Soon after charlie and I sat down to view the movie, a particularly gregarious woman and her boyfriend sat next to us and struck up a conversation. Being the gruff, antisocial, pale hermit that I am I would normally have pointed out some shiny light to them and ran in the other direction to find a seat next to fellow angry loners. This time, however, I was happy to engage them (it was just that kind of atmosphere):
Really Friendly Lady That Laughed Too Much: Are you guys excited?
Me: Actually, I really am. If someone had told me one year ago that I would not only be going to a Michael Moore flick, but going on opening night and excited about it I would have told them they were nuts.
RFLTLTM: Really, why is that?
Me: Moore has a tendency to play loose with the facts. I think it is important for people on the left to not resort to the tactics that people on the right have used because then we lose credibility. More importantly, we don't need to stretch the facts because the case against...
At this point charlie boxed my ears and told me to go get him more licorice. My point is that I like to think I have always valued truth over pure partisinship. I realize that I am certainly not immune to it and that my opinions can't help but be colored by the media I chose to pay attention to and the company I keep, but I try.
What impressed my about the reviews of the flick before I had seen it was that the hawks were not really disputing the factual content. "Partisan!" "not really a documentary!" "contradicts other things he has said!" Surely, I thought, if this is the best they can do then Moore really has something here.
I will spare you the long review, I'll just say that I was impressed and that I cried (very quietly and manly-like, of course).
What has struck me afterwards is the way that some liberals have bent over backwards trying to find ways to criticize the movie in order to maintain some "liberal, but not like that Michael Moore!" street cred.
Take, for example, some criticisms by
Kevin Drum:
What to say? The argument over the film mostly seems to revolve around whether it's factually accurate and presents a logical case, a conversation so pointless as to be laughable. I mean, it's a polemical film from Michael Moore, not a Brookings Institution white paper. It's like complaining that editorial cartoons are unfair because they don't portray the nuance of serious policy discussions.
Now, as it happens, I thought Fahrenheit 9/11 was a bit mediocre even as polemic, but the thing that really struck me about the film was the almost poetic parallellism between its own slanders and cheap shots and the slanders and cheap shots of pro-war supporters themselves over the past couple of years. If Moore had done this deliberately, it would have been worthy of Henry James.
Take the first half hour of the film, in which Moore exposes the close relationship between the Bush family and the House of Saud. Sure, it relies mostly on innuendo and imagery, but then again, he never really makes the case anyway. He never flat out says that the Bush family is on the Saudi payroll. Rather, he simply includes "9/11," "Bush," and "Saudi Arabia" in as many sentences as possible, thus leaving the distinct impression that George Bush is a bought and paid for subsidiary of the Saudi royal family.
Which is all remarkably similar to the tactic Bush himself used to link Saddam Hussein to 9/11. He never flat out blamed Saddam, but rather made sure to include the words "9/11," "Saddam Hussein," and "al-Qaeda" in as many sentences as possible, thus leaving the distinct impression that Saddam had something to do with it.
Or take Afghanistan. In a lengthy and nearly unreadable screed in Slate, Christopher Hitchens takes Moore to task for arguing in 2002 that the war in Afghanistan was unjust but then arguing in the film that Iraq was a distraction from the real war against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
But surely I'm not the only one who's reminded by this of the ever shifting rationales for war from the Bush administration itself? In 2002 it was mostly about WMD. But there was no WMD. So then it became al-Qaeda. But there were no serious al-Qaeda ties. How about liberation? Maybe, except the Iraqis don't seem especially happy with their liberators. Democracy? Stay tuned.
Finally, the last half hour of the film includes a piece of street theater in which Moore accosts congressmen on Capitol Hill and asks if they'll try to get their sons and daughters to enlist in the military. It's a brutally unfair question, but one that echoes a standard debating point of Hitchens and others: "Would you prefer that Saddam Hussein was still in power?" It's a question that's unanswerable in 10 words or less, and about as meaningful as Moore's ambush interviews with congressmen.
So is Fahrenheit 9/11 unfair, full of innuendo and cheap shots, and guilty of specious arguments? Sure. But that just makes it the perfect complement to the arguments of many in the pro-war crowd itself. Perhaps the reason they're so mad is that they see more than a little of themselves in it.
Kevin seems to go out of his way to paint Moore as being just as bad and misrepresentative and the Bush administration. These days, that is about as strong of a condemnation as you can get. He doesn't seem to back it up with much, though.
He criticizes Moore for linking Saudi money with influence. Who in their right mind really doubts that money buys influence in Washington? When Company X donates millions of dollars in campaign contributions to congress and then Company X receives unusually favorable legislation that benefits them, how many really cry "foul" at this fact is being brought up (besides Cheney) or demands that they "connect the dots"? Moore points out that the Bush family has received 1.4 billion dollars from the Saudi family over the past thirty years (A figure that I have not as of yet heard disputed) and points out that the Saudi's received some extraordinary favors from the White House immediately after 9/11 (favors that were, by the way, denied by the White House until they were proven). I seriously doubt that the money came with a signed contract titled "Payment for Access, Influence and in Case Some of Our People Really, Really Fuck Up".
Why does Kevin consider Moore's questioning of congressmen that are so quick to send others off to die about their own children's military service? To me, this is a question that should be asked more often. Why is this "brutally unfair"?
Now to be fair, this is not a completely negative review by Kevin Drum. I posted it in its entirety so that I would not give the impression that it was, but in addition to the points above, why is the entire thing peppered with things like like "mediocre, slanders, cheap shots, innuendo, unfair, specious arguments" to describe it unless it is a deliberate effort to distance himself from it? If it is a deliberate effort and he genuinely didn't like it, fair enough, but I would hope to see more substantive criticism of it for him to come out firing that strongly against it.
The review in
Salon by Stephanie Zacharek is even more bizarre. Read it for yourself, but most of the criticism amounts to "I would have criticized this about Bush instead" or on his tactics or that it is too simplistic. Most of this misses the point. The movie is so powerful because Moore understands the nature of his medium. Human being are pattern-seeking, story-telling creatures. We understand, are effected by and retain more when something is related to us as a narrative. Yes, you could fill entire books with the information that Moore didn't use to criticize Bush. In fact, you could a years worth of NY Times bestsellers with it. He could have filled the screen with more statistics, used less of his humor and gone into much more detail on just about any one of his subjects. If he had, though, it would not be Moore and it would not be filling theatres the way it is right now.
She does make one good point that I had missed before:
Moore is a very specific and slippery kind of bully: He glides along on his underdog status as if it were a parade float. He professes to feel great compassion for the common man. Yet over and over again, in movie after movie, he invites the audience to chuckle over ordinary people. Why? In "Fahrenheit 9/11" he lists the countries that stepped forward as members of Bush's Coalition of the Willing (Palau, Costa Rica, Iceland, Romania, Morocco, and the Netherlands among them), accompanied by funny stock footage of people in costumes of many lands. If Moore is the left's great spokesman by default, shouldn't he be using his influence (not to mention his money) to raise the level of political discourse in this country instead of lowering it? Instead we have a filmmaker who manages the feat of getting liberal audiences to laugh at how funny those foreigners are.
The most honest and worthy criticism I have read about the show was by
Juan Cole. The review is mostly positive and his criticism seems to me the most honest attempt in the pursuit of truth.
See here for an equally persuasive counter-argument by Mick. The differences were mostly of opinion and not on hard facts, so at the very least I would say it is a wash.
My hope is that liberals will avoid criticizing this movie just for effect or just to show that they are not "too liberal". I remember similar cultural pressure during the Clinton blow job "scandal". Don't fall for it. Most importantly, if you have not seen it yet, go check it out for yourself (and bring your Republican friends)!
• My memory is always notoriously unreliable (I'm just grateful that you confirmed for me that there really WAS an obnoxious lady there) and I was using her as a device to launch into my larger point.
I certainly agree that it was "less than rigorous in adhering to academic standards of argumentation", but this is a medium that is never held to that high of a standard (much like the nightly news). Yes, we should be willing to be critical of anything , but there is something inherently wrong when these arguments are only brought forth when it comes to a piece like this. It seems like when the partisans on the other side found that there were no strong factual flaws to bitch about, they fell back on the only argument that was left to them. I hope that the majority of the main stream left doesn't just follow suit without pointing this out.
One thing that was running through my head that I forgot to add in the post was that a better argument that could be made of the Saudi connection is that Saudi money is definately a bipartisan phenomenon (although not in equal degrees). I don't think that this fact exonerates Bush in any way, and we never see any kind of right-wing editorial that would go out of its way to say that "our side does it too". So again, we end up talking about a point that, though legitimate, is only being brought up because it is a last resort and would not even come up if more valid criticisms that were available.
• Moore himself has described it as a "satirical documentary" and fully admits it is not an attempt to be fair. It is the story of the last three years as he sees it. This seems reasonable to me. It may very well be in a different catagory than others. I should mention, though, that most of the documentaries I have seen do come with a point of view (maybe less so the nature documentaries) although they may be more subtle. I don't see any large factual problems with the film.
Do you think that we held "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" to the same standard that as this one and, if not, is that just because so much more info is available on this one?
