Friday, June 25, 2004

Fahrenheit 9/11

This morning Sam and I went to see Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11." The theater was packed on a weekday morning. I think this movie will be seen by a lot of people, much to the displeasure of the Bush partisans.

The movie starts off with the Florida vote debacle and the sorry spectacle of Al Gore, who won the popular vote by half a million votes, having to preside over the certification of the vote in the Senate. Overruling the objections of several black members of the House because they had no Senator (required by the rules of the Electoral College) to sign off on their objection. Moore doesn’t just lambast the Republicans here, he also doles out a healthy dose of disdain for the leadership of the Democrats, who caved when they should have fought tooth and nail.

The next section starts with the 9/11 attacks, in which the screen is dark for the first couple minutes, while the soundtrack is a compilation of sounds from that event. This is a masterful stroke of filmaking, because Moore knows that the visuals of that day are seared into the minds of everyone. You can’t help but see it in your mind as you listen to the horror. You never see the burning towers directly, but only reflected in the glasses, eyes and the anguish of the witnesses in New York.

While this is happening, you see Bush entering a Florida classroom for a photo-op after he has been informed of the first jet striking the WTC north tower. Shortly thereafter, an aide steps in and informs him of the second strike. There is no longer any doubt that we are under attack. Bush sits there for 7 more long minutes, something that no one, not even his most fervent supporters can justify. He looks lost and confused, like a deer in the headlights, not at all like a decisive leader. Is he waiting for someone to tell him what to do? Why isn’t he trying to get ahold of his national security people? Where is the commander-in-chief? Missing in action, AWOL again…

By the way - I remember when Showtime did a movie on 9/11 with the cooperation of the White House, it portrayed Bush as being totally in command of the situation, slinging tough talk like “If some tinhorn terrorist wants me, tell him to come on over and get me - I’ll be home!” Yeah, right. More swaggering cowboy talk.

Well, let’s see the administration try to spin the actual footage of what he did. No wonder the right-wingers are still trying to put a lid on this movie. This is the kind of stuff they’ve managed to keep out of sight for years.

Then on to an exposé of the cozy relationship between the Bush family and the Saudis, especially the Bin Laden family. Bush actually had dinner with the Saudi ambassador 2 days after the attacks, after it was known that 15 out of the 19 hijackers were Saudi. This was on the same day over a hundred Saudis, including 2 dozen members of the Bin Laden family were allowed (with Bush’s OK) to leave the U.S., while everybody else was still grounded. Moore doesn’t say that Bush had prior knowledge of the attacks, despite many warnings, all ignored. What he does do is to question who Bush is working for, the people of this country or the Saudis who made his family rich.

Some of the next section has to do with the rampant fear-mongering that followed the attacks and the Patriot Act. Here he does some “street theater”, commandeering an ice cream truck and driving around the Capitol building, reading parts of the Patriot Act to the members of Congress, who never got a chance to read it before it was rammed through both houses.

The other piece of humor here was a clip of Ashcroft singing a patriotic song he had written. Here is the one and only nice thing I will ever say about Ashcroft - he actually has a good voice. However, he shouldn’t take up songwriting. It was excruciatingly bad. I normally would say something snide to him, like “don’t give up your day job”, but I’ll make an exception here. Please, please give up your day job…

There’s a little about Afghanistan, and how quickly that was dropped, along with the imperative to find Osama Bin Laden, and on to the real goal, the invasion of Iraq. There’s a few scenes of Baghdad in the days immediately before the invasion. Then there’s a number of gut-wrenching scenes of wounded and dead civilians and soldiers, all the stuff that the tamed U.S. press hasn’t been showing you.

Then Moore goes back to his home town of Flint, Michigan. After noting that the Army is running short of cannon fodder to toss at Iraq, he talks to a group of young men, who are faced with the choice of joining the military or likely not finding work in their hometown. He then follows a couple of Marine recruiters as they try to get young men to join.

You are left with the sense that they are little more than predators, as the small talk they make with their “prospects” seems just as hollow and insincere as a snake-oil salesman’s pitch. They keep trying to “connect” with the people they are trying to recruit, saying “you can do that in the Marines”, “that” being whatever their prospect’s interests are. What they studiously avoid is mentioning that what they will do is promptly send them into hell’s maw, with the likelihood that they could die messily, or come home minus limbs, like some of the soldiers you see in this film.

But the most powerful section of the film is that of Lila Lipscomb of Flint, filmed in 3 or 4 segments over a period of several months. She is first seen to be very supportive of young people going into the military, as her daughter had previously and her son was at the time. She was shown to be religious and patriotic, very Middle American and conservative. Later she is seen talking about the Vietnam war, and how she thought that all antiwar protesters were disgusting and against our troops. In the next segment, she reads from the letter her son sent her from Iraq a few days before he was killed when his helicopter was shot down. He hoped that Bush isn’t re-elected and said “Bush sent us here for nothing, why are we here?” She is devastated.

Finally, while in Washington on business several months later, she goes to the White House. Here the pent-up grief overwhelms her. She recovers and says it was still a good thing to go there, because she finally has a place to put her anger, a focus. All through her segments, Moore treats her with respect and this makes it all the more powerful - this is cinema verité, and it’s up close and personal. Although in other sections of the movie, he leavens the heavy import of the footage with well-timed humor, this section stands on its own.

One of the things Moore does here is to bring this all home to the middle-class audience. He starts with the power-brokers and officials, the elite who make decisions, but ends with the results of those decisions - what happens to ordinary Americans (and Iraqis) when the president and his advisers lie, dissemble and ignore any evidence that conflicts with what they want to do.

The movie closes with a chilling quote from Orwell’s “1984” - “The war is not meant to be won. It is meant to be continuous.” Just like the “War on Terror” that “may not end in our lifetimes”...

One of the more memorable clips was Bush, cynically speaking at a black-tie fundraiser. “This is an impressive crowd - the haves and the have-mores. Some call you the elite, I call you my base.” These people are are the ones who have gotten the lion’s share of the tax cuts, over half of the trillions in tax cuts went to the top 1%. They are his constituency, and as the movie goes on you get the feeling that to the Bush administration, everyone else is just a consumable - expendable, cheap and easily cowed by periodic threats of imminent terrorist strikes.

I think that after the opening weekend, you’ll see the audience broaden beyond those who already agree with it’s premise. Part of the reason why this movie is becoming hugely popular is because of the hunger out there for the news we have been denied by an American press that has self-censored in complicity with the administration. I’ve been reading the European press for the last several years, and there’s so much more there than you read in the papers here. Much of what you see on American TV is an uncritical, almost fawning take on whatever garbage the administration wants to shovel out there for public consumption.

It’s not without flaws, but it’s a powerful and entertaining film and leaves an impression that hopefully will be remembered on November 2nd. Just go see it.

- Bob Woods