True even if it isn't

by Edward Cone
7-04-04
News & Record 

Fahrenheit 9/11, the dark comedy hit of the summer, reminds me in some ways of another film shot in faux-documentary style: This is Spinal Tap, the story of a make-believe band that told truths about rock and roll that a dozen earnest concert movies never could. 

Michael Moore’s spin on the Bush administration’s “war on terror” is more grounded in fact than Spinal Tap, of course, drawing its characters, events, and archival footage from recent headlines. But rather than carefully documenting the news, Moore editorializes and extrapolates from it. He has made a fact-based movie with an agenda.

Strip away Moore’s exaggeration, innuendo, and humor, and you are left with his irreducible themes: that George W. Bush’s response to the 9/11 terror attacks, especially the adventure in Iraq, was inappropriate and motivated by considerations other than fighting terrorism; that his administration is dishonest and overly influenced by corporate interests; and that the White House needs a new tenant come January.

Although Moore is an implacable opponent of Bush, the movie is not just an indictment of his administration. It aims at the larger political culture as well, booing the Democrats as they punt on the war and the Patriot Act. But Bush is without question the primary target, and it’s hard to leave the theater feeling good about the President.

That’s part of the problem, shout Moore’s many critics – the filmmaker trades in feelings, not facts. They hope to discredit this “documentary” by enumerating its slippery versions of reality, but the joke is on them. Moore is an impressionist, not a portrait artist. “Was it all a just dream?,” he asks at the beginning of the movie, and then he shows us a feverish imagining of a world very much like our own.

There is plenty of detailed reporting and eye-opening footage – the scenes of Bush continuing to read a book to school children in the minutes after being informed of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center are not helpful to the president’s image as a leader -- but it is all used to inform a script. Moore constructs a counter-narrative to the Bush administration’s version of reality, in which Saddam had nukes, er, weapons of mass destruction, no, wait, close ties to al Qaeda, and anyway the people of Iraq would greet us as liberators. He is fighting fiction with conjecture, telling a true-ish story with Bush in the role of the villain.

Now, even the casual viewer can knock down a lot of the specifics in the two-hour movie. There are sins of omission (pre-war Iraq is shown as a free and happy place), inaccuracies  by implication (it is suggested, for example, that members of the Bin Laden family were allowed to fly when civil airspace was still closed after 9/11, which was not the case) and dubious logic (the invasion of Afghanistan was really about a pipeline deal?)

But the scurrying army of fact-checkers is falling into Moore’s trap, and not just by boosting his box office receipts with the best counter-marketing campaign since The Passion of the Christ. To argue, however convincingly, that Dick Cheney’s past employment by the largest corporate beneficiary of the conquest, or the Bush family’s bosom friendship with the Saudis, were not the proximate causes of the war in Iraq is nonetheless to remind people of subjects that Bush and company would probably prefer to avoid.

Much of Moore’s thesis can be boiled down to the phrase “a war for oil.” This is at best a partial explanation of the underlying case for war, and since the free flow of oil is a vital interest of the United States, not a completely sinister one. But again, even if the movie does not convince viewers of its most reductive arguments, it still leaves the lingering impression that the war is about a lot more than terrorism, and that the administration is not completely forthright about its motives.

Who watches Michael Moore for the news anyway? He doesn’t market himself as “Fair and Balanced.” Moore is willing to throw almost anything against the screen to see if it sticks. Some of it, like the Afghanistan-as-the-Ponderosa bit with Cheney in the role of Hoss, is pretty damn funny. The scenes with Lila Lipscomb, the Michigan woman whose son was killed in Iraq, are a reminder that hating the war is not the same thing as hating America.

My guess is that most people who see the movie will unpack it in some less-than-entirely-credulous fashion. People decode Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh every day, but they don’t seem to trust their fellow Americans to use the same critical faculties. Given Fahrenheit 9/11’s strong performance in the marketplace, it’s clear that a lot of people want to talk about the issues raised by Moore.

And that’s the great thing about this movie, whether you love it or loathe it -- it shows the power of an American citizen to engage in dissent against his government, even in a time of war.