CarnivalAskew

I’m sure you’ve already heard it. This is a film about George Bush, a scathing critique of the man, his presidency, his policy, his war, his family, his friends, business and political associates, his lies, stupidity, arrogance, irresolution, opportunism, and legitimacy. I’m sure I forgot a few. And its true, Moore exploits every opportunity at his disposal to challenge, accuse, or humiliate the President of the United States and those who surround him.

It gives the film a scattered effect, as though Moore is painting his portrait with a shotgun. Its a metaphor I don’t think he would object to, given the ferocity and outrage of his assault. His bias is unabashed and his intention is evident: to do George Bush as much political damage as possible, and he does not scruple against including footage for no other reason than to embarrass his subject.

I mention all of this to put it aside. It has been adequately treated by a plague of critics and commentators on both sides of the argument, and while Moore’s intentions are worthy of inspection, the debate raging over them has largely overlooked the essential achievement of this film.

So let us remove from view all reference to the person of George Bush, let us remove the vacation, the classroom, the failed businesses, the stupid remarks, the embarrassing out-takes from media footage, let us remove Britney Spears exhorting Americans to unthinkingly follow their leader. What remains is the portrait of a country in the throws of crisis.

This is established in its opening on a highly disputed election: a precedent that threatens the legitimacy of one of America’s most hallowed institutions, and a crisis avoided only by the craven refusal of the Senate to entertain the possibility that such a threat even existed. Moore’s analysis of the involvement of the wealthy and powerful family of one of the candidates, and the interference of the media in the outcome of this election is indeed disturbing. But far beyond that, the image of paralysis evoked by the joint meeting of the house in which the decision to challenge the election failed, was harrowing. The sense of helplessness carried far beyond the walls of the Senate to the passionate but relatively isolated protests in the streets. The nation seemed to roll over and go back to sleep. The president went on vacation

On September 11, the country woke up. But it woke up reeling and wounded. The sense of horror and outrage, while justified, did little to address the internal crisis witnessed in the election. In fact it aggravated it. It unified a vast majority will against the threat of terrorism and girded the nation for war. The voice of dissent was even further silenced, this time beneath a veil of menace and intimidation.

Two wars, and two occupations later, Michael Moore has broken that silence. Not that dissent did not persist beneath the surface, Moore is not quite the demagogue his detractors make him out to be. His film could not have had such impact if its audience was not aware of or concerned with the issues it raises. Michael Moore’s achievement was to possess the courage to speak of these concerns, and the intelligence to discover a means of making his message heard.

How he did this can be gleaned from the very methods I mentioned above. He assaults the man, his family, etc. But more to the point, and this is what has really riled his opponents, he assaults the image of the man, the myth. He attacks this myth on its own terms, using short deadly sequences of pop culture referencing to punctuate his points and deflate the cowboy histrionics upon which this myth was founded. The soundtrack is skilfully woven between a weft of ironically deployed pop songs and a warp of emotive and affecting incidental music. Moore’s seemingly arbitrary use of out takes and gaffs gathers a collective force that disrupt and contradict the smooth functioning of the mass media presentation of the president and show the frail, all too frail, fallibility of the man. At the same time, it points to the fabricated nature of the image, spending long gleeful minutes on the president and his associates preening before media encounters, or staring uncomfortably at the rolling camera while waiting for a cue.

But this attack should not be mistaken for the film. It is but a through line. This film also has an arc and a broad documentary vision.

From the disputed election, Moore establishes the image of a wealthy and powerful family, connected to political, media, and economic interests and certainly capable of the manipulation he convincingly accuses them of. From there he further analyses the economic and political ties of the Bush family and presidency to the Saudi Arabian Royal family, the Bin Laden family, the Taliban, and a number of multinational conglomerates involved in, among other things, oil and energy interests, and the military-industrial complex. Mr Moore does not provide the comfort of irrefutable conclusions, but presents a case for conflict of interest so weighty and thorough that it cannot be ignored. He demonstrates, undeniably, who benefited by this war. It was not America, it was not the Iraqi people. It was those whom George Bush calls “the haves and the have mores”. It was those whom George Bush calls “His base”.

This image of wealth and power dominate the first half of the film. The second half is given over to those who have lost by the war. From the absurd passage of the Patriot Act and the abuse of civil liberties, to the bombing of Iraq and the carnage of war, he does what any good war documentarian should do. He portrays its cost. He disinters its visceral image from beneath the video game and action hero template through which it had been integrated into the easily digested, forgone conclusion presented to us by mainstream media.

He shows who has lost: the Iraqi civilian searching desperately in the rubble for his family, the soldier returned home without arms and legs, the mother mourning her lost son. And predominantly, it is the poor on both sides who will pay for this war. Moore’s argument is essentially economic. That for a small minority it is extremely profitable, and for a vast majority extremely costly. It is for the latter that this film was made and the respect with which he treats them is as passionate as the scorn he heaps on the former.

I will not enter into the debate over the obvious bias of this film. As with any portrait, it carries the hand of its creator. That is part of the truth of representation, and far from being a grounds for refuting the truth of a work, it is the foundation of its honesty and the starting point from which the viewer can begin to glean from his/her own perspective, something of the reality of the subject. It is the claim of objectivity that refuses its audience the equal status that permits dialogue.

In my opinion, this makes Fahrenheit 9/11 a documentary in the strict sense. I had to dig for it, I had to think about what I was seeing and discriminate between the various elements presented to me, to draw them beyond the frame of the film to reflect against my own experience of this war and the times we live in (is that not the function of a documentary?). What emerged for me was a broad perspective of a particular moment in history, that moment rarely glimpsed with any coherence or insight: the moment we call present. Moore’s scattered approach, though selective, gave me a sense that he was taking a series of snapshots of different dimension of the same moment in time. From the heights of Capitol hill, from the polling booths of Florida, from the lonely stretch of border guarded by a single state policeman, the parking lots patrolled by army recruiters, the battlefield and the hospital, the coffins, the abuse of power and civil liberties, fear, corruption and greed.

I saw the most powerful country in the world, paralysed and intimidated not by Osama Bin Laden, but by its own massive troubled condition. Divided by extremes of wealth and poverty, power and powerlessness, voice and voicelessness; the ethical and institutional foundation of this nation straining against forces which threaten to render them meaningless. The two institutions that America invests with the protection of its liberties: the congress and the free press seem resigned to maintaining the uneasy comfort of the status quo or worse, are helpless to do anything about it. I saw the wealthy and powerful of this nation, unrestrained and out of control and I fear that we will only start to worry about it when it’s the poor. I also saw a mother who had lost her son to the war, defending the honour of his sacrifice against the random assault of a Bush supporter claiming that it was all a fabrication. As she walked away, she said (paraphrase) “She thinks she knows. She doesn’t know. I used to think I knew. But I didn’t.” I also saw people changing their minds.

Related link:
http://www.michaelmoore.com