Finally saw the film this weekend, and after the all the hype and reviews and discussion, I enjoyed it more than I expected to. The beginning and end are solid, though the middle's a bit weak for a few reasons. From a documentary standpoint, Moore's great triumph is excavating so much previously unseen footage of Bush and his cabinet and of soldiers and Iraqis on the ground in Iraq. From a human interest angle, the portrayal of military recruiting among poor (and--you guessed it!--black) kids in Flint, MI, was excellent, and the story of Lila Lipscomb and her family, who are the subjects of much of the latter third of the film, comes across as genuine and completely uncontrived.
There is much that is praiseworthy in the film, but don't feel the need to iterate it here; I'm not likely to say anything you haven't already read elsewhere. But I will offer my thoughts on the film's weaknesses:
~The
My Pet Goat sequence is wonderful, but the whole "was Bush thinking about X, or about Y, or about..." was a bit overwrought. No big deal, just a stylistic preference.
~Moore contradicts himself in a big way by lamenting the government's Big Brother response to 9/11 (though not a word about Guantanamo Bay or about how the brunt of that response has been borne in this country by Muslims and folks of Arab and South Asian extraction) but also suggests that matches shouldn't be allowed on airplanes and that we need more troopers to guard the Oregon coastline(??). He also tries to say that the bombing campaign in Afghanistan was egregious
and that Bush didn't use the military enough in Afghanistan. Huh? Also, during the segment on police infiltration of an innocuous peace group in California, the camera pans across the group's members and Moore asks something like, "do these folks look like terrorists?" It's supposed to be a laugh line, but in fact the answer is, well, yes, Michael: inasmuch as they're white, like Timothy McVeigh and Henry Kissinger, they do look like terrorists. Which is to say, there is no terrorist "look," and you quickly find youreself in dangerous territory when you start suggesting that there is. Moore should have known better.
~I haven't read any such things myself, but I understand that some people have taken offense at the one-dimensional (and therefore somewhat racist) portrayal of Saudis in the film. Without knowing the details of those criticisms, I will say that Moore's primary interest in the fill is the business relationship between the Bushes and other prominent Americans and the Saudi royal family, so I think he can be excused for not delving into the nuances of life in Saudi Arabia. The implication is pretty clear that the interests of the global ruling class are not the interests of most people, Americans and Middle Easterners alike. I don't think Moore should be faulted for focusing on the effects of those relationships on Americans, but he could have spent some time on their effects on the average Saudi. Because of oil and other strategic interests, the US government has long propped up Saudi Arabia's theocratic monarcho-oligarchy, a grotesque entity by any standard. (Like Red Ken Livingstone, current mayor of London, I look forward to the day when the royal family is swinging from lampposts. Figuratively, of course. This page is not in the business of endorsing harm against authoritarian plutocrats. We should instead try to understand their
feelings.) It is lousy that Moore uses a shot of a public execution in Saudi Arabia to suggest "look, the regime over there is
this bad." Public execution in S.A. is no less acceptable than the electric chair here at home. In fact, the US style of behind-the-scenes state murder is probably more insidious (
paging Foucault...). Anyway, what we see in
Fahrenheit are the wheelings and dealings of the elite class in Saudi Arabia--which is not representative of most Saudi men and women--and how their collaborative relationship with our government serves to maintain one facet of a nasty global status quo.
~Perhaps Moore intended the shots of children playing in Baghdad as a reminder that when our country attacked, we were attacking actual human beings with actual livelihoods and healthy limbs and the like, but it really did come off as, look, the US attacked this happy-go-lucky country. The only pro-war argument with a shred of legitimacy was that the United States had the ability and the obligation to depose a tyrant. I dissented from that argument, but at least it had some intellectual merit. But Moore's first scenes of Baghdad stray too far in the other direction. Yes, Iraqi children would probably unanimously have preferred taking their chances on a playground under Saddam than having to dodge American cluster bombs. Yes, women
qua women have long been treated better in Iraq than in a number of other states in the region that we wouldn't dream of invading. Yes, prior US bombings and draconian sanctions are in no small part responsible for Iraq's devastated infrastructure. And yes, the war was ultimately illegitimate, an insanely bad idea concocted by a cabal of violent, lying thugs who happen to live in the same city I do. But to imply, as those scenes do, that Saddam's Iraq was anything more pleasant than a brutal police state is disingenuous. I certainly allow for the possibility that I'm misinterpreting a benign point, and, above criticisms aside, Moore's portrayal of post-invasion Iraq is extremely well done.
So I guess I took the same path as many of the popular reviewers as described in the piece I linked here a few days ago--hailing the movie while finding significant fault. My biggest hope is that the film left a deeper impression on viewers than just "Bush is a dunce, vote him out." I'd hate for Moore's efforts to expose some of the threads of global crony capitalism, the future of energy resources, and the predatory nature of the military to fall below our collective election-year radar. He didn't need to include a comment at the end of the film about the problems inherent in heirarchical socieities, but he did. Think about it. And go see the film if you haven't yet. I welcome everyone's viewpoints on the movie and whatever else, so go ahead and comment if you're so inclined.
