Fahrenheit 9/11

I saw Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 last night.

I found myself judging this movie by a very different set of criteria than I would apply to an ordinary movie. In the case of most movies, the pre-eminent question I keep at the top of my mind is "Is it entertaining?" With documentaries, this question is usually still critical, but a second question also gets consideration - "is it informative?"

The criteria I found myself applying to this movie were similar, but the difference strikes me as critical. At almost every frame I found myself wondering, "is this movie persuasive?"

In various quarters, Fahrenheit 9/11 has been described as a piece of pure propaganda. The more accurate term, however, might be "polemic."

This movie is an argument. It doesn't advance any particularly new information, nor does it lapse into the worst kinds of conspiratorialism which mark the famous "paranoiac style" of American politics.

If you don't really share Michael Moore's politics, and I don't, then watching his movies can be a little aggravating. In Bowling for Columbine, Moore played incredibly fast and loose with the facts. The speed of the cinematic form allows him to assert connections between logically incompatible facts which would leap off the written page as egregious erros. And of course, when Moore ambushes Charlton Heston in his own home with the photo of a dead child, he might as well be an abortion protester waving jars of fetus. That kind of argument only works if you already share the preconceptions of moral accountability and causality that Moore holds.

In evaluating Fahrenheit 9/11 as a work of polemic, I need to judge it on two major fronts. First, is it really a message I can endorse? Does it convince me? Secondly, if so, is it a message that I think others would find persuasive?

On the first count, I'd have to give it a limited "yes." Sure, there are moments of the film that are ridiculous. As the war of Iraq is about to begin, Moore provides us with a laughably propagandistic montage of children frolicking in Baghdad, as though the lion were lying with the lamb along the shores of Tigris before Americans brought the poison fruit of war to New Eden. Given the problems of starvation and poverty and violence with which Iraq was already beset, such a portrayal, though not untrue, is obviously selective. I'm sure there are even today still playgrounds used by children in Baghdad. In another moment, Michael Moore heads down to Congress to try and get congresspersons to enlist their sons in the military. At that moment, you might as well be watching Death of a Salesman, as Moore humiliates himself, painfully and apparently obliviously.

Nevertheless, the movie is ultimately rather cautious. Moore presents the history of the last few years through the point of view of the various defense and counterterrorism officials who have fled the Bush Administration in recent years with loud protests about the insanity of its strategic choices. I'm not sure that Mooore sincerely believes that the problem with our invasion of Afghanistan is that it was undermanned and incomplete. But I believe it. Even if his liberal militarism is a little late to find its voice, the argument is persuasive, and happens to coincide with what I have long believed.

There's a lot of discussion of the Bush family's connections with the Bin Laden family and the Saudi Arabian monarchy which... well, it's the classic conspiratorial appetizer of red herring... Yet, I can't state that Moore overplays his hand on this. Was Unocal interested in building a pipeline across Afghanistan? Well, yes... Have they? No. Did Hamid Karzai work for Unocal? Well, yes... but he was also already a prominent Afghani dissident exile, long before he found himself on the payroll of a company interested in doing business in his homeland (not a shock, considering)... Most of the facts laid out in that section struck me as incomplete, but not as specifically misleading. There is room for outrage, I suppose, if one takes the line that people are too stupid to avoid making inferences that should be obviously unsupported by the facts. But I don't take that line. The question I face is not whether a wrong-headed argument might be implied, but whether one is advanced through actual lies or misinformation. I'd have to say that Moore walks this line very closely, and I might be mistaken, but at least on areas with which I'm familiar, he didn't betray the facts.

On the second point, "would I recommend it?", I have to say that the answer is yes. If the movie was flat out deceitful, I'd have to say no. I'm a bit of a political junkie, and I know that most people don't spend so many hours of their day reading news and monitoring statistics. For the most part the movie takes commonly known and non-controversial facts - there was a contested election, and a war in Afghanistan, and then one in Iraq - and weaves a polemical narrative out of them which is at least compelling. The images are compelling and candid, the argument is sincere and comprehensible, and I think the film is likely to change your thinking, even if it doesn't bring you exactly round to Michael Moore's point of view (or even change your position).

I recommend it. If you tend to agree with Moore's point-of-view, or even have any broad critique of Bush's Administration, you'll find new information there to support or challenge your hypothesis. And, if you somehow are both pro-Bush and reading my blog (go figure)... well, any good apologetics has to be rooted in the other side's critique... and Moore's film, though it may not be the most intellectually coherent critique of the Bush administration, is at least one of the more articulate of them...