Coming of the anti-Bush

GRAHAM REID unravels the complex political environment of Michael Moore's controversial documentary.


Michael Moore's controversial documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 - being shown in Auckland to a sold-out film festival audience on Tuesday - makes no secret of being an anti-Bush polemic intended to sway voters in the forthcoming American election.

He's not the first film-maker to try to persuade the American electorate. PT109 - the bio-flick of the wartime heroics of a young John F. Kennedy aboard a Navy patrol boat off the Solomon Islands - arrived in cinemas while Kennedy was in the White House in early 1963, giving him a good lead-in for the 1964 election.

Assassination bullets mean we will never know how effective it might have been as political leverage, but it couldn't have harmed his electoral chances for Kennedy to be seen supporting and towing his 10 surviving crew members to safety after their boat was rammed by a Japanese destroyer.

John Wayne's Green Berets was a notoriously gung-ho war movie about America's involvement in Vietnam released in the election year of 1968 (the Duke didn't care for hippies and the rising tide of anti-war protesters). This wasn't his first, barely concealed, political diatribe on celluloid.

In 1952 during the Cold War he starred in the virulently anti-communist Big Jim McLain.. In one scene Wayne dismisses speculation on why people might join the "cult" of communism, and for what purpose.

"I've heard all the jive. This one's a commie 'cause Mama wouldn't tuck him in at night. That one, 'cause girls wouldn't welcome him with open arms. The 'what' I do know. It's like when I was in uniform. I shot at the guy on the other side of the perimeter 'cause he was the enemy."

Life and politics are more problematic today. During George W. Bush's Republican presidency a popular Democrat has actually occupied the White House: Martin Sheen as President Josiah Bartlet in The West Wing.

If the line between acting and being presidential was blurred by the late Ronald Reagan then at least electioneering movies have been identifiable fictions. Moore's film is different because - regardless of how disingenuous or disrespectful of the truth it sometimes might be - it is a documentary. And, as it has proven, it is not just any documentary: it's a chart-topping, record-breaking blockbuster which took US$21.8 million ($33 million) in its first three days. Not bad for a film that runs nearly two hours and doesn't star Angelina Jolie.

The film's pre-history is familiar: Moore claiming Disney tried to prevent its distribution; it winning the Palme D'Or at Cannes; conservative lobby groups asking the Federal Election Commission to examine its advertisements for potential violations of campaign-finance laws ...

Of course, as with our own Society for the Promotion of Community Standards whose condemnation of film festival movies has guaranteed good box-office takings, Moore's detractors have done much of his promotional work for him.

"I want to thank all the right-wing organisations out there," he said, "who tried to stop the film, either from their harassment campaign that didn't work on the theatre owners, or going to the FEC to get our ads removed from television, to all the things that have been said on television. It's only encouraged more people to go and see it."

Response by movie critics has been largely favourable - Moore coming off as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Left for his astute editing and filmic skills - and because his political agenda has been transparent it has disarmed potential detractors.

"Unabashedly partisan, wearing its determination to bring about political change on its sleeve, Fahrenheit can be nit-picked and second-guessed, but it can't be ignored," said Kenneth Turan of the LA Times.

"It is propaganda, no doubt about it, but propaganda is most effective when it has elements of truth, and too much here is taken from the record not to have a devastating effect on viewers."

In an exit-poll of 10 people conducted by New York's Village Voice all said it hadn't changed their minds, a few noting it only confirmed their opinion or hardened their view of the Bush administration. Seven were Democrats, the remainder said they were "Other" or "Independent".

Many commentators have noted pro-Bush people and Republicans - not always the same thing - will not go to it anyway. Advance publicity has put them off or reinforced their view of Moore's antagonistic, blowhard style.

"Moore is still basically preaching to the converted," said the conservative New York Post's Lou Lumenick who called the film, "a heavy-handed polemic." He also said it "isn't half as incendiary or persuasive as its maker would have you believe" and that Moore "is unlikely to win over all that many hearts and minds".

If the Post's opinion of Moore's film was to be expected, less anticipated was the muted response from the Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox network which has been a banner-waver for the Bush administration.

As Village Voice's Richard Goldstein noted a month ago, "So far Fox's main complaint is that Moore won't give them an interview".

Goldstein's explanation: "Rupert Murdoch is covering his ass in case John Kerry wins. For that matter his news machine doesn't have to prove itself to the Bushies - and besides, an attack from Fox would have been easily dismissed as partisan. Better to let NBC and ABC lend the imprimatur of their 'objectivity'."

Both NBC and ABC weighed in against Fahrenheit 9/11, accusing it of evading truths which would undermine its case, notably when Moore asserts many Saudi nationals, including members of the bin Laden family, were allowed to leave the US after September 11 even though commercial flights were grounded. Linking this directly to Bush adds to the notion of collusion between the President and the House of Saud.

But former security adviser Richard Clarke - who delivers a damning critique of the administration in his book Against All Enemies - has admitted he authorised the flights. Moore has avoided talking about that inconvenient fact.

In a curious parallel, some news channels which condemned Moore's mischievous and misleading editing have done much the same to him. When Moore was confronted about Clarke's role, ABC omitted his mildly evasive answers in subsequent broadcasts of their report. NBC's coverage - under the banner "truth squad report" - made similar omissions of Moore's answers to other criticisms.

Why? Goldstein - like Moore, seeing a network of puppeteers pulling invisible strings - asserts that NBC is owned by General Electric, "a prime defence contractor". ABC is owned by Disney whose subsidiary Miramax initially intended to distribute the film until Disney stepped in to prevent it.

Observers note that because Bush once said ordinary Americans could fight terrorism by visiting Disney World the company owed the President for the plug. Also "Disney is dependent on the kindness of federal regulators and to the Bush administration - those mouse ears have a lot to answer for."

Miramax head Harvey Weinstein formed a consortium of companies to get the film released and there have been strong suggestions Disney will part company with Miramax, which it bought in 1993. Weinstein - who yelled "I'm out of a job" after Fahrenheit 9/11 screened at Cannes - has hinted at forming a new company.

The ripples from Moore's film have already been far-reaching.

Todd Gitlin at opendemocracy.net turned the mirror on Moore's critics by asking why Bush's misleading the public and ill-informed judgments haven't been given excoriating treatment by the media, politicians and the electorate.

Moore, he says, is "a not-so-secret weapon against the bully propaganda machine called the White House, which sold a war - a war - on delusional grounds".

"Benighted democracy needs the contention that Moore provokes because the newspapers don't provoke it, television doesn't, the Democrats didn't, Congress didn't, judicious folks didn't. No one who didn't get worked up about the administration's distortions re WMD, al Qaeda, and mushroom clouds has the right to pure rage against Michael Moore. He's not running for President, after all ... Moore is the anti-Bush, and damn if we didn't need one."

At slate.msn.com former leftist Christopher Hitchens mounts a sustained assault on the film and its maker in a series of flailing swipes which veer between tub-thumping analysis and ad hominem attacks.

"I never quite know whether Moore is as ignorant as he looks, or even if that would be humanly possible ... Moore is a silly and shady man who does not recognise courage of any sort even when he sees it because he cannot summon it in himself. To him, easy applause, in front of credulous audiences, is everything."

But in a belligerent analysis - and calling the film "a sinister exercise in moral frivolity crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness" - he tears into Moore's contradictory positions such as that the US should not be in Afghanistan, but sent too few troops.

Of a scene where Bush gives an impromptu press conference on a golf course then invites reporters to watch his drive, Hitchens notes, "If Eisenhower had done this, as he often did, it would have been presented as calm statesmanship. If Clinton had done it, it would have shown his charm".

There is no doubt Moore is disingenuous in his editing, a charge also laid against his earlier Bowling for Columbine. He includes footage of Bush at a fundraiser saying to the monied audience they look like, "the haves and the have-mores ... Some people call you the elite. I call you my base".

What Moore doesn't say is this happened in 2000 before Bush became President and he was speaking at a charity fundraiser. As a writer to the LA Weekly said, "The Al Smith dinner is noted for its self-deprecating humour. Bush was essentially mocking himself by saying what his political enemies would love to hear him say."

Gitlin: "Moore specialises in hodgepodge. He jokes his way past the rough edges. He's neither journalist nor documentarian, for he doesn't set out to discover what he doesn't already know ... "He's an entertainer [when it suits him] whose brush is so broad, at times, as to coat all evidence and logic with bursts of sensational colour. His chief method is the insinuating juxtaposition. Presto, proof by association."

In such a political climate, disassembling American coverage of Fahrenheit 9/11 can be as complex as doing the same for the film itself. Things used to be easier in the old days of John Wayne. Back then you knew who the bad guys were.

But they were just movies; Moore and his documentaries have become so much more. Lena Cohen, a 22-year-old Democrat, was asked in the Village Voice exit poll whether she had learned anything new from Fahrenheit 9/11. She said she hadn't, and while she didn't think Moore was honest or straight, he was brilliant.

"He knows the power of image and cinema. Even though I hate Bush, I thought doing this on Bush is easy ... I saw 200 people come out of the theatre shocked. People couldn't talk. He's using shocking images.

"A lot of Americans' minds will be changed. Moore is dangerous."

* Fahrenheit 9/11 opens for general release on Thursday, July 29.