Wow. I guess the reason why I read The New Republic even though it's liberal and a Democrat magazine, is that they are smart and fair.
Here is a review of a review also picking apart the movie:
WILLIAM RASPBERRY AND MICHAEL MOORE
Be Like Mike
by Andrew Sullivan
Only at TNR Online | Post date 06.29.04 E-mail this article
Reactions to Michael Moore's new movie have--predictably--been mixed. Most film reviewers were positive, but few excused its factual sloppiness or determination to ignore any evidence that undermined its message that George W. Bush is unfit to be President of the United States. But the oddest response has come from liberals who concede that the movie is dishonest, but still endorse it. Here's a column by William Raspberry from yesterday's Washington Post, which indicates, I think, the ethical bankruptcy of some of Moore's supporters. My comments are interspersed.
Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" is everything you've heard. It is a searing indictment of the Bush administration's war on terror. It is an eye-opening expose of a president whose inexperience and limited intelligence make him tragically unsuited for the job. It is a masterful job of connecting the dots between Saudi money and the business interests of the president and his friends. And it is an overwrought piece of propaganda--a 110-minute hatchet job that doesn't even bother to pretend to be fair.
Hold on. How can a movie be all these things? Take one argument here: that the documentary does a "masterful job" of "connecting the dots" between Saudi money and the president's former business interests. But when you see the movie, you see no new evidence of this--merely a rehash of existing reports that among billions invested in energy companies in the U.S., some Saudi money ended up in some Bush oil ventures. Moore has no actual evidence that this corrupted any political decisions at all--or how it might do so. Is the U.S. too close to the Saudi government? Almost certainly yes. Have all recent administrations been guilty? Of course. Could our dependence on Saudi oil help explain this proximity? Undoubtedly. But is there some secret alliance between the Bush family and the Saudi royal family to protect the mass murderers of Al Qaeda so that the president can make money? The movie doesn't even come close to proving this. But it does imply it. If Raspberry is a journalist, how can he call this a "masterful job"? It's a smear job.
That last may be a part of its appeal: There is no hidden agenda, no subliminal message. Moore thinks George W. Bush is dumb, devious and dangerous, and needs to be voted out of office. He doesn't have that much good to say about the Democrats or John Kerry, their presumptive candidate. But it's mostly about how bad Bush is.
It's easy enough to see why Republicans hated the movie before they ever saw it, why they used their influence to try to stop its production and distribution, and why, having failed at that, they are calling on theater owners not to show it.
I'm aware of only a handful of fringe Republicans who tried to prevent screening of this movie. The only real threats to it were Miramax, a liberal Hollywood outfit that passed on distribution over a year ago; and the McCain-Feingold law, which might affect its anti-Bush promotional ads. Sorry, Mr. Raspberry, this particular conspiracy of yours is about as valid as any one of Michael Moore's.
But why did the mostly liberal crowd at last week's Washington premiere--people who like to think of themselves as thoughtful and fair-minded--applaud so unrestrainedly?
They applauded, I suspect, for much the same reason so many members of the black Christian middle-class applaud the harangues of Black Muslim minister Louis Farrakhan. Some of his facts may be wrong and some of his connections strained, but his attitude is right. What's more, he'll say in plain language what nice, educated people cannot bring themselves to say: The man is a devil.
This is an astonishing assertion. What matters is not veracity, good faith, cinematic excellence, but attitude. And Raspberry even invokes anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan as the model! And who exactly is the "devil" in Farrakhan's "discourse"? The Jews! And this, according to Raspberry, is a valid model for Michael Moore to follow. Hello?
And notice the point of this attitude: not that Bush has been wrong in his judgments; not that he has botched a war; not that he has ruined the economy; not that he has pursued any particular policy with which a reasonable person might disagree. The point is that Bush "is a devil." A devil? Like, er, Satan? And this is what nice, educated people believe but "cannot bring themselves to say"? This is not an argument. It's literal demonization--a defense of losing one's sense of fairness and rationality.
I thought from the beginning that the Bush administration was wrong to launch its unprovoked war on Iraq. "Fahrenheit" makes it easier to believe that the war was not simply a horrible mistake based on over-extrapolation from slim evidence.
Notice this weasel formulation: "easier to believe." What can that possibly mean? That Moore so lards up his movie with emotional manipulation, crude editing, and stupid background music that one's critical faculties are instantly suspended? And this is a good thing? What exactly in the movie makes this "easier to believe"? Just a series of non-sequiturs, misleading associations, and the odd outright lie (that "most of Al Qaeda" was left intact by the Bush administration, for example). If you flashed pictures of President Bush interspersed with scenes of rape and murder, it might make it "easier to believe" that Bush was, indeed, a rapist and murderer--but only because of propagandistic and emotional manipulation of an audience that has decided to suspend all skepticism and rational scrutiny, as, apparently, has Raspberry himself.
I've long had my doubts about the president's intellectual gifts. Moore tempts me to doubt his basic competency.
There is that Sept. 11 scene at a Florida elementary school where the president is reading to a group of children when an aide whispers in his ear that an airliner has crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. He blanches at the horrible news but then returns to his reading: "My Pet Goat." What should he have done? Was he well-advised not to show panic? I don't know, and Moore doesn't tell us. He is content to give us the impression of a man who has no idea what to do unless there is someone there to give him instructions.
And Raspberry's point? He knows that showing up-close the president's responses immediately upon hearing of the 9/11 disaster tells us absolutely nothing. There is no way to know what was going on in his head as he absorbed that information in public in front of the television cameras. And Moore doesn't merely "give us the impression" that Bush is clueless without advisers. He tells us in a narrative overlay--in case we might be interpreting the president's shocked responses as, say, horror, or an attempt to portray calm, or a sign that he's desperately scanning his mind and memory for what this might mean. Nope. It means that he cannot function "unless there is someone there to give him instructions." Raspberry laps it up. He is putty in Moore's propagandistic hands.
Or of a man who only pretends to care about terrorism. There is the vacationing President Bush making a grim-faced denunciation of some terrorist action, then turning back to his golf game with: "Now watch this drive." You can tell how bad that looks--but should he have bagged his clubs after delivering that TV message? To what purpose? The movie is full of such slyness--and if Moore is afraid it's too subtle for you, he'll spell it out in one of his numerous voice-overs.
Raspberry is smart enough to see the cheapest of cheap shots here. But he endorses it! My favorite example of Moore's technique is showing various administration officials getting their hair and make-up done before going on television. It is impossible for anyone captured in this pose for minutes not to look somewhat awkward, phony, and even sinister. So Moore deploys this device remorselessly. All it achieves is the deepening of hatred and contempt for the people involved. It is done mainly in silence. That's how propaganda works. Hate needs no words. It just needs an object.
But it's not all slyness. The most powerful story in the film is that of Lila Lipscomb, from Moore's hometown of Flint, Mich., who, when we meet her, is boasting of her family's military service. A daughter served in the Gulf War and a son is serving in Iraq. Later, after the son is killed, she reads, on camera, his last letter home; in it he tells her how pointless and wrong and destructive the war seems to him.
And now this woman, who "used to hate those [Vietnam War] protesters," is a peculiarly effective war protester herself.
This story is, indeed, a saving grace of the film--the one thing that doesn't seem dishonestly framed and packaged for effect. But it is still emotional manipulation of the crudest kind. Using a grieving mother of a fallen soldier to make your case against a war must rank as one of the lowest forms of emotive devices. It's as ancient as it is effective. But it can only tell a partial truth, and needs context to understand in full. That context, in Moore's crude work, is drained of any sense that the war might have been justified, that it has done some good, that the casualty rate has, in fact, been remarkably low, and so on. There are moments when Moore senses that the audience might end up dreaming of these alternative scenarios. So he either rushes to pre-empt them or moves briskly along. Would it make a difference for the audience to realize that it was Moore's antiwar hero, Richard Clarke, who allowed many bin Laden relatives to leave the U.S. after 9/11? Or that Baghdad before the war was not a scene from Mary Poppins but a terrifying police state with 300,000 mass graves in its foundations? Or that every independent survey found that George W. Bush did indeed win Florida by a minuscule margin? You could have conceded all this and still made your point about Lila Lipscomb. But that would not have succeeded in making the president out to be "a devil."
The rest is at
The New Republic
-Rudey
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