Fahrenheit 9/11 (Michael Moore, 2004)
One of the reasons that Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore’s study of the American gun culture, was so wildly successful was that for the most part it renounced the faults of his other work. Columbine was a thoughtful, complex film that avoided the oversimplifications or falsehoods that tended to blemish his earlier films and books. It deservedly catapulted Moore into the public awareness after years as a fringe figure known mainly to left wing political observers, documentary fans, and media buffs. With this new attention coming to Moore during the extremely conservative presidency of George W. Bush, it should not be surprising that Moore would attempt to use his new popularity to launch a concerted attack on the US president. The danger was always that in the resulting film, Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore’s hubris and overzealousness would cause him to lapse back into old habits.
To some extent he does: Fahrenheit 9/11 is not nearly as strong a film as Bowling for Columbine. Yet it remains an important and powerful film. Starting with an extended prologue raking over the coals of the debacle that was the 2000 US presidential election, Moore launches his attack on George W. Bush and his inadequate, misdirected and conflicted response to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. The film is unapologetically an extended campaign advertisement for the 2004 presidential elections, and Moore clearly relishes the task of salvaging and replaying the most embarrassing and compromising footage of Bush that he can. Moore is getting more and more assured with the methods of cinema (at a filmmaking level, this is streets ahead of his straightforward 1989 effort, Roger and Me), and the film is full of clever little touches such as the moment at the start when the footage of fireworks at Al Gore’s premature election victory celebration is reversed to underline the snatching of Gore’s victory away from him. As always with Moore, he uses humour to illuminate some very dark themes, and his use of news footage is particularly effective.
Many of Moore’s critics have pointed to Moore’s techniques (and particularly the out-of-context use of news footage to ridicule Bush and others) as evidence that his film should be considered propaganda. It says a lot about our media that this argument has been so widely accepted, to the point where even leftist commentators start to fall back on arguments that justify the film as a “correction” to the biased coverage elsewhere. Fahrenheit 9/11 is highly partisan, but that is not the same as propaganda, unless we are defining the term so widely that the term should cease to be considered pejorative. There is none of the insidiousness of propaganda in Moore’s work: his anger, and his bias, is open and declared up front. Moore is inciting his audience to become more politically engaged and to question the received wisdom emanating from mainstream media. He seeks out the information that is suppressed by the government and dominant media and brings it to the viewer’s attention. This is not a propagandistic impulse: indeed, propaganda doesn’t really work when not in support of a dominant ideological position (this is why propaganda from other places and periods looks so silly to us). Moore, on the other hand, is clearly at the left of the spectrum, lobbing ideological grenades into the centre of political discussion.
This is not to say that Moore should not to be taken to task when he dabbles in falsehoods. As I said, he has done this before, and it has undermined his work. Yet the critics of Fahrenheit 9/11 have tended, as they did with Bowling for Columbine, to focus on trivial points, or to disingenuously paint fairly conventional editing strategies as akin to the work Eisenstein or Riefenstahl.* If you go searching through the anti-Moore websites for the supposed errors in Fahrenheit 9/11 (a distasteful exercise, since so many are run by the far right) you’ll find that phrases such as “sins of omission” pop up a lot, because of the absence of actual errors or lies in the film. One of the most widely referenced anti-F9/11 articles is Christopher Hitchen’s piece for the online magazine Slate, which uses this strategy (and others) in a superficially very damaging attack on Moore that makes much of the information that Moore leaves out and declares that “[a]t no point does Michael Moore make the smallest effort to be objective.” Yet apply the same standards to Hitchen’s own piece, which is itself a one-sided attack full of loaded language, and you’ll see the problem. (This back and forth debate can continue forever, as witnessed by Chris Parry’s response to Hitchens, published at eFilmCritic.com). Moore picks the points that support his argument, sure, but that isn’t in itself an inherent betrayal of objectivity. Moore’s film doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and it is not the first argument on the topic that its audience has heard. In such a situation it is ludicrous to suggest that the demands of objectivity require the film to lay out both sides of the argument. Moore is entering into an existing debate that is (or should be) familiar to all in his audience, and highlighting particular facts, and connections between facts, that he considers significant.
All this is in response to the film’s more overblown critics who accuse Moore of propaganda or deception. I don’t believe anything in Fahrenheit 9/11 warrants either charge. None of this means, though, that I don’t believe there are weaknesses in Moore’s arguments, and don’t wish that he had put them more strongly. This is why I think this film is weaker than Bowling for Columbine: it simply isn’t as solidly argued as that film was. Moore seems, at times, to have been carried away by the desire to unseat Bush at the election, which leads him to emphasise points that look bad rather than concentrating on matters of more substance. For example, Moore spends much of the early portion of the film mapping the relationships between Bush and the bin Laden family, and querying the way several of the bin Ladens were taken out of the country post September 11. Moore makes legitimate points here: notwithstanding that the bin Ladens are estranged from Osama, they should have been questioned, and it is reasonable to query the way in which Bush’s connections with the bin Ladens and other Saudi oil interests have influenced his decisions. Yet the sheer amount of screen time that Moore devotes to this segment suggests Moore is interested in just hammering “links between Bush and bin Laden, links between Bush and bin Laden” because he knows it sounds bad. Other segments meander, such as the discussion of the number of troopers in Oregon: again, valid point (ie, that there are still plenty of gaps in homeland security), but there must have been snappier or more telling examples he could have pointed to. This wasted time is particularly frustrating given the material he has to rush through quickly, such as the discussion of the 2000 presidential election in Florida. The best part of Moore’s book Stupid White Men is a really damning account of the various actions that disenfranchised potential democratic voters in that state, but his account of the election here isn’t nearly as solid.
Another example of a point that Moore doesn’t seem to want to over-complicate, but which robs him of credibility, is his depiction of pre-war Iraq. In a short montage showing life in Baghdad prior to the invasion, we see children flying kites and happy women on the street, before cutting to shots of buildings exploding during the American “shock and awe” campaign. This is the section that caused Hitchens to object that he didn’t think “Al Jazeera would, on a bad day, have transmitted anything so utterly propagandistic.” I don’t have a problem with the shock edit Moore uses – separating shots of an invasion from shots of potential civilian casualties is just as loaded an editing choice as juxtaposing them – but the sunny shots of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq are unfortunate. I think its admirable that Moore attempts to humanise the population of Iraq, but in the absence of any contextualising narration, he seems to be suggesting all was rosy for the people of Iraq under Hussein. I don’t believe the “regime change” argument is an appropriate way to justify the Iraq invasion (particularly when it is only applied retrospectively) but it is an argument that those who are anti-war need to be able to persuasively counter. Fahrenheit 9/11 would be a considerably better film if Moore were able to acknowledge Saddam Hussein brutalised his people, but still articulately argue that the war on Iraq was wrong.
With all these failings, why do I still believe that the film is important and worth seeing? Firstly, because despite the serious intentions, it is very entertaining (although even here I must mark it down compared to Columbine, which more capably balanced its humorous points and substantial arguments). More importantly, though, Moore is taking important information into the mainstream. Fahrenheit 9/11 is an important reminder that the Iraq war has victims – both Iraqi and coalition – even when they are not on the nightly news (at least partly through governmental interventions, such as the American ban on filming the return of coffins of US soldiers). I know those who are pro-war are not always glib about the lives of Iraqis, but all too many are, and the natural bias of the news media towards stories of local interest means that the true consequences of the war all too easily fade from the thoughts of the politically disengaged. Moore is not immune to this kind of bias either, in that he focuses much more on the impact upon US troops than he does on the Iraqi civilian casualties. However, his depiction of the way the armed forces inevitably feed off society’s underprivileged is sharp enough that it largely compensates for this weakness: the sequence in which military recruiters hone in on the poor and disadvantaged in a shopping mall car park is probably the best in the film. Also powerful is the sequence with a mother of a child who died in Iraq. This portion of the film has also been criticised as highly manipulative, but again, to evade the grief of those who lose loved ones in war is simply a different form of manipulation. We notice one form of manipulation but take another for granted; the type we don’t notice is much more dangerous.
If more of the material in Fahrenheit 9/11 were being treated seriously by the dominant commercial media, then pundits from within that media would be on stronger ground in criticising the upstart Moore for using methods other than traditional journalism to make his point. Fahrenheit 9/11 is an important film because there are more significant and pervasive sins of omission than the trivial ommisions for which Moore is criticised.
* One problem with talking of Eisenstein and Riefenstahl is that while both were propagandists for evil regimes, they were also extremely important filmmakers whose influence is so widespread that it can’t really be used to cast aspersions on a filmmaker. Eisenstein contributed so much to the theory of film editing that his influence on the medium is almost literally all pervasive. Borrowings from Riefenstahl turn up in places as benign as Fantasia and Star Wars, not to mention most sports broadcasts. The unfortunate fact is that the language of cinema has been disproportionately influenced by people with reprehensible political views (particularly once you throw D.W. Griffith into the mix).