Fahrenheit 911
Here is my first (fairly long) entry: I just got back from seeing Fahrenheit 9/11 and I really enjoyed the film. [Here is my "spoilers warning", by the way. That means that I'm going to be referring to specific moments of the film. You've been warned!] On a side note, this log entry comes from a post to a message board where politics are a no-no. I tried to keep this post “politically clean” as a result.
My own personal opinion of Moore’s style of directing a movie is that he likes to “push buttons” for effect, and he does that quite skillfully. I guess that has to be at least part of the reason why the film is doing so overwhelmingly well – financially, at the minimum.
And yes, there were moments when you want to say, “OK, Mr. Moore, you can’t seriously think I can accept a statement such as that.” I thought some of his criticisms of Bush were over the top. From my point of view, you have images on screen that tell their own story. And, as a story teller, you want to speak over top of those images in order to make sure the audience is keeping up with you, so that the story continues on in an orderly fashion.
But the problem is that sometimes you show an image and it says one thing to you while the story teller is saying something different. As one example, when Bush is in the classroom and his assistants alert him to the airplanes crashing into the twin towers and the pentagon, Bush waves them off and continues on with his “photo op”, as Moore tells it. Then Moore inserts a lot of random possibilities as to what Bush might be thinking at that moment, each thought focused on hammering in the connections that the movie attempts to make. But the whole time this scene was on I kept regarding Bush’s face, noticing how it seemed drained of color. I could only think that Bush was feeling rather traumatized by the news, and knew that his presidency was lurching in some awful new direction. To be honest, I felt more sympathetic for Bush in that moment because it humanized him and stole him away from his distant role as President.
Thankfully for my tastes, and possibly for the good of Moore’s film’s successes, there weren’t a lot of what I see as “cheap shots” like that in the film. That there were any is a shame, (and there were several in there) but as I said, he likes to push buttons and well, that’s entertainment. It’s more fun to laugh about Bush spending 4 out of 8 months outside of the office and assuming it all as vacation rather than accepting that he could just as easily be working away from the office and getting a lot accomplished (whether this is true or not), or listen to him butcher an expression and assume he is stupid rather than understand that maybe he’s just not well-versed on that particular expression (whether this is true or not).
Then again, there were a lot of moments where Moore really could have taken Bush to task and didn’t. “The haves and the have mores”? There were a lot of clips showed that were not at all flattering of Bush, but Moore simply played them once without comment and moved on. To be honest, again, I felt that would have been a better approach for this film – well, that and a more consolidated argument…
Back to the criticisms, I think the argument as a whole was somewhat poorly done. Moore jumped topics throughout, but seemed to express the idea that these were somehow connected. But I couldn’t grasp the connection between the lack of Congressional support for blacks, the lack of Senators reading every bill that passes their way, war is bad, and George Bush likes to play golf.
A lot of the film was focused on connecting the dots that are so hard to connect in real life. We might hear one thing and then later another, but many of us don’t connect those two things and understand how inter-related they are – such as, as the film claims, the connections with the Bush group and the Binladen’s. The film takes its time to talk of their various interconnected companies (oil and otherwise), and the amount of money the one group made (through investments in defense, etc) on the backs of atrocities (which made us demand defense, etc) which becomes money for the other group (because they support the Bush group) since they were involved in the decision making and so on.
Much of the latter half of the film was focused on what I would consider to be more an anti-war statement than a specific criticism of Bush, even if he was the leader when war was announced.
The focal point for this segment was a woman who is proud that her children are involved in the army until she finally gains the insight to realize that people die in war, and maybe that isn’t such a good thing after all. (I won’t be so bold as to claim one way or another that she was right or wrong; I simply state that for her it was a discovery.)
The realization she makes is still poignant because I think it is one of those moments that forces people to think. Liberal or conservative or somewhere else entirely, I think too many people simply do not use their brains enough (which is a topic of discussion all its own – for her, it could have simply been a defense mechanism, and rightfully so.). I’m not saying that “using your brain” will lead you to become liberal or conservative because I understand that we’re all made differently and think differently and we will come to different conclusions based on the same evidence, but I think it was a credit to Moore to simplify one occurrence down to a level that was very human and, as a result, thought-provoking.
Too many people “could” watch this film and instantly say it’s all filled with lies or instantly say that Moore is great and this film was needed because “George Bush is bad, m’kay?” But anyone who watched and took the film seriously and, prior to this, hadn’t considered such possibilities (like me) will have surely had their eyes opened, and that can only be a good thing.
In the end, I can see people objecting to seeing this film for many varied reasons, and I don’t think anyone can have a problem with that. But having said that, I think it was a quality film worth seeing, for those who want to see it, for the same reasons that it’s worthwhile to engage in discussion with people who are of like mind as much as those who are not, and because the film lends itself to provide further insight into the tragedy that was September the 11th – or, at minimum, to remind us.
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