(Note: The first paragraph of this piece ran as a letter to the editor in the 6/30 issue of NYPress. Go to www.nypress.com/17/26/mail/TheMail.cfm and scroll down to “Moore vs. White, XII”.)
Armond White’s piece on Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11, in the June
23, 2004 issue of the New York Press, is a biased political screed, not
an honest review of the film. I did not start out a fan of Moore’s, but
each of his films has been less sentimental, more cohesive and more fact-based.
This film is almost there — gimmicks are few and non-central, documentation
is substantial. Moore was careful on this one, because he didn’t want it
to be attackable on these grounds. White doesn’t care; his blanket swipes
at Moore suggest someone who didn’t watch the current film with anything
like objectivity. Nor is there any objectivity in White’s political points.
Moore uses footage of President Bush at an elementary school after he knew
a plane had hit the WTC, sitting for seven minutes in the photo op rather
than leading any action. Moore suggests that without an advisor telling
Bush what to do, he did nothing. White says the same footage shows “the
most powerful man in the world suffering. He’s miserably distracted.”
So we’re supposed to feel sorry for Bush that he was uncomfortable while
he sat there not sure whether he should abort the photo op to address this
national crisis? White then takes a hilariously non sequiturial potshot,
calling Moore’s “insensitivity” towards Bush’s personal pain “liberalism
with a fascist face.” As far as I can tell, this is just a random string
of words intended to discredit anyone on the left. There is nothing about
Moore’s handling of the elementary school footage that was liberal or not,
fascist or not. Even more inexplicable is the editor’s decision to bring
the word “fascist” into the front-page title.
Other stupidities: In attacking the fact that this film was honored at Cannes,
with Quentin Tarentino presiding, White says “not much” in Tarentino’s
career “encourages audiences to think or behave politically.” Ignoring
the vague meaninglessness that “not much” gives the whole sentence,
I would argue that Natural Born Killers is a political film. (Perhaps White
doesn’t know Tarentino wrote it.) I also wonder what point White thinks he’s
making. Is he arguing that only a filmmaker whose body of work is primarily
political has a right to an opinion on others’ political work? Is he arguing
that a documentary has to be more artistic than Fahrenheit 9/11 to be called
“art”? On that point, one of the main topics in post-movie discussion
among those I saw the film with was its craft, especially in the
sound editing and some of the film editing decisions, such as the handling
of the WTC event. It was especially noteworthy because this is not what we
expected from Moore. Again, White is taking shots at Moore’s entire body of
work, not addressing this film.
White puts this film in a “new documentary mode” he calls “American
self-hatred”. This statement by itself calls into question White’s agenda.
There is no way someone could watch Fahrenheit 9/11 with even a shred of objectivity
and walk away not knowing of Moore’s patriotism. If there is one point that
Moore makes definitively in this film, often by telling the story through
experiences of pro-war Americans, it is that being against Bush and the war
is not unpatriotic, and that to whatever extent Bush and Cheney act based
on relationships with the Saudis, they are the ones acting against America’s
interests.
There is nothing paranoid about connecting the dots between Bush’s direct
business ties to the Bin Laden family and his softness on Saudi Arabia, the
Bin Laden family — such as smuggling over 20 members of Bin Laden’s family
back to Saudi Arabia after 9/11 — and perhaps even the delay and side-stepping
in going after Osama Bin Laden himself. White claims Moore’s only goal is
to preach to the converted with trite attacks. If this is the case, why did
he devote much of the latter half of the film to seeing the war through the
eyes of a pro-war mother of a soldier. Far left audience members would have
little sympathy for her. But someone who is pro-war might be affected by seeing
the evolution of her understanding.
White also proclaims that Moore does not “tell us what life is like
now, in what the West knows as the Terrorist Millenium.” Moore actually
addresses this issue substantively, arguing that the threat of terrorism is
mostly contrived to serve the interests of the Administration. White may not
like this explanation, but by pretending it is not in the film, he avoids
having to respond to it, rather letting stand the pontificatorial silliness
of his assertion that we are up for a millennium of terror. A millennium?
That’s just asinine.
White complains that by cutting between Bush golfing or telling the terrorists “bring
it on” and the human damage caused by the war in Iraq,
Moore “obfuscates the war with sentimentality.” So then, we should
avoid being made uncomfortable by the human suffering caused by war by ignoring
it? He goes on to dismiss the idea that it should be unacceptable that significant
numbers of civilian women and children are getting killed and maimed as a
“notion” — tossing Moore aside as naïve, the way practical warriors
always do with those who dare to question any war.
White dismisses as “‘entertaining’ sallies” and “gotcha shots”
a photograph of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein and photos
showing ties between the Bush family and the Bin Laden family. He seems to
be similarly dismissing the White House treating Taliban leaders as world
dignitaries until just before 9/11. This is cynical in the extreme. White
says of Moore, “In his hypocrisy, he chides the corporate greed behind
Halliburton and the Carlyle Group as if it were alien to American custom.”
What is White’s point here? He again tries to paint Moore as naïve, this time
for daring to question the propriety of American companies’ ties to Saudi
royalty, including the Bin Laden family, especially when those companies are,
respectively, one formerly run by our current Vice President and one that
bought a failed business of our current President’s and put him on its board.
I feel I also need to point out that, as with the earlier “fascist”
remark, White’s use of “hypocrisy” here is at best intentionally
misleading and at worst ignorant. There is nothing about what White asserts
that could appropriately be called hypocrisy.
White closes by mocking the idea that installing a Democratic president will
make a difference, pointing out the film’s documentation of the fact that
Democrats in the Senate didn’t try to stop the war from happening. This final
ploy is the most indefensible. Even left leaders who campaigned for Nader
in 2000 do not still believe that. It’s a useful bit of propaganda for Bush,
though, which must be why White included it.
© 2004 Philip F. Rose
