/11 is a funny film. (I didn't describe most of the funny bits because they will be much better if you know nothing about them when you see the film.) Moore weaves his sarcastic wit around a menagerie of unwitting players who bumble and bluster. He makes everyone into a fool, even himself when he drives around in a Mr. Frosty truck reading The Patriot Act over its sound system accompanied by that tinkling ice-cream-man tune.  He blisters the pompous and pricks the haughty. (Although I could have done without Ashcroft singing.)

But the value of Fahrenheit 9/11 is not in its humor or its wit. It is in its brutal honesty about the lives of humans devastated by war; it is in the exposure of the commercialism at the heart of American foreign policy; and it is in the challenge to ordinary people to look openly at their freedoms in the face of constant fear.

When it comes to political propaganda, no one today does it better. The Soviets had Sergei Eisenstein; the Nazis had Leni Riefenstahl.

We have Michael Moore

[MescalineBanana]

I concur.

[Trollax]

I've said it earlier. While it cannot be easily proven that bush has been involved in shady dealings. There are enough people out there saying "x" and "y" to make one wonder what really is going on. Occam may never have been the target of a conspiracy, but to conspire is human nature.
What went on, we may never know, but the fact remains the man is dirtier than a ton of shit in a sewerage plant.

[sakredchao]

to me kerry and bush are the same demon.

out demon out!

[chaosgraves:agentoferis]

why do we keep doing this to ourselves... simply because we don't know how to stop doing it.

[Bella]

Or because we aren't willing to pay the price involved in stopping.

[chaosgraves:agentoferis]

it's free... it's free... I understand but don't grok ...

[Bella]

Not that kind of price.
It would cost paying attention and learning how to change things, and
being willing face the truth and all sorts of unpleasant, but liberating, things.

[chaosgraves:agentoferis]

paying attention?!?!? paying attention?!?!?


that's what got us here I'm talking about freeing from your mind this constuct of ownership... extinction is not stewardship...

lets steward the the world and not I say not grind it anymore... who care where the resources ARE... lets quit paying attention to that... lets pick the berries that grow naturally...


( why do i think I sound like a luddite right now?!?!?)




yyyyyaaaaarrrrrrgggggghhh


forgive them father for they know not what they do.

[Colonel Failure]

Not that kind of price.
It would cost paying attention and learning how to change things, and
being willing face the truth and all sorts of unpleasant, but liberating, things.

Bah!

Humbug!

The good, loyal, patriotic people of the USofA don't have to put up with that kind of touchy-feely, mamby-pamby crap! They should continue to eat cardboard hamburgers and wear jeans made for US$0.12 an hour in india and buy cars that get six gallons to the mile without ever having to realize that they are at least partially responsible for the misery and resentment that causes other countries and radical politico-religious groups to dispise them world wide - BECAUSE THAT'S THE AMERICAN WAY, DAMMIT!

Truth?

We don't need no stinking truth...



CF

[Bella]

paying attention?!?!? paying attention?!?!?


that's what got us here I'm talking about freeing from your mind this constuct of ownership... extinction is not stewardship...

lets steward the the world and not I say not grind it anymore... who care where the resources ARE... lets quit paying attention to that... lets pick the berries that grow naturally...


( why do i think I sound like a luddite right now?!?!?)




yyyyyaaaaarrrrrrgggggghhh


forgive them father for they know not what they do.

I would agree with what you just said about the concept of ownership.

I just don't see how you got there from my suggestion that we pay
attention to what's really going on in the world.

And I actually think the concept of stewardship closely borders the concept of ownership.

[Colonel Failure]

paying attention?!?!? paying attention?!?!?


that's what got us here I'm talking about freeing from your mind this constuct of ownership... extinction is not stewardship...

lets steward the the world and not I say not grind it anymore... who care where the resources ARE... lets quit paying attention to that... lets pick the berries that grow naturally...


( why do i think I sound like a luddite right now?!?!?)




yyyyyaaaaarrrrrrgggggghhh


forgive them father for they know not what they do.

I would agree with what you just said about the concept of ownership.
I just don't see how you got there from my suggestion that we pay attention to what's really going on in the world.

What, the stuff going on in our heads is supposed to make SENSE now?



CF

[Bella]

No, it's never going to make sense.

But we can at least try. That's all.