The screen is black. The roar of jet engines fills the cinema through the surround sound system. We hear explosions, shouts, glass breaking. Then another roar of jets and more chaos. Were these authentic sounds of the destruction of the twin towers of the world trade center? Why go to the cinema to see a documentary? Film is about escape and fantasy, no? Why did a documentary win the Palme d'Or at Cannes? Are we being entertained or informed? Are we seeing the facts or clever editing?
There are serious questions about film-making posed by Fahrenheit 9/11. The sequence of the attack on the twin towers does succeed in surpassing a documentary by the use of the empty screen. My mind was filled with my own experiences and images of that day in September 2001 and I imagine the same thing was going through everybody's mind at the same time in the room. It thus became a truly cathartic experience – a shared moment with the other audience members. This is what makes cinema and theatre different from home entertainment, for better or for worse – though I think this time was for the better. At last I was glad to be in a cinema!
Personally I remembered my drive from Zurich to Brussels that day, the SMS message from my friend in Switzerland breaking the news while I was driving through Luxembourg. Then getting home after the long drive and pausing quietly for a few minutes before turning on the TV, knowing that the world was going to go crazy and be different for years to come.
As the screen shows images again of New Yorkers' shock at events, major points are to be awarded for the use of Arvo Part's “Cantus in Memorium Benjamin Britten,” which is an unmatched musical outpouring of grief.
Another positive item was to show that life in Baghdad before the invasion was not hell as is so often assumed. OK, Moore overdid the saccharin somewhat by showing happy smiling children and weddings. But it is something I tried to tell as many people at the time – Iraq was not the hell of Taliban Afghanistan. (The stupid sexist comment in the film of the Taliban visitor to the US was a good way of showing how dangerous the Afghan leadership was.) I remember just before the invasion reading that the Baghdad symphony orchestra were rehearsing Beethoven. This detail made me realise the error of the Iraq war. Of course Saddam Hussein was a dictator and not a credible leader of a state. It's not the fact that he was removed I object so strongly about, but how and why.
At heart, this film is a socialist polemic. The main message is not really about Iraq or the US elections in 2000 or Afghanistan, or Al-Qaeda or Saudi Arabia or Bin Laden. Fundamentally it is about the exploitation of the poor by the rich through capitalism and war, by the “military-industrial complex.” I can understand why this film is so divisive in the US. As the underlying message is so subversive to the US system, it is easy to see how anyone on the right would find the message impossible to digest. Hence the focus on accuracy and bias from the right. Accuracy is not really the point of this film.
In any case, Moore cleverly defends himself against charges of unreasonable bias by showing interviews with US TV journalists freely admitting their pro-war biases. If Fox TV can lie for the cause of freedom, why should Moore be any different. Only there are no blatant lies in Moore's work – just partiality and omission. There have definitely been lies from the neo-con right.
It was good to be able to see things that were not shown on TV news, such as the real gore of war, children with arms blown apart, cartloads of dead cadavers, the two mercenaries whose bodies were taken apart, burned and hanged in the Faluja street. Also it was instructive to see an actual Saudi public beheading, even if the quality of the image was too poor to see any detail. Other scenes that seem to have escaped the news were the images of the inauguration of George W Bush, where protesters prevented the traditional walk to the stand for the first time ever, and Bush's motorcade being pelted with eggs. It's hard to remember now the farce that was the 2000 US election. Also the scene of the congressional representatives, all from ethnic minorities, protesting at the invalid accession of president Bush and being dismissed by Al Gore as no senator would come forward to sign the objection. Their anger was very affecting.
There were a number of omissions I found strange. The main omission seemed to be the anthrax panic that ensued after the 11th of September. Moore gave a very good sequence about how panic was ratcheted up to ensure public compliance about mass erosions of civil liberties, and there were Fox News items about poison pens and internet chatter on obscure small towns. But there was nothing about how the anthrax scare was sourced to a government laboratory. Was this scare manufactured by the authorities? How many people did die from anthrax poisoning in the end? The sequence on the “Coalition of the Willing” rightly pointed out how few countries were on-side, but it was a bit specious to omit the support of the UK, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands. Also the role of Tony Blair in legitimising the occupation of Iraq was omitted.
On a comedy level, I did laugh out loud more than most films that purport to be humorous.
An interesting aside is how this film has made so much money (over $100 million from box office receipts so far) and yet Moore is amenable to downloading this film by internet. How canny to encourage piracy and show that you can still make a fortune from a low budget documentary. It was funny to see the US right initially encourage downloading as a way to cheat Moore his royalties, only later to go quiet when the right realised this was a great way to spread the message of the film, whilst also disproving that downloading films and music is “killing” the creative arts. Predictably comment is made about how this working-class socialist is now a multi-millionaire – the old champagne socialist argument. So it's OK to make money exploiting poor people then rather than by polemical film-making. And maybe as he's so rich he should get a better haircut and a clean baseball cap?
For me, the quotation from George Orwell's 1984 is the key to the film. Like Orwell, Michael Moore is socialist polemicist using mass entertainment to get his message across.
And now, please. I'm fed up with US politics. I swear people in Europe are more aware of the facts that the average US voter. If Kerry wins, it could be a bad thing as the US economy is heading for a huge debt-induced car crash. A democrat win could mean Bush presidencies for years to come. Let George W. become the John Major of US politics and destroy the credibility of free-market capitalism as the best way to manage an economic system.
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