One controversial 2004 movie down, one to go. (I will see The Passion when I damned well please and on my own time.) Fahrenheit 9/11 is, to my taste, not much of an artistic advance over any other Michael Moore movie, and the same old wishy-washyness about his movies politically/argumentatively remain, but I still see the movie as vital, even if I don’t ever want to see it again. Is it fair to say that seeing the movie with someone whose politics might not necessarily be rightist but her skepticism towards Moore is just as strong as those who are probably had something to do with it? Eh, probably not, since I think we were able to clearly mark off our points of ideological departure… as when she was outraged that Moore would dare critique the soldiers by showing them taunting Iraqi prisoners and I exclaimed that I thought Moore bent over backwards to praise them and pin their transgressions on the dire situation they were thrown into, wrongly, and the number of times they’d been screwed over by the U.S. Government.
Probably the biggest gain from past films is that Moore’s outrage doesn’t always seem undercut by his lack of a solution (not that I think difficult problems require such a thing, or even the hope to find one, but damned if sometimes his films seemed to think they basically were the solution). Simplistic as it may be, 9/11 actually has a very real perscription: a Kerry/Edwards victory in November. Simple. Easy to swallow. True.
I guess I don’t buy the idea that since Moore is onscreen less often, that his offputting grandstanding is thereby less a factor. It’s still all over the movie, and shows up with the shock cuts between contradictory statements (in that department, The Daily Show is still the class act), the ironic use of pop music, and, most disturbingly, the way his films paint a portrait of the world as being nothing but politics. I am depressed just thinking about the possibility that I’m less resistant towards 9/11 than some of his past films simply because his vision is increasingly becoming reality. But, hey, at least that element of his films constitutes a geniune formal strategy. 9/11 is as shapeless as his other films, but it’s got a slogging, lurching chronological approach and the way he keeps shovelling the mounds and mounds of muck up until the whole thing just collapses in exhaustion eloquently taps into the sense of embittered, disillusioned fatigue simply existing has been like for the past few years. It’s not like he’s telling you a whole lot of things that everyone doesn’t already know (apart, it would seem, from that little thing blacked out on the sheet detailing Bush’s service records), or that he’s constantly surprising you with fresh new angles from the Left’s point-of-view. It’s that he’s reminding you of everything you already do know and so how the fuck come you’re still standing here worried about whether or not he’s being “fair”? (I take it back that he didn’t surprise me with fresh new angles. He actually did strike an unexpected nerve with me when he showed military recruiters preying on teenagers at the mall. That part brought back unpleasant memories. Why, again, did I never just say “fuck you guys, I’m gay and I’m not about to throw myself into an environment where I’m forced to pretend I’m not”?)
That said, I am, at the end of the day, distressingly ambivalent on the film. I’m distressed about it for reasons that are made clear by Outlaw Vern, in a piece that deserves to be as much-passed around as the now-canonical Chris Hitchens article… namely that I could be accused of being no better, and every bit as self-interested in protecting my “image” as a “reasonable,” “rational” individual, as the fucking self-defeatist Democrats that allowed the election to be stolen in the first place. What the hell. Iraqi children who have had their limbs blown off, soldiers who have had their morals eroded, dissenters who have had their sense of liberty perverted by the Patriot Act care fuck all about people’s reservations in regards to Moore’s aesthetic worth and whether it truly merited the Palme d’Or on artistic merit. In the end, the movie’s existence is far more important at the end of the day than my pansy-ass liberal guilt (and probably for that very reason).