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FILMS WORTH WATCHING by Robert Alstead
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After being told the US is under attack after the second
plane hit the World Trade Towers on 9/11, George W. Bush
continued to read My Pet Goat in a Florida classroom for
seven minutes.
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They should make a film about Michael Moore’s battle to get
his latest documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 distributed in the States.
What is it about the subject matter that caused financial backers
like Mel Gibson’s Icon Productions to get cold feet? Why did
Disney want to block its release?
Even if you don’t agree with his politics or his documentary
style, Michael Moore is a highly bankable, Oscar-winning filmmaker.
His attack on America’s gun crime epidemic, Bowling for Columbine,
was the most profitable documentary in filmmaking history. Even before
its nationwide release, Fahrenheit 9/11 promised to better that, having
scooped the top film award at the Cannes film festival in May, received
standing ovations at its premieres and impressive reviews from around
the world, including from publications such as The Washington Post
and New York Times. Have film distributors and theatre owners, who
balked at releasing the film, ceased to be interested in the green
stuff?
Hardly. Moore’s claim that distributors and theatre owners bowed
to Republican pressure to block the film sounds perfectly plausible.
See Fahrenheit 9/11 and you begin to realize why, as Moore has suggested,
the White House wants to stop people in the US from seeing this film
so badly in the run up to the presidential election.
Moore’s two-hour “op-ed” has the traits of his other
films. It is an opinionated and passionate argument full of gut-wrenching
emotion, rancor and laugh-out-loud comedy. Yes, there are occasions
when you feel that the edits are steering you with a heavy hand in
a certain direction, but Michael Moore is the first to admit that
he is a partisan filmmaker. Love him or hate him, you have a pretty
good idea what you will get in a Michael Moore movie.
The big man features less on screen here than in previous films (he
apparently had a sign in the edit suite which said, “If in doubt
cut me out”). There are a couple of classic Moore-ish scenes
of him on the streets in Washington canvassing senators to sign up
their children for the war in Iraq, but his lower profile otherwise
allows for some potent montages and interviews. His voice-over provides
the narrative thread, joining the dots to sketch a complex web of
intrigue and corruption at the heart of the US government and the
Bush family’s relations with the Bin Ladens, and drawing it
together into a dynamite thesis.
Moore asserts that even before entering office Bush had an agenda
to wage a war on two fronts - the first front being on the people
of Iraq to advance interests of his corporate supporters (or “his
base” as he likes to call them), including the Bin Laden family,
and the second, through his War on Terror, to keep a stranglehold
on the people of the USA by keeping them in a perpetual state of fear.
The film opens by revisiting the presidential election of 2000. “Was
it all just a dream?” asks Moore, retracing how George Bush
Jr. managed to scrape into office with an alleged 537 votes in Florida.
The turning point came, says Moore, when Fox News Channel decided
to report that Bush had won Florida on election night when all other
channels were reporting Al Gore as winner. Coinciden-tally, the man
at Fox who made that decision was Bush’s first cousin.
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A secret service officer questions
Michael Moore across the street from the Saudi embassy in Washington.
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In this early investigative part of the film, a flood of assertions
and questions ensue. We learn that one of Bush’s best friends,
and financial supporter of one of his early businesses, was also
banker to the Bin Laden family.
Further on, Moore asks why 24 members of the Bin Laden family were
allowed chartered flights out of the US immediately after 9/11 when
all flights were supposedly grounded. Was Bush honouring an old
friendship? A clip of a plane taking to the air to The Animals song
We Gotta Get Out Of This Place makes the rest of his point.
In the section on Afghanistan he posits that Bush never had a realistic
plan for capturing Osama Bin Laden.
These bald facts in themselves may not provide conclusive proof
of conspiracy. However, the weight of accumulated evidence, much
of it already documented in print and on television, is crying out
to be addressed. Voters in the US will have their chance on November
2.
There are many images from the film that stay in the mind, but perhaps
most stark is that of the moments after the first plane hit the
tower. The screen turns black, and only the audio track of panicked
onlookers can be heard. It is a curiously private and personal moment,
powerful in its simplicity.
There is humour as well, but streaked with satirical venom. The
film is withering in its portrait of George Dubya. Through archival
footage and newsreel, he is ridiculed, scorned and raked through
the mud. He is called a fraud, a slacker and a liar. Although the
only dialogue between president and filmmaker was across a crowded
room when Bush called to Moore, “Behave yourself - go find
real work.” The film poster hilariously shows Moore walking
hand in hand with George Dubya on the White House lawn like a couple
of lovers: George, in crisp conservative suit, head thrown back
in laughter; Michael, in obligatory baseball cap, T-shirt and baggy
jeans, looking to the camera with a mischievous grin. It sets the
tone for the film; although Bush’s familiar buffoonery and
bumbled lines provide comic respite, the clips that have been gleaned
from newsreel and feeder footage give him a psychotic edge.
At one point, caught on the golf course, Bush addresses the camera
directly, “I call upon all nations to do everything they can
to stop these terrorist killers. Thank you.” Without missing
a beat, he slips out a golf club and says, “Now watch this
drive.” Even if this is Dubya’s idea of a joke, such
insincerity chills the blood.
Most memorable is the notorious My Pet Goat video, filmed by the
teacher at a Florida kindergarten on the morning of September 11.
After being informed of the second plane hitting the World Trade
Center, Bush, like a rabbit frozen in the headlights, continues
reading a book called My Pet Goat for seven minutes before an advisor
came into the room to suggest he had more pressing matters to attend
to. Moore layers on the sarcasm as he speculates on what might be
passing through the presidential brain at the time. Amazingly nobody
had asked for the videotape before.
One of Moore’s strengths has always been getting the story
behind the story, asking the simple, obvious questions. He scorns
the mainstream media for its coverage of the war in Iraq and for
towing the White House line. Whether it be an Iraqi man tossing
a dead baby onto a truck or rare interviews with limbless and maimed
marines, there is often a sense that Moore has scooped his footage
by simply looking under the carpet. At other times, Moore lambastes
the bold-faced deceit of the Bush administration with biting montages
showing how we were duped over Weapons of Mass Destruction or how
Rumsfeld tries to make a bombing campaign sound as innocuous as
being tucked into bed at night.
A good part of the film is spent with a career counsellor from Moore’s
hometown of Flint, Michigan, Lila Lipscomb. A patriot, who “always
hated” anti-war protesters, and even advised her own children
to join the forces for a better life, she was forced to re-evaluate
her political beliefs during the making of the film by the devastating
news that her son had been killed in Iraq. We see her reading her
son’s last letter (where he urges his family to defeat Bush)
and doubled up with grief in front of the White House. Elsewhere,
an elderly, grief-stricken Iraqi woman rails at the camera for the
US bombing of her family. As the film reiterates: so much anguish
and pain. For what?
At the time of writing, Miramax, Fahrenheit 9/11’s production
company, was appealing the Motion Picture Association of America’s
decision to give the film an R rating, which requires children under
17 to be accompanied by a parent or adult guardian. Is it justified?
Certainly, there are some scenes that are hard to stomach: a blurry
long shot of a public beheading, faces scarred beyond comprehension
by napalm, a horrifying picture of a baby mutilated by a US bomb
attack and the charred corpses of US soldiers strung up in the street.
But the effect is to say, “This is war. It’s ugly. Don’t
do it.”
Another scene, reminiscent of Coppola’s anti-Vietnam War classic
Apocalypse Now, shows marines talking about the adrenaline rush
of going into Iraq guns blazing with the music cranked up in their
field headphones while footage rolls of tanks torching Iraqi buildings.
What apparently caused offence was a marine quoting the line from
the heavy metal Bloodhound Gang’s The Roof Is On Fire, “We
don’t need no water; let the motherf**ker burn. Burn motherf**ker
burn.”
Moore writes on his web site: “I want all teenagers to see
this film. There is nothing in the film in terms of violence that
we didn’t see on TV every night at the dinner hour during
the Vietnam War. Of course, that’s the point, isn’t
it? The media has given the real footage from Iraq a cleansing -
made it look nice, easy to digest.... I trust all of you teenagers
out there will find your way into a theatre to see this movie. If
the government believes it is OK to send slightly older teenagers
to their deaths in Iraq, I think at the very least you should be
allowed to see what they are going to draft you for in a couple
of years.”
It’s difficult to argue that 15 or 16-year-olds are not old
enough to make up their own minds on this. Whatever the result,
the irony is that the more that they try to suppress this film,
the more people want to see it.
More photographs from Fahrenheit 9/11
Michael Moore’s web site is www.michaelmoore.com
Robert Alstead writes for movie
ezine iofilm
Editor’s note: I saw the film and strongly recommend it to
you. Go see the movie.
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