The Fahrenheit 9/11 Files
And now to be serious again. Or maybe not so much serious as slightly less egomaniacal. The discussion of Michael Moore’s new movie rages on. Or not really rages, perhaps, but several people are talking about it. Todd Gitlin, for example, who has some reservations –
But now a pause for a moment of conscience. Let intellect have its due. Moore cuts plenty of corners, so how good can that be? Compelling? Useful? Moore specializes in hodgepodge. He jokes his way past the rough edges. He’s neither journalist nor documentarian, for he doesn’t set out to discover what he doesn’t already know. To patronize Michael Moore by calling him useful is to give him a pass for shoddy work, sloppy insinuations, emotional blackmail and all–around demagoguery.
I haven’t seen ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ so I can’t comment on that in particular – well I can, of course, and I’ve been known to comment noisily on movies I haven’t seen, but I won’t right now, is what I mean. I haven’t seen ‘Bowling for Columbine’ either. But I watched ‘TV Nation’ when it was on, and I’ve seen the earlier movies – so I certainly do know what Gitlin means. But I also know what Gitlin means later on in the article:
So give Moore a cheer for this…because, in the thick of a rolling political emergency, he’s packing in blue–state crowds and blue–niche–of–red–state crowds and who–knows–what–color–in–purple–state crowds. Fahrenheit 9/11 opened as the highest–grossing nonfiction (some would quarrel with the label, but never mind) film of all time. Its average box office take per theatre beat out – good God – Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ.
Yep. I’m in two minds, I suppose, because I think nonfiction movies ought to be actually nonfiction movies, but on the other hand – the left is so pathetic and hapless and ignored over here, it is very difficult not to rejoice that his movie is packing them in and his books are best-sellers. Very difficult indeed, so difficult that I don’t even try.
The issue is also being discussed at Crooked Timber and Normblog and Crooked Timber again.
They’re also talking about the film in the Times, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,482-1169256,00.html
It certainly seems to put us Brits in our place, doesn’t it?
Fahrenheight 451 is a brilliant book. I hope Michael Moore’s film does not besmirch it by association.
Well, from a media point of view, I guess the US Right has extremist whack-jobs like Ann Coulter, and the ‘Left’ have the obviously less deranged Moore. In the UK we have tons of silly newspaper columnists from each political agenda, for instance, Ann Atkins and Christine Odone, but they tend to just be platitudinous and irritating. Moore and Coulter have a certain ‘wow’ factor to their hyperbole. No-one in the UK media operates like they do. In the UK many ordinary people like Michael Moore and are happy to accept him as an important US entertainer with a message, (possibly a hangover form the our own highly politicised ‘alternative’ comedy of the eighties). Moore’s polemics are taken as upbeat rallying points of encouragement for many UK liberals; a sort of ‘John Belushi does Chomsky’ (well, they ought to see it that way if they don’t). We tend to take the po-faced dissent-celebrities such as George Monbiot, Naomi Klein and Arundhati Roy much more seriously over here, and accord them greater respect, but probably take them too seriously for our own good.
Thanks for Times link. Sadly, the Times is subscription for nonUkanians. Fahrenheit 451 is indeed a brilliant book, and Ray Bradbury hopes the title-borrowing won’t drive his out of the collective memory. That would be bad.
And exactly. Over here, the Right has a lot more in the way of whack-jobs than the Left does. Bookshop shelves groan with ‘books’ by the likes of O’Reilly and Limbaugh and Coulter. But still – Moore Could Do Better.