Mission Improbable
Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 was the deserved triumph of Cannes, but will it really help unseat Bush, asks B. Ruby Rich.
Winning the Palme d'Or lends an air of destiny to the choice, but the Cannes film festival was an odd place for Michael Moore, man of the people, to premiere his magnus opus. Fahrenheit 9/11 smoulders with barely controlled rage over what is being done to the US by the most mendacious administration since or even including the Nixon regime. Yet Moore, heartland hero, went out of the country to France's notoriously hoity-toity event to debut the movie. A Memorial Day picnic in Detroit a fortnight later might have been more in character.
No matter. Moore is nothing if not a master strategist. Winning the Palme d'Or certainly puts the frosting on the cake, while going to Cannes in the first place let him assume the mantle of an exile, as though the film could not be shown in his native land. In France he could be received as an alternative diplomat, a deposed prince wrongfully ejected from a government now out of his hands. A fat Hamlet, minus mommy and daddy, but just as set on exposing the plot at the top. Meanwhile, acres of press coverage later, the film's lack of US distribution is presumably a matter of fine-tuning a contract geared to ever-increasing profitability, a matter that will presumably be sorted out in time for Moore's cheerfully announced dream-date opening on 4 July. He'll get the picnic after all.
I loved the euphoria of watching F*9/11 in the Palais crowd, but throughout the nearly two hours I was constantly transporting myself across the ocean and into the future, wondering anxiously how it would play back home and how much or little it might effect its stated aim: to convince the American voter to push Bush out of the White House. And, hey, while we're at it, why not get him and his VP indicted as war criminals and profiteers too? So I tracked the film's strategies both in terms of its cinematic chops and its electioneering rhetoric, switching my focus back and forth to check one against the other. Consider these ruminations, then, as a preliminary scorecard. The final tally awaits November, and the future.
Crescendo of accusation
In many ways, F*9/11 is a victory. First and foremost Moore has kept his own on-screen appearances to a relative minimum. It's a gesture of political and aesthetic maturity that lets the lights shine on a brilliantly selected cast of characters whose personal experiences and specialised knowledge build to a crescendo of accusation that is both emotionally and factually persuasive. Along with the expected boilerplate (Bush's lust for oil, settling scores for daddy), there's substantive evidence that has either not been heard or seen before or never been assembled into this level of critical mass. One example is Moore's footage of how George W. Bush spent his first seven minutes after learning, on the morning of 11 September 2001, what had just happened at the World Trade Center: in an elementary school, reading My Pet Goat to the children. A good move for a teacher, maybe, but not for a president.
Another jackpot is located in Bush's National Guard records, evidently censored between Moore's original requisitioning of them in 2000 and the version released to the US public after the scandal broke over Bush's disappearance from duty. The name blacked out? One James R. Bath, who was Bush's AWOL buddy back then and later became his oil associate and the bagman for the investments of the Saudis, including the Bin Ladens, in Texas oil.
And there's more, and Moore. Even the trademark shticks are more finely tuned, such as when Moore takes a disenchanted military man to Congress and tries to recruit congressmen to send their own children on active duty in Iraq. We see him pitch John Tanner, a Democrat from Tennessee, among others. On the soundtrack Moore tells us that only one member of Congress has a child stationed in Iraq, yet they vote to send the American voters' children there instead. Moore has developed a new tone for this opus: aggrieved dismay. This time around he lets the audience supply the rage.
In a particularly strategic decision Moore departs from his anticipated muckraking to portray the dilemma of patriotic families whose children are killed in action, patriotic soldiers who've decided they're being wrongly deployed, and the military's targeted recruits (back home in Flint, of course). F*9/11 spends quality time with Lila Lipscomb, a flag-waving mom whose attitude is changed not only by the death of her beloved son in Iraq but by his last letter, written shortly before his death and received after the fact, in which he bemoans a misbegotten war and expresses his hope that Americans will vote this man out of the White House. Moore structures whole chapters to show the degree to which African-Americans and the very poor, shut out of other options, join the military and uphold its alleged values. The chapter in which Moore tracks military recruiters - who in turn are busy tracking African-American youth at a downscale shopping mall - is just as chilling as the chapter focused on trying to discover just how and why so many Saudis managed to get out of the US on private chartered jets on 12 September 2001, a day when all aircraft were supposedly grounded.
Smoking guns
Moore's strategies here are very much in keeping with the ways Americans these days absorb information and gauge veracity. It's the personal that counts, not the abstract. Experience is more valued than evidence; appeals to emotion tend to succeed over the most perfectly crafted argument. It's autobiography and pop culture that move American consumers, not sense or sensibility. So Moore and his accomplished team of editors and producers layer on the music, ratchet up the montages and strap their audience into the rollercoaster ride of outrage, supplying enough smoking guns along the way (almost) to build an arsenal.
I have high hopes that F*9/11 will capture the imagination of the US electorate. But whether it will capture the votes is a different matter. While Moore is a master rhetorician, I'd like to think I know something about the subject too, teaching film as I do in the Rhetoric Department of the University of California, Berkeley. Moore has the instinctive grasp of rhetoric found in successful populists. Indeed, it's hard not to think of Argentina's Juan Peron when watching Moore in action, the shadow of the demagogue hanging just over his shoulder. Waiting in the wings is the spirit of P.T. Barnum, a circus-master who knows how to give the public what they want and to convince them that what they want is, in fact, precisely what he's got in stock. Moore is a muckraker in the finest American tradition. It's no wonder he supported Ralph Nader in the 2000 election, jumping ship late in the game when it became clear that Nader was on a fool's errand, set to topple Gore instead of Bush.
Like Nader, however, Moore has a tendency to pick his battles symbolically rather than strategically. As restrained as F*9/11 may be in comparison to Moore's earlier films, and indeed it is his most mature and polished film to date, it nonetheless bears the marks of his two greatest weaknesses as a film-maker and politician: a tendency to lampoon instead of indict and a need for enemies that's so intense he'll sacrifice potential allies in their pursuit.
Stupidity is not the issue
The reliance on lampooning is seen most conveniently in the title of Moore's best-selling book Stupid White Men. Their stupidity is not the issue, Mike! It's their lying, thieving, conflict-of-interest-laden, greedy evil-doing that's the problem. Their smarts, if you will. Though hardly a textbook man of the left, Moore shares with the US left a scorn for leadership that focuses on stupidity as the primary sin, like some sort of Ivy League snobbery in reverse, a good ole boy gleefully outsmarting the blue-chip lads. But the problem with multi-national corporations is hardly that they're stupid; it's that they are so savvy at putting their own bottom line ahead of the public and national good, then spinning brilliant rhetoric to make the public swallow it.
Time and again here Moore resorts to humour to carry his jump-cuts, editing footage to elicit the easy laugh, encouraging the audience to feel smug. It's a show-biz tradition to keep the gallery entertained, but I'm not convinced it's the right gesture. And it gets him into trouble, as in those sequences in which he ridicules the Saudis and casts suspicion on Bin Laden relatives; in a US that's only dimly aware of differences between Middle East nations, it's a tactic that can be received too comfortably as Arab-bashing. The same thing happens when he makes fun of the Coalition of the Willing, then engages in a low level of stereotype via found footage. This year the game is too serious, the stakes too high, for pratfalls. Does humour enrich outrage or diminish it? I don't believe that Moore knows the answer. Or the difference.
Meanwhile, Moore's focus on enemies can be a distraction from alliance-building. Given that one of the prime features of Bush's dastardly actions these past four years is the arrogant disregard for global alliances, I'd hate to see Moore adopt a domestic version of the same thing - yet the evidence is troubling. First, he attacks Democrats with nearly the same fervour as he does Republicans. Fair enough. They've both made a mess. But consider the scene of Moore cornering a congressman with his recruitment pitch. The Republicans won't stop to talk to him, so it's Tanner, the Democrat, whom Moore manages to hornswoggle into a damning conversation. Over and over he pictures the Republicans as evil, the Democrats as hapless. This is hardly a get-out-the-vote strategy unless he's pimping for Nader again, or for the Greens, or Dennis Kucinich. I think there's a grave danger that Moore's tactics will misfire and let Bush glide into home plate once again.
Crash course in rhetoric
In an effort to decode Moore's strategy, I found myself turning to his only American predecessor in the cinema realpolitik game: the late, great Emile De Antonio, who hated Nixon and Hoover at the same at-boil temperature that Moore maintains for Bush and Rumsfeld. De Antonio boasted of his appearance on Nixon's enemies list, but he never appeared in his own films (until the very end, his last, an autobiography), relying entirely on montages of archival material grasped from a stunningly wide range of international sources. Moore seems increasingly to be learning this lesson, amassing materials missing from the mainstream media and letting others speak for him. It's a strong strategy; De Antonio was effective in discrediting McCarthy and helping to jumpstart opposition to the Vietnam War, among other causes. But he never sought to speak directly to voters: instead he focused on communicating with those in power, the policy-makers in a position to depose false kings. He was a prep-school boy, whose rich pals provided the financing, and commoners rarely speak in his brilliant films: instead experts skewer false gods and potentates incriminate themselves.
Well, Amerika has changed since then. Moore's demagogue is a much better fit for a country attuned to talk radio and reality TV, a populace made ignorant by decades of tax cuts to education. Moore isn't really a man of the left, anyway. He comes from Michigan, a prime militia state. In the midst of the Cannes festival, at a café table not far from where the French police were assembled to combat any escalation by the ranks of striking performing-arts workers (who briefly provided Moore with a photo op), a museum curator explained Moore's politics to me. She knew Michigan enough to assure me that, in its terms, Moore is a classic Libertarian. With elements that can look both right and left to the casual viewer, Moore stands up for the little man whose way of life is being destroyed by big corporations and big government. Moore's desire to fight for the rights of Everyman is what unifies the logics of his films and political gestures.
The Democratic Party desperately needs a crash course in rhetoric if it is to have any chance of evicting Bush. Alas, from the evidence of his documentary, Moore the blue-collar he-man doesn't seem to want to help out Kerry the Brahmin gent. Why not? For all his hatred of the Bushes and their hitmen, I suspect Moore can't quite stomach the Democrats either. Too bad. There's a very simple statement that has to be made: the only way to defeat George W. Bush is to elect John Kerry. But F*9/11 doesn't make it. I get the feeling Moore is wishing for some other way to do the deed.
In the end, I fear Michael Moore is content to play the lone prophet once again; no Ayn Rand certainly, but a suspiciously Libertarian individualist nonetheless. While he prepares for his imaginary showdown at the OK corral with George, the Republicans will be busy loading their rhetoric and preparing to blast everyone out of the way. As a film critic and as an American, I so want a bullet-proof F*9/11, a documentary firm in its arguments, outrageous in its evidence, aimed at the electoral season like a surgical strike. Instead Moore struts on his glorious stage with tremendous finesse, justifiably proud of what he has wrought. But to what end? Where are the July theatrical release and October DVD campaign meant to lead us, beyond the box office and home-entertainment centre? I'm afraid that, unless his godfather Harvey Weinstein has a plan up his sleeve that's equal to his infamous Oscar coups, we could well be in trouble, come November.