Michael Moore's film "Fahrenheit 9/11" still has legs. It has earned more than $56 million since its release and has spawned nearly the same amount of words by commentators. It's the consensus among academic film buffs that the only other documentary that has had the same sort of impact was "Woodstock," which memorialized the 1969 rock festival."Fahrenheit 9/11" appeals to the same generational crowd: the Woodstock nation grown up. Early audiences have been made up of this AARP demographic, but, thanks to Moore's celebrity and his previous Oscar-winning film, "Bowling for Columbine," the patrons of "Fahrenheit 9/11" have been a mixed group.
Moore's documentary, in many ways, is just an extension of his latest book, Dude, Where's My Country?, one of many anti-Bush volumes published during this presidential campaign season. Coincidentally, the New York Times Book Review, on July 4, ran a full-page ad for an upcoming film, "The Manchurian Candidate," and a half-page ad for Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11": When the country's most influential book review runs movie ads, it's announcing the age of literacy is over. Moore certainly will reap more profit and impact from the movie than from his book.
And that is the divide in the audiences for Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11": People who have kept up with the Bush administration in print will see one film; those who haven't will see another.Documentaries can either prompt memory or revelation. The portion of "Fahrenheit 9/11" devoted to the 2000 election was the most melancholy, given the import of all that was lost when Al Gore was denied the presidency. Moore never shows the World Trade Center towers in flames or falling; he leaves the screen dark, the soundtrack playing the noise of the catastrophe. The withholding of images makes the audience uneasy and apprehensive.
In a video shot by a teacher, we see President Bush sitting in the grammar school classroom for seven minutes after he is told of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center. A sympathetic interpretation of Bush's actions, or lack of action, is that he is trying to collect himself for the tasks ahead, but there are many more unsympathetic explanations for why he continued to sit.
The GOP propagandist Grover Norquist, champion of the Republican right wing's destructive economic agenda, calls Moore a Democratic "propagandist," but Moore is more a penitent, and his movie a penance, because he supported Ralph Nader in the 2000 election. What damage Moore did then, he is trying to undo this time around.
Norquist compares "Fahrenheit 9/11" to "The Clinton Chronicles," an amateur videotape opus (and later a book) that claims Bill Clinton is the devil incarnate. But that movie didn't have a general theater release (a plain-brown-wrapper distribution was more like it) and wasn't made by an Oscar-winning filmmaker.
Moore's documentary is an anthology of images you don't get to see much on TV, in part because of censorship on the part of the corporate entities that own cable and network television and in part because it would take a point of view to make sense of the film shown. Fox News is happy to take a point of view, but it wouldn't be using Moore's footage. "Fahrenheit 9/11" is Michael Moore News.
"Fahrenheit 9/11" doesn't have any Abu Ghraib torture photos, but, even more illuminating, it has video of American soldiers making sexual jokes about a just-captured Iraqi and putting the by-now-familiar empty sandbag over the head of an already blindfolded prisoner, revealing how widespread that sort of conduct was.
At his film's end, Moore quotes the early 20th century British writer George Orwell on the economic elite's need for "continuous war." Orwell is more eloquent than Moore in the same way Tony Blair is more eloquent than George W. Bush, but Moore's movie makes Orwell's point: There is no more continuous war than the war on terror, and the Bush administration has achieved what Orwell had always feared.
That is one reason "Fahrenheit 9/11" is being attacked so vigorously by Bush operatives. Another secondary reason is that it reminds the world of what George W. Bush was before 9/11. And whatever Bush's problems are now, his past is even less attractive.
