"Fahrenheit" On The Brain

Who cares if Moore's flick is flawed, shameless propaganda?

At least it makes America think.

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist Wednesday, July 7, 2004

Oh my God but Michael Moore is infuriating.

He has made a massively flawed quasi-documentary that treads dangerously close to excessive propaganda, a movie that never lets BushCo have the slightest hint of breathing space (not that they really deserve it), and he zooms his camera in on the distraught faces of weeping mothers and tormented soldiers and holds the lens there far too long, making you go, OK OK, enough already with the misery porn and the emo-manipulation.

Moore takes numerous cheap shots and finds far too many easy targets among the political elite, and he cleverly edits his footage to make the various politicians he skewers appear even more vacuous and slithery and alien and sad than they normally might, which is already quite a lot, I mean oh my God what the hell is wrong with Dick Cheney I mean the man is pure sneering vileness incarnate just by opening his tiny black eyes. Shudder.

"Fahrenheit 9/11" is packed with missed opportunities. It argues obvious points far too weakly and never really digs very far, or very coherently, into the sinister underbelly of How It All Really Works.

And Moore never lays sufficient blame on the weak-kneed Demos, all of whom voted for BushCo's war and all of whom basically rolled over and begged for scraps when the GOP war machine steamrolled in and demanded the nation cower in fear so they could attack a wimpy volatile hate-filled pip-squeak nation that dared to threaten its global petrochemical interests.

However. "Fahrenheit 9/11" is also shockingly stirring and thought provoking, the first major film of its kind to ever smack down a sitting president and his heartless, hawk-filled administration so successfully, so clearly, so shamelessly. It is propaganda made fresh, inspired, explosive, irrefutable.

And you know it's working.  After all, when's the last time a documentary filmmaker became the target of the full force of the GOP spin machine?  When's the last time anyone made any sort of attempt to seriously question, in public, fearlessly, unapologetically, in a mass-media format, the blatantly oily warmongering of a current administration?

When's the last time a documentary -- not to mention one seriously calling into doubt the snide motives of our government's call to war -- was the No. 1 movie in the nation while the war was still under way? Never, that's when.

This, then, is the fabulous thing about Moore's flick. Sure, most of what the movie reveals might seem painfully obvious to anyone who follows the news with any sort of intellectual dexterity. And, yes, most of what Moore uncovers about everything from BushCo's appalling Saudi oil connections and his administration's whorelike corporate favoritism and the stealing of the '00 election you've heard a thousand times before.

But no one has yet strung these facts and events together in any substantive way in the popular media. No one has had the casual nerve to show how deep and far back BushCo's Saudi ties actually run (hint: way, way back), letting us know who it is who really signs Bush's paycheck (hint: it ain't the taxpayers).

No one has so successfully put a package together that can actually be successfully digested by the "average" American citizen, the vast majority of whom, it must be noted, blithely believe the major media spin and Fox News' alarmism and never really question their government, never get to hear any sort of smart, anarchic message, never see the dank underbelly revealed in any substantive, comprehensible, entertaining, humorous, intelligent way. And, for this, you have to fall down in front of Moore's film in abject thanks.

After all, we're Americans. We tend to forget very quickly how it was just after BushCo was elected, or just after 9/11, or just after the war on Iraq was declared. We forget how thoroughly the GOP-fueled fear saturated the country's air like a rank perfume, how rabid patriotism was our national drug, how violent warmongering was forced upon us like some sort of mandatory, painful surgery, the only option for a heartbroken, exhausted nation. Take a moment. Try to remember.

Remember how timid and appallingly pro-war the media was during the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Remember Ashcroft's vicious USA Patriot Act. Remember the orgasmic glee of the "embedded" reporters who were allowed to ride on big scary tanks and speed across the desert in big impressive convoys of U.S. killing machines, as meanwhile, just outside the camera's range, thousands of mutilated corpses of babies and women and other innocent civilians lay in the rubble as the "real" war raged on, just out of the American public's view.

And remember how you thought, oh my God, something is so not right about this. Something is terribly unsound about our thinking and methodology and macho gun-totin' kill-'em-all isolationist Texas swaggerin' approach to the world. This is not a war for freedom. This is not a war for the safety of American soil. Bush is marching us straight into a hellish quagmire, and no one seems to be asking why.

"Fahrenheit 9/11" then, isn't just a movie. It's a breakthrough. A reminder that a nation not only can, but should, ask why. Moore has taken the most successful initiative to date to rip away the veil of fear the GOP had laid over the nation like a stifling blanket, one that had, until recently, kept everyone from pundits to politicians from speaking out and disagreeing with BushCo's rancid stew of lies and misdirects and fearmongerings, lest they be instantly branded an America-hating liberal tree hugger communist who sleeps with Osama.

Which is, of course, exactly what the GOP is trying to do with Moore, right now, calling him an enemy of the state, a traitor, an America hater, a liar and a cheater and sodomite and pedophile and fat slobbish hypocritical pig and goddammit how dare you use that footage of Bush sitting there like a stunned blank-faced monkey at that preschool for seven full minutes after he was informed that a second plane had rammed into the WTC and that the nation was under terrorist attack?

I mean, no wonder the GOP is all frothy. Not only does the film make Bush appear even more of a bumbling, inarticulate dolt than usual (which required, admittedly, nearly zero effort on Moore's part), but it reveals him to be so appallingly disconnected, so politically spoon fed, so completely and frighteningly lost, you can't help but realize who the real threat to America's health and safety really is.

It's also easy to disagree with Moore's own implied politics, a truly annoying mishmash stance that seems to support more troops and more aggression in Afghanistan on the one hand, while at the same time decrying attacking Iraq and painting Baghdad as some sort of gentle happy harmless utopia before the U.S. stomped in and tore apart Saddam's blissful Eden.

Moore has been attacked, often rightfully so, for his scattershot politics, his implied hypocrisy, perhaps no better and more pointedly than by prolific political wonkhead and rabid gin aficionado Christopher Hitchens, who decimates Moore and his movie on every level (Hitchens makes no apologies: he just really, really hates MM) in his mostly excellent, if mostly hysterical, Slate editorial.

But, in the end, Moore's own politics, and his film's unapologetic propagandist bent, don't really matter. What matters is how the movie has helped make radical dissent a healthy part of American discourse again. How Moore has reopened the gates of independent thought and proved that the GOP's famous lightning bolts of spin and hate did not strike him dead as he did so. Helluva gift to the nation, that.

And when you combine "Fahrenheit 9/11" with another, less polemical, more straightforwardly frightening must-see documentary that's out now called "The Hunting of the President," which delineates the GOP's shockingly savage, calculated, historic attempt to destroy Bill Clinton, you've got a portrait of a Republican Party that makes the frayed ragtag fundamentalist nutballs of the Taliban look like the participants at some sort of Tupperware party.

Look. You can disagree with Moore's opinions and his often patronizing conclusions all you want. But you can't, after all, refute his facts. Moore's movie has done more than merely free up the pundits and the disgruntled military generals to speak out, or make timid reporters actually dig for truth again. He has done more than help put surprising words of dissent and criticism back into the mouths of members of Congress and the major media.

He has, in short, made Middle America think again. He has cracked the GOP's frozen ideological sea, showed us all one thing we have so desperately forgotten: America does not, after all, have to be this way, and its citizens do, in fact, have a choice.

And, for that reason, "Fahrenheit 9/11" is perhaps the most wonderfully patriotic film ever made.