The Sigla Blog

If it’s not enough that the American right loathes you, Michael Moore is even losing favour with the left. The filmmaker many love to hate has been dogged by controversy well ahead of the release of ‘Fahrenheit 9/11′ in Ireland. The company originally responsible for distribution pulled out after it “got calls from Republican friends” insisting they withdraw. Miramax then agreed to release it until Disney CEO Michael Eisner blocked this decision fearing the Disney Florida theme park would lose subsidies. Why? Because George W. Bush’s brother Jeb is governor of Florida. Disney countered this by saying Moore knew well in advance they wouldn’t distribute it and used it as his trump publicity card at Cannes.

Harvey and Bob Weinstein, two of Hollywood’s biggest purse-string holders, stepped in separately and the film is being released through Lion’s Gate and IFC films. Having secured distribution, unease on the right about the film escalated. Republican supporters through their group Move America Forward tried to intimidate cinemas into not acquiring prints of ‘Fahrenheit 9/11′. It didn’t work. Only three chains refused. In Illinois, one cinema owner even received death threats. Moore knows all too well that ALL publicity is good publicity and on its opening day ‘Fahrenheit 9/11′ grossed $8.3 million, a record for a documentary and earning it the top spot at the US Box Office.

But it’s not just the conservatives that have been up in arms. Raymond Bradbury, author of ‘Fahrenheit 451′ is demanding an apology from Moore for paraphrasing the title of his book. Bradbury’s 1953 classic novel deals with a future utopian society where the powers that be burn books (hence the temperature reference) to keep people from reading and thinking for themselves. Moore has also lifted this for the taglines on the film’s posters saying ‘Fahrenheit 9/11′ is “the temperature at which freedom burns”. Bradbury claims he was never consulted about this and wants Moore to change the name of the film. Even The Observer, that bastion of liberal journalism has been a little lukewarm to the man himself in recent times. Reporting from Cannes in May, journalist Andrew Anthony was less than impressed with Mr. Moore. He concluded that for someone who makes a living out of asking tough questions, Michael Moore didn’t like the tables being turned on him, especially when asked why he sent his daughter to an exclusive private school in Manhattan. In the same paper the film critic Mark Kermode accused Moore of whining constantly about being silenced (in reference to the distribution debacle) and he snidely remarked “If only”. Even so, the film received a 15-minute standing ovation at Cannes, a festival record.

It was only a matter of time before someone would turn the tables on Moore and start mud-slinging. David T. Hardy and Jason Clarke have penned ‘Michael Moore Is A Big Fat Stupid White Man’ in response to Moore’s ‘Stupid White Men’ and ‘Bowling for Columbine’. Of course they’re entitled to their opinion and there’s little doubt where their political allegiances lie, particularly if you look at the website edited by Jason Clarke. Entitled moorelies.com, the site carries carries banner ads for a shop called Right Wing Stuff - The Premier Conservative Superstore! (their exclamation mark, not mine) You can also buy ‘52 reasons to re-elect Bush’ playing cards and there’s an ad for the Coalition of the Willing where you can ‘click to support Tony Blair’. So each to their own agenda.

Apart from all of that, what’s ‘Fahrenheit 9/11′ the film like? Well, it’s an extraordinary piece of work. If you disagree with Moore’s views or his politics, there are still many relevancies here. Moore’s evidential bricolage adds up to one thing: Bush didn’t win the election, there were no weapons of mass destruction and the culture of fear ruthlessly employed by his administration helped to justify the war in Iraq. From the malfeasance of officials in Florida disenfranchising black voters to unreliable recounts, slowly the picture emerges of how the result was manipulated. The Bush camarilla - or ‘junta’ as Gore Vidal calls them - of Cheney, Ashcroft, Rice, Rumsfeld and lawyer James Baker made sure of that. How else were they going to get so rich? And it’s impossible to frighten people into going to war and pass legislation limiting civil liberties if you’re not in power. Through sharp editing and hilarious voiceover Moore presents George W Bush as a buffoon who is nothing more than Daddy’s puppet continuing Daddy’s presidency. The same gluttonous desire for power and money, whatever the cost, is evident. These cartoonesque interludes are funny and it’s obvious that Moore didn’t have to dig too deep to find footage of Bush as an ignoramus who you wouldn’t leave in charge of your cat, let alone your country.

While jokes and digs are all part of the program, it’s the policies undertaken since September 11th 2001 that really confute the workability of Bush’s government. From sitting in a Florida school classroom for 9 minutes after the Twin Towers attacks to flying 124 Saudi Arabians - including 11 plus members of the Bin Laden family - out of US in days after the attacks, Moore builds up a catalogue of deceit and double-standards. When it comes to the attacks themselves, he forfeits the emotive, much replayed footage of two planes slamming into the towers. Instead the screen goes black and all we can hear are the sounds and the screams of onlookers. What Michael Moore shows us instead is a dead baby in Iraq, the burnt corpses of US soldiers strung up in the streets of Baghdad and Iraqi children with massacred limbs. War isn’t pretty, and Moore doesn’t sanitize it for us. There is plenty of combat footage smuggled out of Iraq and as the war runs on, the optimism and faith of the troops runs out. Early in the film, a young tank corp explain what music they like playing in the tank (which transfers to headphones in their helmets) when they’re out “killing the enemy”. Later on, they are subdued and many say they’ve seen terrible things. One soldier says: “If Donald Rumsfeld was here I’d asked for his resignation”.

Cinema: Fahrenheit 9/11 and the Michael Moore Backlash But perhaps the most powerful thread running through the film is an economic one. No, not the triumph of a greedy government or the rise and rise of Halliburton but a more localised issue centred on Flint, Michigan, Moore’s hometown. At the start of the film he speaks with Lila Lipscomb, a careers advisor in a job centre. Flint has an unemployment rate of 50% having never recovered from the closure of the General Motors factory there (an issue Moore dealt with in his debut film ‘Roger & Me’). When asked if the Military is a good career option for poor Americans, she says that it is. And obviously the US military thinks so too as the film tracks two Navy Seal recruiters desperately trying to sign up the unemployed prospect-less youth of Flint. Lila’s own son and daughter are in the army and her son is in Iraq. As the film moves along in its exposition of the reasons behind the war, she is forced to confront some truths and reassess her views. In one of the closing scenes, she reads a letter from her son in Iraq saying that he hopes George Bush doesn’t get re-elected. It’s an affecting scene and it’s this kind of humanity that makes the film what it is.

As soon as the film ended I wanted to watch it again. Plenty of people who don’t support the war or George Bush don’t support Michael Moore. Criticism from the left centres on everything from his faux-Liberalism and capitalist tendencies to the non-objectivity of his filmmaking. Everyone, not least Moore, has an agenda and even though his certainly has a bias, he’s still telling the world things that we need to hear - particularly in an Election year in the US. If he didn’t speak out, how much would we know about what the Bush administration really does? In a time - particularly in the US - of media censorship, we need people like Michael Moore. Often dubbed the poor man’s Noam Chomsky, by its nature his brand of diluted Moore-speak will always have a broader reach, which can’t be bad if it makes more people question the world around them.

If I had to take issue with the film it would be on two levels. Showing war AS war is harrowing, but it’s important when the US media won’t even show coffins of dead servicemen and women coming home. When the film focuses on the issue of war, it goes for the emotional jugular. Perhaps more time spent dealing with the ‘fictitious’ elements (which Moore railed against in last year’s Oscar acceptance speech) that got the US there in the first place could have been employed. The means rather than the end might have saved Moore from accusations of emotional sensationalism.

The other problem I have could well be just a question of great minds thinking alike. It struck me while watching the film that some of the issues raised - even down to key scenes - are issues that Gore Vidal raised in his 2002 book ‘Dreaming War - Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta’. Information about George Bush Senior’s involvement in the Carlyle group, greed to get a foothold in the mineral rich Middle East, information on Bush Junior’s involvement in energy companies Arbusto and Harken are not exactly secret. It struck me that much of Moore’s subject matter had already been competently covered by Gore Vidal in his book two years ago, to the point where I wondered if he had a screen-writing co-credit on ‘Fahrenheit 9/11′.

When I saw Michael Moore speak in Dublin last year to a rapt audience, the only two heckles he got were about his pro-choice views on abortion (and both, incidentally, were from men). Michael Moore will always get heckled and derided. He will always divide people but his message and the sheer size of the previously apathetic audience he has convinced ought to outweigh the criticisms of him. Fahrenheit 9/11 is an affecting, brutal, brilliant piece of filmmaking. Whether you like or hate the big guy, you should see it.

Sinéad Gleeson