Flak Magazine: Review of Fahrenheit 9/11, 07.02.04

Tom Lehrer is alleged to have said, "Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize." And in a sense this is right. But perhaps satire really just needed a new idiom for us post-literate TV babies. Michael Moore traffics in that idiom in Fahrenheit 9/11, which isn't really documentary in the History Channel sense, but rather satire in vérité mode. Moore's critics are wrong (and, from their point of view, counterproductive) to make their meretricious nitpicking criticisms of the film's factual accuracy. The filmmaker isn't trying to cut a legal brief — instead he's offering a send-up and a polemical corrective to the hysterical blindness of American corporate media. The fact that he and his distributors are about to make truckloads of money by doing it may provide the last, best, most Darwinian hope for American democracy.

Certainly one can distort the truth without fudging figures or Photoshopping images, simply by clever juxtaposition. If, for instance, one presents a light beer and a flirtatious female in rapid succession many people will come to believe (by way of the Kuleshov effect) in a wholly specious causal link. Likewise, to rail against Saddam Hussein while conjuring flashbacks of the World Trade Center could lead one to an inaccurate conclusion. Seeing is believing. But, despite what Sullivan and Scarborough say, this is not Moore's main technique. Instead he tries to deconstruct the elaborate corporate fiction that is the Bush machine. Moore does this best when he simply presents, straight-faced, the many images with which the news media might have told the whole story, but chose (and still choose) instead to suppress. Arguably, he does his worst when he indulges his own sophomoric sense of humor and goes for the cheap laugh. He does a lot of both, but it makes for a chillingly hilarious and surprisingly entertaining movie.

After a jokey prologue — a dream sequence that suggests Al Gore won Florida — the film opens with a bit of digital jiggering: the old "Bonanza" title sequence with Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Blair digitally transformed into the Cartwright clan. It's silly, and hardly elevates the political rhetoric, but it does puncture the distinctly macho image the Bushies so emphatically cultivate. Immediately after this opening, Moore gives us a more sober mode of deflation: images of Bush, Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz looking befuddled as they're made up for national TV appearances. Some have argued that this, too, is a cheap shot — after all, everybody gets made up for the camera. But no administration since the heyday of Leni Riefenstahl has been so dependent on the photo-op to supersede rational critique — so critique in kind seems a proportional response. And Wolfowitz, styled by the White House as a worldly intellectual, makes the montage soar, when he sucks off his pocket comb and runs it through his hair to slick his cowlick, beaming at the cameraman with pride at his own ingenuity. This is clearly a man very far gone into delusional narcissism.

In flashback, Moore breezily synopsizes the major sins and omissions of Bush's feckless past. We get the flash tour of W's AWOL days in the Champagne Squadron, Harken Energy, Enron, the Carlyle Group, Halliburton, Katherine Harris and the anointment by Baker & Botts and the Supreme Court. Moore goes (perhaps too far) out of his way to suggest a shadowy network of cronies who've made sure that Bush has always failed upward, no matter that whatever he touches turns to red ink at best. None of this will be at all surprising to the readers of say, Salon, Harper's or Talking Points Memo. But even many of these folk will be surprised by the footage of Senate President Al Gore gaveling down the objections of a dozen black congressional representatives who protest the felonious disenfranchisement of black Floridians in Bush's election. It's the single most damning indictment of Gore and the Senate Vichycrats ever seen.

Moore wisely refrains from showing us the burning World Trade Center. Instead, we're treated to unbearable audio under a black screen, then close-ups of horrified New Yorkers in the streets, the hallucinatory storm of dust and paper swirling round as the towers fell. Contrary to what Newsweek tells us, Moore carefully and accurately explains how longtime Bush-family financiers like the bin Ladens and other rich Saudis received White House clearance to fly first after the nationwide grounding and to fly out of the country with minimal screening.

Moore veers into dumb jokiness again when he commandeers an ice-cream truck to make the point that our representatives didn't bother to read the Patriot Act before they voted aside our civil rights. The problem for Moore's detractors is that even this joke prompts a laugh, and does, in fact, afford its victims exactly as much respect as they have earned.

When the film takes up the Iraq war, the laughs get fewer and farther between. In preface, we see Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice explaining, in early 2001, that Saddam Hussein was no threat whatsoever to the United States, inviting us to wonder why this footage was not aired again when they were spinning a different story for the UN and the nation. When Fahrenheit 9/11 goes to the war itself, it looks nothing like it does on Fox. Huge bombs pulverize city blocks in the opening hours, killing countless civilians but not Saddam's insiders. Left behind are dead babies, severed limbs and grief-stricken Iraqis calling on God to avenge their misfortune.

We get a different perspective on the American soldiers who came in after the bombs, and it makes the breathless cheerleading of the embedded network haircuts sound completely absurd. Moore's soldiers are, as front-line fighters always are by necessity, brutalized — alternately callous and conflicted. Their sufferings, on the battlefield and in stateside military hospitals, are shown in un-PC detail, as are their misgiving about the mission's value and its dubious prospect for success.

When Moore goes back to Flint, Mich., for a series of interviews with Lila Lipscomb, a mother who lost her son in the first days of the war, it could be a misstep, like Action News shoving the microphone in the face of the just-informed widow. But Moore gives Lipscomb enough screen time to seem a dignified human being with complex motives and emotions. She explains how she encouraged her children to think about the military as a way of escaping from Flint's dead end, how she had always hated anti-war protestors. And then she speaks frankly of her paralyzing grief. She has two of the film's starkest moments. In the first, Lipscomb reads haltingly from her son's last letter home. From the grave, he speaks for an untold number of the president, "He got us out here for nothing whatsoever. I am so furious right now, Mama."

Later, she speaks with a protester near the White House; suddenly a Katherine Harris clone rushes up to screech, "This is staged! This is all staged." Lipscomb whirls on her and says soberly, "My son is dead. That's not staged." The Dittohead sags visibly with her first inkling that "Mission Accomplished" may not entirely cover the case.

Near the film's end, George Bush gets to speak for himself in an infamous moment. "Fool me once, shame on you," he starts the old adage, and then panic crosses his face. After a very long moment, he very tellingly mangles a Pete Townsend lyric, because he's literally incapable of saying, "Shame on me." It's perhaps the most ironically self-disclosing moment in W's ignominious career — other than the seven minutes he spent with "The Pet Goat" on Sept. 11, 2001.

Many Americans, especially liberals, have the relativistic idea that because we must respect peoples' right to believe as they will, we must respect all ideas. But we have the right, or even the duty, to greet many ideas (bigotries, superstitions) with opprobrium and ridicule. Michael Moore has done an exemplary job of this here, thoroughly puncturing the notion that Bush is any kind of leader at all. If W is held up to the ridicule he has long deserved, he can only win by coup — God help us. For as Mencken long ago observed, in political persuasion, "One horse-laugh is worth 20,000 syllogisms."

— David Essex (djessex@earthlink.net)